Category: Languages

How Not to Fight About Words

In his final letter, St. Paul gives Timothy an important exhortation for those under his pastoral care:

Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers (2 Tim. 2:14).

In his previous letter, Paul gives an even more strongly worded warning:

If anyone . . . does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching which accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit, he knows nothing; he has a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, base suspicions, and wrangling among men who are depraved in mind and bereft of the truth (1 Tim. 6:3-5)

As you can see, Paul is not a fan of fights about words.

Yet Paul’s letters are filled with arguments about various issues. How can we square these two facts?

The basic resolution is that Paul cares about substance—that is, what a person believes—and he’s willing to argue about that. But he doesn’t want to argue about expression—that is, how a person phrases his beliefs. Paul is concerned about substance rather than style. As long as the substance of what a person believes is correct, Paul doesn’t want to quibble about how expresses himself.

I’m sure there would have been limits to this. I can imagine situations where Paul would have thought a person was expressing a true thought in a manner that was so misleading that he would have considered it worth discussing.

However, the principle remains: We shouldn’t be quarreling about words in the Christian community. We should recognize that a true belief can be expressed in more than one way, and the mode of expression is not what we should be concerned about.

This is especially true in discussions among different groups of Christians. Because language naturally changes over time, it is only to be expected that different Christians will develop their own ways of using language and their own nuances for terms.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of arguing about words in the Christian community today, and a good bit of it comes from not recognizing how flexible language can be.

People have a natural tendency to assume that words are just meant to be used the way they use them, and if somebody is using them differently, that person must be wrong.

So, let’s look at how some terms have changed over time, and see what conclusions we can draw.

We may learn something about how not to fight about words.

 

Words that Change Meaning in the Bible over Time

Though it may be surprising, there are terms that shift in their meaning even during biblical history.

That’s what you’d expect, since the Scriptures were written over a period of about 1,100 years, and nobody should expect a community’s mode of expression to stay static over that length of time. (Just look at how English has changed since the year 800!)

The matter is complicated by the fact that, not only did terms change meanings over this period, but the language itself shifted, with God’s people first speaking Hebrew, then Aramaic, and then Greek.

Nevertheless, we can track changes in meaning across biblical vocabulary:

Salvation: The basic meaning of this term is “to rescue” or “to make safe,” but there is a dramatic shift in how it is used between the Old and the New Testaments.

In the Old Testament, salvation is connected almost exclusively with being rescued from temporal dangers—ones we encounter in this life, like war, defeat, famine, plague, or death.

However, in the New Testament, the focus has shifted from this life to the next, and the salvation that is primarily under discussion is being rescued from the consequences of sin so that we can share eternal life with God.

One way of expressing this is that the Old Testament is principally concerned with “temporal” salvation, while the New Testament is principally concerned with “eternal” salvation.

Forgiveness: A corresponding shift is the way forgiveness of sin is understood.

In the Old Testament, being forgiven of a sin principally means not being punished—or fully punished—for it in this life. In particular, it means not dying as a result of the sin.

Thus, when David repents of having brought about the death of Uriah the Hittite, we read:

Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against Yahweh!”

Nathan said to David, “Yahweh has also forgiven your sin; you shall not die. But because you have utterly scorned Yahweh in this matter, the son born for you will certainly die” (2 Sam. 12:13-14, LEB).

David had been forgiven in that he would not die, but that doesn’t mean he would escape all punishment. He would be forced to witness the death of his son.

Notice that both of these penalties—David’s death and the death of his son—are temporal rather than eternal.

By contrast, when forgiveness is discussed in the New Testament, it is principally in connection with being forgiven the eternal consequences of our sins, so that we can be eternally saved.

 

Words that Change Meaning in Different Biblical Passages

Even within a single time period, words can be used in different senses in different biblical passages.

Faith/Belief: A classic example is the term “faith” or “belief” (Greek, pistis). In many New Testament passages, this concept involves trust in God. Thus, when Jesus has rebuked the wind and the waves, he turns to the disciples and says, ““Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?” (Mark 4:40).

However, a different sense of the term is on display in James, who informs us that “Even the demons believe—and shudder” (Jas. 2:19). Here “faith” is understood as a purely intellectual one. Demons know the truths of Christian doctrine, but they lack the more robust faith that involves trust in God.

Still a third usage is found in St. Paul, where he says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6). Here we have faith formed by love (Latin, fides formata caritate), which combines intellectual assent, trust, and charity—the three theological virtues (1 Cor. 13:7).

