tanya

I disagree. "ouk" means "none".

ετερον δε των αποστολων ουκ ειδον ει μη ιακωβον τον αδελφον του κυριου

other moreover of the apostles none I saw, if not Jacob the brother of the lord

Please do comment, if you wish, on my question of how one could have expressed the thought, in Koine Greek, as you have translated this verse, but without using "ouk...ei mei".

Here is your translation, roughly: I didn't see anyone else, except for James, the brother of the lord.

What I am really attempting to elicit here, is a response that clarifies whether or not the Koine Greek wording of this verse is contentious, defensive, argumentative, or simply travelogue in tone?

To me, writing, in English, "none except for" is travelogue, non-confrontational, very ordinary English, every day usage.

To me, writing, in English, "none...if not" conveys a defensive, argumentative tone, far more focused on Jacob, than the casual reply, "oh, yeah, guess who I ran into on my recent trip to Jerusalem? Well, gee, gosh, I was sort of surprised to learn that everyone had gone to the beach, well, almost everyone. I did run into Jacob, thank goodness, so the trip was not a complete waste of time...."

I could envision "none....if not", as the reply to a hostile inquiry about Jacob. "How many drug carriers did you meet, while visiting Jerusalem? None, if not for Jacob, that vermin."

LegionOnomaMoi

Based on a translation you read?


Blass, Debrunner, and Funk's grammar: ei me= alla.

There are three connected lines, not two. The first is a simple declaration that he spent 15 days with Peter. Paul doesn't end here, however. He connects the next line to the line about Peter with the particle de. "I spent 15 days with Peter, but that's pretty much the only person I saw." In other words, the next line serves to emphasize that Paul spent this time with Peter, not apostle in general. Paul then gives the one exception to this. The "tone" of the first line is that of a simple declarative description. The second two are both explanatory and emphatic.
"If not" is not a good translation. The greek use of particles, even in conditionals, is much broader and more frequent than english. And this isn't a conditional. The work on the problems with using logical analyses/interpretations of conditionals to interpret natural language is extensive (e.g., the two edited volumes On Conditionals and On Conditionals Again, not to mention Wakker's analysis of the Greek conditional). And this combination of particles isn't a condtional.

tanya

Yes. Here is Strong's Concordance, for "ouk" 3756. Here is a link to the Hort & Westcott, Alexandrian, and Byzantine versions of the Greek text, together with the Latin Vulgate, and nine different English translations.

Here is the Blue Letter Bible, with the nice feature of showing the root of the Greek word. I like this version, because of the facility with which one easily changes fonts, for example, here, all capital letters, the form of our oldest extant copy of Galatians 1:19 together with an English translation from that site.
I think we can agree that no translation can do justice to a masterwork of literature: Snow Country in English, is not much of a tear jerker. Even within the Indo-European language family, it is not easy to convey the same ideas:

Sag es niemand, nur den Weisen, Weil die Menge gleich verhöhnet: Das Lebendge will ich preisen, Das nach Flammentod sich sehnet.

In English, Selige Sehnsucht sounds a bit childish, no? Le Comte de Monte Cristo is a bit banal, in English, but just fantastic in Dumas' own language, in my opinion.

All translations are deficient. The question is just this: how can we most faithfully portray authorial intent in an English translation? Part of the difficulty is time. Part cultural. Japan at the end of the 19th century, and Germany and France during the 19th century, are all very different creatures from Palestine under Roman occupation. Those 1600 year old Greek texts we study so fastidiously, represent, themselves, in large part, translations from the original Hebrew. So, my thought was that perhaps the awkwardness of this portion of the verse, Galatians 1:19, (ouk...ei mei") may have been due to an idea, originally expressed in Hebrew, or perhaps Aramaic, which had a different connotation from the translation today.

The translation you offered, "except for" is logical, precise, very clear, and perhaps conveys exactly the correct cultural implication --a simple travelogue narrative.

I may be making a mountain out of a mole hill.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Tanya,

"Except for" makes no sense whatsoever.
Paul's basic argument is "11For I would have you know, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. 12For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. "

Imagine someone saying, I went to Heaven and I did not see and Gods. I saw nobody, except for the brother of God" Such a sentence is crazy.

