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.
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):
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):
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.
In my previous post, I took on a silly video that has more than a million views of different versions of it. The video centered on Jesus’ statement in Luke 10:18 that, after the disciples had come back from a preaching mission, Our Lord had seen “Satan fall like lightning from heaven” and claimed that if you back translated this statement from Greek to Aramaic and then to Hebrew that “lighting from heaven” would come out as “baraq o baw-maw” or “Barack Obama.” This, the nameless creator of the video suggested, might mean that Jesus was telling us the Antichrist’s name would be Barack Obama.
I greeted the logic of this video with a great big gift bag full of “Nope.”
Whatever Barack Obama’s role may be in the great scheme of things, whether he’s The One who will cause the oceans to stop rising and the planet to heal or whether he’s just the one who went golfing while the Gulf filled up with oil, Luke 10:18 doesn’t establish him as the Antichrist.
One reason, as previously explained, is that this passage isn’t a prophecy at all. On its face, it appears to be Jesus congratulating the disciples on a well done evangelization mission.
Another reason, as previously explained, is that if you translated “lighting from heaven” back into either Aramaic or Hebrew, you wouldn’t get “baraq o baw-maw.” Instead, you’d get something like “baraq min ha-shamayim” (Hebrew) or “barqa min shmaya” (Aramaic).
After posting my post, I thought, “Hey, this isn’t the first time somebody has translated this phrase into this pair of languages. Let’s see what we find if we look it up in a Hebrew New Testament an an Aramaic New Testament!”
Transliterating that from right to left, it reads “kbaraq min ha-shamayim” (ignoring the effect of a few Hebrew punctuation marks that don’t transliterate well into English). The “k” on the front of this is actually a different word. It’s a preposition meaning “as” or “like,” which is part of what Our Lord was just saying: “like lighting from heaven.” But if you just want the phrase “lightning from heaven,” you’d leave off the “k.”
So the translators of this Hebrew New Testament bore out what I said: If you translate the phrase into Hebrew, you’d expect to see “baraq min ha-shamayim,” not something that sounds like “Barack Obama.”
And if you don’t happen to know the Hebrew alphabet, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!
Of course the whole Hebrew thing is really just a red herring—or maybe that should be a red lox—because Jesus wouldn’t have been speaking Hebrew in this combination, but in all likelihood Aramaic. The video maker just jumped to Hebrew because he knew even less about Aramaic than he did about Hebrew.
So what happens if we check an Aramaic New Testament?
The standard Aramaic translation of the New Testament is the Pshitta, a version of which is online here. This version happens to be an interlinear, with the English words appearing over the Aramaic ones they correspond to. Just remember that the Aramaic letters read right to left rather than left to right.
Here’s the phrase from Luke 10:18:
This edition isn’t pointed for vowels, but transliterating it you get “barqa min shmaya” (there is no “k,” as in Hebrew because the Aramaic uses a separate preposition for “like” here).
Again, don’t just take my word for it. CHECK ME OUT!
(BTW, these other alphabets may look different, but they aren’t that hard to learn. Give ‘em a try!)
Anyway, either way you go—baraq min ha-shamayim or barqa min shmaya—neither sounds much like “Barack Obama.”
Consider the following video, which has been going around the Internet, with over a million hits on YouTube between different versions.
Okay. So that kind of settles it.
NOT.
I don’t know who is behind the video, but whoever it is clearly has only the most rudimentary understanding of the things he’s talking about, and he makes mistakes left and right. (Put another way: He’s totally out of his depth.) This is made clear by the annotations that start popping up in the video (you can shut them off with the controller in the lower right hand corner) that, among other things, advertise an updated version of the video, in which he tries to eliminate some of the most blatant errors that critics have pointed out.
The new one doesn’t work any better. It’s just got a few of the worst mistakes cut out.
Like this one: The claim that Jesus spoke Aramaic, which is the most ancient form of Hebrew.
NOT.
