Silent women and dotty manuscripts

Many people seem to think that every interesting question about the Bible has been answered long ago. After all, it has been studied in depth for nearly 2000 years (more, of course, for the Hebrew Bible). For some of these people the best answers were given by their favourite Church Fathers, popes or Reformers. For others, the answers have come from 19th or 20th century biblical scholarship. Yet, it turns out, there are many questions still unanswered, and not just ones which cannot be answered for lack of data.

So the discipline of biblical studies is still alive and fairly well. Last week it had its annual jamboree in New Orleans, a double whammy of ETS and SBL, attended by many of my blogging buddies. I’m sure a lot of what was presented there was speculation on the basis of old evidence, or of no evidence at all. But at least a few really new things seem to have come up. And they are not all about purely academic matters; some actually have practical implications.

One of the latter, amazingly enough, has to do with some dots in an ancient biblical manuscript. These dots, occurring in pairs and so known as umlauts or distigmai (Greek for “two dots”), are in Codex Vaticanus, which is one of the oldest known manuscripts of the New Testament. They were (at least according to textual critic and Evangelical Textual Criticism blogger Tommy Wasserman) discovered by the biblical scholar Philip Payne. Payne himself blogged last month about his discovery and analysis of these dots, at Zondervan’s Koinonia blog, where he wrote:

The paper I will read at the ETS Annual Meeting at 8:30 AM, Thursday Nov. 19 in the Waterbury Ballroom on the 2nd floor of the Sheraton will establish with conclusive statistical evidence that the distigmai in Codex Vaticanus are marks of textual variants.

Now this might appear to be of little interest to anyone much except for the textual critics. But not so! These dots turn out to be major supporting evidence for the theory that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is an interpolation, not an original part of Paul’s letter. This is the notorious passage in which the apostle allegedly tells women to be silent in church. It is hardly surprising that egalitarian evangelicals, most notably the well known exegete and commentator Gordon Fee, have tended to conclude that this passage is not original. The evidence for this which Fee gives in his NICNT commentary on 1 Corinthians has not convinced everyone. So of course it was of great interest to many people when Payne claimed to have found further evidence of the passage being an interpolation.

Move on from ETS to SBL, still in New Orleans, probably in the same Sheraton hotel, and just two days later on Saturday 21st. A new scholar, Peter Head, who also blogs at Evangelical Textual Criticism, has arrived from England during the night, having put the finishing touches to his presentation on the plane. So he wasn’t at Payne’s presentation. Had he seen a report of it? I’m sure he had at least seen the kind of summary of arguments which Payne had already posted. But, as Wasserman reports, Payne was in the front row when Head presented his paper, and so witnessed his argument being thoroughly demolished – at least if Wasserman’s account (which continues here) is fair.

Payne dated the distigmai to the 4th century. Head turned this theory on its head by dating them a full 1200 years later, to the 16th century, and even suggested the name of the person responsible for adding them to the manuscript: Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (UPDATE: this name was first put froward by Curt Niccum, as Tommy Wasserman points out in a comment below). Part of Head’s argument was in the positioning of the dots, avoiding other marks dated to as late as the 15th century. But his main argument related to which textual variants are marked. Payne apparently claimed a 60-70% match between the locations of the distigmai and the locations of textual variants known to date back to the 4th century. Head claimed a 98% match between distigmai and textual variants known to Erasmus in the 16th century. And it is known that Erasmus corresponded with Sepulveda about the text of Vaticanus at these very locations. If Head’s findings can be confirmed (and analysis of the ink of the dots might allow this), it seems that the mystery of the distigmai has been solved.

So, does this undermine Payne’s argument? It certainly undermines his dating of the distigmai to the 4th century. Therefore he no longer has clear evidence that the textual variant in 1 Corinthians 14 was known as early as that. However, he has found evidence that this textual variant was known at some time, perhaps in the 16th century. Quite probably this relates to the fact, probably well known to Erasmus and Sepulveda as it is to modern scholars, that the passage in question, 1 Corinthians 14:34-45, is displaced to after 14:40 in many manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate as well as in the so-called Western Text of the Greek; in one Vulgate manuscript, Codex Fuldensis, the passage is actually a later addition. This is basically the same evidence which Fee used to claim that these two verses are an interpolation into the original letter. And Fee’s argument, even without added evidence from the distigmai, is a strong one.

