The Gospel According to Mel Gibson

Greetings.

Jewish date:  5 ’Av 5770 (Parashath Devarim).

Today’s holidays:  The Nine Days (Judaism), Feast Day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Friends of Israel Initiative”.

Topic 1:  The Passion of the Christ (2004), which might be better titled The Gospel According to Mel Gibson, after the man responsible for this film.  This is the most overtly anti-Semitic of the Gospel films your humble blogger has seen, putting the blame for the death of Jesus directly on the Pharisees, Priests, and a Jewish mob.  Pontius Pilate is exonerated entirely, being backed into a situation where he has no safe option.  If he exonerates Jesus, he is afraid that Caiaphas’s followers will revolt.  If he kills Jesus, he is afraid that Jesus’s followers will revolt.  If he puts down a revolt, Caesar will be very, very angry with him because of all the killing of revolting Jews he has been doing for 11 years which his majesty wants stopped.  Pontius tries getting away with “merely” letting Roman soldiers who enjoy their work too much beat up Jesus, but as this fails to pacify the mob, he gives into their demand for crucifixion.  This is a marvelous piece of work to make Pontius Pilate a sympathetic character (albeit not the bloodthirsty monster historians think he was), but it does nothing to really explain why the Jews would want Jesus dead in the first place.  Despite that Jews are correctly depicted as speaking Aramaic, there is no sign of research into Second Temple Period Judaism or any attempt to understand what Jesus’s Jewish opponents were thinking.  Gibson uncritically buys into the blood libel of the Gospels and simply echoes it in the film.

(Parenthetical tangent:  Romans are incorrectly depicted as speaking Latin when they really should have been speaking Greek, the other common language used over there at the time.  Greek was commonly used enough that the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews during the Second Temple Period.  It took a few centuries more for a Latin version to be created.  But I digress.)

Rather than work out motives for the antagonists, Gibson puts a great deal of effort into depicting the end of Jesus’s life, from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Resurrection.  Standard Christian doctrine is that Jesus suffered and died for our sins so we could receive salvation, and Gibson takes us through all that suffering, step by step, to an extent far greater than any other Gospel film your humble blogger is aware of, to show what Jesus was willing to go through for our sake.  The result is a film which is very dark, very ominous, very violent, and very bloody.  Not to mention this Jesus really looks and sounds beaten up.  Many people will find this too disturbing to watch.  The scenes of torture at the hands of the Romans are interspersed with flashbacks, mostly showing Jesus making predictions and encouraging behaviors opposed to the violence he suffers.

Also unusual in this film is the depiction of Satan.  Most depictions of Satan in Gospel films are dull, with nothing to really show him as evil.  Satan here is surreal and androgynous, neither clearly male nor female, but clearly meant to be attractive.  He(?) interacts with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, releasing a snake which Jesus stomps on, possibly meant as a reference to the Garden of ‘Edhen and the punishment of the original snake (Genesis 3:16).  Satan continues to stalk Jesus throughout the film, unseen by anyone else, evidently as a cause or symbol of the torment Jesus is put through.  Infamously, Satan holds an ugly baby thing while Jesus is being flogged, perhaps a bit of a parallel between the Father and Jesus.  (Or maybe not.)  Satan is also furious at the end, with Jesus successful in what he set out to accomplish.

The Passion of the Christ is great for reviewing all the horrible things which purportedly happen to Jesus at the end of his life.  Unfortunately, the care and detail which went into the making of this film did not go into making the story more believable.

Topic 2:  Your humble blogger is getting annoyed by the translators who created the King James Bible not knowing Hebrew well.  This past week I have come across translations/transliterations of names of groups of people such as “Anakims” (Deuteronomy 1:28, 2:10-11), “Emims” (Deuteronomy 2:10-11), “Horims” (Deuteronomy 2:12), “Zamzummims” (Deuteronomy 2:20), “Avims” (Deuteronomy 2:23), and “Caphtorims” (Deuteronomy 2:23).  The Hebrew suffix -im indicates the plural, mostly of masculine nouns.  In each of these cases the -im of a plural noun has been misinterpreted as an integral part of a collective noun.  There is no excuse for this level of grammatical incompetence in a translator.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

On conscience in V

Greetings.

