Lost in Translation: Matthew 22:37
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This article is part of a series explaining what is lost in translation from the Greek in Jesus’s most popular verses. See this article for the beginning of this series.
This popular Jesus quote includes four verses, Matthew 22:37-40, but its first verse has so much lost in translation that it deserves a whole article. It was one of the main reasons for my writing about how Jesus uses the various Greek words for various aspects of being human. That article is the source of the illustration above.
The context of these quotes is that a Pharisee asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is. The beginning of Jesus’s answer, Matthew 22:37, is based on the Torah, specifically Deuteronomy 6:5. This answer wasn’t a surprise at all. It is the beginning of the Shema, a prayer that observant Jews recite twice daily. This is the expected answer from anyone teaching Judaic law. I suspect that this Deuteronomy verse was as popular in Hebrew meeting house discussions as it is among preachers today.
The “love” here is the “love” of caring, not the “love” of liking or enjoying someone or something (see this article). So, Jesus starts by saying that we should care about “the Divine,” that is, that which is beyond ourselves and our world. In his description of how we care about the Divine, Jesus changes the original Deuteronomy from the Greek of the Old Testament Septuagint, but we cannot see all this change in our English translations because they are translated to match more than they do in the Greek.
However, Jesus’s final change is something no listener could miss. It was one that would have been shocking to those listening, especially to the Pharisee who asked the question. To appreciate this, we need to explain several key words.
The Little Changes
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