While Jesus did speak Aramaic, Aramaic is not an ancient form of Hebrew. It’s a related language, but neither is an ancestor of the other.
What he’s done is the equivalent of saying that English is the most ancient form of Dutch.
It reveals how utterly devoid of basic competence in the biblical languages this person is.
His overall strategy then becomes clear: He knows that the New Testament is recorded in Greek, but he wants to get back behind that to Aramaic so he can jump (quickly!) back to Hebrew. This is where his real interest is: Talking about Hebrew, because he’s got access to a rudimentary Hebrew dictionary. He doesn’t really know or care about Aramaic. It’s just a way of getting quickly to the Hebrew dictionary he’s discovered.
And by the way, it is evident that this man has no training in biblical Hebrew or he never would have made the mistake of saying that Aramaic was a form of it. You can’t take a class (or even read a whole book) on biblical Hebrew without learning how the two languages are related, since they’re both used in the Old Testament. He’s just some guy (possibly a minister, possibly not) who has access to a Hebrew dictionary.
A particularly, old, problematic Hebrew dictionary.
In fact, what he really has is a copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance. As its name suggests, it’s not really a dictionary; it’s a concordance—a book that allows you to look up where words occur in the Bible. For example, if you looked up “faith,” you’d find a list of all the verses in which the word “faith” occurs in the King James Bible.
Strong’s happened to assign numbers to the words, and it offers a numbered word list to give a basic idea of what the original Greek or Hebrew word meant.
The problem is that Strong’s definitions are (a) more than a hundred years old, (b) extremely brief and lacking in detail, and (c) very, very prone to misuse.
Whenever I hear anyone starting to use Strong’s numbers when making an argument, I cringe because I know that misuse of the original languages is almost certain to occur.
The problem is so common that the Wikipedia entry on Strong’s Concordance devotes two paragraphs to warning people not to misuse the numbers:
Strong’s Concordance is not a translation of the Bible nor is it intended as a translation tool. The use of Strong’s numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English by those with formal training in ancient languages and the literature of the cultures in which the Bible was written.
Since Strong’s Concordance identifies the original words in Hebrew and Greek, Strong’s Numbers are sometimes misinterpreted by those without adequate training to change the Bible from its accurate meaning simply by taking the words out of cultural context. The use of Strong’s numbers does not consider figures of speech, metaphors, idioms, common phrases, cultural references, references to historical events, or alternate meanings used by those of the time period to express their thoughts in their own language at the time. As such, professionals and amateurs alike must consult a number of contextual tools to reconstruct these cultural backgrounds.
I don’t know who wrote that in Wikipedia, but whoever it was, God bless him (or them)!
So let’s see how the video manages to botch things with Strong’s numbers.
First, it cites Hebrew words number 1299 and 1300, which Strong’s lists respectively as meaning “to lighten (lightning)—cast forth” and “lightning; by analogy, a gleam; concretely, a flashing sword—bright, glitter(-ing sword), lightning.”
Okay, fine. Fair enough. But here is where not knowing what you’re doing comes in. It’s true that the Hebrew word(s) for lightning come from the root BRQ, but that is not where Barack Obama’s name comes from. It comes from a different root: BRK.
We don’t distinguish the sounds of K and Q in English very well, but in the Semitic languages, they do. K is pronounced towards the front or the middle of the mouth, while Q is pronounced toward the back of the mouth, on the soft palette. In other words, these are two different sounds in Hebrew and Aramaic, and you can’t count on a word derived from BRQ to have the same meaning as a word derived from BRK any more than you can count on the meaning of the word “cab” to have a meaning similar to the word “cap” (B and P being similar sounds that English speakers use and distinguish but that some, such as Arabic-speakers, don’t).
(There are also other variants on the K sound in these languages, but we won’t go into them for simplicity’s sake.)
So what is the real meaning of Barack Obama’s first name?
