Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Digging Around in the Greek

Over the last week or so I've begun digging around in the Greek that makes up the Bible and I'm finding the exercise really interesting. The motivation for the study is a devotional I write for the Christian college group I'm the Faculty Advisor for. A couple of weeks ago I started to work through Chapter 12 of Romans (Therefore, offer yourselves as living sacrifices...). As I got to verse 9 I relaize I really wanted to know the meaning of a specific work in the text. So I went to my favorite on-line greek resource, www.greekbible.com, to check it out. Well one thing led to another and all of the sudden I'm retranslating the text because I don't think the NIV really gets at what Paul is trying to say. Now, I'm workign my way through the restof the chapter seeing what I can find.

While I'm not ready to say that the NIV or some other translation has gotten it wrong, I do wonder how much they took context into account when they put things together. Now, I'm not a linguist or a Biblical scholar or anything like that so you probably shouldn't put a lot of stock in anything I say, but I'm really beginning to wonder if some of these guys got it right. When I look at what Paul wrote, I see that he's got a lot more going on that the translation seems to convey. It's hard to give an example right now but I think I'm going to have to sit down with a Ancient Greek-English dictionary and work through the entire passage to see what I come up with. It's almost like there are two paths Paul could have been wanting his readers to take with the passage. Probably he really wanted us to consider both paths but that feeling's totally lost when the Greek gets turned into English. There also seems to be a lot of wordplay in the writing that is lost as well. Its hard to say though as the original Greek is all in capitals with no spaces or punctuation (you'd think a culture as sharp as the Greeks would have invented the space, of course you'd also think the Romans could have invented real numbers and a zero but they missed that boat too).

Really, really interesting stuff.

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