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”

The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights

Periodically I need to step back from the billboard of my studies of independent Bible teacher Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) and survey that big picture, reviewing the salient points of his teaching, all of which are being sourced for the growing manuscript, Maverick Workman: How Otis Q. Sellers Broke with the Churches, Discovered the Premillennial Kingdom, and Embodied Christian Individualism. One hundred two years and seven days ago, that is, on November 23, 1919, Sellers received Christ as His savior. What he did with from that point onward is the book’s subject.

By “independent” I mean he wasn’t affiliated with any church after 1932, the year he left Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky which, in the middle of the Great Depression, he had served as pastor for four years. He broke with them over the meaning of βαπτίζω (baptízō), the Greek word that every English-language New Testament transliterates as “baptism,” but never translates. After painstaking study, he concluded neither he nor anyone else had the authority to bring about the reality to which the water ritual of “baptism” referred, namely, “an identification amounting to a merger.” He could no longer, with integrity, subscribe to Baptist theology.

The home of Otis Q. Sellers and family, Fort Thomas, KY, 1932

Later, and by similar reasoning, Sellers reached another conclusion no less radical: not only that “church” is a bad translation of ἐκκλησία (ekklesia)—nothing new there—but also that this governmental term pertains to God’s purposes establishing His Kingdom, which Jesus Christ announced during his earthly ministry, but suspended at the inception of the current dispensation of grace (Ephesians 3:2).

Sellers’s studies convinced him that although the societies we call churches abound—they are among the institutional fixtures of the past two millennia—the meaning of ekklesia does not apply to any of them. There is a diversity of churches today, to be sure, and you may join any of them or not, he held, but none has the authority of an “out-positioned one” or ekklesia. Christians misidentify themselves as out-positioned, and this is the root of all “ecclesiastical” evil and controversy. “Out-positioned” is what Christians were from Acts 2 until Acts 28:28 and will be again when God resumes His Kingdom purposes. Or so is the conclusion his studies brought him to.

Today’s churches have evolved according to the demands and logic of human, not divinely instituted, organizations. Their members may be generated of God, but only as individuals. The societies they form cannot reflect the spirit of their members. As corporations, however, they have no standing before God; their data are primarily of historical, sociological, cultural, and esthetic, and only secondarily of biblical-theological interest.

Continue reading “The Maverick Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers: Highlights”

Marksism-Levinism

The following review of Mark R. Levin, American Marxism (Simon & Schuster, 2021) appeared on Amazon on November 12, 2021)

Trained as a lawyer, Mark Levin served under Attorney General Ed Meese during the Reagan Administration. When Levin speaks about the US Constitution, many listen, including this reviewer. And so when he turns his attention to extra-legal affairs, he’s assured of a respectful hearing. His many contributions to the constitutionalist cause have earned him the presumption of competency.

In American Marxism, however, Levin seems to have abused that privilege. Continue reading “Marksism-Levinism”

“Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal

In “If the problem be electoral, how can the solution be? Thoughts on our parlous state,” published January 7th of this year, the day after the political equivalent of a Democrat Party Reichstag Fire evicted The Big Steal from the headlines, I asked how we could wait patiently for another election cycle. What they did a year ago today, and during the years leading up to November 3, 2020, they could do again, effectively perverting this country into a one-party dictatorship.

In the months since, I’ve wondered whether the truth about the war against Trump’s 80 million-strong base (Trump himself is but one man), a war I had followed daily for over five years, could ever vacuum up the corrupt media’s smokescreen.

Without election integrity, which was eviscerated last year, a citizenry in a nominal republic has the potential to become either an aggregate of slaves or an army of soldiers in a kinetic civil war.

Where could people open to the truth find a patient, comprehensive rebuttal of academedia’s bodyguard of liars? How can people who wouldn’t be caught dead searching conservative websites consider what is, for them, the unthinkable?

We now have the answer: they can read Mollie Hemingway’s Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections (Regnery, October 12, 2021). Her patriotic service justifies a qualified hope that, “Yes, truth can win out.” You can read Rigged, and you can put it in their hands.

Hemingway, the eloquent, soft-spoken conservative author, columnist and commentator, a senior editor at The Federalist and Fox News contributor, will not scare off your liberal relatives. In her book, she painstakingly, but never boringly, explores how Democrat operatives, led by corrupt officials and financed by the “Big Money” they excoriated not many years ago, exploited the pandemic to make mail-in ballots the rule, not the exception thereto, and to enact voting “reforms” that make a mockery of “one person, one vote.”

Then she documents the corruption that predictably followed.

