Can We "See" Jesus in Translation? - Part 1

From John 9:3 to John 9:41, Jesus cures a man born blind, and the result, because of the reaction of the Pharisees, is pure comedy. Everyone in the area seems to have known that the man was blind from birth. He can now see. The Pharisees try to convince him that Jesus could not have cured him because Jesus is not a man of God. The man doesn’t know anything about that. He only knows that he was blind but now he can see. The Pharisees persist in arguing against the obvious facts with their religious logic. They even go to the man’s parents. When Jesus is involved, he teases the Pharisees about their not being able to see. The whole thing is very like a Greek comedy of the era with the Pharisees playing the traditional role of the “foolish wise.”

Jesus’s words in these verses include a lot of humor that is lost in translation. Jesus makes many fun wordplays related to “seeing.” Sometimes Jesus changes the verb he uses because he is echoing the words spoken by the person speaking to him. However, we cannot see any of this because all the different verbs, with different shades of meaning, are translated the same, as “see.”

The idea of “seeing” was very important to his philosophy all through the Bible. He used seven different Greek words for different aspects of seeing. He used these different words for a reason. In this article, I will examine only one of these words in detail, the word that Jesus most commonly used. That one word, however, creates a problem for translators because its meaning changes with its tense in a way that few English words do.

The Different “See” Words

There are six different words that get translated as "see" in Jesus’s teaching. They are, in order of frequency, eidon (εἶδον), blepo (βλέπω), horao (ὁράω), optanomai (ὁράω), noeo (νοέω), and theaomai (θεάομαι). Each word means something a little different.  One of those words, the most common, eidon, has three different forms that Jesus uses for different purposes.  My assumption is that Jesus always chooses his words for a specific reason. He doesn't use all these different words to show off his vocabulary. Nor does he use different words to avoid sounding repetitious. He uses a lot of repetition, intentionally, because it is memorable and because it can be funny.

Since I am a translator, I find this number of different words for the same general idea intriguing. It is like knowing that the Eskimos have forty-seven different words for “snow.” The use of many different words means that there are important distinctions to be made. The fact that today’s translators of the Bible don’t find these distinctions interesting tells me more about them than Jesus.

Often in analyzing the various English translations of Jesus’s verses, it seems that the primary goal is simplifying his message. In areas of special knowledge, we all seek a simple account, but one that does not obscure the complexities of the topic. We want the uninformed to understand our exploration, but the expert to find no fault with it. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein in teaching atomic theory said it best: Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.

My fear, of course, is that we have made Christianity so simple that only the simple can trust it. Jesus was not a simple man. He did not say simple things. He did not teach only the simple.

To "See" is to "Know"

The most common word that Jesus uses to mean “see” is eidon, but a main part of this word’s utility is that it can mean "know," a bit like we use "I see" to mean "I know." This is a very entertaining concept, at least to me, and apparently, given his frequent use of this slippery word, to Jesus as well.

However, this Greek word creates problems in knowing what Jesus actually said in any given verse when it is translated into English. When we read the word “see,” it is often this word, but it can also be one of the five other words translated as “see,” each of which has a slightly different meaning. We have a similar problem when we read the word “know.” It might be this word, but it could also be another common Greek word that primarily means “know.” That word, however, means “knowing through learning” rather than “knowing by seeing.” These are two very different ideas, at least they were to Jesus.

Eidon is used by Jesus in a hundred and sixty-six verses. This word means "to see," "to examine," "to perceive," "to behold," "to know how to do," "to see with the mind's eye," and "to know." However, that count represents its two other common forms as well. This more common indicative form meaning only “see” was used in something closer to seventy-eight verses.

Its command form, idou,  (ἰδοὺ)  is used in fifty-two verses. This is an imperative verb but some describe it more like an adverb. It is often translated in the Bible as "behold!" But, of course, that is just Biblical talk for “look” or "see there."

Eidon gets really interesting in its past perfect form, oida (οἶδεν). This form is used by Jesus at least thirty-eight times but it may be more because the past perfect forms are even more irregular than the other irregular forms of this verb. The past perfect tense usually represents an action completed in the past. However, with this verb, what has been done in the past has a different meaning in the present. What we “have seen” in the past, we “know” today.  So, this past perfect form is often, and maybe usually, translated as the present tense in English. This is true not only in the biblical translation but in a lot of ancient Greek literature. This is just the kind of wordplay that Jesus loves and cannot resist.

For example, in John 10:5, the verse is translated as saying that the sheep do not "know the voice of a stranger," the verb “know” is oida,"have not seen.” The joke is that a voice cannot be seen. However, in another verse in the same discussion, John 10:14, Jesus says that he is the good shepherd and "knows his sheep and mine know me," but in that verse, he uses the regular Greek word for "know," ginosko. This wordplay is hidden when the two different Greek t words are both translated as the same word, "know." And the connection to the idea of “see” is lost.

This is why in translating this verb, eidon, I tend to go with"see" even if "have seen" also means "know" in English as it did in Greek. Though I am tempted to translate the past perfect versions as "to know," as we see above, Jesus often uses the "see" as part of his wordplay. Translating the word simply as “know” loses that connection. If we “have seen” the truth of this word, we know what it means.

Conclusions

In future articles, I will examine the other words translated as “see.” We will see if we can find better English words for them that all use to view the differences in Jesus’s meaning.

In the early days of Christianity, people worked much harder at trying to understand Jesus, his message, his meaning, and his logic. They truly believed that Jesus’s words revealed a deeper reality that he meant us to explore. Modern Christianity has made it much simpler for us today in our homogenized English translations. Should we be thankful?

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