However, even if the passage is not an interpolation, it should not be concluded that the apostle Paul was a misogynist or that the Bible teaches that women should not be allowed to say anything in gatherings of Christians. Paul cannot have written that because it would be in direct contradiction to what he had written in 11:5, that women may pray or prophesy (the latter at least must be out loud in a gathering) as long as their heads are covered. If he did write 14:34-35, his meaning must have been that women were not to disrupt meetings by chattering or asking questions.

So is this a case of the apparent complementarian Peter Head, formerly of Oak Hill College, winning an argument over the egalitarian Philip Payne? No, that would be a caricature. I’m sure Peter’s motivations for presenting his paper were entirely scholarly, concerning his field of textual criticism, and nothing to do with proving a point about women. Perhaps one speculative piece of support for the egalitarian position has been found wanting, but  the position as a whole has not been compromised at all. Certainly no one should use Peter’s SBL presentation as grounds for silencing women in their churches.

http://www.koinoniablog.net/2009/10/why-would-1-cor-143435-be-an-interpolation.html

Five statement Bible summary

Sorry for not much blogging recently. As a newly married man I have new responsibilities, and a new way of life to adjust to. Also I have been doing some temporary paid work, for the first time for some time, and on top of that I have been having serious computer problems. Now the work has come to an end, at least for this week, and the computer is just about working again. So I have had some time to catch up on blog reading, and have just found enough for a short post …

Doug Chaplin, a.k.a. Clayboy, has tagged me with The new five statement bible summary meme. He also tagged David Ker, whose response is the only other one I have seen. These are the rules for the meme, which seems to have originated with Doug:

Summarise the Bible in five statements, the first one word long, the second two, the third three, the fourth four and the last five words long. Or possibly you could do this in descending order. Tag five people.

I’ll try this in descending order.

  1. God created everything very good.
  2. Human beings messed up.
  3. Chosen people failed.
  4. Jesus succeeded.
  5. Wow!

Of course here I gloss over the entire church age, by no means a “wow” time, to the best one word summary I can think of for the ultimate Christian hope.

Like David Ker I will decline to tag five others. Part of my excuse for that is that I can’t find links easily on my newly restored but still not quite right computer. But the main reason is that I don’t want to put people on the spot to be original on this one. So instead I’ll tag all five people who actually read this. Or if the number is in fact 500, this could be the world’s fastest growing meme.

Anthropos, gender and markedness, part 3

This continues the series from Part 1 and Part 2. In the former I started to examine Joel Hoffman’s claim that the Greek word anthropos has a male meaning component. In the latter I introduced the concept of markedness and outlined how it might be applied to gender in Greek. Now I want to bring these two together by considering how the markedness helps to explain how anthropos is used.

As I explained before, anthropos is one of a group of Greek nouns which can be either masculine or feminine. The technical word for this is “epicene”. The feminine form of anthropos is rare, and not found in the New Testament. I guess many epicene nouns are much rarer in the feminine than the masculine – although the opposite is true, at least in the NT, of parthenos “virgin” which is usually feminine, but presumed (on the basis of usage elsewhere – the gender is not marked in the NT text) to be masculine in Revelation 14:4 (referring to men only) and perhaps 1 Corinthians 7:25 (referring to both men and women).

Let us now consider how anthropos is used in the New Testament. According to the rough figures in my Modern Concordance to the New Testament (Darton, Longman & Todd 1976) the 552 occurrences can be divided as follows: 88 in the phrase “son of man”, mostly referring to Jesus but including Hebrews 2:6 which I discussed here yesterday; 5 referring to Adam; the 5 occurrences I discussed earlier in which there is a contrast with “woman”; 29 other cases referring to Jesus; 39 referring to other named individuals; 43 referring to unnamed individuals; 5 referring to inhabitants or citizens; 1o referring to the self or nature; 2 in the phrase “man of God”; and the rest, more than 300, referring to “MAN, HUMAN(ITY) – PEOPLE, EVERYBODY, EVERYONE – SOMEONE, ANYBODY”.

Some of the 111 references listed as to named or unnamed individuals are in fact to groups which may well have included women. But it appears that every reference to a single individual is to a man, an adult male, rather than a woman or a child. I say “appears” because in many cases the gender and age of the referent is not otherwise stated. But I would not dispute a claim that in the New Testament anthropos never refers to a specific woman – although it does (with feminine gender) in other Greek literature.