It has nothing to do with lightning. But if Mr. Video Maker hadn’t been so fascinated by Strong’s numbers 1299 and 1300, he might have looked up at 1288 which is the real source of the name: barak, which can mean a variety of things, but the relevant one is this: blessing. People see their children as blessings, and they want them to be blessed by God, and so variants on the root BRK have been used in Semitic and Semitic-influenced languages for thousands of years. Which is why lots of people from Bible days down to ours have had names based on this root, even in other languages than Hebrew.
So much for the Barack = baraq business. President Obama’s first name has nothing to do with lightning, and a native speaker of Aramaic or Hebrew would have distinguished the two words as easily as we distinguish “cab” from “cap.”
We already have plenty of evidence that the vid is a load of hooey, but let’s keep going.
To get the word “Obama” into the picture, Mr. Video Maker seems to reason like this: Jesus said something about the devil falling light lightning from a high place, so let’s find somewhere in the Old Testament (so it’ll be in Hebrew) where the devil falls in connection with a high place.
He settles on Isaiah, which he says is the source of the Christian concept of Satan (???), and specifically on Isaiah 14.
Now the thing is, Isaiah 14 is not about the devil. Certainly not in the literal sense of the text. It involves a series of prophesies against neighboring kingdoms that have been persecuting Israel: the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Philistines—all of whom the text explicitly names, so we don’t have to be confused about it. The verses that Mr. Video Maker applies to the devil are, in fact, part of a taunt song directed toward the king of Babylon, telling him that although he is high and might now, he’s going to die and end up rotting, with all his pomp and glory coming to nothing.
Over time, Christians have lifted some of the imagery from this passage and applied it to the devil, but that is not what the text is literally talking about. It’s talking about the death of a Babylonian king.
So: More problems for Mr. Video’s thesis.
Now, it’s true that the word bamah can mean height or high place. It’s also a term referring to pagan shrines, which were built on elevated platforms (that’s the kind of high place the prophets often rail against). But it’s not the normal word for “heaven,” in Hebrew, which is shamayim. If you took Jesus statement that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven (Greek, ouranos) and you translated this back into Aramaic or Hebrew, the word you’d use for “heaven” would be shmaya (Aramaic) or shamayim (Hebrew). Bamah would not be the expected word.
So: Another problem.
Then there is the bizarre things that Mr. Video Maker does with the conjunction waw- (or vav-). This functions as the equivalent of the word “and,” and it is prefixed to words in Hebrew and Aramaic.
Video Guy tells us that this is often transliterated “U” or “O” by some scholars.
Uh . . . no. Not when it’s used as a conjunction. (The same letter can be used as an O in the middle of a word, when it’s functioning as a vowel, but not when it’s on the front of a word functioning as a conjunction.)
When it’s used as a conjunction, it’s pronounced “veh-” in modern Hebrew, and it’s pronounced “u-” (as in “tube”) in Aramaic (and Arabic).
So this is just wrong. waw as a conjunction is not pronounced O.
Mr. Video then strings it all together: baraq + o- + bamah and suggests that this would be used “in Hebrew poetry” to mean “lighting from heaven” or “lightning from the heights.”
GAH!
Okay: Here is something Mr. Video should understand just from his days in grammar school. Just from English. Conjunctions are words like “and,” “but,” and “or.” “From” is not a conjunction. It is a preposition.
So in Hebrew and Aramaic, U- is a conjunction. It means “and,” not “from.”
What you want for “from” is min. “Lightning *from* heaven” would be something like baraq min ha-shamayim (Hebrew) or barqa min shmaya (Aramaic) or similar variants.
So things aren’t going well for this thesis.
But now let’s pull the rug out from under it entirely.
Consider the context. Read Luke 10, where the quotation in the video comes from. Jesus has sent out the Seventy-Two on an evangelization mission and when they come back . . .
17 The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.”
18 He replied, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. 19 I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you. 20 However, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
21 At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was your good pleasure.
So what is the context of “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”? Is it a prophecy referring to the 21st century? No! It’s a remark about the evangelization mission that the Seventy-Two have just completed!
