“DId Jesus speak the Greek that well, or at all?”
If he was God in the flesh, I’ll give you one wild guess.
[quote]KingKai25 wrote: The answer you are trying to provide, an answer which is very popular among some Christian groups, is that, since God is the ultimate author of Scripture, the meanings he intended to convey can go beyond those the human authors intended or understood. <<<[/quote]You may not even be addressing me here, but this isn’t the way I would state this. [quote]KingKai25 wrote:<<< It relies on a model in which God dictates the words and the authors write them down. >>>[/quote]I reject this entirely. Sigh, there are only so many hours in a day.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote: A better, accurate translation of the first 3 verses seems awkward in English: “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth–and the earth was (startling) desolate and empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep…” Note the tense–its like the past progressive; this is descriptive of events left incomplete in the past. The first action of God is not “created” but saying, “(Let there) be light.” [/quote]Now hold on just a second there Spanky. Are you meaning to imply either incompetence or dishonesty or both in EVERY one of these translators and translation committees?
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-1.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-2.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-3.htm
Furthermore, even if your (or probably Alter’s) past progressive deal is accurate, that could mean 30 seconds. I know you’re not gonna try n say that the preponderance of early Jewish thought, though not uniform in detail, featured a large representation of a belief in millions of years in the Genesis narrative. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote: <<< chooses to follow the literal word of the Bible, one should be a literalist in the extreme, >>>[/quote]Nonsense man! Not every single statement of the bible is intended literally. Also, there are lies reported in the bible as well. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote:<<< and question the use of venerable but inaccurate translations. [/quote] Don’t take me wrong, you are an extraordinarily capable fella and yes I do remember that Hebrew is a native language for you. I mean no disrespect. However, just to be clear. You ARE advancing Alter’s as THE only reliable translation in history then? Because his method and results are quite often quite unique.
[/quote]
This is what you get when you don’t realize that Jesus and the Apostles used the Septuagint. [/quote]
And not the Targum Onkelos, or the Targum Jonathan? DId Jesus speak the Greek that well, or at all? Just askin’ …
And that’s what you get if all that you read is the Septuagint, which has a restricted vocabulary, insensitivity to tense and construction, but at least was taken from an older text.
[/quote]
It is indeed a major question as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek. He certainly knew some Hebrew, as would have most of the apostles. Consequently, I would argue the use of the Septuagint was primarily a matter of convenience.
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]KingKai25 wrote: The answer you are trying to provide, an answer which is very popular among some Christian groups, is that, since God is the ultimate author of Scripture, the meanings he intended to convey can go beyond those the human authors intended or understood. <<<[/quote]You may not even be addressing me here, but this is n;t the way I would state this. [quote]KingKai25 wrote:<<< It relies on a model in which God dictates the words and the authors write them down. >>>[/quote]I reject this entirely. Sigh, there are only so many hours in a day.
[/quote]
I was speaking specifically to Pat’s claims. I know you don’t assume a dictation theory of inspiration. Pat’s “secretary” analogy (which he used earlier) suggests a dictation theory.
[quote]KingKai25 wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote: A better, accurate translation of the first 3 verses seems awkward in English: “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth–and the earth was (startling) desolate and empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep…” Note the tense–its like the past progressive; this is descriptive of events left incomplete in the past. The first action of God is not “created” but saying, “(Let there) be light.” [/quote]Now hold on just a second there Spanky. Are you meaning to imply either incompetence or dishonesty or both in EVERY one of these translators and translation committees?
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-1.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-2.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-3.htm
Furthermore, even if your (or probably Alter’s) past progressive deal is accurate, that could mean 30 seconds. I know you’re not gonna try n say that the preponderance of early Jewish thought, though not uniform in detail, featured a large representation of a belief in millions of years in the Genesis narrative. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote: <<< chooses to follow the literal word of the Bible, one should be a literalist in the extreme, >>>[/quote]Nonsense man! Not every single statement of the bible is intended literally. Also, there are lies reported in the bible as well. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote:<<< and question the use of venerable but inaccurate translations. [/quote] Don’t take me wrong, you are an extraordinarily capable fella and yes I do remember that Hebrew is a native language for you. I mean no disrespect. However, just to be clear. You ARE advancing Alter’s as THE only reliable translation in history then? Because his method and results are quite often quite unique.
[/quote]
This is what you get when you don’t realize that Jesus and the Apostles used the Septuagint. [/quote]
And not the Targum Onkelos, or the Targum Jonathan? DId Jesus speak the Greek that well, or at all? Just askin’ …
And that’s what you get if all that you read is the Septuagint, which has a restricted vocabulary, insensitivity to tense and construction, but at least was taken from an older text.
