ANWQEN in John 3:3 ff
Fritz Goerling
Fritz_Goerling at sil.org
Thu Dec 26 15:30:56 EST 2002
From: Fritz Goerling
To: Bert de Haan
Bert,
I am coming from a Bible translator's point of view, working with Wycliffe
Bible Translators in West Africa. As such, I was confronted with this
problem a number of times.
Who can say with certainty that Jesus used a word in his mother tongue in
the first place that meant "(born) again" and "(born) from above?"
Sometimes it would be really helpful to reconstruct what Jesus really SAID.
Is there even a Hebrew or Aramaic word of similar meaning which has this
spatial and temporal ambiguity?
I have a hard time believing that there was a double meaning of "(born)
again/(born) from above" in the original word Jesus used which could be
rendered by a word with the same double meaning in Greek. For that to
happen, the two languages are too much apart. Plus even among related
languages the direct transfer of word plays VERY rarely happens.
Talking with Nicodemus in his mother tongue, I think, Jesus did not use
a word with more than one sense. It was the evangelist John that did.
Fritz Goerling
At 11:25 AM -0500 12/26/02, <bertdehaan at gosympatico.ca> wrote:
>Hi everyone.
>I was reading in the Gospel according to John and came to the passage
>where Jesus said to Nicodemus:...unless one is born again... I was
>surprised that the word translated as again was not PALIN but ANWQEN. When
>I looked up ANWQEN I found that it is a cognate of ANA and its first
>translation was suggested to be; from above.
>Would Nicodemus have had a clue that Jesus was speaking about something
>other than a physical birth by Jesus' choice of ANWQEN over PALIN?
This has been discussed many times on the list; you might search the
archives using the word ANWQEN as your trigger. One significant little
thread on it was in June of 1998. One might prefer to understand ANWQEN
either exclusively as "again" or exclusively as "from above," but there are
many who think that this is one point at which the evangelist deliberately
chose a word that could bear more than one sense.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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