Here is the Greek text of the most convincing example of feminine anthropos, from Herodotus 1:60, the first of the six examples Suzanne quotes in English translation:

οἱ ἐν τῷ ἄστεϊ πειθόμενοι τὴν γυναῖκα εἶναι αὐτὴν τὴν θεὸν προσεύχοντό τε τὴν ἄνθρωπον καὶ ἐδέκοντο Πεισίστρατον.

Here we have two feminine epicene nouns: he theos “goddess”; and he anthropos, rendered “human creature” and referring to the woman who had just been described, more typically, as gune. Presumably she is called anthropos because she is being contrasted with the goddess Athene. I can’t help thinking that anthropos would have been used in a somewhat similar incident in the New Testament, at Acts 12:22, even if the referent had been a woman.

To complete this study it is important to look at that majority of the occurrences of anthropos classified as referring to “MAN, HUMAN(ITY) – PEOPLE, EVERYBODY, EVERYONE – SOMEONE, ANYBODY”. The significant point here is that only a very few of these more than 300 refer to men rather than women or indeed have any gender significance at all. Many of these gender generic examples are plural, but there are also a considerable number which are singular but still gender generic. Consider for example the use of singular anthropos in Mark 7:14-23 and Romans 3:28, teaching which surely applies to women as much as to men. So there really is no evidence to support the common claim that anthropos is gender generic in the plural but specific to men in the singular.

To put this in the language of markedness, this very common use of anthropos to refer to men and women indefinitely without specifying gender seems to show that this word is the default or unmarked one for referring to human beings in general, singly or in groups. In the thinking of the time (and to some extent today) the default or unmarked person, the prototypical person (to use the language of another semantic model), was a man, an adult male.

This explains why when it was known that a person was a woman or a child it was normal to use not anthropos but a different word, one marked as referring to a female or a young person. But in exceptional cases, perhaps for stylistic variation or to contrast with a god or an animal, anthropos could be used of a specific woman or child. And when used of a woman it was also marked as such with its gender, feminine rather than the unmarked masculine. But the selection of grammatical gender seems to have been independent of the choice between anthropos and other words.

The implication of this is that anthropos is a word entirely devoid of gender marking within itself, that it in no sense “means” “man” to the exclusion of woman. The fact that it is rarely used of specific women is entirely explained by markedness theory, and does not indicate any male meaning component.

I accept that this is only the outline of an argument, which would need to be firmed up by a more careful examination of the evidence, not relying on the sometimes questionable classifications in my concordance and not restricted to the New Testament. But I think I have given enough evidence to show that Joel’s hypothesis that “one meaning of anthropos is “man”” is unlikely to be correct.

Anthropos, gender and markedness, part 2

In Part 1 of this series I outlined the issue with the Greek word anthropos and Joel Hoffman’s claim that this word has a male meaning component. I showed that the word is used only extremely rarely to contrast with words meaning “woman”. I also linked to evidence that the word is used of specific women, although rarely and never in the New Testament, in which case it has feminine grammatical gender.

At this point I want to introduce my readers to the concept of markedness. This is an important idea in linguistics, one which was first developed in the field of phonology but is now proving useful in describing other aspects of languages.

Steve Runge helped me to learn more about markedness in a series of posts earlier this year on his NT Discourse blog. The most important post for this discussion is the first one; in his other with the markedness tag he applies this theory to Greek verbs and discourse. Here is part of Steve’s introduction:

Markedness is an organizational framework for taking a complex set of data and organizing it into meaningful groupings to facilitate description of the members. The organization is accomplished by taking the most simple, basic member of the set, and using it as the canon against which the other members are contrasted. The most basic member is referred to as the default. The other members of the set are then described by how each differs from the default and from the other members. The default option is the one used when, to paraphrase the Hallmark commercial, “you do not care enough to send the very best.” In other words, when there is nothing special that one wants to signal as present, the default is the natural choice. For this reason, the default is generally the most frequently occurring member of the set. It does not signal or mark the presence of any special feature. In this way the default is also called the unmarked option.

This system that I have described is an asymmetrical approach to markedness, where each different member of the set marks the presence of a different, unique feature. There is another approach to markedness that is far more widely known within NT studies, though it is not used nearly so prevalently in linguistics proper. I mention it here for clarity sake, knowing that it may cause confusion for some. The intention is to show what I do not mean by markedness when I use the term.

