A path to discovery
Bethel professor Juan Hernández uses his passion to fuel textual criticism research projects to advocate for Biblical literacy.
By Makenzi Johnson and Vanna Contreras, reporters
Juan Hernández stands in front of a class of Spanish-speaking adults ages 18–60, drawing Venn diagrams on a dirty chalkboard. He gestures with his hands and grins as the students laugh at his jokes. They take out their iPhones to snap photos of the PowerPoint and run their pencils across notebook paper to keep up. He teaches Introduction to the Bible in Spanish, a new class offered at Bethel for adults who have graduated high school or have their GED, but want college credits.
Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies, Hernández approaches each class he teaches with one goal in mind — sharing his passion.
“It wasn’t just that he was passionate about the subject, but he was also really passionate about bringing new students along in that [passion],” Bethel alumna and former student of Hernández Grace Shull said.
Hernández pushes his students in a way to not wreck a student’s faith, but to help reconstruct it. He challenges them to think outside of what they had been taught before coming to Bethel.
“Prior to taking classes with Dr. Hernández I would say I loved the Bible, but at times that was just because I knew that was what I was supposed to say. [His] classes helped me become more aware of the incredible artistry… in the biblical texts,” Bethel alumnus and former student of Hernández, Ross Van Kley said.
One of the reasons Hernández grew to be so passionate about the Bible is through his uncle. Hernández was raised bilingual and bicultural in Camden, New Jersey. Despite having a Catholic upbringing, he had a conversion experience at the age of 15 and started attending a Pentecostal church, with his uncle. Hernández would spend hours at his uncle’s house and see how his uncle had memorized hundreds of Bible verses. Seeing his uncle fall in love with scripture inspired Hernández to do the same. As a high schooler, he would memorize one verse a day on weekdays and 5 more on Saturdays.
“I didn’t realize that not only [do] I have a passion for this, it was just fast, it was just fun… it felt fulfilling, spiritually,” Hernández said.
In his PhD program at Emory University in Atlanta, Hernández needed a meaningful dissertation topic. He knew he enjoyed the Greek language, the New Testament and that he was detail oriented. Hernández discovered that textual criticism would check off all of those boxes.
Through textual analysis, decades-old books and manuscripts were being exposed for various types of errors. Hernández described these discoveries to be “groundbreaking,” since these books had never been questioned before this.
“At that time, it was a trend to look at manuscripts and see if the scribes had changed anything… and no one had done anything on Revelations,” Hernández said.
Hernández needed a project, and there were few manuscripts about Revelations then. He proposed a method that would go about trying to find if the book of Revelations had changes to the text over the years. These changes don’t necessarily mean drastic content edits, but grammatical or translation errors that have minutely tweaked things over time. Hernández knew he could devote time into finding out if there are any errors in the book of Revelation.
“My hypothesis was: if there’s ever a place that you might find changes, Revelation is probably your best candidate, and no one had looked,” Hernández said.
The field of textual criticism was dominated by German scholars. Hernández needed to be able to speak, write and read in German in order to begin any research — he did just that. After learning German, Hernández started looking at various manuscripts for any errors. He looked at three manuscripts in particular: one from the fourth century and two from the fifth century. After comparing the three, Hernández found that there were small errors throughout the centuries. Even though these were small, it changed the meaning of certain verses.
Revelations 9:15 says, “The Four Angels were untied and let loose, Four Angels all prepared for the exact year, month, day, and even hour when they were to kill a third of the human race.” (the Message Bible) Through textual analysis, Hernández found an error of merely two words, of which equated to a negative participle.
“The text in that fourth century manuscript reads, “They were unleashed without killing”… the text is softened, actually it’s negated,” Hernández said.
The fourth century translation is the opposite of what Revelations 9:15 says. Despite the difference only being between two words, it changes the context of the verse and what the angels were doing. Hernández states that this discovery is important because it shows how a reader’s understanding of the Bible could be altered.
Hernández also found an error in the fifth century manuscript. This text states the angels “were saddened that they should have to kill.” Through analysis, the findings exemplify how just two small words in each manuscript’s verse is enough to alter the context of Revelations 9:15. Even more remarkable is that the manuscripts are separated by a century.
“It’s not like those changes weren’t noticed before, but nobody put it together,” Hernández said.
The error found in Revelations 9:15 was not the only one Hernández has found. Another error involved Josef Schmidt, a German priest who had written a text on the book of Revelation. Schmidt’s work had never been questioned nor translated into English, only German. Hernández went through the work of translating the book into English so he could analyze it. The results showed that Schmidt’s claims, which had been based on a fourth century manuscript, were actually from a seventh century manuscript.
“The problem with that is that he had dated the whole tradition back to four centuries, he was off by three centuries, and no one had noticed in 60 plus years,” Hernández said.
After finding this error in particular, Hernández started emailing German scholars to report his research results.
No one believed him at first.
People ignored his emails, not willing to respond to the claims that Josef Schmidt may be wrong. Trying to get involved in a field dominated by old, white, German men as a Puerto Rican American whose name is Juan Hernández was not easy.
A Dutch scholar, Dr. Dirk Jongkind, realized Hernández was right about Schmidt’s work and was the first person to confirm his findings. Hernández was soon invited to Germany to present his research. After presenting, Hernández wrote a series of three articles documenting his textual analysis on Revelations. Eventually, he thought it would be a good idea to combine the three articles into one book and get that published. In collaboration with American scholar Garrick V Allen and Dutch Scholar, Darius Muller, Hernández published “Studies in the History of the Greek Text of the Apocalypse: The Ancient Stems.”
“This [book] is basically now considered mandatory reading for anyone doing studies on the text of Revelation, because we give a whole history of the discipline and the scholarship,” Hernández said.
Whether Hernández is standing in front of Bethel students or German scholars, each opportunity is the chance to live out his passion for the Bible while teaching others, in hopes of growing their own passion.
