ANWQEN in John 3:3 ff
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Dec 26 16:47:20 EST 2002
At 8:30 PM +0000 12/26/02, Fritz Goerling wrote:
>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.
Well, here we go again, passing beyond the question that is clearly WITHIN
the parameters of list-discussion, that is, what the GREEK text can mean or
does mean, to matters that are speculative. For my part, I don't think we
should rule out the notion that Jesus and Nicodemus may have held this
dialogue in Greek, although I am aware that the range of opinions
concerning Jesus' linguistic abilities is not very restrictive. Or it may
be, as you suggest, that this is the evangelist's contribution to the
narrative. But although that is arguable, I don't think it is definitively
demonstrable, and in any case it goes beyond the issue of what the Greek
text may mean.
--
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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