 

Words that Change Meaning Between the Bible and the Fathers

Of course, language did not stop developing with the close of the apostolic era, and so we find terms continuing to change in meaning:

Witness/Martyr: The Greek term martus originally meant “witness,” and in this sense we find St. Paul writing:

For God . . . is my witness [martus], how constantly I make mention of you, always asking in my prayers if somehow now at last I may succeed to come to you in the will of God (Rom. 1:9-10).

However, this term came to be associated with those who served as witnesses to the truth of the Faith by giving their lives for it and so being “martyred.”

Following the age of persecutions in the early Church, the term became so associated with being killed for the Faith that people who were not killed became known by other terms, such as “confessors” (those who confessed the Faith under persecution, even though they were not killed).

Today, a popular Christian audience would never understand the term martyr to refer simply to a person who bore witness to something.

Sacrament: The term sacrament (Greek, musterion, Latin, sacramentum) originally meant “secret” or “mystery,” and it occurs in this sense in the New Testament, as when Jesus tells the disciples, “To you has been granted the secret of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside everything is in parables” (Mark 4:11).

However, in the era of the Church Fathers, the term came much more to be associated with various rites of the Christian faith, such as baptism and the Eucharist.

Eventually, this usage came to predominate, and today nobody would know what you meant if you translated Jesus as saying, “To you has been given the sacrament of the kingdom of God.”

 

Words that Change Meaning Between the Fathers and the Scholastics

The Middle Ages also saw shifts in terminology that had been present earlier in the tradition:

Anathema: Though this term is found in the Greek New Testament (Gal. 1:8-9) and even has roots in the Old Testament, it shifted meaning over time, and by the Middle Ages it had come to refer to a special form of excommunication.

This form had to be performed by a bishop, who imposed it with a special ceremony. (There was a parallel ceremony for lifting the anathema once the offender had repented—which was a key goal of excommunicating him, to prompt him to repent of sin and come back to God.)

Unfortunately, knowledge of this meaning has been lost in many circles, leading to enormous confusion about the meaning of the phrase anathema sit (Latin, “let him be anathema”) in Church documents.

For example, many in the Protestant community understand anathema to mean something like “damned by God,” and take anathemas to be something that takes effect automatically and is pronounced upon all Protestants.

None of these things are true. In ecclesiastical usage, anathema referred to a special, ceremonial form of excommunication. Because it involved a ceremony, it did not take place automatically, and it was not applied to non-Catholics. Eventually, it was abolished, and it no longer exists in current canon law.

Elect/Chosen: By the Middle Ages, the term elect came to be used for a specific group of people—those who will be saved on the Last Day.

This meaning has been inherited by most contemporary doctrinal traditions, including both Catholic and Protestant ones.

However, this is not how the term is used in the Bible or the earliest Church Fathers—as I document in a study I did of this question. Instead, the primary meaning of elect was being chosen to have a special, intimate relationship with God, but not one that implied salvation on the Last Day.

The model was Israel’s status as God’s “elect” or “chosen people,” which implied a special relationship between them and God but not the final salvation of every single Israelite.

 

Words that Change Meaning Among Doctrinal Traditions

The fragmentation of Christendom into different doctrinal traditions—especially the fragmentation that occurred following the Protestant Reformation—has led to further developments in how terminology is used:

Law and Gospel: For example, while Law and Gospel are important concepts in the Bible, they have taken on unique usages in the Lutheran tradition. Thus, the Lutheran Book of Concord states:

Anything that preaches concerning our sins and God’s wrath, let it be done how or when it will, that is all a preaching of the Law. Again, the Gospel is such a preaching as shows and gives nothing else than grace and forgiveness in Christ.

It is certainly possible to go through the Bible and identify passages which speak of sin and divine wrath and compare them to passages that speak of grace and forgiveness in Christ, but these are not the primary ways that the biblical authors use the terms law and gospel. They are distinctively Lutheran usages.

In the Bible, the primary conceptualizations of law are either as divine principles given to guide human conduct or, specifically, the Law of Moses (Gen.-Deut.). Similarly, the principal focus of the gospel is God and his actions through his Son, especially Christ’s death and resurrection.

While law is related to sin and wrath, and while the gospel is related to grace and forgiveness, Lutheran theology has developed its own uses for these categories that do not map directly onto the thought worlds of the biblical authors.

Justification: A notable difference has developed in how the term justification is often understood in Protestant and Catholic communities.

The Catholic community uses justification to refer to “not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man” (CCC 1989). It also uses the term justify to mean “to cleanse us from our sins and to communicate to us the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ” (CCC 1987).