The second approach to markedness is the symmetrical one. …

At this point I would like to make it clear that I am also using the “asymmetrical approach to markedness”, and not “the symmetrical one”. Read Steve’s post for more explanation of the difference.

I would like to apply this concept of markedness not to Greek verbs and discourse but to Greek gender and gender-related words. Of course I can only do this very inadequately in the course of a short blog post – there is very likely enough material here for a PhD. But I would like to make some provisional observations based on my experience of how Greek works.

First, I think Greek makes a clear distinction between gendered lexical items and grammatical gender. At the lexical level one can distinguish between gender pairs of words which are very different in form, e.g. ho aner “man” and he gune “woman”; pairs which differ only in their ending, in effect declining like adjectives, e.g. ho adelphos “brother” and he adelphe “sister”; and words which can be masculine or feminine depending on the gender of their referent but do not change their form, e.g. ho diakonos “servant/deacon (male)” and he diakonos “servant/deacon (female)”. The word we are mainly discussing here, anthropos, fits in the third category, although its feminine form is rare and not found in the New Testament. Some words fit in more than one category: the female form of ho theos “god” can be he theos, as in Acts 19:37, or he thea, in Acts 19:27.

In Greek, as in all gendered languages as far as I know (certainly also in French, Latin, German, Italian, Russian and Hebrew), the masculine plural is regularly used to refer to groups of mixed gender. This is already a strong indicator that masculine is the unmarked or default gender and the feminine gender is marked. Further evidence of this, at least in Greek, comes from the regular use of the masculine gender in indefinite sentences, e.g. to refer back to the genderless pronoun tis “someone”/”who”, even when the sentence is clearly applicable equally to men and women.

So how might these principles apply more specifically to anthropos? I will discuss that in Part 3.

Anthropos, gender and markedness, part 1

I’m sorry that this post is rather technical, and so may be hard for some of you my readers to understand. But in view of some of what I have read recently on blogs it is important to get these matters right.

There has been quite a lot of discussion on various blogs about whether the Greek word anthropos “means” ” man”, in any way to the exclusion of women. In particular Joel Hoffman has taken the position, here and here (see also this post), that

one meaning of anthropos is “man,”

and that in some places where the word is used

the Greek text means to emphasize “man” over “woman” … anthropos emphasizes “man” in contrast to “woman.”

I have strongly opposed Joel’s position in comments on these posts. Also disagreeing with Joel have been Suzanne McCarthy, here and here as well as in comments on Joel’s blog, and Kurk Gayle, here with links to several other related posts, also here and in comments elsewhere. See also Mike Aubrey’s related post, here. I also touched on this issue in two previous posts of mine, here and here. Read the comments on each of these posts.

In particular, I had to correct Joel for the following demonstrably false statement which he made in comment 5 here:

3. I still haven’t seen any convincing evidence from extrabiblical sources to support anthropos referring specifically to a woman. Did I miss one?

There is convincing evidence, provided by Suzanne, and Joel had earlier commented on this post showing that he had seen the evidence. I have twice asked Joel to correct this error. His response the first time suggests that he may have intended to qualify his statement with “with the masculine determiner”. With this qualification the statement would be correct: when anthropos is used of a specific woman or a group of only women it is grammatically feminine. But Joel has refused to correct or withdraw his original statement, which, without the qualification and so stating that anthropos is never used of specific women, is factually incorrect and highly misleading.

However, my main purpose here is not to correct Joel on a detail, but to look in more detail into why his overall approach to this issue is wrong-headed.

The essential feature of Joel’s argument seems to be this: because anthropos is sometimes used to contrast with words meaning “woman”, that implies that there is something male about its essential or core meaning. I consider this to be an incorrect deduction. The core meaning of a word is not found by looking at a few unusual examples.

This usage of anthropos in contrast to a word meaning “woman” is in fact rather rare in the New Testament. According to my Modern Concordance to the New Testament (Darton, Longman & Todd 1976), out of 552 occurrences of anthropos in the NT only five are “IN RELATION TO WOMEN”. Three of these, Matthew 19:5, Mark 10:7 and Ephesians 5:31, are direct quotations from the LXX Greek translation of Genesis 2:24, rendering Hebrew ish. So this is translation Greek – and as linguists know it is never good practice to study the characteristics of a language from a translated text.  A fourth case, Matthew 19:10, immediately follows one of these quotations and so can be understood as an echo of the translation Greek.

