A Tale of Two Verses
One of the reasons we know Jesus taught in Greek
It was the best of verses; it was the worst of verses. Nah! This article is nothing like that. Today, we are going to look at two verses. I didn’t choose these verses because of their religious or philosophical importance. My interest is in translation because I am a translator, not a teacher or philosopher.
The first verse is Mark 5:41:
KJV: Talitha cumi; Damsel, I say unto you, arise.
NIV: Talitha, cumi...Little girl, I say to you, arise.
Listeners Heard: Talitha, cumi (Little girl, arise). This little girl? To you I say, wake up!
And the second is Matthew 27:46:
KJV: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
NIV: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Listeners Heard: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? God of mine, God of mine, for what do you leave me behind?
There are two reasons why these verses are interesting: the obvious one and the one lost in translation. The obvious one is that both don’t contain just one language, but two: Aramaic and English. Abiding by standard translation procedures, the base language, Greek, is translated while the “other” language, Aramaic, is left untranslated. This is not only obvious but very important for studying Jesus’s words. However, the least obvious is a that these verses also tell us something about a recurring problem in translating Greek: translating whether or not the speaker is addressing someone, in these cases, “the little girl” and God.
Indisputable Evidence
Like everyone else, I once thought that Jesus taught in Aramaic not Greek. Why? Because the “experts” all agreed that he did. Then I began to study the Greek, and I discovered that their claims were nonsense. I’ve studied their reasons and found them all sadly wanting, but these two verses provide great evidence, that Jesus's taught primarily in Greek not Aramaic. Why do people say otherwise? I suspect because of politics, but I am a bit cynical in that direction. For a more academic and extensive exploration of this issue, I can recommend the book, Did Jesus Speak Greek? by G. Scott Gleaves.
But just consider these verses. So, supposedly, Jesus is speaking Aramaic all the time. That Aramaic is being translated into Greek all the time. Then, the translator comes to these phrases and decided, “Nah, let’s not translate these lines like we did the other two thousand supposedly Aramaic quotes. These two times, we should first write the Aramaic in Greek letters, and then translate them.” Why would they do this? I have no idea, but academics still claim that this is what actually took place because….I have no idea, really.
It is like all the other Aramaic words that are sprinkled through Jesus’s Greek, words like amen, Pharisee, satan, mammon, and so on. The translators just came to these particular words and said, “Nah, we don’t need to translate that word, ever. Let us just write it in Greek, and it will be fine!”
As an alternative, I propose this crazy idea. Jesus and his people were bilingual. After living in a province that was part of a larger Greek empire for two hundred years, they had adopted the common language. (Koine means “common” in Greek.) This is as nutty as suggesting that Hispanics in California started speaking English when it became part of the US a hundred and fifty years ago. And maybe they popularized a few Spanish words, eh, amigo, in the common language and their children learned their mother tongue at home. I know this sounds crazy, but that is what I propose based upon the best evidence I have: all the Greek of the New Testament.
When does Jesus speak Aramaic? In the first case, when talking to a young child, who was in her home and was sick. Or, in the second, when he is dying, quoting a Psalm he himself probably learned as a child in Aramaic. Maybe this doesn’t make sense to the academics, but the situations explain themselves to me.
This also explains why the Gospel writers felt the need to translate the Aramaic. In these cases, Jesus actually was speaking sentences in Aramaic and the Gospel writers knew it should be both preserved and translated. Matthew is regarded by those “experts” as the Gospel most aimed at the Jewish community for a variety of reasons, and yet Matthew felt the need to translate these short Aramaic lines as well. Why? If Jews all spoke Aramaic? Because while his audience may recognize popular Aramaic words, for many their Aramaic vocabulary was limited.
Another Interesting Oddity
Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidence), these two verses also share another oddity, but one that may perhaps only interest someone who really cares about what Jesus said. Both verses contain words that, supposedly, address someone: the “little girl” in the Mark verse and “my God” in the Matthew one. Why is this the least bit interesting? Because they illustrate a common problem with translating many verses in the New Testament that Bible translators translate as addresses someone. It is a problem I run into frequently enough that I want to talk about it.
In Greek, there is a special noun form for addressing someone. Technically, this is called the “vocative case.” The problem is that a lot of verses that are translated as addressing someone, like the “little girl” in Mark, are not in the vocative. Despite their nouns being in the form of a subject and, sometimes, even an object, they are translated as if addressing someone. In Greek, the "little girl" could be vocative because, strangely, it is neuter not feminine, and there is no difference in form for neuter noun identifying it as a subject, object, or vocative. However, when there is an article, that is, a "the/this" as before "little girl," we can tell the form of the neuter noun. Except for the vocative. There is no vocative article. When addressing someone, you don’t precede their description with a “the/this.” It would be like saying, “Mr. the Postman” in English when addressing a postal worker. However, the New Testament has as many as sixty cases where the nouns or their articles aren’t in the form of address, but in the form of a subject or even object.
Why didn’t the Gospel writer translate “little girl” without an article? I suspect because he didn’t see the words as being addressed to the girl. For example, if we compare this to the translation of the Matthew verses, the “God” is translated in the vocative. And while something like ninety percent of the references to God in Jesus words have an article before them, this one doesn’t. Why? Because there is no vocative article. To me, it looks like in his reference to “the little girl,” Jesus was asking a question. Was this girl the one he was brought to see. Even though there is no verb, when a subject is used without the verb in Greek, the verb “to be” is assumed, but, when we ask questions, the verb is often unnecessary, “This little girl?”
I ran into a similar example recently with Mark 5:8:
NIV: Come out of this man, you impure spirit.
Listeners Heard: Get out! This spirit is the dirty one. Out of this man!
The Greek has an article before both “spirit” and the adjective, “dirty,” making it into a noun, “the dirty one.” Add a verb “to be” between them and you get a comment about the spirit’s nature instead of Jesus calling the spirit names.
One Last Thing
In case you are wondering, having the Aramaic for these two verses doesn’t help decide the issue. Because Aramaic, like English, doesn’t have a special word ending for addressing someone as Greek and some other languages do.
Anyway, that is all I have for now.