[/quote]
It is indeed a major question as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek. He certainly knew some Hebrew, as would have most of the apostles. Consequently, I would argue the use of the Septuagint was primarily a matter of convenience. [/quote]
How about this speculation:
- The Sept. was written in a Greek that was already antique by the time of Jesus
- As a Galilean, what Greek he may have spoken was with peasants who barely were schooled in it themselves.
- The practice in the late Second Temple period was to read aloud Torah on market days and Sabbath, but to alternate the lines in Hebrew, which was poorly understood, with the vernacular Aramaic, probably Targum Onkelos or Targum Yonatan. (A similar practice occurred from time to time in Alexandria, where the Septuagint was respected. But there would have been little reason to read it in Greek in Judea, where it had been banned in any case–by the Greeks–about 180 years before.)
It is hard to see how or why Jesus would have had any acquaintance with the Greek Septuagint.
Paul certainly did and the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews (which you really should read Hebrews 1 ESV ) quotes it just about exclusively.
“It is indeed a major question as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek.”
Exactly how can one be open to Jesus being wholly ignorant of knowing a language?
Lemme see, he raised the dead, healed the sick, saw the future, came back from dead,
cast out demons…yet may have not known Greek?
You’re kidding right?
So, AFTER he ascended was there was possibly Greek language School in Heaven to
learn the language?
I’m not being funny, He must know Greek now…so then HOW did Jesus learn Greek
if he possibly didn’t know the language down HERE?
[quote]Karado wrote:
“It is indeed a major question as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek.”
Exactly how can one be open to Jesus being wholly ignorant of knowing a language?
Lemme see, he raised the dead, healed the sick, saw the future, came back from dead,
cast out demons…yet may have not known Greek?
You’re kidding right?
So, AFTER he ascended was there was possibly Greek language School in Heaven to
learn the language?
I’m not being funny, He must know Greek now…so then HOW did Jesus learn Greek
if he possibly didn’t know the language down HERE?
[/quote]
I’m assuming the Dr. here doesn’t have a view of Jesus that the NT ascribes to him but rather a view closer to what Bart Erhman has which is “that Jesus was a failed apocalyptic prophet who was crucified and died and that the NT has historical nuggets that can tell us about the “historical” Jesus but the rest of the stuff was embellishment.”
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]Karado wrote:
Having full understanding is impossible with a lot of it…like who are the 2 stork-winged
Women depicted in Zechariah 5:9?
And Who were the “Nephilim” in Genesis 6, Who were on the Earth, and also popped up
up “after that”…I imagine that means AFTER the flood?
I thought there was a ‘reboot’ of Humanity with the flood, then the Nephilim show up again?
it’s like Nephilim ‘whac-a-mole’…Those beings were apparently so big a pain in the
ass not even a flood could completely wipe em out, so does that mean a Nephilim
snuck into the Ark, or did a number of them somehow survive the deluge?
How did they return after the Flood?
[/quote]
Another notorious mistranslation?
“B’nai elohim” might mean sons of God.
But the text reads “b’nai ha-elohim,” which is “sons of the lords” (or “nobles,” “magistrates” etc.) Not “sons of gods” (b’nai elim)
Take it from there, and the story is a little less louche: princes lusting after women.
Haha nice move, but I’m going to have to throw a flag on this one. Rashi was an 11th century rabbi, a fact which renders any appeals to his authority suspect on two levels. First of all, there have been considerable developments in our knowledge of ancient Hebrew since Rashi’s time. Secondly, like most rabbis in the middle ages, Rashi assumed a relatively naive view of God’s role in the authorship of Scripture, such that, for Rashi, every aspect of the text is assumed to bear tremendous significance. The passage you refer to in his commentary on Genesis illustrates this second point well. Rashi’s problem with taking verse 1 as an independent clause is not so much syntactical as theological, as I will demonstrate momentarily.
The modernist charge is ludicrous. Again, the rabbis assumed that little things like that bore more significance than can be linguistically justified. The fact is that the verb-subject-object construction is standard in Hebrew prose. In other words, Genesis 1 evinces a typical sentence construction. The only times subjects/ objects occur before the verbs in prose is for emphasis or to mark a change in subject (poetry is much more variable in its syntax). Even the placement of the temporal marker bereshit at the beginning of the sentence is standard. There is nothing strange about the syntax of this sentence.
