Henry Imler August 18th, 2008
If Jesus is the “Word,” and we don’t want to be sloppy with our language and steer ourselves away from confusing the Word with the Bible, then what ought we call the Bible to emphasize it’s nature as God-breathed scripture?
I don’t like using “the word of God” because it confuses the Bible and Jesus and I want to stay as far away from that as possible. Using the word “scripture” is what I end up doing, but it just does not carry the weight that I want it to carry. The closest thing that I can think of for the Bible internally referring to itself (and I recognize the problems with even typing that sentence.) is in 2 Timothy 3:16 where the author refers to writings that are inspired of God.
The author of 2 Timothy uses γραφή (gra-phay), lit - “a writing” a term that can mean anything from sacred writing, to a painting, to a legal document. The author equates these “writings” with Θεόπνευστος (theh-o-neus-tahs). This is a curious word, which only shows up in the NT and LXX here in 2 Tim 3:16 and is a combination of θεο + πνευστος, or God + spirit. Thus, Θεόπνευστος becomes “inspired by God” or “[having] the spirit of God.”
So, it Bible and Scripture the best terms to use for the collection of books that we Christians consider to have been inspired by God? What other options are there? What do you use?
Henry Imler July 3rd, 2008
I know this is not a German grammar blog, but it is my blog and I can post whatever I like and right now I like to post snippets from my final project.
1. In diesem Komplex von Einfltissen und Ausstrahlungen ist … auch das Evangelium Jesu von Nazareth verkündigt worden. (In this complex of influences and transferences the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth has been declared.)
Mood: Indicative, Voice: Active, Tense: Passive Present Perfect– ist … verkündigt worden → sein + past participle (infinitive: verkündigen = to declare) + worden = “has been announced”
2. …Autoren, die sich mit der Geschichte des altesten Christentums in Edessa befasst haben…(…Authors, who have dealt with the history of the oldest Christianity in Edessa,…)
Mood: Indicative, Voice: Active, Tense: Present Perfect – befasst haben → haben + past participle (infinitive: befassen = to deal/occupy + sich/mit) = have dealt
befassen = inseparable prefix verb (be+fassen [to hold]) which is also reflexive and takes a dative – accompanied with sich, the reflexive third person pronoun and mit which tells the read what object the subject has deal/occupied itself with.
This is a relative clause, set off by the commas and the use of die as Autoren’s relative pronoun instead of its base use as a definite article. The relative clause describes the authors in further detail.
3. Religionswissenschaft
Compound noun: Science of Religion, or Religious Studies
Religions + wissenschaft
Religions → of religion
wissenschaft → science
Henry Imler July 2nd, 2008
This is the last sentence I had to translate for my German project was difficult challenge for my meager German skills and non-existent German vocabulary":
Es ist um so frappanter, dies festzustellen, als die Methode der Religionsgeschichtlichen Schule, die innerhalb der Religionswissenschaft nur noch wenige Anhanger hat, in dieser Weise - namentlich auf dem Gebiet der alten Kirchengeschichte - eine Nachblüte erlebt.
This is the best I can come up with:
It is so much more remarkable, this assertion [ascertaining], as the method of the School of Religious History, which has only but a few supporters within Religious Studies [lit: the Science of Religion] –namely in the area of the old Church History – experiences a second flowering.
I think that sentence makes sense. The assertion that he talks about in the previous sentence (that Christian or Jewish-Christian is programmatic of Edessan “pure culture” when, in point of fact, there was considerable Roman and Parthian influence on the city as a whole as it lied directly on the outer edges of both empires influences) is even more remarkable when you consider that there is a second flowering going on in the study of religion, coupled with the fact that this method of doing Religious History has only a few supporters and that those supporters are primarily in the area of Old Church History.. If I had to put all of that into one sentence, I would do it the following way:
This assertion is so much more remarkable, considering that the method of the School of Religious History, which has only but a few supports within Religious Studies (namely in the area of old Church History) experiences a second flowering.
We will see. Now to pick out some neat grammatical constructions.
Henry Imler July 1st, 2008
Today Twain is not the type of splitting preformed upon Robin’s arrow at the archery contest, but instead is the famous author discussing interruptions in thought while writing:
We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog which stands for clearness among these people. For surely it is not clearness — it necessarily can’t be clearness. Even a jury would have penetration enough to discover that. A writer’s ideas must be a good deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out to say that a man met a counselor’s wife in the street, and then right in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the woman’s dress. That is manifestly absurd. It reminds a person of those dentists who secure your instant and breathless interest in a tooth by taking a grip on it with the forceps, and then stand there and drawl through a tedious anecdote before they give the dreaded jerk. Parentheses in literature and dentistry are in bad taste.
Henry Imler July 1st, 2008
This week’s "Point; Counterpoint" comes from Jim West and Richard A. Rhodes on Bible translation. West makes the contention that translations should be "woody" and goes so far as to say, "[they] are better because they maintain the proper distance between ourselves and the Biblical authors." Rhodes strongly disagrees with this sentiment in his reaction against West’s position. He maintains that:
"The stuff of the Bible that is of interest are those things about human nature. The differences in the worlds and worldviews is irrelevant, beyond the fact that knowing something about them helps us to better understand the motivations and reactions of the people."
I encourage you to check out both articles. I can sympathize with West’s sentiment. He is correct that the totality of the "biblical" experience is far removed from us and that it takes a lot of work in order to approach that world. However, I think this can be done and modern translations can be filtered through this necessary legwork to produce a meaningful translation for people who aren’t biblical scholars.
For me it all boils down to a simple question: What question am I asking of the text? If I am trying to figure out historical circumstances or do a detailed grammatical analysis of the relation of two clauses, I’ll go to the Greek and supplement that with a very literal translation like the NASB or the NRSV. If I am seeking to teach laypersons about a saying of Jesus in Sunday school for instance, I’ll go with a translation that tries to place the text into terms and syntax that is the most understandable, thus I’ll probably use the NLV or the ESV. Not everyone asks the same questions of a text and due to this, we should not expect for there to be one “best” translation for all situations everywhere. Each and every translation is an interpretation, whether one likes it or not.
Further reading:
Scholarly Legends by Rhodes
Why Modern Translations of the Bible Bungle It by West
Henry Imler June 30th, 2008
Sometimes, when I am frustrated with cramming a couple of years worth of German into my face in a few short days (I’m a drama queen, I know) it helps to remember that the great American writer, Mark Twain had some helpful thoughts on the German language.
Here is an excerpt:
The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance. A favorite one is reiste ab — which means departed. Here is an example which I culled from a novel and reduced to English:
"The trunks being now ready, he DE- after kissing his mother and sisters, and once more pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair, had tottered feebly down the stairs, still pale from the terror and excitement of the past evening, but longing to lay her poor aching head yet once again upon the breast of him whom she loved more dearly than life itself, PARTED."
However, it is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is sure to lose his temper early; and if he sticks to the subject, and will not be warned, it will at last either soften his brain or petrify it. Personal pronouns and adjectives are a fruitful nuisance in this language, and should have been left out. For instance, the same sound, sie, means you, and it means she, and it means her, and it means it, and it means they, and it means them. Think of the ragged poverty of a language which has to make one word do the work of six — and a poor little weak thing of only three letters at that. But mainly, think of the exasperation of never knowing which of these meanings the speaker is trying to convey. This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
![Hundie Jo [Dot] Com](http://www.hundiejo.com/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache2/7d6a910bbe08845c0836a517a70936d5.png){kind=small}