Two elements are thus found in the Catholic use of justification:

1. The remission of sins/being cleansed from sins

2. Inward sanctification/renewal/reception of righteousness from God

For the most part, the Protestant tradition has focused on justification as involving the first of these (with a corresponding understanding of justification as the impartation of legal righteousness), but not the second.

Instead, Protestant schools frequently refer to the inward renewal of the Christian using a second term: sanctification.

 

Words that Change Meaning Among Theological Traditions

Even within a given doctrinal tradition, different theological schools develop their own nuances for terms:

Regeneration/New Birth: For example, in Protestantism the term regeneration has taken on several meanings.

In Calvinist circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs prior to the expression of personal faith and which makes explicit personal faith possible.

In Lutheran circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs in baptism, regardless of whether explicit personal faith is present.

In Baptist circles, regeneration is used to refer to a transformative reception of grace that occurs when a person makes an explicit act of personal faith.

Predestination: Similarly, in both Protestant and Catholic circles the term predestination is understood in different ways among different theological schools.

Thus, in the Protestant tradition, Calvinists understand predestination differently than Arminians.

And in Catholic circles, Thomists understand it differently than Molinists.

 

Some Conclusions

Having gotten a sense of the ways religious terms change across time, what conclusions can we draw?

Principally, we’ve seen that there is no single way to use terms, which is the fundamental reason for Paul’s dictum not to engage in word fights.

The Bible itself shows different usages, both across times and by different authors living in the same time.

Given this diversity in Scripture itself, we should not expect doctrinal vocabulary to be frozen at any given moment in history.

What is normative is the fundamental doctrinal substance of the Faith, which was frozen with the end of public revelation at the conclusion of the apostolic age.

Even then, that fundamental content remained to be meditated upon and further elaborated, with its implications being fleshed out through the process of doctrinal development (which any accurate understanding of the history of Christian doctrine and theology must recognize).

But what are we do to about the different usages that have grown up in the Christian community?

Lest confusion result, each communion should in general retain the usages that have developed within it, though even these are not frozen and are subject to further development with time.

For the sake of accurately understanding of the Bible, of history, and of each other, there also should be an awareness of the way terms have shifted and continue to shift.

  • Exegetes need to be aware of how terminology is used in the Bible and how to translate it into the vocabulary of their own traditions—without forcing their tradition’s meanings back onto the biblical text.
  • Patristic scholars need to do the same thing with respect to texts from the Church Fathers.
  • Historians of doctrine and theology need to do it with the historical texts they study.
  • And Christians in dialogue among different doctrinal and theological traditions need to be able to do it across the biblical, historical, and contemporary texts.

Part of learning how not to fight about words is learning to translate between these vocabularies.

For example, when it comes to the terms like justify and justification, we should not suppose that there is only a single way that these can be used—or that Scripture uses them in only one sense (it does not; Scripture has multiple uses for them).

Instead, we should be able to explain how our tradition uses the term and what we mean by it—and be prepared to explain the basis for what we believe.

Catholics and Protestants typically believe in both the forgiveness of sins with an accompanying legal status of being righteous—and a renewal of the inner man by God’s grace.

We do not need to be divided by the terminological issue of whether our community uses justification to refer to just the first of these or to both, as long as we agree on the substance—the fact that both occur.

When it comes to the biblical texts, we need to be prepared to recognize that Scripture may or may not use terms the way that they have developed in our communities. We should not force our doctrinal or theological uses back onto the text.

Instead, we should seek to determine—as best we can—what the biblical authors meant, regardless of whether it corresponds to later uses.

Sometimes, it will. The different uses of faith that are emphasized in different schools today are all found in Scripture. But the conventional meaning of the term elect is not.

It is good—to the extent possible over time—to steer our vocabularies so that they correspond to the way terms are used in Scripture, but language change requires time and cannot be suddenly imposed without causing tremendous confusion and dissension.

Such dissension is precisely what St. Paul sought to avoid by prohibiting quarrels about words. As long as we agree in substance, precisely how we express that substance is a secondary matter, and—even if we think another school is departing from the language of Scripture in how they express themselves and it would be better if they didn’t—we should still be able to recognize it when they are correct in substance.

Pronouncing Biblical Names (Wherein I Rant)

Pronouncing biblical names is often tricky. They’re names from other languages, after all.

Some have become standard, English names. But for every David or John there’s also an Artaxerxes and a Mahershalalhashbaz.

When you’re reading the Bible aloud and you come across a name, you may:

  1. Use the standard English pronunciation
  2. Use the standard pronunciation in the original language (Hebrew, Greek, etc.)
  3. Fake it

Many readers that I hear seem to prefer option 3.

