"you Don't Know Greek/hebrew!"

[SkepticalDaniel]

I get this a lot on YouTube whenever I refer back to the original Hebrew and Greek with Christians (especially when they're KJV-only). This particularly happens when I point out Exodus 21:20-21 about beating slaves or Deuteronomy 22:28-29 with pointing out rape-marriages, or whenever I point out the word "Sheol" which is used for "Hell" in the Old Testament.

[qadeshet]

SkepticalDaniel

 

Just snap back: "And do you?" Then give them my favorite saying:

 

Know Thyself!

[WarriorPoet]

I sure don't know Greek or Hebrew, but I do know a bit about the bible, having been educated in a private xian school through 12th grade.

 

 

2 Timothy 3:16 (KJV)

 

 All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness

If I'm reading that right, it says "all scripture.  Not Greek scripture, not Hebrew scripture.  Do these people really think that if their omnipotent and omniscient god existed he couldn't protect the message of his holy word across the language barrier?

 

One more thing, the language issue is a problem of god's own making, according to their book.  The story of the Tower of Babel states that god was the one that made it so that we no longer spoke a common language and had to rely upon translations to be able to understand anything that was written in other languages.  (Genesis 11)

[rjn]

Fundie Christians don't know shit beyond using capslock excessively and condemning other people to Hell. Going by all the comments I've seen on blogs, Youtube-videos, articles, forums and so on, they're among the dumbest, most ignorant as well as most hateful people on the planet, who cares what they think? Many of them don't even know their own scripture, let alone Greek or Hebrew. They rarely know anything about Ancient History or Comparative and Historical Linguistics either, even though these subjects are intimately tied to the study of ancient texts.

[Lilith666]

I love that I can see Christian phrases in these thread titles and know what the thread is about. Christians are so predictable.

 

Yeah, and I'm sure all the Christians speak Greek and Hebrew. Next time one tells you that you don't really understand the bible because you don't speak the original language, ask them what they think of the Quran. Do they believe it promotes murdering non-Muslims and abusing women? If they say yes, tell them they can't know that because they don't speak Arabic. Muslims make the same argument for their holy book that Christians do for the bible.
 

[miamia]

My fiancee, (who I have found is a whole lot more agnostic than I thought he was) Is actually being a lot more vocally anti religion.He was raised in a jewish home and actually does read and understand hebrew, so when anyone whips that out he's like yeah, I do know hebrew, how about you? 

[buffettphan]

Just snap back: "And do you?

 

 

 

I've actually done that.  The response was along the lines of "Well, I have Strong's Concordance and IT says......blah blah blah."   Gotta laugh.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

SO many times I've heard preachers say "What it REALLY means in Greek is (something new I concocted because I have to come up with something new to entertain you sheep)". Once it was "Jesus didn't mean he'd cut off any branch in him that doesn't bear fruit! He said he would care for that branch and help it." That is utter bullshit in Greek or any translation ever done. But the sheep will gobble up a lot of this stuff and repeat it as fact. Others will point out that the pastor got it wrong, and will then be told that they'd "probably be happier elsewhere". I was told that after questioning a pastor when he lied about the genealogy of Jesus "really" being the genealogy of Mary. Smart sheep aren't welcome.

[qadeshet]

7 members, 67 guests, 1 anonymous users

 

Fuego, did you ask him why both genealogies say that Joseph begat Jesus; and Mary isn't even mentioned?

 

Know Thyself

 

SO many times I've heard preachers say "What it REALLY means in Greek is (something new I concocted because I have to come up with something new to entertain you sheep)". Once it was "Jesus didn't mean he'd cut off any branch in him that doesn't bear fruit! He said he would care for that branch and help it." That is utter bullshit in Greek or any translation ever done. But the sheep will gobble up a lot of this stuff and repeat it as fact. Others will point out that the pastor got it wrong, and will then be told that they'd "probably be happier elsewhere". I was told that after questioning a pastor when he lied about the genealogy of Jesus "really" being the genealogy of Mary. Smart sheep aren't welcome.

[Ellinas]

This is one of my big gripes.

 

True, I have not studied NT Greek - but I am reasonably competent in the modern form, and there are sufficient similarities in the grammatical forms and terminology for me to sniff out the error of 80 to 90% of attempts to quote or explain Greek words and grammar without further research.

 

Strong's concordance, even when combined with a decent interlinear and a lexicon, does not render the user a linguistic expert.  I've heard so much daftness talked about the aorist that I am in serious danger of defenestrating the next f*ckwit who tries to make a point by saying "I'm no scholar, but the books tell me..."