Jewish date:  22 ’Iyyar 5770 (Parashath BeHar-BeḤuqqothay).

Today’s holidays:  Day 37 of the ‘Omer (Judaism), Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of St. Guiness (The Stout) (Church of the SubGenius), National Day Of Reason (Humanism), National Day of Prayer (USA).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Sign the Petition | Terror Gap” and “Samsung: Come Clean About the Hazards in Your Workplace - The Petition Site”.

Topic 1:  The latest episode of V, “Hearts and Minds”.  This episode puts Father Jack through a wringer.  Our heroes shoot down what is supposed to be a V craft without any humans aboard, and in the wreckage they find what are apparently bones—human bones.  While no one is particularly happy about this, Father Jack, being a priest, is distraught.  He is very explicit that preservation of human life is paramount, and he cannot bring himself to deliberately endanger humans.  He even tipped off Chad (who is turning into a double agent) not to be aboard any V crafts the day our heroes planned to shoot one down.  At the end of the episode Father Jack insists that even though they are at war, they must not let the Vs compromise their principles.

Also:  In his distress, Father Jack talks to his bishop without actually specifying what he feels guilty about.  The bishop, while all for confession (they are Catholics, after all) tells him that if what Father Jack feels guilty over having done is a matter of (state) law, he should make a “different kind of confession”, that is, go to the police.  Intuition suggests this is a reflection of how the real-life Roman Catholic Church should have handled cases of suspected sexual abuse by priests.  We can only hope that real Catholic clergy will act this way in the future.

Also:  Lisa seems to be developing a conscience.  She looks disturbed at a human being subjected to the V version of abduction and probing.  (Think of cliché alien abduction scenarios which make more sense in terms of paranoid fantasies rather than ways to gain knowledge of humans.)  Furthermore, her feelings for Tyler appear to be genuine, and in an effort to apparently spare him being tortured or whatever Anna have in mind for him, she breaks up with him and then tells Anna that she has failed to convince him to live aboard the V mothership.  Anna, however, climbs to the next level of being a psychopath.  Her response is to punch Lisa in the face so hard as to leave a bruise, and then she orders one of her guards to break Lisa’s legs.  The point of this is to claim that Lisa was attacked by the Fifth Column and to lure Tyler into trying to help her.  I have to admit:  the writers are definitely doing a good job of making Anna scary.

Topic 2:  The daily dose of anti-Semitism:  “BBC's Non-Response to HR Report”.  Essentially the BBC tried to bluff their way around a serious bias problem.

Topic 3:  “Shanghai Is Trying to Untangle the Mangled English of Chinglish” and “A Sampling of Chinglish”.  This article and slide show are about translation gone horribly wrong due to people relying too much on dictionaries and not enough on people who know English well.  This should be a warning to anyone underestimating the importance of good translation.  Try to envision the level of disaster when stuff like this happens to religious texts.

Topic 4:  For today’s religious humor: “Crossin’ bridge to holy grail, BRB”:

I think there may be something of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in this one.

Peace.

Aaron

Translation anomalies and the origin of ethics

Greetings.

Jewish date:  6 Nisan 5770 (Parashath Ṣaw).

Today’s holidays:  Fifth Sunday of Lent (Roman Catholicism), Spring Equinox (Thelema), Naw-Rúz (Bahá’í Faith).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Stop the Money Train to Washington - The Petition Site”.

Topic 1:  Yet another translation problem:  The King James Version translates the Hebrew minḥah (used  first  in Leviticus 2:4 and periodically afterwards) as “meat offering”.  While this may have been an accurate translation in the days of King James I, the meaning of “meat” has changed substantially since then.  The actual meaning of minḥah, which makes sense in context, is “flour offering”.

I also came across a translation anomaly in the New Testament recently, too.  In the story of the prodigal son, Luke 15:16 specifically, pigs are described in the original Greek as eating keratiōn.  The King James Version translates this as “husks”, while the New International Version says “pods”.  But the dictionary claimed something rather more specific:  “St. John’s bread”, also known as “carobs” and Ceratonia siliqua.  I have no idea why this discrepancy exists.