This leaves just one example, 1 Corinthians 7:1. I dealt with this issue as long ago as 1988 (long before I had a particular interest in gender issues), in an essay which I posted on this blog in 2006, in a section dealing with possible quotations in 1 Corinthians from a letter to Paul from the Corinthians:

A second characteristic is the use of ἄνθρωπος [person (anthropos)] in both 7:1 and 7:26 for man as opposed to woman, where ἀνήρ [man (aner)] is normally expected. These are the only unambiguous examples in Pauline writing of this use, except in Ephesians 5:31 where Genesis 2:24 is quoted. This provides added evidence that there is a quotation in 6:18, for in context the ἄνθρωπος in this verse is probably male. The similar use of ἄνθρωπος in 7:7, contrasting with the regular pairing of references to men and women in 7:1-16, strongly suggests that here also there is an adapted quotation from the Corinthians: θέλω δὲ πάντας ἀνθρώπους εἶναι ὡς καὶ ἐμαυτόν [but I want all people (anthropos) to be as also myself]. The similarity of this to καλὸν ἀνθρώπῳ τὸ οὕτως εἶναι [good for a person (anthropos) to be like this] in the acknowledged quotation of 7:26 is more evidence for this further quotation.

In other words, I am suggesting that this non-generic use of anthropos was a characteristic of the letter from the Corinthians, reflecting the dialect or idiolect of its author. It certainly doesn’t seem to be characteristic of the rest of the New Testament.

So we have effectively shown that this gender specific use of anthropos is extremely rare in the New Testament, being found only in translation Greek and in an exceptional case. This is already enough to cast serious doubt on the proposition that gender is a core component of the meaning of the word. But I accept that further proof is needed.

There is still a lot more that I would like to write about this issue, but this post is getting too long already, so I will continue in Part 2 and Part 3.

The value of women, oxen and cows

A few days ago I posted on The value of men, women and sheep. The issue I brought up there, the meaning and translation of Matthew 12:12, generated quite a lot of discussion on this blog and elsewhere. Suzanne, in a comment on one of Joel Hoffman’s posts, raised the issue of the rather similar passage in Luke 13:

Jesus Heals a Crippled Woman on the Sabbath

10 On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, [a] you are set free from your infirmity.” 13 Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

14 Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”

15 The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? 16 Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

17 When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

  1. 12 The Greek for Woman does not denote any disrespect.

Luke 13:10-17 (TNIV)

Structurally this story is rather similar to Matthew 12:9-14, although here the healing takes place before the objection. Also the comparison of the value of a human being to that of an animal is only implicit in this story, but explicit in Matthew 12:12. However, the two passages cannot be considered parallel passages. That is because the Matthew passage has much closer parallels in Mark 3:1-6 and Luke 6:6-11 – although only Matthew makes the human-animal comparison explicit.

Interestingly in Luke’s account of the man with the withered hand he is initially introduced as anthropos, i.e. his gender is not specified, but later referred to as aner, confirming that he is male. This may be simply stylistic variation, but from memory it is not the only place where Luke has aner and other gospels have anthropos.

But Luke balances his story of a man being healed in the synagogue with the rather similar story of a crippled woman being healed in the same setting, which has no parallels in the other gospels. Clearly Jesus showed no gender discrimination in his healing, and Luke wants to make that clear.

I did find one interesting translation point in the story of the crippled woman. In TNIV, and most other translations (including NLT and CEV, but not The Message), she is implicitly compared with an ox or a donkey, and considered to be of much greater value.

Now the Greek words used for these two animals, bous and onos respectively, work like anthropos in that they do not specify the gender of the animal. All these words can be grammatically feminine (without changing the form of the noun) when referring to a specific female: onos is feminine in Matthew 21:2,7, but masculine in Luke 13:15; bous is also masculine here and, like anthropos, in every case in the New Testament where its gender is specified. However, again like anthropos, when used in generalisations onos and bous are masculine, but this should not be taken as specifying the gender of the animal.