This is simply false - Rashi’s syntactical argument for the meaning of bereshit is not that reshit acts as a preposition before a noun. Rather, Rashi argues that reshit is always in the construct state, meaning that it is always precedes and is modified by another noun (KING of kings, LORD of lords; HOUSE of cards). Reshit isn’t actually used very frequently in a temporal sense; it is usually used to denote “first,” as is most often found in references to “the choice first fruits” intended as offerings. With the inseparable preposition bet, however, it denotes a time period, and this precise collocation only occurs 4 times in Scripture. A recent study demonstrated that bereshit always denotes a period of time rather than a point in time; for example, in Jeremiah 49:34, bereshit does not refer to the moment when Zedekiah’s reign began, but rather to the early period of his reign. This supports my earlier point that Genesis 1:1 is a summative statement introducing what follows, NOT an account of God’s first act of creation (meaning there’s no room for the ludicrous “gap” theory). Again, this kind of summative statement preceding the account of the action is common in Genesis; look at 7:1-10, where God commands Noah to take his family and various animals into the ark (7:1-4); the command is followed by the claim that Noah did exactly what God commanded (7:5); and then the actual account of Noah and the animals entering the ark and the coming of the flood is told in 7:6-10.
Yes, Rashi wrongly interprets bara as a gerund rather than a finite verb, and he does so based on (1) his lack of awareness of the summative statements that structure Genesis; (2) his inappropriate comparison of the function of the word tehilla in Hosea 1:2 with bereshit in Genesis 1:1; (3) his incredulity over the fact that, if (in his view) Genesis 1:1 was taking as an independent clause, this would imply that the heavens and earth were created before water. Again, if Genesis 1:1 is a summative statement, the entire problem disappears, and this is the much more natural sense of the syntax. So Rashi is still right - verse 1 does not “teach the order of creation” - but there is no legitimate linguistic basis for reading the qal verb bara (and yes, Doc, it IS a qal verb) as a gerund.
You’ve got to update your source material - Rashi, like most of the rabbis, allowed theological concerns to color his grammatical evaluation. I’m not going to cite Augustine as a evidence that Paul affirmed original sin.
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]pushharder wrote:
[quote]Karado wrote:
Having full understanding is impossible with a lot of it…like who are the 2 stork-winged
Women depicted in Zechariah 5:9?
And Who were the “Nephilim” in Genesis 6, Who were on the Earth, and also popped up
up “after that”…I imagine that means AFTER the flood?
I thought there was a ‘reboot’ of Humanity with the flood, then the Nephilim show up again?
it’s like Nephilim ‘whac-a-mole’…Those beings were apparently so big a pain in the
ass not even a flood could completely wipe em out, so does that mean a Nephilim
snuck into the Ark, or did a number of them somehow survive the deluge?
How did they return after the Flood?
[/quote]
Another notorious mistranslation?
“B’nai elohim” might mean sons of God.
But the text reads “b’nai ha-elohim,” which is “sons of the lords” (or “nobles,” “magistrates” etc.) Not “sons of gods” (b’nai elim)
Take it from there, and the story is a little less louche: princes lusting after women.
[/quote]
Doc, we need to get you in a biblical Hebrew course. This distinction between B’nai elohim and b’nai ha-elohim (the ha being the definite article) is NOT that significant. The article is frequently employed with elohim both when it is a reference to Yahweh (Gen. 5:24, 6:9; Jonah 3:10) and when it clearly refers to angelic or semi-divine beings (Job 1:6, 2:1; Psalm 136:2). The presence or absence of the article does not determine whether the reference is to God or “nobles”/angelic beings. So yes, Karado and push, the problem remains.
Very Interesting.
Jude seemingly alludes to the sexual sins of the Angels anyway, comparing what they did
to the human sexual sins at Sodom…Jude sez the Bad Angels left their “first estate”, their original habitation, a big no-no…they broke the rules, also confirmed in the Book Of Enoch.
Compare “The Book Of The Watchers”, Enoch Chapter 7, to Genesis 6, It’s very similar…it seems to clear this up who the “Sons Of God” really were…they were Angels.
And yes, yes, I know it’s not Scripture, fine, but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s
false either…The Dead Sea Scrolls are the probably the most important find
of the 20th Century.
Enoch 7:1 It happened after the sons of men had multiplied in those days, that daughters were born to them, elegant and beautiful.
Enoch 7:2 And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamoured of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.
Enoch 7:3 Then their leader Samyaza said to them; I fear that you may perhaps be indisposed to the performance of this enterprise;
Enoch 7:4 And that I alone shall suffer for so grievous a crime.
Enoch 7:5 But they answered him and said; We all swear;
Enoch 7:6 And bind ourselves by mutual execrations, that we will not change our intention, but execute our projected undertaking.
