[B-Greek] Jn 12:44
Iver Larsen
iver at larsen.dk
Sat Nov 19 02:51:02 EST 2005
Dear Webb,
Thank you very much for your added comments and clarification. I find nothing to disagree about, and you have expressed
several things very well. Just a further comment on a few items below:
> You said: We need to recognize that John is thinking in a Semitic pattern
> rather than modern English pattern. That John writes in Greek does not mean
> that he doesn't think primarily in Semitic terms. So, even a good knowledge
> of Greek is not always sufficient to understand his thoughts. Whereas the
> English thought pattern is linear by default, Semitic thought pattern is
> "overlapping" by default.
>
> I reply: I broadly agree with you on this whole point. But as for Luke
> 8:37b-39, I would probably just take the imperfect EDEITO as having
> pluperfect force, something like this:
>
> But he (Jesus) got in a boat and went back. Now, the man that the demons had
> gone out of had been begging him to go with him; but he sent him off. He
> said, "Go back home, and tell people what God has done for you." And he went
> off and spread the news of what Jesus had done for him all over the town.
In your English translation above, you are using pluperfects to explicitly mark that the thought pattern is NOT linear.
This is one of the ways that translators can handle the transfer of a default overlapping structure to a default linear
one. The Greek imperfect is a rather imperfect way of dealing with the problem.
In modern English newspapers, magazines and TV news the overlapping structure is often used, but it is always explicitly
marked, because it is not the default. For instance, newspapers use brief headlines (which are often ambiguous if
interpreted out of context), they may use short summaries and finally the full article. TV News also first go over the
headlines briefly and then say "Let us now look at these events in more detail."
Another option of dealing with the cultural mismatch is to make implicit some of the general statements in the
beginning, if the same information is covered a second time later in chronological order. As an example look at v. 38 in
the NLT:
"The man who had been demon possessed begged to go, too, but Jesus said, "No, go back to your family...."
Notice how the overview statement "but he sent him away" has been deleted from the translation. The reason is that it is
confusing in English and unnecessary, since the same idea is expressed in detail directly in the quote by "No, go back
to your family..."
NLT utterly fails to address the problem in v. 37, though, when it says "So Jesus returned to the boat and left,
crossing back to the other side of the lake."
A third option is to indicate an intention rather than a completed action. This is what the UBS handbook suggests for
8:37, and the CEV (Contemporary English Version) and God's Word to the Nations are the only English versions I know of,
that address the problem.
CEV says: "When Jesus got into the boat to start back, 38 the man who had been healed begged to go with him."
GW says: "Jesus got into a boat and started back." (This is not nearly as well done as the CEV rendering).
A fourth option of dealing with the mismatch is to reorder the statements so that they come in the order expected in
English. This entails combining verse numbers. In our own translation into Danish we are using all of these options,
depending on the context and the amount of discontinutiy in the original.
Let me end by quoting a back translation of our idiomatic Relevance Theory-inspired translation into Danish of this
passage:
"Then the people from there asked Jesus to leave their area, since they were afraid of what else he might do. Jesus
then entered the boat in order to sail back to Galilee. 38 The man who had been possessed by evil spirits, asked for
permission to come along, but Jesus said: "Go back to your family...."
> You said: I find it very hard to understand that Lattimore could make such a
> blunder. The word PATHR in John 8:44 does not mean "father", but
> "originator" as Chrysostom understood (thanks, Yancy). The AUTOU (in this
> context it must be neuter) either refers to TO YEUDOS or the acitivity of
> lying (ad sensum).
>
> I reply: It's not a blunder in terms of Lattimore's expertise in Greek. In
> purely grammatical terms, without reference to the broader conceptual
> context, it simply looks like "and so's his father". BTW, he has the
> alternative, "and the father of it (that is, the lie, or falsehood)" in an
> endnote. Which means that he's very aware that the latter meaning is
> grammatically possible--but he makes the deliberate choice to go with the
> construal that is more natural of the two on a purely Greek-grammatical
> level.
But one cannot do exegesis, and certainly not translation, by ignoring the wider context and only look at a text from a
purely Greek-grammatical viewpoint, unless it is made clear that what one is doing is neither exegesis nor ordinary
translation, but a special rendering of the Greek text which has as its purpose to illustrate the range of more or less
probable interpretations of the Greek words. I cannot even see how one can get "and so is his father" from hOTI YEUSTHS
ESTIN KAI hO PATHR AUTOU. Where do the "so" and "is" come from? There is no hOUTWS and no ESTIN in the second part.
What I could accept is: "because he is a liar and indeed the father/originator of it/lies/lying."
Sorry if this has been more translation theory and practice than Greek, but these concepts are important for a proper
understanding of the Greek NT.
Iver Larsen
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