I transferred to a new school this semester. Classes started last week. On Tuesday I only had time to attend classes and get a temporary parking permit, which took just long enough for me to completely miss Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony. Wednesday, on the other hand, I had hours to kill between classes. I had some chores to do, like go get my car from the church parking lot I'd wound up in and try to find a spot on campus. But what was the very first thing I did?
I went to the library, of course!
And I checked out
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume one. The Roberts-Donaldson translation, which hails from the 1860s -- rather old-fashioned language, but it has the advantage of being a complete set. Of the assorted other translations of various works available, a couple provided the Greek text alongside, which is kind of neat but no use to me at present (it'll be some time before my Greek is that good).
Speaking of the language,
here's a post where a guy takes Rob Bell to task for a rather embarrassing Greek mistake. Apparently in one of the nooma videos Bell says:
And then, the Bible says [in Mark 3:5] that Jesus looked around at them in anger. Jesus gets angry. Now this story was first told in the Greek language, and there’s a subtle nuance to this word “anger” in the Greek language. It’s in what’s called the aorist tense, which is a technical way of saying that Jesus’ anger is a temporary feeling. It comes on him, and then it leaves him.
Um, actually the aorist would be the looking around, not the anger (which, being a noun not a verb, has no tense), and all it tells us is that Jesus looked around and then did other things. Nothing about whether he continued to feel angry after he was done glaring at the crowd.
The critique also comes with a fun YouTube music video, "
All Things Are Better In Koine."
Bell is hardly the first public figure to make a blooper, though. I once saw Greg Boyd accidentally
confuse arche (αρχη, meaning 'beginning' mainly, but a contentious term in some contexts) for
archon (αρχων, ruler). It's an easy and understandable mistake to make, but I'm not sure I would say that Satan is the
arche of this world . . .
Anyway, I'm really glad to be getting back into the Fathers. They'll be showing up on this blog from time to time. As will anything particularly interesting that I learn in class -- I'm taking intro to linguistics, archaeology, physical anthropology, and retaking the second semester of American history. Being an anthropology major ROCKS!
Comments (3)
Arche and archon are surely related. They have the same root, or one is the root of the other. I guess that's not what you're commenting on.
I'm not a big fan of "word studies" in Bible study. Somehow people get the idea that meaning in Greek works differently from English, and they try to squeeze out all kinds of nuance based on all the different meanings a word has rather than the meaning it has in that particular context. Also, a lot of people refer to Greek cases and conjugation without having done text studies to see the patterns. They ought to begin with text analysis and work down, rather than focus so much on individual words. And Greek and Hebrew are treated as mystical languages with much more power and subtlety than English, rather than the ordinary means of communication of a lot of people.
If God were as hung up on Hebrew as a lot of Christians are, he wouldn't have had the Hebrews return from exile speaking Aramaic and then later writing in Greek.
Even the famous passage at the end of John, where Jesus asks Peter, "Do you love me?" How many sermons have I heard on agape vs. phileo? But that conversation almost surely took place in Aramaic. I wonder how the concepts were expressed in that language? No one has ever written or preached about that, to my knowledge.
Text analysis looking at patterns is also helpful in looking at the Books of Moses; he has a pattern of interrupting some stories at a climax and inserting other stories or information, then resuming the previous thread by summarizing it briefly, like a section on Passover regulations thrown in near the end of Moses and Aaron's last meeting with the Pharaoh, or the words to the psalm they sang after they crossed the Red Sea followed by a summary of the song and the situation as the narrative returns to the story, or Judah and Tamar tossed in as Joseph gets to Egypt. These are the kinds of things that gave rise to the Documentary Hypothesis, because scholars didn't know what to make of them.
@Roadkill_Spatula - Yes, most of what ordinary preachers do with the original languages is simply silly, like the seminary-educated evangelical exegeting a stop sign. My personal favorite gripe is with the people who try to cram all this elaborate theological meaning into words like faith, grace, or agape, as if they were some sort of special theological terms that were only used by Christians. Charis for example did not mean a special kind of favor given specifically by God to those who did not deserve it with no strings attached. It just meant gift or favor. And I've also read that agape and phileo could sometimes be used interchangeably, so hah.
Then there's things like pretending that the phrase "righteous man" absolutely must mean that Joseph was a tzaddik and corresponded exactly to that modern Jewish category. Sorry to pick on Bell again, but he's an easy target because he actually tries to bring in the cultural background to the text, but doesn't always do the best job of it.
I really do think that knowledge of the original languages is extremely useful, perhaps more for the things that are unclear in the Greek but given a meaning by translators, than the other way around.
Arche and archwn come from the same root, but knowing the meaning of one doesn't tell you anything very precise about the meaning of the other. By the way, I made a blooper of my own there -- I typed Rob Bell's name in when I meant to say Greg Boyd.
P.S. So does this mean you're as bored with the current sermon series at your church as I am?
"My personal favorite gripe is with the
people who try to cram all this elaborate theological meaning into
words like faith, grace, or agape, as if they were some sort of special
theological terms that were only used by Christians."
Yeah :P
Pastor today said one line about ekklesia being used in regard to certain authoritative assemblies, then asked us what God wants the ekklesia to be. *headdesk