{"id":35284,"date":"2018-03-17T01:00:31","date_gmt":"2018-03-17T05:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=35284"},"modified":"2018-09-18T10:55:57","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T14:55:57","slug":"qotd-translation-error","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/17\/qotd-translation-error\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Translation error?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here are two more facts known to many educated people:<\/p>\n

1. The Christians did not begin to arrive at a settlement of the question of the divinity of Jesus until surprisingly late \u2013 the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and important controversies remained live until the Third Council of Constantinople in 680.<\/p>\n

2. The original Aramaic-speaking Christians of Palestine having been effectively wiped out in the aftermath of the Bar Kokba revolt in AD 70, Christianity was re-founded by Paul of Tarsus among speakers of Koine Greek. The entire New Testament is written in Koine Greek.<\/p>\n

Now here are two facts generally known only among a handful of specialist scholars. I picked them up through omnivorous reading and did not fully realize their significance for a long time.<\/p>\n

3. In other Aramaic sources roughly contemporary with the New Testament, the phrase \u201cSon of God\u201d occurs as an idiom for \u201cguru\u201d or \u201choly man\u201d. Thus, if Jesus refers to himself as \u201cthe son of God\u201d, the Aramaic sense is arguably \u201cthe boss holy man\u201d.<\/p>\n

4. The Koine Greek of the period, on the other hand, did not have this idiom.<\/p>\n

Now, imagine a Koine speaker reading the lost Aramaic source documents of which the Gospels are redactions, with only an indifferent command of the latter language He does not know that \u201cSon of God\u201d is an idiom\u2026<\/p>\n

Yes, that\u2019s right. I\u2019m suggesting that Jesus got deified by a translation error!<\/p>\n

(Correction: The Bar Kokba revolt was AD 132; I was confusing it with the revolt of AD 70 in which the Temple at Jerusalem was destroyed.) <\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Translation Errors”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2009-02-12.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here are two more facts known to many educated people: 1. The Christians did not begin to arrive at a settlement of the question of the divinity of Jesus until surprisingly late \u2013 the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and important controversies remained live until the Third Council of Constantinople in 680. 2. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,370,41,11],"tags":[360,1235],"class_list":["post-35284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-middle-east","category-quotations","category-religion","tag-christianity","tag-esr"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9b6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35285,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35284\/revisions\/35285"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}