 

Best approach is to tell these people that tools are only as good as the tools that use them.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

 

7 members, 67 guests, 1 anonymous users

 

Fuego, did you ask him why both genealogies say that Joseph begat Jesus; and Mary isn't even mentioned?

 

Know Thyself

 

SO many times I've heard preachers say "What it REALLY means in Greek is (something new I concocted because I have to come up with something new to entertain you sheep)". Once it was "Jesus didn't mean he'd cut off any branch in him that doesn't bear fruit! He said he would care for that branch and help it." That is utter bullshit in Greek or any translation ever done. But the sheep will gobble up a lot of this stuff and repeat it as fact. Others will point out that the pastor got it wrong, and will then be told that they'd "probably be happier elsewhere". I was told that after questioning a pastor when he lied about the genealogy of Jesus "really" being the genealogy of Mary. Smart sheep aren't welcome.

 

Yes, I did. He referred me to his cronies who took my name and scuttled off. He didn't like being questioned, gets in the way of money coming into the coffers. After all, he's "a pastor's pastor". Harumph!

Never got a response. Soon after, some far more fundy people actually picketed the church for being worldly. I went out and listened to them, and being an "on-fire" believer myself at the time I agreed with them, left the church and found one closer to home that was giving most of their Sunday offering to missions.

 

That didn't last too awfully long either when they decided to get a building and diverted most funds to that instead. Then they went on the warpath wanting us to get more bodies in the seats to pay for the building. They wanted my wife to quit work and do their finances. Uh, no. We have our own mortgage to pay. "Oh, but this is the work of GAWD!" She was feeling terribly put-upon, so I pulled us out of the church entirely and we did our own church at home for years, and supported missions. I primarily was supporting and promoting a particular missionary/preacher from Louisiana doing work among the Mexican Indians, and claimed all kinds of miracles. It turned out that all he preached was biblical, it just wasn't true. Finding that out was what started me looking for answers from God, fasting and praying, asking serious questions that needed real answers. That's how I found this website.

[qadeshet]

 

 

7 members, 67 guests, 1 anonymous users

 

Fuego, did you ask him why both genealogies say that Joseph begat Jesus; and Mary isn't even mentioned?

 

Know Thyself

 

SO many times I've heard preachers say "What it REALLY means in Greek is (something new I concocted because I have to come up with something new to entertain you sheep)". Once it was "Jesus didn't mean he'd cut off any branch in him that doesn't bear fruit! He said he would care for that branch and help it." That is utter bullshit in Greek or any translation ever done. But the sheep will gobble up a lot of this stuff and repeat it as fact. Others will point out that the pastor got it wrong, and will then be told that they'd "probably be happier elsewhere". I was told that after questioning a pastor when he lied about the genealogy of Jesus "really" being the genealogy of Mary. Smart sheep aren't welcome.

 

Yes, I did. He referred me to his cronies who took my name and scuttled off. He didn't like being questioned, gets in the way of money coming into the coffers. After all, he's "a pastor's pastor". Harumph!

Never got a response. Soon after, some far more fundy people actually picketed the church for being worldly. I went out and listened to them, and being an "on-fire" believer myself at the time I agreed with them, left the church and found one closer to home that was giving most of their Sunday offering to missions.

 

That didn't last too awfully long either when they decided to get a building and diverted most funds to that instead. Then they went on the warpath wanting us to get more bodies in the seats to pay for the building. They wanted my wife to quit work and do their finances. Uh, no. We have our own mortgage to pay. "Oh, but this is the work of GAWD!" She was feeling terribly put-upon, so I pulled us out of the church entirely and we did our own church at home for years, and supported missions. I primarily was supporting and promoting a particular missionary/preacher from Louisiana doing work among the Mexican Indians, and claimed all kinds of miracles. It turned out that all he preached was biblical, it just wasn't true. Finding that out was what started me looking for answers from God, fasting and praying, asking serious questions that needed real answers. That's how I found this website.

 

 

"Sir, Your Book is a collection of very old Myths, copied and retooled from earlier Myths. The NT is a retelling and adaptation of the OT Myths. If you want to know, then Know Thyself!

This is what I"m using next time. Maybe roll your eyes first. It should save a lot of time. Greek or not, they're still Myths. I once spent talking with those idiots. We know their apologetis better than they do. Have a great night! My Maxims are from the Oracle of Delphi. Better than commandments. Cheers!

 

Know Thyself!

Exercise prudence!

[Astreja]

SkepticalDaniel

 

Just snap back: "And do you?" Then give them my favorite saying:

 

Know Thyself!