The disciples went out, preached, worked miracles, and struck a blow against the kingdom of Satan. So Jesus congratulates them telling them that before their evangelistic effort, King Satan fell from his throne like lightning from the sky (which is where lighting falls from; “sky,” “heaven,” same word in all these languages).
He’s not prophesying the future. He’s congratulating them on the past and how effective they were by God’s grace.
So, Mr. Video Maker is just wrong on all kinds of fronts. There is no prophecy of the Antichrist here. His video is all bunkum.
I too have been enjoying your posts on Aramaic in the New Testament. While my Hebrew is fairly good, my Aramaic is non-existant except for the Mourner’s Kaddish.
But in this latest post it looks like you’ve opened a real can of worms. You state that in the Pshitta Acts Jesus’ name is literally rendered at "Jesus the Nazirite". This would tend to confirm the view that Jesus was originally a member of the ultra-ascetic sect of Judaism known as the Nazirim. And he may not have been from Nazareth at all, and that some archaeologists even have doubts as to Nazareth’s existance 2000 years ago.
A few. First, I’m glad you’ve been enjoying those posts. I hope you find this one useful as well.
Second, what the text of the Pshitta actually calls Jesus in Acts 2:22 is a "Nassraya." In Aramaic, –aya is a common gentilic suffix, meaning that you use it to turn a noun into a word describing a group of people. For example, the word for a Chaldean is Kaldhaya (kal-THY-ah), the word for a Christian is Mshihaya, the word for a Catholic is Qatoliqaya. –Aya is thus similar to the –i gentilic suffix that one finds in Hebrew and Arabic, resulting in words like Israeli ("a person from Israel") and Suri ("a person from Syria").
(Indeed, it seems to be the same ending, spelled –ay since there is no simple letter /i/ in these languages, only with Aramaic’s characteristic –a noun ending stuck on it since Aramaic routinely uses the emphatic state even for non-emphatic words.)
While nassraya sounds similar to the word for Nazarite, and some have speculated that’s what was meant in this passage, I don’t think that’s what’s going on.
The Nazarites weren’t quite a sect (i.e., a group of folks who held religious views different than others). They were more like a religious order. They took the Nazarite vow either temporarily or permanently as a form of consecration to God. Samuel is the best known instance of a Nazarite from birth that most folks are aware of.
I have no problem with saying various New Testament figures were Nazarites–John the Baptist, for example, would be a good contender. Indeed, John is known for honoring one of the things that was part of the Nazarite vow: abstinence from wine (Luke 7:33).
This, however, is in marked contrast from Jesus, who in the very next verse is said to drink wine (Luke 7:34). He also made wine central to the Eucharist. It thus does not seem to me that Jesus was a Nazarite in the sense of one who had taken the Nazarite vow or who was made a Nazarite from birth like Samuel.
It seems to me that the origin of the word nassraya is more likely to be an attempt to form a gentilic noun based on the place-name nassrath ("Nazareth"), which is given in Acts 10:38. It’s thus nassrath + -aya = nassraya = "a person from Nazareth." (-ath being a feminine ending on the place name that would drop out when making a masculine gentilic noun.)
Unfortunately, when I was composing the post I was doing it quickly and my mind locked onto "Nazarite" as a translation of nassraya without remembering the Nazarite vow.
Sorry for the confusion. I hope the clarification is enlightening.
As to the idea that Nazareth didn’t exist in the first century, I frankly don’t hold much truck with that notion. It proceeds form a hermeutic of skepticism that wants to say everything in the New Testament is false unless it can be proven from independent sources. That is a criterion applied to no other historical text (except the Old Testament). Historians simply do not hold their sources in such contempt.
First, we have New Testament documents clearly and explicitly referring to it on multiple occasions. That of itself is evidence that can’t be dismissed. When folks were dating books like Acts absurdly late, it would have been easier to claim that Nazareth didn’t exist in the first century, but as archaeology has moved the dates of the books earlier and earlier, the claim gets harder and harder to sustain.