Topic 2:  “The Ethical Dog”.  There is a major question about where morality and ethics come from.  My view is that they are social constructs which may (or may not) be imposed by a god.  This article notes that the constructs have evolutionary roots:  ethics evolved because they aid the survival of those who play by the rules and thus getting genes on to the next generation.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  “My temple is prepared.”

I am under the impression that at least some cats really seem to think this way.

Peace.

Aaron

Is it too hard for Muslims to demand that their children learn Arabic?

Greetings.

Jewish date:  10 ’Adhar 5770 (Parashath Teṣawweh).

Today’s holidays:  Wednesday of the First Week of Lent (Roman Catholicism), Feast Day of Charles Stansfeld Jones (Thelema), 1st and 2nd finding of the Head of the Forerunner (Greek Orthodox Christianity).

Topic 1:  Questions of language show up again.  “U.S. mosques debate using English for sermons” discusses problems Muslims in the US are having at mosques because many of the younger generation do not know Arabic and thus cannot understand Arabic sermons and prayers.  The solution discussed is introducing English into sermons.  Not discussed is the fact that people who do not know Arabic cannot understand their own prayers in Arabic or essential Islamic literature in Arabic.  Such people can only know what anything in Arabic says through translation, essentially putting them at the mercy of Arabic-speakers.  Keep in mind that translations, as I have repeatedly noted in this blog, can distort the meaning of the original, so using English is at best only a short-term solution.  Better would be for Musilms to promote the learning of Arabic.

“Translation to explain Episcopal tenets in Hmong” deals with the same basic problem but with a difference:  while the younger generation of American Hmong-speaking Epicopalians knows the critical language of Anglicanism/Epicopalianism, English, older Hmong Episcopalians often do not know English.  Since the older people are, the harder it usually is for them to learn a language—though the situation is definitely not hopeless—this has led to a need for Hmong-language Anglican materials.  Interestingly, apparently for some of the younger Hmong Episcopalians, learning Hmong in church is a way of connecting with Hmong culture.

Topic 2:  The daily dose of anti-Semitism (yeah, I know:  often it seems like the proverbial broken record):  “Israel adds West Bank shrines to heritage list”.  To make a long story short:  Israel has declared the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Raḥel’s Tomb to be national heritage sites.  The “Palestinian Authority”, ever supporting Islamic anti-Semitic propaganda which denies solid historical and archaeological evidence that Jews have a long history in Israel, declares that this move will derail the “peace process”.  Keep in mind that the Islamic notion of the “peace process” is that Israel has to make concessions while the Arabs can do whatever they want, whether or not it actually advances an actual peace.  Such a “peace process” is not in Israel’s—or humanity’s—best interests, so I encourage Israel to do whatever it can to keep the “peace process” derailed until the Arabs start making concessions to create a real peace.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor, another essentialist LOLcat picture:  “sum born gud”:

Anyone who knows of a genuinely evil baby, please let me know.

Peace.

Aaron

Mistranslations of materials used for the Tabernacle

Greetings.

Jewish date:  5 ’Adhar 5770 (Parashath Terumah).

Today’s holidays:  Friday after Ash Wednesday (Roman Catholicism), Chaoflux (Discordianism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Dick Cheney confessed to a war crime. Prosecute him.”

Topic 1:  Yet another round of pointing out what can go wrong with translation.  Thus says the King James Version (KJV) of Exodus 25:1-9:

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring me an offering: of every man that giveth it willingly with his heart ye shall take my offering. And this is the offering which ye shall take of them; gold, and silver, and brass, And blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen, and goats’ hair, And rams’ skins dyed red, and badgers’ skins, and shittim wood, Oil for the light, spices for anointing oil, and for sweet incense, Onyx stones, and stones to be set in the ephod, and in the breastplate. And let them make me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them. According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it.