Thus in Luke 13:15 the translation of onos as “donkey” is correct, as this word is gender generic in English. But the rendering of bous as “ox” is more questionable. First we need to clarify what is meant by “ox”. Here is the definition from answers.com:

ox (ŏks) pronunciation

n., pl. ox·en (ŏksən).

  1. An adult castrated bull of the genus Bos, especially B. taurus, used chiefly as a draft animal.
  2. A bovine mammal.

[Middle English, from Old English oxa.]

Which definition did the TNIV translators have in mind? If the latter, then they are exegetically correct. But would it be normal language, among their target group of speakers of contemporary English, to refer to bulls and cows as oxen? I think not. The generic term in current use is “cattle” or “bovine”, or colloquially “cows” although as a country boy I find it strange, and a sign of city-dwellers’ ignorance, when male cattle are called cows.

I would suggest that the word “ox” is more or less obsolete in modern English. If it is used at all, it is used in the rather specific sense 1 I quoted above, of an adult castrated male bovine. This is probably how it is understood by most Bible readers today who have any real understanding of the word.

So, I would suggest that TNIV, while being carefully gender generic about humans, has failed to follow the same principle when referring to cattle. To be consistent, it should drop “ox” in this verse and 14:5 and find an alternative gender generic rendering.

“Ox” can remain in 14:19, 1 Corinthians 9:9 and 1 Timothy 5:18 as these verses are about draft animals which in the cultural context probably would have been castrated males. But the cultural context in 13:15 is quite different. Here we have a person, probably an ordinary villager, who keeps one bovine and one donkey in a shed or courtyard and has to untie them to lead them to water. This is still common practice in the Middle East. And the bovine would normally have been a cow, a female – such families would have had little use for an ox but a cow would have been an important source of nutrition.

So in 13:15 I would actually suggest “cow”, as in The Message. I thought of “one of your cattle”, but that implies that the person has more than one whereas the text and the cultural context suggest the opposite. Thus “cow” is better. If anyone complains that “cow” is not gender generic, one can point them at this sense in the dictionary:

A domesticated bovine of either sex or any age.

But if a choice has to be made between a term with male connotations and one with female connotations, in this case of a comparison with a woman surely the more female word is preferable.

I hope no one thinks this is political correctness gone mad! My point is simply that translations need to be accurate. To use a gender specific term to translate a gender generic one, whether for humans or for animals, is inaccurate translation.

The ironic thing here is that in first century Palestine a cow, a female producing milk, was probably more valuable than an ox, a castrated male – at least to an ordinary village person. Jesus in his parable compares the woman to a cow, more valuable than an ox, or for that matter than the sheep of Matthew 12:12. Translators should not demean women by comparing them to something less than Jesus had in mind.

The value of men, women and sheep

Not long ago I was discussing whether men and women are equally valued in the Bible, in the context of the translation “sons” or “children” in Psalms 127 and 128. It has been interesting to read scholars like Claude Mariottini trying to argue that the biblical author intended to value sons higher than daughters. But in the end their arguments have to be based not on the words in the Hebrew text but on their ideas of what people would have been expected to think at that time. This is a very dangerous way of doing exegesis as it effectively stops the Bible being a radical or counter-cultural document.

Just now a similar issue has come up concerning Jesus’ teaching. Joel Hoffman’s new blog about Bible mistranslations God Didn’t Say That is generally excellent, so much so that I put it straight on my blogroll. But Joel himself got into mistranslation when he called Matthew 12:12 in TNIV “an explanation in part, not a translation”. I picked up Joel’s lapse in the comment thread on his post. J.K. Gayle has also posted about this error, and the issue has come up in discussion at Aberration Blog.

Joel’s error is basically that he persists in understanding the Greek word anthropos as referring at least primarily to males only. Although at one point he accepts that “The Greek anthropos was both inclusive and specific”, at the same time he continues to claim that translating it as “person” “diminishes the specificity of the example” – which only makes sense if he understands anthropos at least in this verse as gender specific.

But this is wrong. I accept, in line with the standard Greek lexicons, that anthropos can occasionally have a gender specific sense, in contexts where gender is in focus and the word is contrasted with a specifically female word like gune. But there is no such context in Matthew 12:9-14, where there is no explicit mention of gender at all. While we assume that the person with the withered hand is male, we are not actually told that. As I wrote in a comment on Joel’s post,

There is nothing in the entire account drawing any attention to anyone’s gender. Gender is no more relevant to the story than the colour of the man’s eyes. To bring gender specific words into a translation is to distort the text by introducing into it an entirely irrelevant and extraneous issue.

