by Terry 49 Replies latest watchtower bible
fulltimestudent
No that person referred to by Chris Forbes was not me and I do not know to who he was referring.Yes I heard of Farleigh James who write articles for Awake and I did meet him at a District Assembly but I believe his knowledge of Greek would be minimal. I understand he lived in Canberra not Sydney.
scholar
Diogeneister
Regarding the translation whether 'by the grace of God' or 'aside from God', it is the fact that the former has the strongest textual support whereas the latter rendering is simply based on patristic evidence. An excellent discussion of this subject is found in Hebrews 1-8, WBC, 1991, vol.47A, by William F Lane,p.43,n.8
scholar
Thank you scholar for clarifying that point. But its an interesting coincidence that three JWs (albeit one of them, at least is an exJW) should all have attended MU and have known Chris Forbes, Maybe there are many more JWs attending Universities, in spite of the official discouragement. In the past I knew of only one, the brother of ex-jw Martin Yeomans. Last I heard of him he was a lecturer at New England University (NSW) and an elder in the local congregation.
As to Farleigh James, he became a witness in Sydney after being trained as an Opera singer by Eugene Goosens, who years ago won notoriety in Sydney for being stopped by customs at Sydney airport for having a suitcase full of didldos that he said were for his lesbian friends.
But back to James, In WW2 he was captured on Crete by the German army and imprisoned in a concentration camp. During the early period of imprisonment he became an atheist. He later escaped and lived in the hills for a few years until rescued from the island by a British submarine, While living in the hills he learned Greek (modern, of course). Back in Sydney he and his wife became JWs somewhere in the early 1950s. He later served in New Caledonia where there was one helluva row in the congregation. Later be became a CO in many areas of Australia. An interesting guy!
Finally, since you make some claims to scholarship, do you agree that Judaism in Jesus day was increasingly "Hellenised" and Jesus therefore was a Hellenised Jew?
fulltimestudent
Thank you for that information about Farleigh James for I remembered meeting him at the Rooming Desk at a Sydney conversation and sought from him clarification of John 1:1 but did not find him helpful so that impelled me to attend classes in koine Greek at Sydney uni.
I am glad to hear that I was not alone in attending courses at Macquarrie for I am a great advocate for University learning as I have completed two degrees majoring in Religious Studies and half of an Honours degree in Philosophy.
Hellenism was a major cultural influence on Jewish Society at the time of Jesus but it is somewhat of a stretch to classify Jesus as 'Hellenized Jew' for there is simply no evidence for such a label.
scholar
So is the bible real guuyyzzz???
Rooooooooooofl
Just got round to watching the video , very interesting .
Thanks for posting the link .
Jan
scholar: "Hellenism was a major cultural influence on Jewish Society at the time of Jesus but it is somewhat of a stretch to classify Jesus as 'Hellenized Jew' for there is simply no evidence for such a label."
I understand your reasoning, but if Jewish Society (in general) was 'hellenised,' then most Jews were hellenised culturally. For another example of this process we could cross to what is now Afghanistan and find examples of Buddhism being Hellenised. The people who produced the sculptures etc that are still extant were themselves deeply affected by Greek culture.
And an example of the process can be found in 1 Maccabees 1:13-1513
"some from among the people promptly went to the king, and he authorized them to introduce the ordinances of the Gentiles.
Thereupon they built a gymnasium* in Jerusalem according to the Gentile custom.15
They disguised their circumcision and abandoned the holy covenant; they allied themselves with the Gentiles and sold themselves to wrongdoing."
and in 2 Maccabees 4: 12-1612
" With perverse delight he established a gymnasium* at the very foot of the citadel, where he induced the noblest young men to wear the Greek hat.13
The craze for Hellenism and the adoption of foreign customs reached such a pitch, through the outrageous wickedness of Jason, the renegade and would-be high priest,14that the priests no longer cared about the service of the altar. Disdaining the temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they hastened, at the signal for the games, to take part in the unlawful exercises at the arena.15
What their ancestors had regarded as honors they despised; what the Greeks esteemed as glory they prized highly."
Even the priests wanted to spend time in the Greek gymnasium, wrestling naked with other young men (which is why they attempted to stretch their foreskins because in the Greek culture of that time, showing the glans of the penis was shameful).
Of course, some did not go along with them, which is what the Maccabees books are about.
So what about Jesus, I take your point, its a stretch because we do not know where Jesus stood on these matters.
All our knowledge of Jesus is second hand. Written years later, maybe 20 years in the case of Matthew, Mark and Luke and maybe 70 years later in the case of John.
Even if the gospel writers were acting as editors, they had control over what they included or excluded,
So its difficult to have clarity, isnt it?
fulltimestudent
There is a difference between Hellenism and Hellenization according to current scholarship. Regarding Jesus according to one reference work, "it has often claimed that the region of Galilee was thoroughly Hellenized, particularly to the extent that it contained a large Gentile population". However, a growing body of literature suggests that Gallilee was far less Hellenized than other regions of the Graeco-Roman Empire
Jesus' primary language was Aramaic rather than Koine Greek and the historiography of the Gospels is biblical in nature and reflects an engagement with Jewish and Greek culture which are key points to consider in this discussion.
scholar
A deeper examination of the Bible only shows that it is all Transparently BS stories made by bedouins to help control people and explain thunder and lightning.
I havn't continued the above discussion, as it is likely to get bogged down in logical semantics. It's difficult for Christians to accept that Jesus who had (in both orthodoxy and JWism) a pre-human existence could ever be affected by an alien culture.
Bur, since all we know about 'Jesus' was written by someone else those writers, at leasts, could have been culturally influenced by Greek ideas.
Let me give a small example. In Luke 24 it is claimed that the resurrected Jesus appeared in a (different) human form and the disciples only recognised him after he blessed and broke some bread (in a manner that he-Jesus- had always done) verses 30 to 31 tells that story.
Quote: "30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”" Luke 24: 30-32 NIV
Unless we knew something about Greek culture the time, we'd likely miss the point. Robin Lane Fox, in his book 'Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World.' and Ch. 4 titled 'Seeing the gods' explains that in Greek culture it was believed that the gods would often appear to humans in human form but not recogniswable as a god. The human visited by such a divinity would only recognise the god through some small sign by which the god would reveal himself,
We can therefore imagine that the author of Luke's gospel knew 'Greek' culture and could his 'Jesus' story using memes that were known if Greek (not Jewish) culture.
Another of the text books used in a Study Unit in which I enrolled at Macquarie U was, 'Introducing the New Testament: Its Literature and Theology,' ( Achtemeier, Green and Thompson - Eerdmans 2001). In the first chapter, the authors discuss the influence of Hellenism on Jewish society and expresses the claim that both Jesus and his disciples would have been able to communicate in Greek, even if they spoke Aramaic.
We will not (short of the discovery of some unknown document that describes Jesus more clearly) ever know whether Jesus could speak Greek, or that he addresses the groups that heard him in Greek, But it must be clear that if Jesus was just a human (and had no pre-existence) then he also grew up in a world in which the culture of the Greeks prevailed.
