I came across an interesting thought from Ernst Käsemann in my reading today:
Ernst Käsemann, “‘The Righteousness of God’ in Paul” in New Testament Questions of Today (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969) 180.
How true!
Pope Benedict XVI is expected to turn out a post-syndol apostolic exhortation on the Bible at some point in the next few months. Last time that he had an October Synod (2005), the exhortation came out in February 2007, about a year and half later. The Bible Synod took place last October 5-26, 2008. Cardinal Marc Oullet, archbishop of Quebec, requested that Pope Benedict write an encyclical on the Bible and biblical interpretation at the Synod last fall (see Zenit). While I do not think it likely for the Pope to produce both an apostolic exhortation and an encyclical on the Bible in a relatively short period of time, it is possible. We can expect he will be spending extra effort on the exhortation in order to sum up the synod and clearly re-state the Church’s views on the Bible. If Benedict remains with us for several years after the exhortation, it is possible he could produce an encyclical as well. However, I bet he will invest the exhortation, which he is obligated to provide, with a great deal of thought and energy. It should make for good reading. I imagine it will re-affirm what Catholics believe about the Bible and provide a good synthesis of post-Vatican II teaching.
Food for thought:
“The medieval theory of levels of meaning in the biblical text, with all its undoubted defects, flourished because it is true, while the modem theory of a single meaning with all its demonstrable virtues, is false. Until the historical-critical method becomes critical of its own theoretical foundations and develops a hermeneutical theory adequate to the nature of the text which it is interpreting it will remain restricted—as it deserves to be—to the guild and the academy, where the question of truth can endlessly be deferred.”
-David Steinmetz, “The superiority of pre-critical exegesis,” Ex auditu 1 (1985): 82.
You may have seen this story swirling through the Bible news internet blogoplex. Ellen van Wolde, a professor at Radbound University in the Netherlands has claimed that the Hebrew word br’ in Genesis 1:1 means “separated” not “created” thus making God a divine manipulator of things already existing, not a creator ex nihilo. Well, as you can imagine, there have been many responses.
The original article in Trouw (in Dutch)
A report from the UK Telegraph
Responses from:
God Didn’t Say That
Ancient Hebrew Poetry (examines the Hebrew)
Chris Heard
Clayboy
Alternate Readings (examines the LXX evidence)
Claude Mariottini
This debate is is important because of the central idea of creatio ex nihilo in Catholic thought. The Catholic Catechism addresses the doctrine of creation in CCC282-301, especially 296-298. The Catechism cites Lateran Council IV which states that the Trinity is “the one principle of the universe, the creator of all things, visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal, who by this almighty power from the beginning of time made at once out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then the human creature, who as it were shares in both orders, being composed of spirit and body” (Neuner-Dupuis 19; DS 800; emphasis mine).
However, I don’t think very many people will take Prof. Wolde’s theory very seriously.
I just found a great resource for anyone who wants a brief introduction to text criticism of the Bible. Apparently, Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts by Sir Frederic Kenyon used to be a common textbook for textual criticism. I found it to be a very helpful summary of the important points. It can help you make sense of the text-critical apparatus in the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament or Rahlfs’ Septuagint, even the Hebrew Bible–but the book was published in 1939, seven years before the discovery of the caves at Qumran. Hence the reason it is no longer a standard.
Kenyon’s book has been superceded by a few other books: Bruce Metzger’s Textual Commentary on the New Testament (2005) and his Text of the New Testament (co-authored with Bart Ehrman, 2005), Kurt and Barbara Aland’s Text of the New Testament (1995)and Emmanuel Tov’s Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (2001).
So often, too often, scholars are seduced by the similarity between the studied and the student, the researched and the researcher that they make the unforgivable mistake of combining, conflating and confusing the reality of the thing studied with the discipline that studies it. Thus, certain problems between people become “sociological” rather than “societal” or people engage in building “high ethnological walls” rather than high “ethnic” walls.
This phenomenon is an abuse of language. So next time you encounter conflicting neighborhoods or some addiction that afflicts human society, refer to the “social” or “societal” problem you are observing. In this manner, you will be engaging in an act of “sociological” study. Likewise, if you see someone building high walls between ethnic groups, remember that they are “ethnic” walls and that you have just made an “ethnological” observation.
All you Greek scholars out there (and anyone who has ever taken a biology class) know that the “-ology” at the end of a word comes from the Greek word logos, “word, knowledge.” So “biology” is “the study of bios” or “the study of life.”
Well, I’ve been using various instant messaging programs for a few years, but I just realized something I never thought of: We have no Christian instant messaging greetings. At least, there are no standard, traditional ones that go back a long ways because well, instant messaging has only been out there for very short time.
Perhaps however, a few traditional Christian greetings can be modified for the IM world. I mean, we like to say things like “God bless you!” or “Godspeed!” (archaic, I know) or even “He is risen!” In writing letters and now emails, Christians often use a complimentary close like “Yours in Christ,” or even “Faithfully Yours.”
But how are you supposed to convey God’s blessing to a fellow Christian through instant messaging of all things? Perhaps there is a way. If you figure it out, let me know.
I suppose we could borrow from speech and letter writing, but it seems a little odd to end an IM session with “Faithfully Yours.”
Tabitha (Acts 9:36, 40) is a person who shows up a couple times in Acts.
In Greek: ??????
In Aramaic: ????????