Continue reading ““Rigged,” Mollie Hemingway’s patriotic service, on the anniversary of The Big Steal”

Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes

From the Renaissance humanists the Reformers borrowed a motto: “Ad fontes!,” that is, “[Back] to the sources or fountains of truth.” The sources were texts, the Greek and Roman classics for the former, the Bible for the latter.

The phrase comes from Psalm 42:1, or rather from Jerome’s Latin translation of the Hebrew for his Vulgate edition of the Bible:

Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.

As the New King James Version renders it:

As the deer pants for the water (מָ֑יִם, mayim) brooks (אֲפִֽיקֵי, ha-pi-que), so pants my soul for You, O God.

“To be short of breath” or “to pant” renders the Hebrew תַּעֲרֹ֥ג (ta-a-rog), which Jerome represented by desiderare: to desire, wish for, long for. It refers to a want or desire that induces gasping, breathlessness.

The psalmist’s desire is, figuratively, for a source of water (ad fontes aquarum). Thirst is symptomatic of a lack, and God is the divine analogate of the thirst-quenching brook, the supplier of the spiritual hydration we need at our core.

Jesus Christ spoke of Himself that way. He promised that

… whosoever drinks of the water (ὕδωρ, hudor; whence our “hydration”) that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life. John 4:14

Babbling brooks extinguish the thirst of deer whose throats will again dry up. Jesus’ quenching of spiritual thirst, however, is a gift of a spring of water (ὕδωρ) that wells up (ἁλλομένου, allomenon) into life. What kind of life? Not “eternal” in the sense of “timeless,” but dynamically outflowing (αἰώνιον, aionian).[1] Otis Q. Sellers’s research sheds light: Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers: The Autodidact Who Returned ad fontes”

Of Monuments and Memory: The Commitment of Donald Martin Reynolds

Before Peter identified the God-fearing (but non-Israelite) household of Cornelius with Jesus (Acts 10:48), a messenger of God assured the Roman centurion that his prayers and charitable acts had gone up before God as a memorial (μνημόσυνον, mnēmosynon) (Acts 10:4).[1]

After the woman with the alabaster box poured precious ointment on His head, Jesus predicted that it will be a recounted as a memorial (μνημόσυνον) to her wherever the Gospel will be proclaimed (Matthew 26:13, Mark 14:9).

That word is also the Greek root of “monument” (monere, the Latin, meaning “to remind, advise, warn”). The artifacts we Anglophones call monuments commemorate, remind, and warn. To create, behold, and contemplate a monument is to lift up in our minds the figures they commemorate. Photos of behemoth monuments that dot the former Soviet Union’s landscape convey but an inkling of their evocative power. Successor states have removed, warehoused, or destroyed some of these reminders of a dark past, lest they occasion the veneration of evil. All things being equal, however, aides to memory are beneficial.

My friend, the art historian Dr. Donald Martin Reynolds has devoted his life to studying monuments and, at Columbia University for over three decades, imparting his profound appreciation of them to generations of students. Earlier this year Routledge reissued “Remove Not the Ancient Landmark”: Public Monuments and Moral Values, an anthology of 22 scholarly essays on the monumental form which their authors originally read at two symposia Dr. Reynolds had convened. (Besides the Introduction, he also contributed Chapter 7, “The Value of Public Monuments.”) Its topics include “Arch, Column, Equestrian Statue: Three Persistent Forms of Public Monument,” “The Psychology of Public Monuments,” “Venice: Time and Conservation,” “Statues of the Tsars and the Redefinition of Russia’s Past,” “Monument to Russian Martyrs under Stalinism,” “Monumental Revisions of History in Twentieth-Century Germany,” “Eternal Celebrations in American Memorials,” and “Cathedral.”[2]

The reissued book’s title is from Proverbs 22:28. The Hebrew word for “landmark” is גְּב֣וּל (gebuhl): monuments are not only memorials, but also historical and cultural landmarks that delineate one worldview’s “turf” from another as landmarks demarcate one territory’s boundaries from another’s. Forbidden memorials tell us as much about a society as do the ones it insists upon erecting.

Dr. Reynolds, believing that we depreciate such markers at our spiritual peril[3], compiled The Remarkable Prescience of a Biblical Imperative, which tells the story of (and documents) his passion for architecture in general and monuments in particular. When he sent it to me, he gave me permission to share it. Clicking on Remarkable Prescience will download a PDF file.

