One question to ask as you read the New Testament that will bring it wonderfully alive

I'm in the middle of reading the New Testament, and in the past I had never bothered to consider word choice. But this time around, I posed the question:

Why did Jesus use the phrasings that He used?

To get His meaning across in anything He said, He could have chosen between different phrasings. Yet He phrased it a certain way. 

Of course, we should be cautious how much importance we put into this. After all, the Bible was written in Hebrew and Greek. It was not written in English, so what I am reading in English is a translation. Inevitably, something winds up having to be approximated in a translation. Also, certain translations of the Bible are more focused on word for word while others are more focused on meaning for meaning. 

If you are wondering about phrasing, then use a word for word translation (e.g. Good News Translation), since a meaning for meaning translation might wander further from the original words used.

Nonetheless, it's still a fascinating exercise to ask why Jesus used the phrasings that He used. It brought the New Testament alive for me in a way it hadn't before. I feel it also brought me closer to knowing Jesus. I only wish it had not taken me this long to discover this.

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