However, that’s not what I want to rant about today. Instead, I want to rant about a pet peeve of mine.

Yes, I know it’s trivial, but it drives me nuts.

 

Elijah and Elisha

Consider the names of these two Old Testament prophets: Elijah and Elisha.

They’re different, no? One of them has a /j/ in it and the other has an /sh/ in it.

And that’s the only difference.

So it should be the only difference in how you pronounce them, right?

 

The Traditional English Pronunciation

Sure enough, in the traditional English pronunciation, it is: Elijah is pronounced ee-LIE-jah and Elisha is pronounced ee-LIE-shah.

If somebody names their kid Elisha, you call him ee-LIE-shah.

At least, that’s how you do it if you’re using the standard English pronunciation.

 

The Traditional Hebrew Pronunciation

Normally when reading aloud, you wouldn’t want to use anything but the standard English pronunciation.

It would confuse your audience, and you could come across as just showing off.

Like if you pronounced the name David as dah-WEED in church for no reason.

However, there are situations—like in a language class—where you’d want to know the pronunciation in the original language.

So how would you pronounce Elijah and Elisha in biblical Hebrew?

There are a few things you need to know:

  1. Hebrew doesn’t have the /j/ sound; it uses the /y/ sound instead.
  2. Every syllable in Hebrew must begin with a consonant, even if it’s just a glottal stop—i.e., a constriction of the throat (we actually have this consonant in English, but it’s not part of our alphabet; if you pay attention, you can hear yourself saying it on the front of the word apple).
  3. After a glottal stop, Hebrew tends to have a short vowel that’s basically equivalent to the English /uh/ sound (like in the word upper).
  4. Both Elijah and Elisha start with a glottal stop followed by a short vowel.
  5. Both Elijah and Elisha have a long /ee/ sound (as in seem) in the middle.
  6. Hebrew tends to stress the last syllable of the word (in contrast, English often stresses the next-to-last syllable, as in gateway or edition).

With that in mind, you can work out how you should (roughly) pronounce Elijah and Elisha:

  • Elijah becomes uh-lee-YAH
  • Elisha becomes uh-lee-SHAH

 

The Newfangled Nonsense Pronunciation

In recent years—in some circles—the people who write biblical name pronunciation guides have been promoting a ridiculous, alternative pronunciation of this name.

I suspect it’s the same people who were pushing for all manner of liturgical novelties in the 1970s and 1980s, including items of Orwellian Liturgical Newspeak (e.g., “We Are Church,” which is just bad English).

The alternative pronunciation they’ve been promoting is ee-LISH-ah.

No!

This is not the standard English pronunciation, and as far as Hebrew goes, Every. Syllable. Of. This. Is. Wrong.

  • The /ee/ on the front is wrong because Hebrew has a short vowel here: /uh/ as in upper, not /ee/ as in seem.
  • The /LISH/ is wrong (a) because it’s improperly given the stress, when that should be on the last syllable, (b) because it grabs the /sh/ that must be on the beginning of the last syllable, and (c) because it uses a short /i/ sound (as in hit) when it should be an /ee/ sound (as in seem).
  • The /ah/ on the end is wrong (a) because it doesn’t have a consonant on the front of it and (b) because it isn’t stressed, as it should be.

Weirdly, the people promoting the ee-LISH-ah pronunciation haven’t been doing the same thing with Elijah. They haven’t been urging people to pronounce it ee-LIJJ-ah.

This makes me suspect that they wanted to use the difference in pronunciation to help people keep Elijah and Elisha straight, given how similar their names are.

But they needn’t bother. Most people today don’t know the difference between Elijah and Elisha in the first place.

And they’re doing violence to the language.

So please, do not pronounce Elisha so that it kinda-sorta sounds like the word delicious.

The fancy way of saying that one word kinda-sorta sounds like another is to say that the two words are assonant.

So please, when it comes to Elisha, don’t be an assonant.

The Voynich Manuscript – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

In 1912, a rare book written in an unknown alphabet containing bizarre illustrations was revealed by Wilfrid Voynich and despite decades of effort, it has never been deciphered. Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the theories for what it is, including very recent claims made about the book.

Further Resources:

Mysterious Headlines:

Direct Link to the Episode.
Subscribe on iTunes. | Other Ways to Subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

The Dead Sea Scrolls Mystery – Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World

MYS009

Where do the Dead Sea Scrolls come from and do they contain secret knowledge about Jesus? Jimmy Akin and Dom Bettinelli discuss the claims about the ancient scrolls and what we know about them, as well as their personal experiences.

