[B-Greek] Jn 2:25 AUTOS DE IHSOUS OUK EPISTEUEN AUTON AUTOIS
Wayne Leman
wayne_leman at sil.org
Tue Feb 20 15:19:36 EST 2007
Yes, Webb, I wrestled with the same issues you raised, and I'm not claiming
that my suggested wording was the best. But how would you deal with the
matter of the lexical cohesion in that passage? It seems to me that the
author intended repetition of the forms of PISTEUW. How can we maintain the
rhetorical focus on that while still translating each of the verbs as we
feel it is best translated in its context? I don't know the answer to that
question. Just as I do not want to lose accuracy in translation of either
verb, I would not want to lose the rhetorical cohesion in the translation.
Translation truly is treason sometimes, as the Italian proverb reminds us.
I don't want to get into theology, but I don't think there is any
theological significance to the biblical idiom of doing something "in the
name of someone" even if their name has theological significance. The idiom
existed regardless of what someone's name was.
Wayne
----
Wayne Leman
Better Bibles Blog:
http://englishbibles.blogspot.com
>I think something significant drops out if one translates AUTOS DE IHSOUS
> OUK EPISTEUEN AUTON AUTOIS as "Jesus didn't trust them. I would render it:
>
> "But Jesus himself wasn't entrusting himself to them."
> Or maybe, in order to remove the stylistic clumsiness of the two instances
> of "himself":
> "But as for Jesus, he wasn't entrusting himself to them."
>
> Later in John, the crowds attempt to crown Jesus as king by force (see Jn
> 6:15), but Jesus refuses to be conscripted in that way. I suspect that
> John
> is giving us a hint of that same dynamic in Jn 2:25.
>
> As for Jn 2:23, POLLOI EPISTEUSAN EIS TO ONOMA AUTOU, "lots of people
> believed in his name", I think it doesn't mean that people emotionally
> "trusted Jesus". In context, I think it means that people were forming an
> opinion that Jesus was someone special and positively gifted by God in a
> religious sense, and that they were more or less associating themselves
> with
> him by embracing that opinion.
> To give a modern example, you could ask somebody, "Do you believe in
> Benjamin Creme?" You could also ask, "Do you trust Benjamin Creme?" The
> answers to these two questions would probably be the same 95% of the time,
> but they are not the same question. I think John is affirming that people
> "believed in" Jesus in the sense I just mentioned, not that they "trusted"
> him.
> Of course, literally it says that they "believed in his name". By this,
> John
> could even be saying that they believed that in some way his divine
> gifting
> was expressed in his literal name, Jehoshua', "YHWH Saves". In other
> words,
> they could be thinking/believing/hoping that Jesus was a divinely
> appointed
> savior for Israel.
>
> Webb Mealy
>
>
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