What Jesus Means by "Truth"

I ended the previous article on “freedom” with a great quote of his from John 8:32:

NIV: Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

To help you understand this quote a little better, the concept of “truth” is referred to by Jesus in forty-two verses if we count all the different word forms that reference the concept: the noun, the two different adjectives, and the adverb from the same root. In this range of different words, we discover the true (pun) meaning of the concept. The noun form is the most common, appearing in nineteen verses.

The Noun “Truth”

The Greek noun is aletheia (ἀληθείᾳ). The Greeks used it to mean both "truth," and "reality." The literal meaning of the Greek word for "truth" is "not hidden," and it means what is real as opposed to how things seem. What is real is what people agree that they can easily see, physical things. Applied to people, it means "truthfulness" and "sincerity." The opposite of a lie or appearance. In a sense, this means people agree one what can easily be seen, that is physical reality.

This means that the quote from John 8:32 could be literally translated as:

And you learn to know this reality, and this reality will free you.

This idea of “reality” is echoed again in the adverb forms of the word, discussed below. This word, Jesus’s word, is not the technical "truth" of words, courts, or even mere facts. It is the philosophical truth of understanding what is real, what is really going on beneath the surface. The Greek concept of "truth" also means "reality" as opposed to appearances. So appearances can hide the truth. Everyone wants to claim their ownership of the “truth.” That is much harder to do if we are talking about “reality,” which is a little too big for ownership, but people do differ on the nature of reality.

This differing view of reality is reflected in aletheia’s meaning as "real events.” This meaning seems strange to us because we don’t realize that we think of “truth” as “events,” but we do. For example, the truth is that we landed men on the moon in 1969. The moon landing was not faked. People can deny such events, but, in doing so, but they are denying the truth. In Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother controlled people’s thinking by rewriting history, but apparently, this practice of denying what really happened goes back to ancient Greek.

However, my favorite meaning of aletheia and the most foreign to us is "the realization of a dream." This means something like getting married or becoming a millionaire would be described as “truth.” Using this last meaning, the quote becomes:

And you learn to know the realization of a dream, and this realization of a dream will free you.

The Greek word emphasizes that our dreams can and do become reality. Personally, I find this particular version much more inspiring than the rather dry, abstract concept of “truth.”

When this noun is applied to people, it means "honesty" and "sincerity." This meaning is reinforced by one of the adjective forms, alethinos (ἀληθινὸς), used in eight verses, which means both “truthful” and “trustworthy” when it is applied to people. Trustworthiness connects the concept of truth to the Greek word translated as “faith,” which actually means “trust,” especially trust in someone’s words. We trust the words of someone because they are truthful. Truth takes trust’s hand so they can walk together.

The Sources of the Word

Though not technically a source, aletheia’s meaning is influenced by Greek mythology. In some versions, Aletheia, is the daughter of Zeus, one of his hundred or so daughters. In the story by Aesop, however, Aletheia began as a statue carved by Prometheus, but Dolos (Dolus), the god of trickery, made a lookalike statue, but he ran out of clay and couldn’t finish its feet. Prometheus gave life to both statues in his kiln. The real Aletheia moved forward while the false one was stuck in place. The truth is reality and reality constantly changes. This means that truth is a path, not a single point in time and space. The real events that happened are truth, but so is what is happening now. Truth marches on.

The opponents of Aletheia in mythology are Dolos, trickery, Apate, the goddess of deception, and the Pseudologoi , the gods of lies. Truth is the opposite of lies. These opponents of Aletheia are relevant because the Greek word literally means "the state of not being hidden." Trickery, deception, and lies depend upon something that is hidden.

Let us dissect aletheia. The “a” that begins it means “not.” It is the standard Greek prefix of negation as we would add “non-” or “un-” to an English word to negate it. The root of the word is the Greek verb lanthano (λανθάνω). It means “escaping notice,” “being unseen,” or “being unaware.” It also means “to cause one to forget” or “to choose to forget.” So “truth” is what we are not unaware of, things that are not unseen, and things that are not forgotten. The rewriting of history, for example, is a form of forgetting. Forgetting the past is a lie we tell ourselves.

This underlying meaning explains the other adjective form of the word, alethes (ἀληθής). This adjective means "unconcealed", "so true", "not forgetting", "careful," [of persons] "truthful" "honest," [of oracles] "true" and "unerring." Jesus uses this adjective seven times. In some forms, it is used as an adverb that means "actually" and "in reality." The other adverb form, alethos (ἀληθῶς) means "actually," "really," "truly," and "obviously." The meaning of “obviously” obviously comes from “not hidden.”

Conclusions

In English, we don’t really (or is it truly) interpret “true” and “real” as meaning the same things. We separate “truth” and “reality” in a way that the Greeks did not. However, we also do not consider all of reality as obvious.

There is something more to think about here. Jesus describes his Father as “in the hidden” (Matthew 6:18) and as seeing into the hidden (Matthew 6:4, Matthew 6:6). So the Divine’s nature is both beyond the truth and what is real, but to the Divine, there are no lies, trickery, or deception.