 

Or better still, "Γνῶθι σαυτόν."

[mwc]

     Who gives a shit.  Most of the ancient Greeks and Hebrews couldn't read it either.

 

     I might actually be better at it than they were and I'm illiterate in those languages.

 

          mwc

[♦ ficino ♦]

I studied Hebrew for two years in university, but most of it is forgotten now. I know ancient Greek quite well and work on it professionally. Even outside the NT sphere, there is always dispute about how to construe a passage in an ancient author. In the time of Socrates there were literary texts written in four major dialects of Greek, and the Homeric and other epic poems are in an amalgam that is sometimes called "epic."  Then, as the conquests of Alexander brought the Greek language to an even wider exposure, people would use Greek whose native language was not Greek. And by "ancient Greek" we mean Greek as written between c. 700 BCE and, say, the 500s CE. Words change their use over time!

 

And then - there's the influence of Hebrew on the Greek written by Jews and converts. Blood has already talked about the problem of the Septuagint. And there's the problem that most of our sources for Jewish language, law and custom of the first century CE are much later than that. 

 

So when someone with perhaps only as much Greek as he (usually always a man) learned in seminary says, "in the original Greek, it means ... ", I notice that often, that person picks one of several attested meanings of a word and insists that THAT meaning is the one intended in the biblical passage. It's often confessional commitments or even just personal fancy that determine which sense the interpreter may give to that word.

 

So yes, I think it's critical to know the ancient languages. And it's critical to use the resources of philology to try to determine meaning. AND it's critical to admit that a passage is obscure when it's obscure. The "plain meaning of scripture" is often not so plain. And on the other hand, it's often plainer than the apologist wants to make it.

 

I guess the upshot is, if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent God, he sure picked a screwed up method of communicating to creatures if the Bible is the means he picked.

[Thought2Much]

I guess the upshot is, if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent God, he sure picked a screwed up method of communicating to creatures if the Bible is the means he picked.

 

Exactly. And why would this deity allow so many mis-translations in his "love letter to the world"? If this god really intended it to say a particular thing, and it's really important to our very eternal salvation that it mean that one particular thing, why allow entire committees of translators to come to the conclusion that it means a different thing altogether, and then allow that error to be printed in numerous versions of this vital communication?

 

If such a god exists, it isn't very smart. Or, it is just an asshole that hates us.

[Blood]

I studied Hebrew for two years in university, but most of it is forgotten now. I know ancient Greek quite well and work on it professionally. Even outside the NT sphere, there is always dispute about how to construe a passage in an ancient author. In the time of Socrates there were literary texts written in four major dialects of Greek, and the Homeric and other epic poems are in an amalgam that is sometimes called "epic."  Then, as the conquests of Alexander brought the Greek language to an even wider exposure, people would use Greek whose native language was not Greek. And by "ancient Greek" we mean Greek as written between c. 700 BCE and, say, the 500s CE. Words change their use over time!

 

And then - there's the influence of Hebrew on the Greek written by Jews and converts. Blood has already talked about the problem of the Septuagint. And there's the problem that most of our sources for Jewish language, law and custom of the first century CE are much later than that. 

 

So when someone with perhaps only as much Greek as he (usually always a man) learned in seminary says, "in the original Greek, it means ... ", I notice that often, that person picks one of several attested meanings of a word and insists that THAT meaning is the one intended in the biblical passage. It's often confessional commitments or even just personal fancy that determine which sense the interpreter may give to that word.

 

So yes, I think it's critical to know the ancient languages. And it's critical to use the resources of philology to try to determine meaning. AND it's critical to admit that a passage is obscure when it's obscure. The "plain meaning of scripture" is often not so plain. And on the other hand, it's often plainer than the apologist wants to make it.

 

I guess the upshot is, if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent God, he sure picked a screwed up method of communicating to creatures if the Bible is the means he picked.

 

 

 

A classic example is the Jesus character using a pun on a Greek word to say, "You must be born from above," meaning born from ouranos, heaven,  but which was mistranslated into "you must be born again." The Baptists base their entire religion around that mistranslation. And nobody even tries to make the case for an "Aramaic original" underneath the Greek, which makes the whole thing a reductio ad absurdum.

[miamia]

 

I studied Hebrew for two years in university, but most of it is forgotten now. I know ancient Greek quite well and work on it professionally. Even outside the NT sphere, there is always dispute about how to construe a passage in an ancient author. In the time of Socrates there were literary texts written in four major dialects of Greek, and the Homeric and other epic poems are in an amalgam that is sometimes called "epic."  Then, as the conquests of Alexander brought the Greek language to an even wider exposure, people would use Greek whose native language was not Greek. And by "ancient Greek" we mean Greek as written between c. 700 BCE and, say, the 500s CE. Words change their use over time!