I have already discussed mistranslation of Divine names.  Today I am going to talk about the materials donated and used for the Tabernacle.  “Blue”, “purple”, and “scarlet” are not colors; rather they are specific dyes:  tekheleth, ’argaman, and tola‘ath shani.  The former two are produced by snails, the latter (I think) from an insect larva.  While the colors of the dyes are correct, calling them by their colors gives the false impression that the colors alone are important.  Furthermore, the “badger” referred to is actually the taḥash, a creature which no one really knows what it is and may or may not really be the badger.  The tendency to pretend one knows what words mean also recurs in the description of the ḥoshen (breastplate) in Exodus 28:17:20 in the listings of gemstones embedded in it.  At least some other terms without English equivalents, such as shiṭṭim and ’efodh, are merely transliterated without anyone pretending they are something else.

Topic 2:  For today’s religious humor:  “Even kittehs must face”:

I am really not clear on when people began to talk about things wrong with their psyches as “demons”.  Possibly this is an offshoot of the notion of demonic possession which is dealt with frequently in the Gospels.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

A dancing monk, words with multiple meanings, and Jon Stewart

Greetings.

Jewish date:  25 Shevaṭ 5770 (Parashath Mishpaṭim).

Today’s holiday:  Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Heart Disease and Stroke. You’re the Cure.:  Alert Letter:  Let the Senate Rules Committee Know it's Time to Pass the Cigarette Tax”, “MoveOn.org Political Action: Tell Congress: Stand with Melanie”, and “Take Action: Help Protect New Mexico's Paleozoic Treasures”.

Topic 1:  “Japanese monk gets down with the beat for Buddhism”:  An interesting tactic for promoting Buddhism.

Image of the frontispiece of the KJV via Wikipedia

Topic 2:  Yet another problem with translation:  words may have multiple meanings.  Thus says the King James Version (KJV) of Exodus 22:28:  “Thou shalt not revile the gods, nor curse the ruler of thy people.”  The original Hebrew actually allows for four possible interpretations of whom one is not supposed to revile:  1) gods in general, 2) ’Elohim (= YHWH, God of Israel), 3) angels, and 4) judges.  The KJV, strangely, takes the interpretation least compatible with Jewish and Christian theology, option 1.  Intuition suggests the KJV’s misinterpretation may be an inspiration for Mormonism’s polytheism

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor, submitted by Harold:  “Scewby Jew”, in which Jon Stewart deals mercilessly with Ḥamas’s anti-Semitic cartoons for children.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Story Hole - Children's Cartoons From Hamas
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

Peace.

Aaron

Miscellany

Greetings.

Jewish date:  21 Shevaṭ 5770 (Parashath Yithro).

Today’s holiday:  Feast of Agatha (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy causes of the day:  “Coal Ash is Hazardous Waste and Must Be Regulated Now - The Petition Site”, “CARE : Defending Dignity - Fighting Poverty :  Ask Congress to Help Haiti”, “Tell China: Free Tibetan Filmmaker - The Petition Site”, and “Save BioGems: Take Action: Save Wolves Under Siege”.

Topic 1:  Reviews I have written relevant to this week’s Torah portion:  “There can be miracles when you disbelieve: a review of The Prince of Egypt” and “You cut up the Bible, you bloody baboon!:  A review of The Ten Commandments and The Ten Commandments: The Musical”.  Note that the later in particular deals with my recurring complaint about mistranslation.

Topic 2:  In some commentary I made a while back on Jesus Christ Superstar, I claimed the interview I discussed was with Andrew Lloyd Webber.  This was incorrect.  It was with his master lyricist Tim Rice.  (Yes, I make mistakes.)

Topic 3:  “TV Coverage (1995)”.  I am not the only one who has thought of the Arab-Israeli War as a “PR jihad”.

Topic 4:  For today’s religious humor:  “That’s”:

Reportedly cats do seem to think like this.  This may or may not be related to the ancient Egyptian cat-headed goddess Bast.

Peace and Shabbath shalom.

Aaron

Never blindly trust a translation III, or, How to Serve Man

Greetings.

Jewish date:  17 Shevaṭ 5770 (Parashath Yithro).

Today’s holidays:  Monday of the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Candlemass/Festival of Light (Ritual of the Elements; not to be confused with Candlemas) (Thelema).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Oppose the Murkowski Attack on the Clean Air Act - The Petition Site”.  Also, I donated platelets yesterday.  Please consider donating blood or blood components yourself if you can and save some lives.