Links for this episode:

Mysterious Headlines

Direct Link to the Episode.

Subscribe on iTunes. | Other Ways to Subscribe.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Pronoun Trouble

They're butchering the Swedish language! And it isn't the Swedish chef who's doing it!

Even Slate Magazine seems skeptical of a recent move in Sweden to introduce a genderless personal pronoun into the Swedish language:

Earlier this month, the movement for gender neutrality reached a milestone: Just days after International Women’s Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country’s National Encyclopedia.

The entry defines hen as a “proposed gender-neutral personal pronoun instead of he [han in Swedish] and she [hon].”

The National Encyclopedia announcement came amid a heated debate about gender neutrality that has been raging in Swedish newspaper columns and TV studios and on parenting blogs and feminist websites.

It was sparked by the publication of Sweden’s first ever gender-neutral children’s book, Kivi och Monsterhund (Kivi and Monsterdog). It tells the story of Kivi, who wants a dog for “hen’s” birthday.

The male author, Jesper Lundqvist, introduces several gender-neutral words in the book. For instance the words mammor and pappor (moms and dads) are replaced with mappor and pammor.

Slate’s skepticism emerges in a subsequent passage noting the Orwellian attempt to force children to behave against their nature:

Ironically, in the effort to free Swedish children from so-called normative behavior, gender-neutral proponents are also subjecting them to a whole set of new rules and new norms as certain forms of play become taboo, language becomes regulated, and children’s interactions and attitudes are closely observed by teachers.

One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys “gender-coded” them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys.

Another preschool removed “free playtime” from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely “stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.”

And so every detail of children’s interactions gets micromanaged by concerned adults, who end up problematizing minute aspects of children’s lives, from how they form friendships to what games they play and what songs they sing.

What to make of all this?

Was Jesus Dissing His Mother When He Called Her “Woman”?

At the wedding at Cana, Jesus told Mary: "Woman, how does your concern affect me?" Was he showing disrespect to her?

At the wedding at Cana, Jesus turns to Mary and says, “Woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.”

Sounds disrespectful, doesn’t it?

Or at least you could take it that way.

But Jesus wasn’t being disrespectful at all.

Here’s the story . . .

 

Pronoun Trouble

First, the translation “How does your concern affect me?” (John 2:4 in the NAB:RE) is not a literal rendering of what Jesus says in Greek.

Word-for-word, what he says is “What to me and to you?”

In context, Mary has just come up to him and informed Jesus that the people running the wedding have no wine, so you might literally translate his response as “What [is that] to me and to you?” In other words: “What does that have to do with us?”

He’s not dissing her. He’s putting the two of them–both of them–in a special category together and questioning the relevance of the fact that people outside this category don’t have wine. He’s saying that it’s not the responsibility of the two of them to make sure they have wine.

But that’s lost if you take the Greek pronoun that means “to you” (soi) and obliterate it in translation.

 

“Woman”

Part of what makes it sound like Jesus might be dissing his mother is the fact that he refers to her as “woman.”

We don’t talk to women like that today–not if we respect them, and certainly not our own mothers.

But the connotations–of respect, disrespect, or other things–that a word has in a given language are quite subtle, and we can’t impose the connotations that a word has in our own language on another.

Consider: Suppose, in English, we replaced “woman” with a term that means basically the same thing but with better connotations.

For example, the word “lady” or “ma’am.”

Suddenly what Jesus says sounds a lot more respectful.

In British circles, “lady” has distinctly noble overtones (it’s the female counterpart to the noble honorific “lord”).

And even in demotic America, a son can say, “Yes, ma’am” to his mother and mean it entirely respectfully.

So what can we learn about the connotations of “woman” as a form of address in Jesus’ time?

KEEP READING.

Why Don’t We Call Moses and Elijah “Saint”?

If Moses and Elijah were present in the Transfiguration, why don't we call them saints?

Recently I received the question: “Why don’t we call Moses and Elijah ‘Saint'”?

In other words: Why aren’t they referred to as St. Moses and St. Elijah?

Evidence for Sainthood

After all, we have it on pretty good authority that they are holy and in heaven.

Both Old and New Testament attest to the holiness of both individuals. We have a clear indication that Elijah was taken directly into heaven, without dying, and while Moses did die, there’s no serious doubt about his making it to heaven (at least after heaven was generally opened to the righteous of the Old Testament).

Most impressively, both Moses and Elijah get to appear with Jesus in the Transfiguration.

That’s kind of a giveaway.

So why don’t we call them saints?