I’m borrowing the Aramaic transcription from Thayer’s Lexicon. He gets it from Kautzsch’s Aramaic grammar. It is a female given name seemingly related to the Aramaic word for good (tab). So it means “good, precious, worth” or something like that. Here a couple dictionary entries on it: DJPA and Jastrow p. 515b. (It is not related to the word “talitha” discussed below.) It seems similar to the names Tobias and Tobit which are related to the same root word in Hebrew and Aramaic.
However, Acts 9:36 indicates that name “translated, means Dorcas.” Well, maybe this is helpful for Greek speakers, but us English-speaking folk need a little more help. So, if you happen to look up Dorcas (??????) in a Greek dictionary, it means “antelope, gazelle.” So, what the heck? Is Tabitha really related to tab or not? It seems not.
The real root of Tabitha in Aramaic is the word for gazelle, ??? (tby). The “-tha” ending just feminizes the masculine word. Here’s Jastrow’s entry:
https://catholicbiblestudent.com/uploaded_images/tby-726702.JPG
So, Tabitha means gazelle. I suppose that that is a complimentary female name. Now, there is one other point of interest here. In Acts 9:40, Tabitha has died and Peter goes in to the body, pronounces the words “Tabitha, arise” and she is raised from the dead. Of course, this looks a lot like the phrase Jesus used “Talitha, qum” or “Talitha, arise.” Very interesting that these two resurrection stories have such similar words. Also, it seems that the minor variant “tabitha” in Mark 5:41 probably originated from confusion with Acts 9:40. But it seems that this is merely a coincidence. “Little girl” and “gazelle” mean very different things even though they are only one letter different.
This is my favorite use of Aramaic in the New Testament.
Overview of this series
Many scholars conjecture Aramaic underpinnings to much of the Greek in the New Testament. They will cite “Semitic influence,” “semiticisms,” or “Aramaisms.” The point is that a lot of the writers of the NT were GSL people (Greek as a second language). Some people used to think that parts of the NT were originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic (especially the Gospel of Matthew), but very few people hold that anymore. Most folks think that the NT was written by Aramaic speakers who were bilingual in Greek. Although some deny knowledge of Aramaic or Hebrew to certain NT authors.
What I want to do in these posts is highlight something more specific: the use of transliterated Aramaic in the NT. “What weird idea!” you might say. But these curious words are often misunderstood or simply not understood since they are rarely translated into English, they are simply transliterated (i.e. the sounds are reproduced by English letters) from Greek because they were transliterated into Greek from Aramaic. Now, this gets a little complicated because the Greek does not necessarily show all the features of the Aramaic. I mean, Aramaic is written right to left with no vowels and such. Greek attempts to reproduce the sound of the Aramaic, but isn’t always faithful or consistent.
Side note: one of the ways we know how ancient Hebrew and Aramaic were pronounced is through the use of transliteration in the Greek NT, but more importantly, the ancient Septuagint translation of the Bible. Most transliterated words are names since they are notoriously hard to translate.
Talitha cum! (Mark 5:41)
In Aramaic: טַלִיתָא קום
Transliterated into Greek: ταλιθα κουμ
Now, the first word we can find in the Jastrow Aramaic Dictionary:
If you notice, the vowel pointing I used is a little different than Jastrow’s because I’m working back from the Greek transliteration, but no matters, it’s the same word. So the word basically means “young girl” or something like that. There’s a very similar word for boy (taley).
Now qum is a very common word which means “to stand, arise.” But here’s the fascinating part. In Aramaic, qum is used as a second masculine singular imperative, which would make perfect sense here IF the dead person were a boy. The feminine version would be קומי qumi! So a couple questions arise, so to speak: 1.) Is the Greek faithful to the Aramaic? 2.) Are there textual variants? 3.) Is the dead person actually male?
In reverse order:
3.) We know from the previous verses, esp. v.35, that it was a daughter who had died, not a son. She is usually referred to as “child” (paidion in Greek) which is a neuter word. But, we know it’s a daughter, so the dead person is female, not male.
2.) There are textual variants! Now, don’t get too excited. Sinaiticus, Vaticanus are on the side of the text qum. But Alexandrinus, Koridethianus and a few others have qumi (well, it’s actually in “κουμι” in Greek transliteration). I guess the New Testament text committee decided on qum because of B and א. There’s a few other witnesses that have ταβιθα instead. But these are very rare.
1.) Ah! And lastly, it appears that no, the Greek doesn’t quite capture the Aramaic. The variants are probably corrections rather than representing an earlier text. It also seems that most of the early copyists did not know Aramaic, so they wouldn’t be tempted to correct it.
The translation usually given “Little girl, arise!” is quite good. The Greek inserts “I say to you” just to clarify that it is an imperative.
Well, now you know more than you ever could have wanted about this passage. Now you can impress your friends with your Aramaic knowledge!
Anathema (1 Cor 16:22)
Bethesda (John 5:2)
Eloi, eloi, lema sabachthani! (Matt 27:46; Mark 15:34)
Gabbatha (John 19:15)
Golgotha (John 19:17)
Kephas or Cephas (John 1:42, et al.)
Maranatha! (1 Cor 16:22)
Rabboni (John 20:16)
Raqa (Matt 5:22)
Siloam (Luke 13:4; John 9:7, 9:11)
sign on the cross (John 19:20)
Tabitha (Acts 9:36, 40)
Talitha cum! (Mark 5:41)