The denial of seeing James/Jacob is the only thing that would make sense. The specific linguistic formation of the sentence allows us to translate the sentence this way. Since one translation makes no sense and the other translation as a conditional clause ("If I didn't see Jacob/James the brother of the Lord, I didn't see anybody") makes perfect sense in the argument, (I didn't see anybody including Jacob/James, the brother of the Lord) we have no reason to choose the senseless translation.

Once we recognize that this sentence is badly translated, we can realize that the fantastic idea that Jesus' brother James/Jacob became a leader of the early Christian Church is based only on a misunderstanding of a this line in Paul.

I am writing a blog to explain this more clearly which should be done by Thursday.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Duvduv

Are there any ancient versions of Galatians that have a different rendering of the verse mentioning James? Or did any ancient writers specifically mention the verse without the attribute of brother of the Lord?

For that matter, did any ancient writers challenge the idea that "Paul " wrote all of the epistles based on any criteria that are discussed today?

tanya

Holy Cow, Jay, you just turned this thread upside down!!!

Well done, sir. I am very impressed with your logic, and hope that the folks on the forum who are fluent in Greek, will offer some comments. I look forward to Andrew's comment, if he has time.

It makes so much sense, when I read your explanation, I just want to kick myself, for having been so stupid, as to have not seen this obvious alternative to the orthodox view. See, Jay, that's the difference between those of us who WATCH cinema, (like me), and folks like you, who CREATE cinema. Bravo. hurrah. This thread needed a lift, and you gave it one.

Jay, congratulations. You have earned the title: Philosopher for the day!!! Best post on this thread, by far.... Wonderful work.

:notworthy:

LegionOnomaMoi

Becareful with concordances, which are not meant (like lexicons) to give you the meaning of the word.

If you want to know the meaning of a word without knowing the language, the best thing to do is to use a lexicon. For ancient greek in general, there is one lexicon that is THE lexicon. The LSJ. For the greek of the NT and other christian authors, the best and most respected lexicon is the BDAG.

The problem, however, is that here you are dealing with particles. Particles work on a clausal level and are more "grammatical" than "lexical." There is an entire book on greek particles by Denniston. It's basically a 600 page "dictionary" that only gives the "definitions" of about a dozen words.

However, from K-G's, Schweitzer's, and BDG's grammars, along with Denniston, there is more than enough material on the use of ei me not only to get a sense of the use, but for further references. Take, for example, Wakker's Conditions and Conditionals:An Investigation of Ancient Greek volume 3 from the edited series Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology (1994).

In chapter 6 ("Some Peculiar Usages of Conditionals") Wakker covers conditionals that aren't really conditionals, or at least frequently are not. Section 6.3.2 covers the conjunction of ei me. It is a "fixed adverbial combination with the meaning 'except.' As such it occurs in all discourse types (also in narrative) in various expressions, which all have in common that they introduce a mere exception to or a qualification of (part of) the preceding negative assertion or the preceding question."

Paul's line introduces the exception to his "preceding negative assertion." Wakker's study is specifically on conditionals, and is mostly devoted to "if X, then Y" type of structures in Greek. However, as the particle usually translated as "if" is "ei" Wakker covers places where this translation doesn't hold. This is one. We find the exact same thing if we look at Blass, Debrunner, and Funk's A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature or the most recent edition of the BDAG. For ei me, the BDAG states ei me=plen, a greek word which means "except" or "but". The BDG (as a grammar) is more extensive here. It lists "unless, except (that)' as well as particular uses of this conjuction of particles with yet more (which do not occur in galatians).


To be honest, the reason I studied the languages I did (french, german, greek, latin, navajo, hittite, hebrew, old english, middle english, gothic, and a tiny bit of half a dozen others) was either to read important primary texts (greek, latin, hebrew, old english, middle english, and I'm working on Arabic), to read scholarship (french, german, and I'm working on italian), or to understand linguistic structure (all the others). Translating ancient literature is a whole different ballgame than modern. And I agree with what you say below: the further apart two langauges are in time, linguistic structure, and culture, the more problematic translation is.

Also, I'm a bit spoiled when it comes to French. I was first using Duhoux's Le Verbe Grec Ancien, and having very few problems understanding it, at a time when reading Le Petit Prince was more of a challenge. Unlike German, all the technical vocabulary in French academic texts resemble the English versions, and a lot of the rest is just basic vocabulary (prepositions, the most common verb forms, etc.). Of course, that was a while ago, and I've since read a fair amount of at least non-technical French (En attendant Godot, L’étranger, "L'existentialisme est un humanisme", etc), but I would be willing to bet that reading Dumas would take a while, with more than a few times of me running to my copy of Larousse's dictionnaire de français (2000).