Old Testament Saints in General

A basic answer would be that we tend not to use the honorific “Saint” for human beings who lived in the Old Testament period.

We do use it for angels we read about in the Old Testament–St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael–but not human beings.

That is probably just an artifact of how the term “Saint” evolved. Originally it was an adjective, meaning “holy” (Latin, sanctus). People started prefixing it to the names of notably holy individuals (holy Peter, holy Paul), and eventually it came to be used as an honorific–like “Mister” or “Doctor” (thus St. Peter, St. Paul).

But for whatever reason, people tended not to do this for Old Testament figures.

Perhaps this was because holy figures of the Old Testament were thought to already be sufficiently hallowed by their inclusion in Scripture–although that would not explain why the apostles and other New Testament figures got the title “Saint.”

More likely, Old Testament figures were seen as less directly relevant as examples to Christians, because they lived before the Christian age. Those living in the Christian age, like the apostles and later saints, are more like us and thus more direct examples for us in a certain sense.

However that may be, Old Testament figures were generally not called “Saint.”

But sometimes they were. . . .

Meet St. Moses and St. Elijah

The Latin Church maintains an official list of saints and blesseds known as the Roman Martyrology, and it actually lists some humans from the Old Testament, including Moses and Elijah.

Here is part of the entry for September 4:

On Mount Nebo, in the land of Moab, [was the death of] the holy lawgiver and prophet Moses.

And here is part of the entry for July 20:

On Mount Carmel, [was the departure of] the holy prophet Elijah.

Latin or English?

The Roman Martyrology, of course, is in Latin, and the translation offered above is accomodated to standard English usage, which avoids using “Saint” for Moses and Elijah. The Latin original is a bit different.

Here is  the Latin for these two entries, along with a more word-for-word translation:

In monte Nebo, terræ Moab, sancti Móysis, legislatóris et Prophétæ.

On Mt. Nebo, of the land of Moab, [was the death] of saint Moses, lawgiver and Prophet.

In monte Carmélo sancti Elíæ Prophétæ.

On Mt. Carmel [was the departure] of saint Elijah the Prophet.

This is the same construction that is used to report the deaths of other saints in the Matyrology. For example, a bit later on September 4th, we read:

Tréviris sancti Marcélli, Epíscopi et Mártyris.

Which would be:

At Treves [was the death] of saint Marcellus, Bishop and Martyr.

You might note that the term “saint” is lower-case in the Latin, and you might argue from that that it should be translated as an adjective–“holy”–but the point is that the Martyrology is applying to Moses and Elijah the same terminology that it applies to other saints.

It’s listing them in the same way, despite the fact that they’re Old Testament figures.

And then there’s this . . .

Meet Mar Musa and Mar Elia

English and Latin aren’t the only two languages in the Church, and the Latin Church isn’t the only body in union with the pope. Consider, for example, the Chaldean Church, which is one of the Eastern Catholic churches.

It uses a dialect of Aramaic as its liturgical language, and it refers to Moses and Elijah as saints, using the standard Aramatic term fors “saint”–“mar”–as a title for both of them.

They are referred to as “Mar Musa” (St. Moses) and “Mar Elia” (St. Elijah).

You will find various Chaldean institutions, like churches and monasteries, named after them the same way you find them named after other saints.

And Mar Musa and Mar Elia don’t just have particular days celebrating them on the Chaldean liturgical calendar. They actually have liturgical seasons devoted to them.

I should note that the term “mar” also has other meanings. Its root meaning is “lord.” And you can see it in the term “maranatha” (Marana tha = “Our Lord, come!”).

By extension it also is used as a title for saints, as with Mar Musa, Mar Elia, and all the other saints honored in the Chaldean Church.

Finally, it is also used as a title for bishops, but nobody is under the impression that Moses and Elijah were bishops.

We thus have to be a bit careful about who the “we” is when we ask why we don’t refer to Moses and Elijah as saints.

Some of us do, because the practice can vary from one language to another and from one Catholic rite to another.

Who’s Punning? Jesus or John?

A reader writes:

Question: An atheist has claimed that Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus couldn’t have happened because it’s a greek word that has two meanings, critical to the story, and Jesus didn’t speak greek.

I know neither greek nor aramaic, and according to some english, so any thing you happen to know would be useful. Thanks!

It’s true that in John’s account of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:1ff) the Greek word anothen (an-OH-thin) is used, and that this word can mean either “from above” or “again.” It is often assumed that the Gospel of John uses this word as a deliberate pun (“born again” vs. “born from above”).

However, from an apologetic perspective, this is a non-problem.