 

And then - there's the influence of Hebrew on the Greek written by Jews and converts. Blood has already talked about the problem of the Septuagint. And there's the problem that most of our sources for Jewish language, law and custom of the first century CE are much later than that. 

 

So when someone with perhaps only as much Greek as he (usually always a man) learned in seminary says, "in the original Greek, it means ... ", I notice that often, that person picks one of several attested meanings of a word and insists that THAT meaning is the one intended in the biblical passage. It's often confessional commitments or even just personal fancy that determine which sense the interpreter may give to that word.

 

So yes, I think it's critical to know the ancient languages. And it's critical to use the resources of philology to try to determine meaning. AND it's critical to admit that a passage is obscure when it's obscure. The "plain meaning of scripture" is often not so plain. And on the other hand, it's often plainer than the apologist wants to make it.

 

I guess the upshot is, if there were an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent God, he sure picked a screwed up method of communicating to creatures if the Bible is the means he picked.

 

 

 

A classic example is the Jesus character using a pun on a Greek word to say, "You must be born from above," meaning born from ouranos, heaven,  but which was mistranslated into "you must be born again." The Baptists base their entire religion around that mistranslation. And nobody even tries to make the case for an "Aramaic original" underneath the Greek, which makes the whole thing a reductio ad absurdum.

 

wow! I did not know that

[rjn]

A classic example is the Jesus character using a pun on a Greek word to say, "You must be born from above," meaning born from ouranos, heaven,  but which was mistranslated into "you must be born again." The Baptists base their entire religion around that mistranslation. And nobody even tries to make the case for an "Aramaic original" underneath the Greek, which makes the whole thing a reductio ad absurdum.

 

To be honest, I don't really see much of a difference between those two. Being "born from above" looks like a rather plain metaphor for some kind of divine influence, so to me it looks like nothing else but a different phrasing, but with largely the same meaning semantically.

[TheLyniezian]

Frankly unless one is an expert on the language in question it seems wrong to make any authoritative argument for what the text "really" says, and relying upon one person's argument or the Strong's concordance isn't always helpful. I recall one argument, for example, I had whilst still a Christian on a secular discussion board concerning what the Bible says about homosexuality, and the meaning of the term "abomination" in the Hebrew. Whilst the Strong's seemed to back up the basic meaning as translatied in English, one other poster (an expert on Middle Eastern languages as I recall who was familiar with the Hebrew) actually said that it wasn't the ideal translation (whilst I don't know what precsely he said, I got the impression how he understood it was far similar to "taboo"- as in a certain cultural practice forbidden by god to the Israelites, or similar).

 

At the same time I wonder if we should dismiss any such claims out of hand simply because they happen to come from a Christian apologist, or simply because it contradicts a point we might want to make against Christianity, unless we know better. The whole Deuteronomy 22:28-29 "rape-marriage" thing being a case in point. It is not even clear in some English translations that it is taking particularly about rape as we would understand it, and indeed it doesn't seem in the OT as though they even cared much about consent vs. non-consent where the woman was concerned as we would today. Whether this is quite the same as assuming the woman was simply considered chattel I don't know, but it seems to be much more about respectibility and the woman not being "defiled" by illegitimate sex, than it is about caring whether she consented or not. How many marriages even took the woman's views into account in other cases?

[TheRedneckProfessor]

I saw a production of Romeo and Juliet once in Odessa, Ukraine. It was a translation from the high British of Elizabethan England to the Old Russian of the Czarist era. I'm fluent in neither; but I still understood what was happening. In fact, I consider that to have been the most powerful performance I've ever seen; and I was once an English teacher.

 

If god's word is eternal, then it should mean the same today as it did when it was written, irrespective of what language it was originally written in. I should be able to understand god's message without a masters degree in Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, or Yiddish.

 

"IF" it is, indeed, eternal.

[Lilith666]

God is a personal god who wants to be accessible to and have a close relationship with humans, but his book is an enigma because it's in another language and is full of things he did that appear to be immoral and make people not want to be Christian. Even though it actually was moral, we can't understand it because his mysterious ways are far beyond our comprehension and he won't explain it to us. But he's a personal god... really.

 

I don't understand why all the verses about how mysterious and superior to humans god is don't kill the notion that he's a loving and personal god. If he were, he wouldn't be showing off his powers and reminding us that he can crush us any second if he feels like it.