Topic 1:  Yet another example of things that can go wrong in translation.  Soon after the Exodus, the Children of Yisra’el asked for food.  And YHWH grants their request, and in the morning they find something resembling Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes on the ground.  And thus the King James Version translates Exodus 16:15:

And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat.

What is the problem here?  This translation makes no sense.  No one is going to simply call anything “manna” simply because they do not know what it is.  The original Hebrew for they the Children of Yisra’el were saying to each other is Man hu?  This is a question, not a statement, and a somewhat archaically phrased on at that.  It translates as “What is it?”  The strange substance did end up being called man, so essentially everyone was calling it “what” due to a lack of a better name.

(And the comparison of man to Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes is not my idea; it is what I was taught back in grade school at Addlestone Hebrew Academy.)

Topic 2:  For today’s religious humor:  “Now I lays me down to sleep by penskii”:


Peace, and please be nice to the dog.

Aaron

Never blindly trust a translation II

Greetings.

Jewish date:  5 Shevaṭ 5770 (Parashath Bo’).

Today’s holidays:  Feast Days of Fabian and Sebastian (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy cause of the day:  “Take Action: General Mills Palm Oil Causes Rainforest Destruction”.

Topic 1:  Recently I complained about the inherent flaws of translations.  I gave two examples then showing that a bad translation can give impressions which are wrong.  And now I give another one.  In my reading of the New Testament in Koinē Greek, I am working on the first chapter of Luke, and it so happens that in Luke 1:26 describes Mary as enmnēsteumenēn.  The parallel passage in Mark, verse 1:18, describes her as mnēsteutheisēs.  These words—the same word, expressed a bit differently—is conventionally translated in English as “betrothed”—and this translation is wrong.  From the way the same word is used in the Septuagint versions of Exodus 22:15, Deuteronomy 20:7, Deuteronomy 22:23, Deuteronomy 22:25, Deuteronomy 22:27-28, and Hosea 2:21-22, it clearly means something significantly different.  Judaism recognizes two stages to marriage, ’erusin and nissu’in.  ’Erusin, which is usually contracted by by the groom giving the bride a ring, is not betrothal.  (There is not even a real concept of betrothal in Judaism.)  After ’erusin, the bride is considered a married woman, and if she sleeps with any man other than her husband, she commits adultery.  It is with nissu’in, however, that the husband brings his wife into his domain (symbolically), and the marriage can be consummated.  (It should go without saying that Judaism forbids premarital sex.)  Mary, at the time discussed by these verses, is a me’oreseth and thus already Joseph’s wife, but without the marriage being consummated.  It is for this reason that Joseph in Matthew 1:19 plans to divorce Mary:  she has presumably committed adultery, for which Jewish law requires divorce.  If they had not been actually, then she would not have been forbidden to him, even what she had presumably done is prohibited.  Thus by mistranslation of a single term, the whole incident is given an incorrect interpretation.

Topic 2:  More reports of current anti-Semitism:  “Global National Issues On-Air Clarification After HRC Complaint (January 19, 2010)” and “BBC: Denying Jewish Jerusalem”.  For a twist, “Israel: Bringing Hope Amidst Haiti's Rubble” reports on positive reporting about Israel for a change.

Topic 3:  For today’s religious humor:  “LOLcat bible book uv Fluffeh, ch 7 v 10 by wonphatcat”:

(Hint:  Matthew 4:18 and Mark 1:17.)

Peace.

Aaron

Never blindly trust a translation

Greetings.

Jewish date:  26 Ṭeveth 5770 (Parashath Wa’era’).

Today’s holidays:  Tuesday of the First Week of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism).

Worthy causes of the day:  “MoveOn.org Political Action: Save the Clean Air Act” and “Another bad idea from Alaska”.

Topic 1:  More coverage of anti-Semitism:  “Canadian Muslim Paper Condemned For Blood Libel”.  Some people either do not know how implausible organ theft is (disembodied human organs under the best of conditions have lives measured in mere hours, which make the logistics of such a crime very tight at best) or do not care.  Major rule:  If it sounds implausible, be suspicious.