Santuário de Cristo Rei, Almada, Portugal (facing Lisbon)

This post is an inadequate token of my appreciation of Don and his wonderful wife Nancy Zlobik Reynolds for their years of friendship and fellowship at The Shrine of the Holy Innocents in Manhattan and for having invited me to many of his conferences, not all of which, I regretfully recall, I accepted. I hope it piques the interest of many others in his rich legacy.

Notes

[1] The English “to be baptized” does not translate but merely transliterates the Greek βαπτισθῆναι, baptisthēnai. The root baptizo (from bapto) conveys the idea of identification of one thing with another to the point of merger (e.g., when white linen is dipped into a bowl of dye). “To be identified with” is better than “to be baptized.” In the River Jordan, John identified Jesus with the submissive company in Israel (Matthew 3:13-17). The reality to which the ceremony refers is key, but since churches merely pour their distinctive dogmas into the symbol “baptize,” they see little need to translate.

[2] Dr. Reynolds’s other books include Hiram Powers and His Ideal Sculpture, Garland Publishers, 1977; Masters of American Sculpture: The Figurative Tradition from the American Renaissance to the Millennium, Abbeville Press, 1994; Monuments and Masterpieces: Histories and Views of Public Sculpture in New York City, Wiley, 1988, revised 1997; The Architecture of New York City, Wiley, 1984, revised, 1994; For Our Freedom and Yours: The Art and Life of Andrew Pitynski, Portrait of an American Master, 2015. His Introduction to 19th Century Art and Architecture, Cambridge University Press, 1988 and 1992, has been translated into in several languages.

[3] In July 2020, for example, when a great hue and cry arose demanding that James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt be removed from the grounds of the American Museum of Natural History, Dr. Reynolds appealed to the Executive Director of the National Sculpture Society to request that New York City “realize the integrity of John Russell Pope’s original plan for an Inter-Museum Promenade through Central Park thereby connecting those two great cultural institutions of international renown, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” A few months later, his account of this effort was published as “The Original Plan for the Theodore Roosevelt Monument,” Sculpture Review, Vol. 69(3), September 1, 2020, 37-41, doi/10.1177/0747528420967271.

The History of Herbert Aptheker: Partisanship’s Threat to Truth-telling

The 2021 issue of Opera Historica (Czech Republic) has been published. In its “Historiography and Methodology” section is my “The History of Herbert Aptheker: Partisanship’s Threat to Truth-telling” alongside Sean Wilentz‘s “The 1619 Project and Living in Truth” and Ivo Cerman‘s “America’s Racist Founding? An East-European View.” The whole issue and each article can be freely downloaded as a pdf. My new essay goes beyond Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness to examine (among other things) what is probably the first (1944) academic review of American Negro Slave Revolts, pinpointing where contemporary scholars detected a problem with Aptheker’s treatment of the evidence of slave discontent. I hope those of you who read my “History” will alert others of its existence and maybe even post a comment here. Thanks.

Aptheker-related posts

“Six Popes”: One of “The Six” Gets His Copy

Monsignor Hilary C. Franco presenting a copy of “Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers” to Pope Francis during a private audience in the Apostolic Palace, the papal residence, Vatican City, on September 4, 2021. Published here with the permission of Monsignor Franco.

Last May in “Monsignor Hilary C. Franco’s wonderful life,” I announced the launch of Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers (Humanix Books, 2021), which I ghostwrote after interviewing him in late 2019, early 2020.

This morning he sent me several photos taken last Saturday during his audience with one of The Six, Pope Francis, in the papal residence. The one you see on the left is posted here with his permission.

Edward Pentin, the National Catholic Register Rome correspondent who has speculated about Francis’s successor in The Next Pope, has this to say about Six Popes:

With a life spanning six pontificates, Monsignor Hilary Franco’s new book offers insights into current crises within the Church and society, highlighting his work with Venerable Fulton Sheen, and even helping Mother Angelica during EWTN’s first days … Now in his eighties, the Bronx-born priest has just completed Six Popes: A Son of the Church Remembers, a fascinating and colorful memoir of a life that has included attending the Second Vatican Council as an expert adviser, working as an official at the Congregation for Clergy for 24 years and, most recently, serving as an adviser at the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations in New York.

Since last May, Six Popes has almost continuously numbered among the top ten in Amazon’s “Clergy” category. The stats, as of this posting, are:

Best Sellers Rank: #5,919 in Books

- #2 in Religious Leadership (Books)
- #2 in Christian Leadership (Books)
- #2 in Christian Popes

Take a peek at its product page to see if you’d like to help it climb higher. The first chapter’s text is appended to that page’s About the Author section. (Click on Read more.)