First, an unbiased look at the evidence strongly suggests that Acts dates to A.D. 61 or 62 and that Luke is earlier (possibly by a year or two), or about 65-70 years after Jesus was born. It also was written by a gentleman who was a close associate of one of the major apostles and who clearly interviewed a number of people in the apostolic community (and likely Mary herself) to obtain his material. The idea that a town called Nazareth could have sprang into existence in that 65-70 year interim and then got so famous that it could be so quickly confused with the hometown of a man whose followers regarded him as the Messiah simply strains credibility.
It is far more likely that, since Nazareth was apparently a pretty humble place, it simply didn’t show up in the independent records that we do have until later on (maybe because it became more significant and noteworthy to people and even more populous on account of its famous Resident).
I’m getting a number of requests these days, inspired by the movie The Passion of the Christ, for language learning resources for Aramaic.
I’ll be happy to oblige to the extent that I can, but unfortunately there aren’t a lot of good resources out there, especially for self-teaching. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of demand for knowing Aramaic in this country, and so few resources have been developed. Many of the resources that do exist can be expensive and often presuppose that you already know Hebrew, since in biblical studies one usually learns Aramaic after one already knows Hebrew.
There’s just a dearth of good, self-teaching Aramaic resources. I’m hoping to help correct this with several projects that I have in the works, but they aren’t close to being ready yet.
What I generally recommend in the meantime is that someone who wants a little exposure to Aramaic get a copy of Classical Aramaic: Book 1 by Rocco Errico and Fr. Michael J. Bazzi. This is published in workbook format, so it’s suitable for self-study, and it is very basic, so it won’t be too hard. It will teach you how to read the Eastern Aramaic script and give you about a hundred word vocabulary, with many of the terms related to the faith.
Now, let me pose a question to you, the reader: Just how interested are you in learning Aramaic? Would you be interested, for example, in a two or three tape set that taught you how to both say the Rosary in Aramaic andunderstand it? How interested would you be in similar sets for saying the Rosary in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew? Would you like to use it for yourself or with your homeschool kids or your study group? If you have thoughts on any of these questions, e-mail me. I’m doing a little market research. (And note: This isn’t one of the secret projects. Those are still secret.)
I’m getting a number of requests these days, inspired by the movie The Passion of the Christ, for language learning resources for Aramaic.
I’ll be happy to oblige to the extent that I can, but unfortunately there aren’t a lot of good resources out there, especially for self-teaching. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of demand for knowing Aramaic in this country, and so few resources have been developed. Many of the resources that do exist can be expensive and often presuppose that you already know Hebrew, since in biblical studies one usually learns Aramaic after one already knows Hebrew.
There’s just a dearth of good, self-teaching Aramaic resources. I’m hoping to help correct this with several projects that I have in the works, but they aren’t close to being ready yet.
What I generally recommend in the meantime is that someone who wants a little exposure to Aramaic get a copy of Classical Aramaic: Book 1 by Rocco Errico and Fr. Michael J. Bazzi. This is published in workbook format, so it’s suitable for self-study, and it is very basic, so it won’t be too hard. It will teach you how to read the Eastern Aramaic script and give you about a hundred word vocabulary, with many of the terms related to the faith.
Now, let me pose a question to you, the reader: Just how interested are you in learning Aramaic? Would you be interested, for example, in a two or three tape set that taught you how to both say the Rosary in Aramaic andunderstand it? How interested would you be in similar sets for saying the Rosary in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew? Would you like to use it for yourself or with your homeschool kids or your study group? If you have thoughts on any of these questions, e-mail me. I’m doing a little market research. (And note: This isn’t one of the secret projects. Those are still secret.)
This version of The Weekly Francis covers material released in the last week, from 9 May 2024 to 12 December 2024.
A reader writes:
