The Fun of Multiple Meanings Lost In Translation
Jesus made his ideas very entertaining. One of the tragedies of simplifying Jesus’s words to conform to a simple Christian philosophy is that we cannot appreciate how many different ideas he would guide his listeners through as he spoke.
To illustrate this, we are going to look at one short phrase. It appears for the first time at the ending of John 10:11 (KJV): “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.” The last part is rendered in the other versions as “lays down his life for the sheep.” This is, of course, a significant statement in Christian philosophy, that Jesus sacrificed his life for us. However, this is not what Jesus said. The translators make it seem that way, changing his words. In the KJV, the verb that means “put” is changed to “give.” In other versions, the verb “put” is changed to “lay,” and the “down” is added to create the desired meaning of sacrificing his life. This is a post-crucifixion idea, not the lens through which his listeners at the time would have heard his words.
The Basic Meaning
The Greek words here are: τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ τίθησιν ὑπὲρ τῶν προβάτων. There are multiple meanings to the keywords here. The literal meaning, using their most general definitions is, “this self of his he puts above the sheep” or, in more orderly English, “he puts that self of his above the sheep.” This has almost the opposite sense of sacrificing his life, but it is not likely what his listeners heard. Jesus has a lot of fun as he shifts through them by changing their context.
It is easiest to start with the word translated as “life” in English Bibles. This is the noun that we examined in the previous article. The BIble translates this noun as “soul” as of as it does, “life,” but no translator would suggest Jesus laid down his soul for his followers. Instead, as we demonstrated in the previous article, it is better translated as “self.”
The verb translated as “put” is one of Jesus’s favorite multi-meaning words. It is tithemi (τίθημι), which means to “put,” “place,” “propose,” “suggest,” “deposit,” “set up,” “dedicate,” “assign,” “award,” “agree upon,” “institute,” “establish,” “make,” “work,” “prepare oneself,” “bear arms [military],” “lay down and surrender [military],” “lay in the grave,” “bury,” and “put words on paper [writing],” and it is a metaphor for “to put in one’s mind.” It is all these meanings that make Jesus’s wordplay here possible. “Lays down” is not one of this word’s many meanings except in the context of a military surrender.
So, the first context in which this phrase appears in John 10:11 is: “I am the good shepherd,” where Jesus, in the previous verse, gives abundant life to his sheep. In this context, how was this phrase heard? The verb, “put,” can mean “to dedicate,” and the preposition meaning “over” can also mean “on behalf of.” So his listeners probably heard the phrase referring to a shepherd as: “...dedicates that self of his on behalf of the sheep.” This is a good, general statement about shepherds and their flocks.
Shifting This Meaning
However, then Jesus shifts the discussion to the hired man running away when he sees a wolf in John 10:12 and John 10:13 because he does not own them. Though Jesus doesn’t repeat the phrase again in these verses, this story changes its meaning. His listeners now hear the “self” of ownership as a reason to protect. So, it is a statement of defense and a statement of ownership: “...arms that self of his on behalf the sheep.”
Then, Jesus changes the topic again. In John 10:14, he emphasizes that he knows his sheep and they know him. In the following verse, John 10:15, he starts by saying that he also knows the Father and the Father knows him, before repeating this ending phrase. This changes the context again. Now the “self” is what others know, a character and set of values. In this verse, he also changes the verb to the first person. So this ending phrase becomes a statement about forming the character and values of his sheep where the “put” has more the sense of putting into one’s mind: “I put that character of mine upon the sheep’.”
Notice that in both of these uses so far, Jesus has used this phrase as a punchline, ending the verse. He has conditioned his audience to expect this. So what does he do on the third repetition? He makes it seem like the end of the verse, but then he adds a new punchline, once more, changing its meaning one last time. In John 10:17, (KJV): “Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again.”
The punchline is now, “I might take it again.” The “might” is from the form of the verb that indicates that this is just a possibility. It is not certain. This is emphasized in the next verse, John 10:18, where Jesus says, literally, referring to his self: “No one has lifted it from me. Instead, I myself put it out of myself. A power I have to place it and a power I have to take it back.” The word translated as “power” also means “choice.” So Jesus is saying that he can give his character to someone and take it back, but no one can take it from him.
However, this is all very slippery because the verb translated as “take” is another of Jesus’s multiple-meaning words. It is lambano (λαμβω). It can mean to “take,” “take hold of,” “grasp,” “seize,” “catch,” “overtake,” “find out,” “detect,” “take as,” in Logic, “assume,” “take for granted,” “understand,” “undertake,” “take in,” “hold,” “get,” “receive [things],” “receive hospitably,” “receive in marriage,” “receive as produce,” “profit,” “admit,” “initiate,” “take hold of,” “lay hold on,” “seize and keep hold of,” “obtain possession of,” “lay hands upon,” “find fault with,” “censure,” “to apprehend with the senses,” and “to take hold of.” The way Jesus uses it is a lot like our word “get,” meaning both to “take,” and “receive” and to “understand.” The adverb translated as “again” primarily means “back” when used with this verb.
There are so many combinations of meanings for the words translated as “lay” and “take” here that I hesitate to suggest any of them as what people heard when they were used together. Perhaps they heard two opposing meanings, but the only possibility I see is “deposit” and “get back.” So, because the Father values him, Jesus can “deposit” that self of his and get it back. Since the word “put/deposit” can also mean “bury,” this comes the closest to referring to Jesus going into the grave and returning, but that is not likely what people heard without knowing his future.
This confusion with the possible meanings of these words is the effect they had on his listeners at the time. In John 10:19, the Gospel writer reports (KJV): “Many of them thought that he was crazy, that is, in the colloquial speech of the time, “had a demon.”
Conclusions
Given all the possibilities in these verses, I almost don’t blame the translators for changing Jesus’s words to simplify them and promote a Christian doctrine. However, there is no getting around the fact that he didn’t say “lay down” and didn’t use the Greek word referring to his physical life. He could have said those things, but he chose not to. It all comes down to whether or not we want to choose the wide, easy path or the narrow, difficult one that we must work out for ourselves.