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Nicholas Kip, "How Knowing Greek Led Me to Know God," Awake! (March 22, 1987).
Many people have written to CRI and requested information responding to Nicholas Kip's article in Awake! magazine. Attached here is a copy of my correspondence with Nicholas Kip since the publication of that article. The correspondence (which is reproduced in its entirety) ends with my most recent letter to Mr. Kip.
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Permit me, then, to comment on some of the specific points you mentioned in your article. The first had to do with the translation of the word stauros as "cross" in Christian version of the Bible. You wrote: Suzanne would come to me and ask: Oh, Nicholas, here's a word that Karen and I studied in the Bible. Could stauros just mean 'stake'?" Well, sure. It does mean 'stake.' I don't know how they ever got 'cross' out of stauros. But I'm not surprised The Christian church has been doing things like that at least since Constantine's time." First of all, that last sentence seems awfully anachronistic to those of us who are familiar with the Jehovah's Witnesses. It is quite common to hear Witnesses referring to the time of Constantine as a period when an apostasy from the Bible was in full swing. To a non-Witness like myself familiar with Witness thought, this sentence sounds like something a person would say after becoming a Witness, not two years before. Is it possible you are reading back into your memories of that time an attitude which you acquired only after becoming a Witness? It does seem at least possible.
But let us assume that you really thought in that fashion back then, two years prior to becoming a Witness. That would mean that you were already to some extent predisposed against the Christian church, otherwise such a disparaging remark would be highly out of character. Second, you recalled commenting, "I don't know how they ever got 'cross' out of stauros." I don't doubt that you didn't know. But did you try to find out? Did you research the matter in the various Christian reference works that were available on the meaning of biblical words (other than the selective quotes you found in Watch Tower literature)? Did you study the history of Roman crucifixion and consider the evidence of archaeology and ancient Greek literature?
Evidently not, for if you had, you would have discovered -- as I did when, troubled by the Jehovah's Witnesses' plausible arguments against the translations "cross," I pursued a careful study of the matter -- that the word stauros was commonly used in other than its etymological sense of a straight stick to refer to a variety of wooden instruments of execution used by the Roman, including the cross. Let's go into this matter more deeply. You claimed to have studied Latin, French, and Greek in high school, and to have received a Master's degree in Latin and Greek. Having no reason to doubt your word, I must assume then that you mastered in the principle of language study, known to anyone who has taken so much as a year of foreign languages in college, that words often have meanings that extend beyond their original etymology. You seem to recognize this point when you make mention of the fact that words can have a variety of meanings. If you are at all unclear on this matter, however, I urge you to drop everything and read such books as D. A. Carson's Exegetical Fallacies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), J. P. Louw's Semantics of New Testament Greek, Society of Biblical Literature Semeia Studies (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press; Chicago, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), and Moises Silva's Biblical Words and Their Meanings: An Introduction to Lexical Semantics (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Co., 1983).
Now, the simple historical fact is that the Greek word stauros was often used to refer to the Roman instrument of execution which was in Latin called the crux, from which (as was noted in Reasoning from the Scriptures, p. 89) we derive the word "cross." That, if you want to know, is "how they... got 'cross' out of stauros." In truth, the "cross" could and did take on a variety of shapes, notably those similar to the Greek letter tau (T) and the "plus" sign (+), as well as (infrequently) a simple upright stake with no crosspiece. To argue that only the last-named form was used, or that stauros could be used only of that form, is simply contradictory to the actual historical facts, and is based on a naive restriction of the term to its etymological meaning. To go even deeper, the Latin terminology sometimes used the word crux to refer to the instrument of execution as a whole, including both pieces of wood intersected together, while at other times it was used to refer to the crossbeam only, the movable second piece of wood which the victim usually carried to the place of execution. Sometimes, however, the fixed piece of wood was called the stripes crucis, while the movable crossbeam was called the patibulum. This variety of usage is found also with stauros.
Sometimes it refers to a single beam of the cross, either the upright stake of the crossbeam; sometimes, however, it refers to the combined pieces, the crux proper. In other words, sometimes the etymological meaning of an upright stake applies, but even then a crossbeam of some sort is almost always implied. Once in a while, when no second piece of wood was available, the victim was nailed to the stake without benefit of a crossbeam (called a crux simplex), but this was the exception rather than the rule.
If you wish to verify this information for yourself, I would refer you to a number of good sources, among them the following, each of which will also refer you to other, older sources (this is merely a sampling of the vast documentation I could supply for the above historical facts): -Brandenburger, Egon. "Stauros," The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Colin Brown, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Co., 1975, pp. 391-403. -Burke, D. G. "Cross; Crucify," International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, genl. ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1979), pp. 825-830 -Hengel, Martin. Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the message of the Cross(Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1977). Schneider, Johannes. "stauros, stauroo, anastauroo," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. VII, ed. Gerhard Kittel, tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Wiliam B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971), pp. 472-584.
Please note that none of these scholarly sources are bothered about refuting the Jehovah's Witnesses, or even about proving that Christ died on a cross as opposed to a crux simplex. For the most part, the shape of the cross is incidental to the concerns of the authors of these works. But along the way, they provide proof positive that the argument of the Witnesses are without basis in fact. Having established that the word stauros could refer to a cross, the upright part of a cross, the crossbeam, or to an upright stake with no crossbeam, we have established that there is no basis in the word itself for the Jehovah's Witnesses' contention that Jesus did not die on a cross. The question now is, does the Bible tell us anything else of relevance to this question? The answer is yes: In John 20:25 the apostle Thomas, in expressing his doubt concerning Jesus' resurrection, said, "Unless I see in his hands and print of the nails and stick my finger into the prints of the nails...." According to Thomas, then, more than one nail was used to impale Jesus' hands to the stauros. The most natural conclusion is that there were two nails used, one for each hand, and that therefore the hands were separated on a crossbeam of some sort. (It might be helpful to keep in mind here that the word "nail" might better be rendered "spike," since we are not talking about a thin little nail.) Once this fact is noticed, I cannot see how an impartial student of the facts can come to any other conclusion than that Jesus died on a cross.
At this point, I would feel fairly safe in predicting that your response is to appeal to W.E. Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, or to similar works, as Jehovah's Witnesses invariably do when this question comes up. I can only say that (1) neither Vine nor any of the other authors who deny that Jesus died on a cross and are cited by the Watch Tower publications, so far as I can tell, have dealt with the historical and archaeological evidence outlined above, and that (2) none of them have dealt with the matter of John 20:25. Despite the fact that Vine's work is generally well respected among evangelical Christians, I am not at all embarrassed or reticent to say that on this matter he is flat wrong, as Hengel's book especially proves. Now, admittedly the shape of the stauros is of little consequence. But the Watch Tower publications, by making an issue of it, have made a show of superiority in biblical interpretation that any person acquainted with the literature on the subject should realize is shallow...
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Very interesting long letter & site whether one agrees with the author or not.
waiting