#1 Paraphrase is allowed in writings of this sort. It is easy to demonstrate that the New Testament authors employ paraphrase (as do ALL ancient historical writers). The claim is that the gospels faithfully reflect the teaching of Jesus (they speak with his ipsissima vox) not that they give an exact word-for-word Greek translation of what he said on all occasions (his ipsissima verba). Thus in faithfully transmitting the *teaching* of Jesus, John may have noticed that a Greek pun was possible and chosen to use it. On the other hand . . .

#2 Cross-language puns are far easier to construct than people imagine. Just because there is a pun in one language doesn’t mean that there can’t be an *equivalent* pun in another. Jesus may have made a pun in Aramaic and then John constructed an equivalent pun in Greek. On the other hand . . .

#3 The pun may not be intentional on John’s part. The objection assumes that John was deliberately punning, but as we all know, it’s quite possible for someone “to be a poet and not know it.” On the other hand . . .

#4 They *did* speak a good bit of Greek in first century Palestine. While it is more likely that they were speaking in Aramaic, this conversation could have taken place in Greek.

I don’t view these alternatives as equally likely (my money would be on #1 as the most likely explanation, then #2), but they are all possible, and the claim that the conversation couldn’t have happened because of a Greek pun in the gospel is simply false.

“It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us”

Council A reader writes:

"For it has 'seemed' good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and froom blood and fromw what is strangled and froum unchastity" (Acts 15: 28-29).

This is taken from the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Second Edition.

An older Bible I have says, "It IS the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us…"

My question is why has it been modified from "is" to "seems?" When it is translated "seems," I think that adds ammunition to Protestants who would say, "See, the Church is not infallible when it makes doctrines because it only "seems" to be good to them."

Do you share my concern here? Could you address this and why on earth this current translation exists instead of the older, and I believe, more accurate one?

I understand the reader's concern, but I don't think it's necessary.

In particular, we (all of us, Catholics and Protestants alike) need to guard against preferring a particular translation because it's more useful. "More apologetically useful" does not equal "more accurate."

Our approach should be to try to figure out what the most accurate understanding of the text is and then assess what apologetic value it has. (And that's when we're trying to do biblical apologetics. If that's not our task at the moment then we may assess it in other terms–e.g., what it says about God [theology proper] or what moral lesson it carries [moral theology] or what we can learn for our own spriritual lives [spiritual theology].)

So what about Acts 15:28?

In Greek the phrase "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" is edoksen gar tO pneumati tO hagiO kai hEmin. Broken out word by word, that's edoksen (it seemed good) gar (for) tO pneumati tO hagiO ([to] the Holy Spirit) kai (and) hEmin ([to] us).

The key word is thus edoksen, which is a form of the verb dokeO. Like most verbs, this one has several related meanings, and it does indeed mean things like "think, seem, seem good, appear, appear good, suppose, be of the opinion, judge, etc."

For a variety of reasons, the most logical literal translation is "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." I won't go into all the technical minutiae, but there is no noun there corresponding to "judgment." Edoksen is a verb with the implied subject "it" (it's 3rd person singular), and in context things like "it judged" make no sense (e.g., "It judged to the Holy Spirit and to us"?).

The proper literal translation would thus be something along the lines of "For it seemed/appeared good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

This is the way the Latin Vulgate takes the passage, too (since we're talking about older translations). In the Vulgate the phrase reads visum est enim Spiritui Sancto et nobis. This is a very straightforward translation of the Greek: visum est (it seemed good) enim (for) Spiritui Sancto ([to] the Holy Spirit] et (and) nobis ([to] us).

Visum est is a perfect passive form of the verb video, which (as you might guess) means "see" or "look at," but in the passive voice (which this is) means things like "seen," "seem," "seem good," "appear," and "appear good." Again, it has an implied subject of "it," and "it seemed good" or "it appeared good" is the most natural literal English translation.

(By the way, "the Holy Spirit and us" cannot be the subject of the verb in either Greek or Latin because the corresponding nouns are in a grammatical form known as the dative case, which prevents them from being subjects of the main verb; also, we'd have a compound subject which would lead one to expect the plural, and both verbs are singular; thus the correct subject of the verb is an implied "it.")

You'll note I've been saying that "it appeared/seemed good" is the most natural literal English translation, but one can use nonliteral ("dynamic") translations, which is what the reader's older Bible apparently does. I don't know what translation it is, but the thought that the Jerusalem Council is sending to the churches is that the decision of the Holy Spirit and the Jerusalem elders is that only minimal requirements should be made of Gentile converts for the sake of Church harmony.

