Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Daily Gospel Exegesis podcast. This is a bonus episode of the podcast

where I'm going to try and respond to some listener questions

that have come in. Thank you so much to those who have sent their questions in. I do get a lot

of questions via email and I can't always answer all of them, but I want to do my best to get to

as many of them as I can and to try and respond to them as best I can, with the goal of helping you as the listeners

learn more about the Bible and particularly learning more about what the Catholic Church

teaches about the Bible and how to answer difficult questions that relate to interpreting

the literal sense of the text. So let's get into some questions and answers.

Christine wrote in to ask, thank you so much for your daily gospel exegesis. I've been listening on Hello for a few

months. I have found them to help me understand the word of God so much better. I'm very

interested in learning more, especially the original words in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek.

Where would be a good place to start to learn more that is also in line with Catholic teachings?

This is a great question, Christine. The first thing I would say in response is a lot of our English

Bible translations are actually pretty good at capturing what the or as close

to what the original language said as we can get with an English translation. So probably

my number one tip is just make sure you have a really good scholarly English translation.

The revised standard version second Catholic edition is a really good one to use from a Catholic perspective that does its best to be as literal as possible when looking at the Hebrew for the Old Testament and also the Greek for the Old Testament as well and the Greek for the New Testament.

So using a good translation that is trying to be as literal as possible

without being woodenly literal is actually a really good way of learning what the original

text said without having to learn another language. Having said that, if you do have an interest

in learning the actual languages or the original languages of the Bible, like Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

A really good resource to start with is the software called Verbum.

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