Interestingly enough, many of the modern techniques used in classics, comparative linguistics, etc., were borrowed from biblical studies. When modern mathematics and science (which were then, along with history and linguistics, pretty much all "philosophy) began to dominate academia, the older approach to biblical texts began to fall out of favor. It was no longer "acceptable" to approach these like the scholastics of the middle ages had. Although it wasn't long before studies of Indo-European and classics were clearly seperate from biblical studies, the point is that the intensive study into Greek (which, unlike latin, had to be "rediscovered") Hebrew, Aramaic, etc., began with biblical studies and never stopped. Which is why the BDAG, the BDG, and other texts on hellenistic Greek all take into account how the spread of one language as a lingua franca affected the language in general, as well as how particular primary languages like Aramaic, Coptic, Hebrew, etc., may have or did affect how it was understood in particular places.

So, for example, the BDG includes a sub-section when discussing the word alla or "but, yet, except, rather" etc., which includes how ei me sometimes replaced this (and vice versa), and includes the affect that aramaic had on such occurences in the NT.

Duvduv

So far I guess it looks like the answer is "No" to my two questions below in terms of no responses. I look forward to any responses about it.

dog-on

Perhaps there is an ancient writer that might provide evidence of this epistle without this verse. See what you think of this:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03125.htm

LegionOnomaMoi

There are two problems here. The first concerns Paul's "basic argument." You are conflating two very different sections with very different purposes. Paul makes this explicit. After talking for some time about his direct relationship to Jesus and God through revelation (and thus the basis for his authority to preach the "good news" and be called an apostle; cf. 1 Cor. 15:10), he then talks about his 3 years preaching in Arabia and then back to Damascus. However, he introduces this within the context of his argument of "authority via revelation." He doesn't just say "then I went to Arabia..." but oude anelthoun eis Hierosoluma pros tous pro emou apostolous... The oude here explicitly connects this line with the previous, itself part of Paul's declaration of his claim to apostleship. Why would Paul continue his argument about being an apostle through revelation and through god, by noting that he did not go to Jerusalem to the other apostles? This is to bulster his argument. He didn't need to, because he was an apostle to God. It is only after saying this that Paul then notes that eventually (after three years), he did in fact go to Jerusalem to spend 15 days with Peter. If we see this as still a continuation, at least to some extent, of his indepent claim to be an apostle, then why does he say he went at all? And for 15 days?

The way these lines are connected give us clues (as do other lines from this letter and others). In Gal 2, Paul admits that Peter is a "pillar" or an important figure. Having a connection to the Jerusalem church was clearly important. And in various places in Galatians and other Pauline letters Peter is singled out as the most important. Paul, therefore, admits that he did spend time with Peter, but qualifies this. He spent his time with Peter alone, not with the other apostles in general, with one exception. The emphasis is on the time spent with Peter, rather than the apostles at Jerusalem in general, and therefore Paul emphasizes this, and admits James as an exception, rather than saying he spent time with Peter and saw James too.

As for the "seeing the brother of God," this of course is not what Paul says.

The "one translation makes no sense" only if you interpret "lord" as "god," but not only is there no reason to, there is good reason not to.

Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for Paul to make an obscure transformation of classical logic (which wasn't around yet). Humans are not naturally inclined to be able to understand modus tollendo tollens. They are even less likely to use the resulting structure in natural speech. We could spend weeks searching through corpora without finding an instance of natural speech in which someone uses a conditional sentence with the logical structure outlined above along with the contextual environment. It just doesn't happen outside of a logic class. When people want to say "I didn't see anybody else" that's exactly what they say. What possible reason could there be for Paul to include the ei me conjuction and what follows about James at all if all he wanted to say was "I didn't see anybody else? Had he left out the part about James, the line would read "I did not see any of the other apostles." Simple, plain, easy to understand. But Paul doesn't say that. He adds ei me Iakobon ton adelphon tou kuriou. So according to you, rather than just saying "I didn't see other apostles" Paul uses an obscure conditional logical structure "If I didn't see James, then I didn't see any of the other apostles."