Topic 2:  “Sikhs strive to keep language alive”.  The gist of this is that Sikhs in the United States are finding they have an urgent need to make sure all their people know the Punjabi language and Gurmukhi script the Guru Granth Sahib, their scripture, is written in.  Now, many out there might ask why knowing Punjabi matters.  The Guru Granth Sahib has been translated into English, and thus American-born Sikhs can always read it in translation.  The problem is that translations are imperfect.  There is the obvious issue that words and constructions in one language do not always correspond exactly to words and constructions in another language, which alone is enough of a reason for Sikhs to learn Punjabi (and the rest of us to learn the language of our own religion).  But there is another, less famous reason:  even given the constraints of the former problem, sometimes the translations get it wrong.  To illustrate, I present here two examples which have been bugging me recently.

1) Thus is it written in the King James Version (KJV) on Exodus 6:2-3:

And God spake unto Moses, and said unto him, I am the LORD:  And I appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, by the name of God Almighty, but by my name JEHOVAH was I not known to them.

The KJV, while in some aspects a good translation, utterly mangles Divine names.  Anyone who had not read the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew and reading the KJV from the start would think this is the first time that the Tetragrammaton (= “YHWH”, rendered here with the wrong vowels as “JEHOVAH”) is mentioned.  And he/she would be wrong.  The Tetragrammaton first appears in chapter 2 of Genesis.  Usually the KJV, following the Septuagint, renders it “the LORD”, but on a few occasions it uses “JEHOVAH” instead, thus creating the illusion of a distinction which does not exist.  Furthermore, the KJV, following the Seputagint, has a tendency to give interpretations of personal Divine names instead of transliterating them.  This erases distinctions between certain names (“’El”, “’Eloahh”, and “’Elohim”; “YHWH” and “Yahh”) and gives the illusion that certain interpretations are the only ones there are.  In this passage, “God” really stands for “’Elohim”, but “God Almighty” stands for “’El Shadday”.  As such, the KJV, by its translation errors, gets the text wrong.

2) Thus is it written in the KJV on Mark 12:35-37:

And Jesus answered and said, while he taught in the temple, How say the scribes that Christ is the son of David?  For David himself said by the Holy Ghost, The LORD said to my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand, till I make thine enemies thy footstool.  David therefore himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son? And the common people heard him gladly.

The KJV here reflects the Greek text well, but that is not where the problem is.  The problem is with Jesus’s argument.  Jesus cites Psalms 110:1, claiming it “my Lord” refers to Mashiaḥ (the Messiah/Christ).  Since “Lord” refers to a god, Jesus claims, Mashiaḥ must be a god.  Besides the fact that Jesus does nothing to show this verse actually refers to Mashiaḥ and this interpretation flies in the face of everything taught about Mashiaḥ in the Hebrew Bible, this interpretation is untenable, even completely ignoring the context of Psalms 110:1.  Thus is it written in Psalms 110:1, my translation:

For (or by) Dawidh:

Spoken by YHWH to my lord:  “Sit at my right

Until I place your enemies as a footstool for your feet.”

In the original Hebrew, YHWH is talking to a human.  There is no single term used twice, period, and the second term is not a Divine name or a general term for a god.  So why does Jesus think the same term is used twice?  Because in the Greek the same term is used twice.  “YHWH” is conventionally (and wrongly) rendered Kyrios (“Lord”) in Koinē Greek, and Hebrew ’adhon (“lord”) is also rendered kyrios in Koinē Greek.  By relying on a translation, Jesus (or someone putting words into his mouth) makes an inference which is untenable in the original Hebrew.

The moral of all this:  Do not rely blindly on translations, because translators make mistakes and give the impressions of things not found in the original text.  This is why it is important for Sikhs to know Punjabi and for everyone to know the languages of their scriptures.


Topic 3:  Today’s religious humor:  “Little did you know that the freezer…”.

I am really not sure where the idea of a porthole to Hell comes from.  If anyone knows, please tell me.

Peace.

Aaron