[B-Greek] Jn 21.13 & 21.15 How much do you love me?

Wayne Leman wayne_leman at sil.org
Sun Dec 17 01:56:21 EST 2006


I am of the camp that believes that if we understood Greek better, close to 
the competence of its native speakers, there would be far fewer ambiguities 
than we find in the text today. Human communication does not work well with 
too high a number of ambiguities. Many ambiguities in the biblical text are 
there because of our analysis and not authorial intent. So, I encourage 
people to study the context of each passage better, study the theme of a 
passage, study the flow of the logic, attempt to determine what the author's 
overall point was that he was trying to communicate. In many, many cases 
what we think are ambiguities can disappear, and simply be considered as 
relics of the analytical process not taking everything into consideration 
that the original author and his audience had to work with as assumptions.

There are a few intentional ambiguities in the biblical texts. I think any 
other real ambiguities are far less than often suggested. Study, study, 
study! Especially study passages in their total context.

Wayne
----
Wayne Leman
Better Bibles Blog:
http://englishbibles.blogspot.com

>>
> If a text is ambiguous in the  original, let's keep it
> that way in translation.  Dynamic equivalence theory
> translators  often go overboard to make explicit what
> is implicit in the original, and often drift into the
> field of interpretation.  In this passage, the
> antecedent of TOUTWN in v 15  is for interpreters to
> decide rather than  grammarians.  Anyway, that's how I
> see it.




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