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.
"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.
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.
. . . that when I first read about "abortion doulas," I wasn't sure about the meaning of the word "doula."
Well, I recognized the origin of the term. It was clearly derived from the Greek word "doula," which means "female slave" or "female servant" or "handmaiden" or things like that.
But I wasn't aware of what it meant in a twenty-first century, English-speaking context.
It turns out that doulas are women who aren't midwives but who assist pregnant mothers during the act of giving birth and/or after the child has been born.
Unfortunately, I'm not a father. My wife died before we were able to have children, so I'm not up on some of the terminology . . . at least in the home-birth movement.
I suppose my recognition of the origin of the term reveals me as a nerd, while my failure to know its current meaning reveals me as a n00b.
There are a lot of things I disagree with Arnold Schwarzenegger about–from abortion to immigration–but he was dead-on recently when he indicated the best way to learn a language.
EXCERPT:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a gathering of Hispanic journalists that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly.
"You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set," the Republican governor said Wednesday night at the annual convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. "It’s that simple. You’ve got to learn English.
"I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say and I’m going to get myself in trouble," he said. "But I know that when I came to this country, I very rarely spoke German to anyone."
Now telling a group of Hispanic journalists that Latinos should avoid media produced in Spanish was bound to provoke reaction, and it did:
"I’m sitting shaking my head not believing that someone would be so naive and out of it that he would say something like that," said Alex Nogales, president and chief executive of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, who called the remarks "preposterous."
Nogales said Schwarzenegger must have forgotten the challenges of being an immigrant in the United States. Hispanic immigrants need Spanish-language media to stay informed and "function in this society," he said.
"That doesn’t mean they are going to sit there," he said. "They are also going to learn English in the meantime."
I’m sorry, but it’s Mr. Nogales that is naive and out of it. You will have greater success in a country if you can speak the local language, and you will learn the language faster and better if you use a total immersion methodology, which means denying yourself access to material in languages you already speak. The more time you force yourself to spend interacting with the local langauge, and the less you use your native language as a crutch, the better you will learn the new language. Period.
To the extent Spanish-speakers–or speakers of any language (English included)–allow themselves to have recourse to their native language, it will slow their acquisition of a new one. Every hour a person spends watching TV in their native language is an hour that they’re not spending watching TV in the language they’re trying to learn, or studying the language formally, or talking to people who speak the new language. It hinders their ability to think in the new language, which is essential for language mastery.
Slowing (or stagnating) your acquisition of the language of the local environment is precisely what will cause one to have problems trying to "function in this society."
The longer you don’t know the local language, the longer your ability to function in the society will be limited, leaving you more vulnerable and exploitable by those who do know the local language. Getting the local language down is key to personal empowerment and the ability to succeed in a society.
The course recommended by Mr. Nogales would prolong and intensify the struggles that native Spanish-speakers in the U.S. have, potentially (especially for those who are here illegally) putting them or keeping them in situations of exploitation and danger.
If I relocated to a non-English speaking country, one of my highest priorities would be learning the local language as fast as possible, and the way for me to do that would be to spend as much time functioning in the new language as possible, denying myself the crutch of English at every possible opportunity.
Once I’d mastered the new language, I could indulge myself by reading English language newspapers or watching English language television or listening to English language music or reading English Internet sites, but during the crucial period of language acquisition, I’d avoid English as much as possible.
This is not a matter of identity politics; it’s a matter of how humans learn languages.
”How are these words of Jesus
[in the consecration of the Eucharist] to be understood? In the New Testament, the Greek word estin that is
used in Jesus’ saying ‘This is my body’, could mean either ‘is
really’ or ‘is figuratively’ (or ‘signifies’). Both senses of the
word occur in the New Testament."
Then he goes on to explain the
supports of the Catholic teaching. My question is he right about
this as a possible translation?
From a linguistic perspective I would consider it problematic to represent the Greek word esti in English with the word "signifies."
Esti (which sometimes appears with a nu after it as "estin") is just the Greek equivalent of "is." It’s the verb "to be" in the third person singular form (present tense, active voice, indicative mood), and it would translate as "(he/she/it) is."
