December 2021 – Anthony G. Flood

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III

Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992), a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ for over 73 years, was an assiduous student of the Holy Scriptures. His business in life was the study and proclamation of God’s Word through radio broadcasts, the writing and distribution of Bible-study literature, a tape-recorded ministry, and semiannual Bible conferences throughout the United States. He arrived at his conclusions after considering all the Biblical material and any other material that could shed light on the subject under consideration. He studied Hebrew and Greek words to bring forth their exact historical and grammatical meanings. As constant study forced him to alter some of his former beliefs, he always asked his readers to take his latest writing to be his latest light. Sellers received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior at age 18 on November 23, 1919. Throughout 1921 he attended Moody Bible Institute (Chicago); the following year he was ordained a Baptist minister. He traveled with an evangelistic party for several years and served as pastor in Baptist churches. By 1932, however, after his studies led him away from the rituals and ordinances (such as water baptism), he left the Baptist Church, never looked back, and never joined another. He began writing pamphlets in 1935, and by 1936 was publishing The Word of Truth (17 Volumes over the next 20 years). He expanded this ministry with booklets, radio broadcasts, and 570 recorded messages covering most books of the Bible and many doctrinal issues. In 1971 he began publishing Seed and Bread, four-page leaflets, 196 of which he had produced by the time of his passing in 1992. With the cooperation of his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (1927-2020) and her son Rusty Hancock and the assistance of Sam Marrone (who remembers Sellers teaching at the Marrone household in the 1950s when Sam was a boy), I’ve been researching his life and thought for a book tentatively entitled “*Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism.”—Anthony G. Flood*

Our study of Otis Q. Sellers’s excavation of God’s Word for what it says about “soul” continues. (See Part I and Part II.) The ground having been cleared, we can now display the raw nuggets of textual information he mined for his 1939 booklet, What Is the Soul?

“In these studies,” he writes, “the method will be to present a concordance to a group of passages, then deal with such passages as may seem necessary,” a concordance being a list of words in the text, the text being the Bible, the first subsection of which is Genesis [1]: “In Genesis, every passage will be dealt with in some manner. This is to acquaint the student with the method so that he can follow on himself in passages that I have felt needed no exposition. After Genesis, the only treatment given to many passages will be to list them in the concordance.”

The first word under consideration is נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh). Not being formally trained in Hebrew, Sellers claims that the list “has been checked from every possible angle, and I feel I have been guilty of no oversight or carelessness in this matter. If I have, the Hebrew or Greek scholar can correct me, and I will gladly acknowledge any oversight or error that has been unwittingly made.”

I, too, await their judgment of Sellers’s use of the tools his fellow scholars made available to him and to countless others. In the interest of space, I will pass over the exhaustive list of the occurrences of נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) in Genesis in favor of a focus on key passages. [2]

In Genesis 1:20 are, Sellers writes, “three prominent Hebrew words: … sherets [שֶׁ֖רֶץ], which is translated [in the KJV] ‘creature,’ and … nephesh chaiyah [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה] … ‘life.’ … In this passage the words “bring forth abundantly” and “moving creature” are but different grammatical forms of one expression in the Hebrew. [My emphasis—AGF] [Joseph Bryant] Rotherham [1828-1910] translates this as

Let the waters swarm with an abundance of living soul.

A more literal translation would be

Let the waters swarm with swarms of living souls.

“To swarm” involves the idea of motion. From this first occurrence of the word nephesh we learn that God calls the moving, living things in the sea living souls.

In verse 21 the KJV refers to “every living soul that moveth.” As man has not yet been created, “this refers only to animal life.”

… [A] distinction is being established between living things that move and living things that do not move. Plants are living things, but they do not and cannot move. They are rooted in their place. They grow from the warmth of the sun, derive nourishment from the soil and carbon from the air. Yet, they do not enjoy the warmth of the sun, neither do they feel any sensation or consciousness from all that happens to them. Plants are never called souls, but not so with animals. They are called living souls. They move from place to place; they have sensation and consciousness; and these are the chief characteristics of those things that God calls living souls.

When Sellers gets to Genesis 1:24—“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature [נֶ֣פֶשׁ חַיָּ֑ה, nephesh chaiyah] after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so”—he observes that

The first time the word nephesh occurred [Genesis 1:20] the translators rendered it “life.” The second and third times [Genesis 1:21, 24] it is rendered “creature,” the fourth time [Genesis 1:30] “life,” and the fifth time [Genesis 2:7] “soul.”

Sellers apparently felt justified in imputing bad motive to the translators.

It is obvious that the translators desired to cover up the fact that God called the fish of the sea, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field, living souls. Many readers will remember having heard great emphasis placed upon the theory that in the account of creation man alone is called a living soul. The simple evidence proves that this is false …. [My emphasis—AGF] Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part III”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II

We continue our survey of What Is the Soul?, Otis Q. Sellers’s early (1939) substantial study of certain the God-breathed (theopneustos, θεόπνευστος) Hebrew and Greek words. Anglophone Bible translators have traditionally rendered them “soul,” a choice that tends to support doctrines that most Christians implicitly believe are grounded in the Word of God. (See Part I.) The aim in this series is to go beyond general claims about what Sellers was doing to examine the ore he mined. We will catch the miner’s mind at work so we may evaluate it for ourselves, to see if he answered questions that were worth asking.

The words in question are נֶ֫פֶשׁ‎ (nephesh) and ψυχή (psyche, which Sellers preferred to represent as psuche). Let’s take the Hebrew nephesh first. Implicitly referencing 2 Peter 1:21, he begins with a methodological reminder:

The word nephesh occurs seven-hundred and fifty-four times in the Hebrew Old Testament. Seven-hundred and fifty-four times God breathed the word nephesh; seven-hundred and fifty-four times holy men of God wrote the word nephesh as they were moved by the Holy Ghost [2 Peter 1:21]. Each time it was written it expressed the mind of God; each time it was used it was the word of His choice.

The average Bible student not only doesn’t know that numerical fact, but also doesn’t know an equally remarkable one:

But in the Authorized Version we find the word nephesh rendered at least thirty-three different ways, and fourteen times that it occurs in the Hebrew it is unrecognized and omitted altogether by the King James translators. Thus, their unfaithful treatment of the word nephesh becomes so contradictory and confusing that the value of the God-breathed Word is destroyed, and the Word that cannot be broken is shattered into many fragments, so far as those readers who are shut up to the Authorized Version are concerned.

He clarified:

Yet every reader of the Authorized Version must face the fact that he does not possess any word in English to represent the word nephesh on fourteen occasions that it came from the mouth of God. The translators treated it as if it was superfluous and unnecessary. But this was not their greatest error.

By his count, they rendered it “soul” 471 times; “life,” 119 times; “person,” 30; “self,” 21; “heart,” 15; “mind,” 15; “creature,” ten times; “dead,” “desire,” and “dead body,” five times each; “any” and “body,” four times each; “man,” “me,” “pleasure,” and “will,” three times each; “appetite,” “ghost,” “lust,” “thing,” and “he,” two times each; “hearty,” “own,” “him,” “one,” “mortally,” “whither will,” “they,” “breath,” “deadly,” “would have,” and “fish,” once each.

As for ψυχή (psyche), “the translators did not do much better. This word occurs 105 times in the Greek Scriptures,” and here’s how they rendered it: “soul,” 58 times; “life,” 40 times; “mind,” three times”; and “heart,” “you,” “heartily,” and “us,” once each.

It is my conviction [Sellers continued] that no Bible student or teacher would dare to try to defend this disloyal, confusing and unfaithful treatment of the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche. There is no concrete word in any language that will yield as many diversified and contrary meanings as the translators have forced upon the word nephesh. Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part II”

Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I

When in 1934 Otis Q. Sellers set about to do his own biblical studies, he meant it: no more “hand-me-down” theology. He would no longer ransack commentaries, concordances, and lexicons to do what he had done the previous decade-and-a-half, that is, landscape a garden path of “evidence” to an opinion he was already inclined to hold (because people he respected held it).

No, he would consult such resources to examine the evidence, verse by verse, draw his conclusions, and let the chips fall where they may. In What Is the Soul?, published in 1939, Sellers shared the fruit of five years of laboring in the Lord’s vineyards. Twenty years into his life in Christ, at the age of 38, he was ready to show what starting from scratch looked like.

It was five years ago [1934] that I determined to place my own shallow, hearsay opinions concerning the soul upon the shelf and to open the Word of God, determined to know and embrace the truth. In presenting in written form the findings that have come from these years of definite study, I desire to present the steps which have led me to my present conclusions. The entire apparatus of study is given in order that the reader can follow the steps one by one and see if by so doing they arrive at the same conclusions. I ask the reader to observe that I do not attempt that seemingly impossible feat, performed by so many, of beginning at the top, then going down certain steps in order to demonstrate that if I had come up the steps I would have arrived at the same position.

There is a price to be paid for such independence of mind.

All truth seekers will come, sooner or later, to this crisis where decisions must be made and results of study must be embraced or rejected. These moments will never come to the one who studies what other men have to say about the Word, neither will they come to the man to whom the Bible is a book of texts upon which he may hang his sermons.

Many subtle men will carefully steer their course so as to avoid these crossroads where definite choice must be made and one path or another must be followed. Thus, they are able to hide behind their own confusion which they have deliberately created, and by continually traveling up and down the same well-worn paths they keep away from those places where the road divides and both paths cannot be taken.

For one’s view of the soul is related to one’s idea of future punishment: if the fear attaching to the latter is lively enough, it may inhibit one’s handling of the former. One hedges one’s bets. If, for example, one learns (as Sellers claimed to have learned) that “hell” is not a possible destination for a “soul,” what becomes of the business plan of countless “fire and brimstone” preachers? Continue reading “Spadework on Display: Sellers the Maverick Workman on the Soul—Part I”