If one is doing a free translation rather than a literal one, "It is the decision of" would be okay. It's just not what the Greek literally says.

The Greek also doesn't indicate any uncertainty about the resulting ruling, despite what "seem" or "appear" commonly connote in English. Instead, as a way of politely giving an order to the affected churches, the Jerusalem Council is using a literary form known as meiosis, which you deliberately understate something as a way of emphasizing it (e.g., calling the Atlantic Ocean "the Pond" when it is clearly vastly larger than a pond).

And less anybody reading the letter miss the point, the Holy Spirit is mentioned first in who the ruling seemed good to. The Holy Spirit is God, and thus omniscient and all-perfect, and anything that "seems good" to him may be taken as most definitively good.

Rather than timidity about the judgment, the way the letter is written stresses its authority, while using meiosis as a way of giving the order diplomatically.

With this understanding of the text we can now ask about its value for apologetics.

I wouldn't worry about the weaker-appearing verb "seemed" because it is the better literal translation, and it does not take away from the authority the letter had for the first century Church.

Further, even if this passage did express tentativeness, that would not disprove the Church's infallibility. There are lots of things the Church is tentative about. Some things that the first century Church was tentative about are mentioned in the Bible (e.g., when Paul expresses a personal judgment that he acknowledges he doesn't have a command from the Lord on).

But this passage isn't a tentative one. It's an emphatic one, and what it actually shows is that the Holy Spirit superintends certain kinds of Church councils and his authority backs them up.

That's a message that points in the direction of at least certain kinds of magisterial functions being infallible.

This doesn't give us a full-orbed theology of ecclesiastical infallibility, but it does point in the direction of that reality, and thus the passage has apologetic value even on the "weaker" (but more literal) understanding of what the letter said.

And, not coincidentally, the Acts 15 council is the paradigm for the ecumenical councils that have been held throughout Church history, so there is apologetic value there as well, with the Acts 15 council serving as precedent and model for them.

Hope this helps!

Abba: The Case of the Missing “B”

Over on Facebook, a reader writes:

Mr. Akin, could you possibly post "Abba" in Aramaic fully pointed. Why is the Beta repeated?~Thanks again

First let's look at "Abba" in Greek, which is displays the issue that the reader is wondering about. Here is how the word appears in Greek (cf. Mark 14:36 in a typical Greek New Testament):

Abba3

As you can see, the term is spelled alpha-beta-beta-alpha. The reader asks why the beta is repeated, and the answer is that this is how they said it, with a reduplicated "b" sound separating the two vowel sounds. The Greek is giving us a fuller phonetic explanation of the word (how it sounds)–at least in this respect. (The Greek, like the English, does not record the invisible consonant on the front of the word.)

Now here's how the same word looks in Hebrew/Aramaic block script (which is a stylized form of the Aramaic alphabet, though it is most familiar to us as the script used to write modern Hebrew):

Abba2

It's spelled aleph-beth-aleph, which prompts the reader's question: Why only one letter corresponding to "b" in this version?

The answer is that the original Semitic scripts were unpointed, meaning that they only included consonants (aleph is a consonant, believe it or not, though it later came to serve as a kind of vowel marker, making it a mater lectionis). Also, because of the way syllabification works in Semitic languages, their scripts often do not (or in unpointed versions do not) mark reduplicated consonants.

Thus even though you said the word "ABBA," you'd spell it "ABA." In an unpointed script, if you spelled it "ABBA" then the second "B" would suggest an extra syllable: "a-ba-ba" or something like that.

This reflects a fact that is also true of English (and even moreso French!): the script for the language is not fully phonetic. It is assumed that you already know the words you are reading and just need enough visual information to help you identify the word. You don't need how it's actually said spelled out in detail. That's what allowed the ancient Semites to get away without using VWLS N TH FRST PLC.

Eventually, they did come up with ways of indicating vowels–and other things–using a system of "points," which are small marks placed above, below, or within the letters. In the block script version of the word above, the marks under the first two letters (reading from right-to-left) are vowels–two different versions of the "a" sound.

The dot in the middle of the middle letter (beth), however, is not a vowel. It's a mark known as a dagesh forte (borrowing from Latin, meaning a "strong" dagesh). The dagesh forte (also called a dagesh hazak) tells you "double this consonant."

Thus even if you don't know the word "Abba," you could figure out how to say it using the modern, pointed version, because the dagesh forte tells you to say it "ABBA" rather than "ABA."

There are a variety of other Aramaic scripts that the word can be written in, and they have their own unique pointing rules, but the same basic issue applies.

Hope this clarifies the case of the missing "B"!