This passage as rightly understood, just like Psalms 127 and 128, in no way suggests that male humans are more valuable than females. Instead we here have Jesus’ strong affirmation that all human beings, men and women, are far more valuable than sheep.

Did Jesus live in Nazareth according to the Sermon on the Mount?

Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, and elsewhere, is very hard for anyone to live up to. I certainly don’t do so myself, although I do make it my aim.

This is so hard that some Christians teach that the Sermon was never intended to be lived up to, but only to provide an unattainable standard of excellence to show us humans how sinful we are. This is the Unconditional Divine Will View or the Repentance View, numbers 10 and 11 of the 12 interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount listed in this Wikipedia article. The implication of these views, and indeed of several of the other views in this list, including the dispensationalist view, is that the Sermon should not be understood as practical instructions for Christians living normal lives in this world.

This view is challenged by the implications of what I read today at Bill Heroman’s NT/History Blog. In the latest instalment of his long series on Jesus’ life in Nazareth, Bill writes:

In Matthew 6:16-18, Jesus tells us that God rewards those who fast secretly, who put oil on their heads and wash their face, so that no one will know they are fasting. If rewarding such behavior means God likes that behavior, then Matthew must be implying this behavior was characteristic of Jesus before his baptism. …

If this is not valid, we would have to assume that Matthew thought Jesus was inventing new strategies for fasting which he’d never practiced himself. That certainly doesn’t seem to fit Matthew’s high opinion of Jesus and would actually place him closer to the showy hypocrites just decried in the same series of statements. …

Therefore, if we take the original passage as an historical teaching of Jesus, according to Matthew, then we may also take the inversion of it as a historical aspect of Jesus’ life in Nazareth.

If Bill’s line of argument is valid, then Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere must be based on his own practice.

There is a step which I don’t think Bill has actually proved, that Jesus’ teaching reflects his practice before he began his public ministry, and not just during this ministry. But the alternative would have to be that his baptism marked a radical change not just in his way of life but also in his basic attitudes. This would be inconsistent with the Christian teaching that Jesus was the sinless Son of God not just from his baptism but also from his birth. Also in this case, given that the Sermon on the Mount occurs early in Jesus’ ministry and doubtless some of his hearers near Capernaum would have known him from his time in Nazareth, one would expect some references more like “Don’t do as I used to do” alongside those of “Don’t do what the hypocrites do”.

The implication of this is that during the “hidden years” of his life at Nazareth, working as a carpenter (Mark 6:3) in Joseph’s workshop and living with his mother, brothers and sisters, he was leading his life according to the standards which he later taught in the Sermon on the Mount. This further implies that it is possible to live according to these standards, not only while living apart from the world but also while living a normal family live and doing a normal job.

I note also that at this time Jesus was not filled with the Holy Spirit in the same way that he was after his baptism. So it is hard to argue that being filled with the Holy Spirit is a prerequisite for living according to the Sermon on the Mount. Anyway, this is no excuse for Christians, who are already filled with the Holy Spirit even if this is not always evident in their lives.

So why are so many of us Christians quick to find reasons why we don’t have to obey Jesus’ teaching? Could it be just a little bit too uncomfortable and demanding? Does living according to the Sermon on the Mount sound a little too likely to lead us to rejection and even death, as eventually it did for Jesus? But isn’t that what we are called to as Christians? Isn’t that what Jesus meant with these words?:

Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

Matthew 16:24-25 (TNIV)

Daughters and sons are a heritage from the LORD

Sons are a heritage from the LORD …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are sons born in one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.

… your sons will be like olive shoots
around your table.
4 Thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (NIV)

I know these psalms well in NIV and have always semi-consciously understood them as meaning that sons are more of a blessing than daughters, at least in the mind of the psalmist. But is this what was intended?

It was no surprise to me that the TNIV translators thought differently:

Children are a heritage from the LORD …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are children born in one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them.

… your children will be like olive shoots
round your table.
4 Yes, this will be the blessing
for the man who fears the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (TNIV)

(By the way, TNIV retains “man” in both these psalms for the explicitly masculine Hebrew word geber, while using “those” for the more ambiguous Hebrew ish in Psalm 1:1, in a formula otherwise identical to the one in 127:5.)

