by Amazing 144 Replies latest jw friends
How is "sun autois" different from "ama sun autois"?
How is "with" different from "together with"?
What role does it play in 5:10 except stylistic emphasis?
Ross:
That was not an objection... notice in John 8:44f the devil is conspicuously uncreated.
Narkissos....The inferrence is interestingly made in the Vulgate which has simul rapiemur cum here.
Jeffro...Well, I mentioned the interpolation of "Jehovah" in the NT which gives you 237 "serious errors" right off the bat. Here is example of a rendering that illustrates what is wrong with the NWT imho:
Philippians 2:6: "[Christ Jesus], who, although he was existing in God's form, gave no consideration to a seizure, namely, that he should be equal to God".
I find this to be very unnatural, if not grotesque, English and the added words are part of this (note that this is not a literal translation). "Although" is meant to clarify the concessive force of huparkhón, but its inclusion plus the rendering of this participle "existing" into a verbal predicate (which is often necessary to smooth the heavy use of participles in Greek into more natural English) obscures the relation between what follows and the initial "who", i.e. "who, being in the form of God, did not think..." vs. "who, although he was in the form of God, did not think..." In other words, dreadful English style. Then, having changed huparkhón from a non-finite participle to a finite verb, they do the opposite with égésato by nominalizing it -- thereby requiring even more verbiage ... requiring a new main verb "gave" and the nominal suffix to the verb. The verbiage adds to the woodenness but it is typical of the NWT (cf. "taking in knowledge" for "knowing", exercising faith" for "believe", etc.). Then harpagmon is literally rendered as a noun, but "a seizure" in modern English does not necessarily convey the same thought as the more wordy but clear "a thing to be grasped" or "something to be held onto". If they wanted to use that word, it would have been better to say "an act of seizure"; seizure by itself makes it sound like Jesus refused to give himself epilepsy. The whole phrase is very unnatural in English....a robber planning a heist would not say, "Okay, let's consider having ourselves a seizure". Next the insertion of "namely" makes for a much looser connection between "a seizure" and "that he should be equal to God". In the Greek, both these phrases are equivalent, i.e. "He did not consider X(acc) Y(acc)," like saying "He did not consider [Tom] [a fool]". But the rendering eliminates the parallelism by turning the noun phrase "equality with God" into a clause "that he should be equal to God", hence the "namely". Finally, it is an exegetical move to turn "equality with God" (which by itself does not claim whether or not this is a status he already had) into the expanded clause "that he SHOULD BE equal to God" (which contains within it an implicit claim that this is a status he did not already have).
Having said this, I do not consider the rendering of harpagmon by the word expressing an act of seizing as necessarily wrong or correct...this is a notorious crux interpretum and is hotly debated in scholarship, and I think the wording is ambiguous (intentionally so?) as to whether Jesus already had "equality with God" prior to the incarnation but gave it up, or went into a course that was opposite of seizing "equality with God".
Leolaia,
Jeffro...Well, I mentioned the interpolation of "Jehovah" in the NT which gives you 237 "serious errors" right off the bat.
That is actually one serious error repeated 237 times.
HS
Jeffro...Well, I mentioned the interpolation of "Jehovah" in the NT which gives you 237 "serious errors" right off the bat.
Is that a serious error? While it may not be a word-for-word literal translation, any one of those instances would only be a "serious error" if the 'person' being referred to is not actually intended to mean God (or for the Trinitarians, 'God, the Father').
LittleToe:
Jeffro:
Gawd you're obsessive - and I thought I was bad!
Yes. And I'll take that as a compliment. :)
Jeffro....Yes, I would say (my opinion, of course) that inserting "Jehovah" anywhere in the NT is itself a "serious error," as it violates a basic rule of translation. There is not a single textual authority for "Jehovah" in the NT, and the insertion is carried out on an arbitrary basis. Of course, this is also compounded by the way in which the "Jehovah" interpolation interferes with sense of the text, especially in cases in which reference is clearly to Christ (e.g. Romans 10:9-13, 14:8-9, 1 Corinthians 2:16, 4:4-5, 10:16-21 [= 11:27], among other examples).
Leolaia
Jeffro ....Yes, I would say (my opinion, of course) that inserting "Jehovah" anywhere in the NT is itself a "serious error," as it violates a basic rule of translation. There is not a single textual authority for "Jehovah" in the NT, and the insertion is carried out on an arbitrary basis. Of course, this is also compounded by the way in which the "Jehovah" interpolation interferes with sense of the text, especially in cases in which reference is clearly to Christ (e.g. Romans 10:9-13 , 14:8-9 , 1 Corinthians 2:16 , 4:4-5 , 10:16-21 [= 11:27 ], among other examples).
I would define a serious error as something that distorts the meaning.
If some written information refers to 'the manager', and someone translates the information and writes 'Bill' there instead, and the target audience is aware that Bill is the manager, then that wouldn't really be a serious error. On the other hand, if they write Bill in place of references to any manager, those instances would be serious errors.
Didier:
It crossed my mind that I don't recall reading where the Devil was created, and I decided to sleep on it.
Oh the joys of a subconscious mind that works overtime while I sleep:
A = Abba - Male
B = Breath - Female
C = Christos - Male
D = Demiurge - Female
There ya have it - Satan is a Lolita biatch; a veritable she-devil from hell!
Jeffro:
Yes. And I'll take that as a compliment. :)
Good
As for 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and 5:10--
syn, 'together with.' It is used only with the associative-instrumental case, and the basic idea of association is always present...
Twice, it is used with hama: 1 Th. 4:17; 5:10. This is really a redundancy, and shows the beginning of the retreat of syn before hama.
An Exegetical Grammar of the Greek New Testament, William Douglas Chamberlain, p.130
Therefore the NWT translation of this idiom is not incorrect, as has been admitted above (reflected in many other non-JW translations), nor have any variant readings of this phrase (there are none) been glossed over in the NWT.
Therefore argument about this verse is a theological one, not a grammatical one.
Very poor choice of examples, if one is trying to show how "messy" the NWT is.
Nonetheless the JW doctrine that the faithful "anointed" go up in heaven as they die naturally in the time period since 1918 (after the "return" of Christ) is completely wrong. There is no such scenario in the Bible the dubs got their eschatological series of events completely wrong. Who can trust them since they make such crude error or rather intentional crude errors? Whether we say "with them" or "simultaneously with them" it's the same outcome.