And so it began…til the deluge, to wipe the resultant hybrids and nasty neandrathals out
of existence…allegedly.
[quote]Karado wrote:
Hybrid offspring seems to be the case, The Book Of Enoch (part of the Dead Sea Scrolls) seem to clarify the events in Gen. 6 …Be careful King Kai, I have tough questions now on the alternate ‘Lines Of Seth’ theory, a theory that came later.
Again, they are ONLY questions…lemme know when you are ready, and I’ll list them for you,
One by one…let’s see how clearly you can answer them, you seem to be the most erudite here,
just give me the “green light”, and I’ll list them… 'see how good you are, and maybe we can
all clear this up, once and for all.
Hmm, Apparently:
“The New American Bible commentary draws a parallel to the Epistle of Jude and the statements set forth in Genesis, suggesting that the Epistle refers implicitly to the paternity of nephilim as heavenly beings who came to earth and had sexual intercourse with women.”
Isn’t the “New American” Bible supposedly a legit, commonly used Catholic Bible?[/quote]
It is used in the Novus Ordo liturgy for the US. I’m not sure if I’d consider it legit. I don’t usually goto the Novus Ordo anyway (at least not if the Extraordinary Form is available).
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]Tiribulus wrote:
[quote]DrSkeptix wrote: A better, accurate translation of the first 3 verses seems awkward in English: “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth–and the earth was (startling) desolate and empty, with darkness upon the surface of the deep…” Note the tense–its like the past progressive; this is descriptive of events left incomplete in the past. The first action of God is not “created” but saying, “(Let there) be light.” [/quote]Now hold on just a second there Spanky. Are you meaning to imply either incompetence or dishonesty or both in EVERY one of these translators and translation committees?
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-1.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-2.htm
http://bible.cc/genesis/1-3.htm
Furthermore, even if your (or probably Alter’s) past progressive deal is accurate, that could mean 30 seconds. I know you’re not gonna try n say that the preponderance of early Jewish thought, though not uniform in detail, featured a large representation of a belief in millions of years in the Genesis narrative. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote: <<< chooses to follow the literal word of the Bible, one should be a literalist in the extreme, >>>[/quote]Nonsense man! Not every single statement of the bible is intended literally. Also, there are lies reported in the bible as well. [quote]DrSkeptix wrote:<<< and question the use of venerable but inaccurate translations. [/quote] Don’t take me wrong, you are an extraordinarily capable fella and yes I do remember that Hebrew is a native language for you. I mean no disrespect. However, just to be clear. You ARE advancing Alter’s as THE only reliable translation in history then? Because his method and results are quite often quite unique.
[/quote]
This is what you get when you don’t realize that Jesus and the Apostles used the Septuagint. [/quote]
And not the Targum Onkelos, or the Targum Jonathan? DId Jesus speak the Greek that well, or at all? Just askin’ …
And that’s what you get if all that you read is the Septuagint, which has a restricted vocabulary, insensitivity to tense and construction, but at least was taken from an older text.
[/quote]
Yes, it would make sense for that time period. His common tongue would have been Aramaic though.
[quote]Karado wrote:
“It is indeed a major question as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek.”
Exactly how can one be open to Jesus being wholly ignorant of knowing a language?
Lemme see, he raised the dead, healed the sick, saw the future, came back from dead,
cast out demons…yet may have not known Greek?
You’re kidding right?
So, AFTER he ascended was there was possibly Greek language School in Heaven to
learn the language?
I’m not being funny, He must know Greek now…so then HOW did Jesus learn Greek
if he possibly didn’t know the language down HERE?
[/quote]
According to what is orthodox, the hypostatic union dictates that Jesus being one person, nevertheless has two natures: God and man.
Being that he has two natures, he has two wills and two minds. His human mind would have been undeveloped as any other human being’s mind would be. He wasn’t born knowing how to build, he submitted himself to his foster father Joseph to learn how to make a living. In doing so, he dignified work and learning. Same thing with being conceived, born, being subject to Mary for 30 years, &c. He dignified all of man’s life from birth to death.
Thank you…your last two posts make sense…looks there will always be legitimate ‘wiggle room’
for the Amourous Angels possibilty, no matter what anyone sez.
There’s a “Sacred Heart” Catholic Church my sister goes to, and they’ve taught that, and
hold to that position, maybe the Priests also have copies of Enoch, Jubilees, and Jasher in their Rectory to further confirm Angel/Human unions? (The book of Jasher is mentioned twice is Scripture)
Who knows.