What came as more of a surprise was that the ESV translators have made almost the same translation choices:

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord …
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
who fills his quiver with them!

… your children will be like olive shoots
around your table.
4 Behold, thus shall the man be blessed
who fears the Lord.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (ESV)

There is a footnote on “children” in 127:4: “Or sons“. This ESV rendering is even more odd because NRSV, following RSV, has “sons” in 127:3,4, but “children” in 128:3. But perhaps the ESV translators have looked back to KJV:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD …
4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.
5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them …

… thy children like olive plants round about thy table.
4 Behold, that thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the LORD.

Psalm 127:3-5, 128:3-4 (KJV)

Coverdale (1535, as found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer), ERV (1885) and ASV (1901) all have “children” consistently, although Wycliffe (1380s) has “sones”.

So what is the issue here? In each case (127:3,4, 128:3) the Hebrew is banim. This word is technically the plural of ben “son”. But, as was well known even to the KJV translators (compare their regular rendering “children of Israel” for beney Yisrael) and to Coverdale’s sources (compare Luther’s (1545) rendering “Kinder”), in the plural the word normally has a gender generic meaning, referring to daughters as well as sons. Even the drafters of the infamous Colorado Springs Guidelines accepted this when they wrote:

(However, Hebrew banim often means “children.”)

And it was presumably on this basis that the ESV translators, who followed these guidelines, translated “children” in these psalms.

It seems to me that this is a case of the RSV (1952) and NIV (1978) translators (and, more surprisingly, those of NRSV (1989)) introducing and perpetuating an innovative rendering suggesting extremely damaging teaching, that sons are more of a blessing from God than daughters. This may be what is believed in some countries, e.g. China where, according to a 2004 report, nearly 20% more boys than girls are born because of selective abortion – a statistic which is becoming a threat to that country’s future prosperity. But this preference for sons was never taught in the Bible, at least not in Hebrew, and not in modern English until 1952.

It really is well past time for some of these misleading translations to be retired. There are similar issues with how they use the word “man” – see for example how “man” has been introduced into Romans 4:4,5, 1 Corinthians 3:8,12 etc NIV. RSV is already obsolescent, barely still in print. But this example shows that NRSV, still widely used in “mainline” denominations and in academic circles, now needs revisions. It also demonstrates clearly that it is time for NIV to be retired, and replaced by TNIV.

Delivered from Alexander's Sword

I reported nearly two weeks ago on what David Ker has called the Alexander’s Sword method of interpreting the Bible. In the light of this I was interested to read the first part of Ajith Fernando’s guest post at Koinonia.

Fernando, a Bible teacher from Sri Lanka, starts by describing how his students at a particular course were approaching the Bible:

I found that many of my students were latching on to an inspiring thought from the passages we were studying, forgetting the context in which that thought appears and ultimately missing out on the message of the passage. So I had to keep asking them over and over again questions like, “What does the passage really say?” “Why does Paul say that?” …

It sounds like the students were addicted to the Alexander’s Sword method. So it is interesting to see how Fernando responded:

… It was a desperate battle. At one time I was so concerned that I sent SOS text messages to about 20 people asking them to pray that somehow God will break through and help them to learn how to read and study the Bible. I think the basic problem was that they have not really learned to read!

The battle went on for the whole week until I believe God’s Spirit broke through to them. I am confident that those who persevere in using what they learned will develop skills for a lifetime of thrilling study of the Word. By the end of the course many of the students told me that they had never realised that there is so much to get from the Scriptures. …

So, it seems, these students’ eyes were opened to the truth and they were delivered from their addiction by the Holy Spirit through the power of prayer. Perhaps more such prayer ministry is needed for those who persist in misinterpreting the Bible!

Fernando continues with some sensible words to put the Alexander’s Sword approach into its proper context:

Having said this we must agree that there are times when God does grab us with a personal message from a single spot in a larger passage. But that is an exception to the rule. The God who inspired all of Scripture can send us a message through a little portion of the passage if he wants to. But he usually works through the message he wanted the biblical writer to convey. That is the message we must labour to discover.

He concludes this introduction to what looks like being a helpful series on how to do inductive Bible study with these words from A.W. Tozer:

To get to the root I recommend a plain text Bible and diligent application of two knees on the floor.

Amen!