Esti works just the same way that "is" does in English. In both languages, the verb "to be" can be used to signify existence (as in "God is") or predication ("the grass is green") or equivalence ("Bruce Wayne is Batman"). It can also be used literally ("Jesus is the Son of God") or figuratively ("King Herod is a sly fox"). The latter seems to be a special case of equivalence.
We do see passages in the New Testament where esti is used figuratively. For example, in Revelation 17:9 John is told, "the seven heads [of the beast] are seven mountains on which the woman is seated." The word for "are" here is "eisi(n)" which is just the plural form of "esti(n)," the way that "are" is the plural of "is." Here we have a figurative use of "is," and the seven heads do signify seven mountains.
However, I would resist translating eisi as "signifies." That’s not what the word means in Greek. What it means is "are." It’s being used to convey the idea of signification, but that’s its connotation rather than its denotation.
It would be legitimate to use the connotation of a word as a translation if the receptor language can’t express the same thought any other way (e.g., in languages that don’t have the verb "to be"), but if the receptor language (English in this case) has exactly the same usage of exactly the same verb (it does) then the thing to do is translate the word according to its actual meaning, which is "is."
To render esti in English as "signifies" is not actual translation. It’s paraphrase. Paraphrase is warranted when actual translation is impossible or when it would be misleading, but when the receptor language accomodates a straightforward translation, it should be used. We otherwise run the risk of the translator’s own biases distorting the message in the original. Whenever possible the original should be presented to the reader in the receptor language, and he should be allowed to determine the connotation of what is being said.
Yesterday there was a caller on the show who wanted to know about finding the Our Father in Aramaic. I mentioned that it’s found in the Pshitta, an Aramaic translation of Scripture, and it’s also available online. Unfortunately, the address of the site I had was too long, so I promised to put it up on the blog this morning.
Unfortunately, after the show, a closer inspection of the site showed it to be kooky to the extreme. The translation they gave of the Aramaic into English was completely wrong, so I decided just to print the text of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.
First, though, here’s an audio file of it (.wav format):
After doing a little digging around, I found the following nice image, which contains the prayer in English and the Aramaic alphabet, with an Aramaic pronounciation also. Bear in mind that the English and the Aramaic pronunciation runs left-to-right, while the Aramaic script itself runs right-to-left.
Also bear in mind that the pronunciation the prayer is given in Aramaic will vary from one group of speakers to another, based on accent. For example, the first word of the Lord’s prayer in Aramaic is Abun, which will be pronounced by some groups as "Ah-boon," others as "Ah-woon," and still others (as in the transliteration below) as "Ah-voon."
Click to enlarge.
One word of warning about the above: What’s on the Aramaic transliteration line doesn’t always match up to exactly what’s on the English line. Because of word division and length, the lines don’t match up exactly. For example, on the third line from the bottom in the Aramaic column, you’ll see the word Malkutha ("Mal-koo-tha"), which means "Kingdom," but Kingdom is on the fourth line from the bottom in the English column.
I can’t go through the whole prayer line by line right now, but some folks might find it interesting to understand a little of how the language works.
The prayer is often called the Abun Dbashmaya in Aramaic, which are its first two words. This is similar to the way we call it the Our Father after it’s first two words. But in Aramaic "Abun Dbashmaya" means more than just "Our Father."
The "Our Father" part of it is just the first word: Abun. As you know, one of the Aramaic words for "father" (there are actually several variants) is Abba, which is just spelled ABA in Aramaic (it being understood that the B reduplicates in pronunciation).
In Aramaic, pronouns often take the form of suffixes on the ends of words, and the suffix -un is a pronoun suffix that means "our." When you stick -un on Abba, you get "Abun," meaning "Our Father."
The Aramaic word for "heaven" is shmaya, and you can see that in the second word of the prayer. The prefix b- (sometimes followed by a vowel, sometimes not) is the Aramaic equivalent of "in" (remember the in/on discussion we had recently?), so bashmaya means "in heaven." And the prefix d- is the Aramaic equivalent of "who," "which," or "that." Dbashmaya thus means "who (is) in heaven." (Aramaic sometimes omits the verb "to be," as it does here.)
Thus you can see how "Abun dbashmaya" translates as "Our Father, who art in heaven."
A reader writes:
