EthnAlln

Isn't this a great question for a philosophical forum?

But I am starting this thread for a much humbler reason. I have always thought (ever since I became reasonably competent in ancient Greek) that the question is improperly translated. If you look in John 18:38, you find:

"legei autoi ho Pilatos, Ti estin aletheia;" that is, "Pilate says (historical present) to him: What is truth?" But this form of the question occurs elsewhere in Greek, in phrases like "Tis on touto poieis;" literally, "Being who are you doing this?" More colloquially, "Who do you think you are, doing this?" That's the sense in which I believe Pilate's question was intended. I think it should be translated, "What difference does the truth make?" or "What has truth got to do with anything?" or the like.

I don't know if this interpretation has been suggested previously, and I don't know what sources would be a good place to look. Has anyone heard this suggested previously?

Toto

Good question. I have edited your thread title to alert some of our Greek experts.

In context, your suggestion seems to make a lot of sense.

Julian

Εστιν makes αληθεια a predicate nominative. "What is truth" is an accurate translation.

Julian

EthnAlln

Oh certainly, it's a literal translation. I'm not questioning that. My question is what Pilate meant by this rhetorical question. Earlier he had asked rhetorically, "Am I a Jew?" Again, "Tis on touto poieis;" is literally "You do this being who?" But the meaning isn't that; it's more like, "What gives you the right to do this?" I don't think Pilate was asking literally what the truth was. This was definitely a rhetorical question, so what did it mean? It could mean that he thought the truth impossible to attain and had given up on it, which would be closer to the suggestion I have made.

Julian

You are being very liberal with you translations. The issue is between how you interpret it and how you translate it. You are more concerned with interpretation and not with translation. I think "What is truth" is very good and thoughtful whereas your interpretation is tendentious, I don't mean that in a bad way, I am just saying that it is. You are reading what you want to read.

Julian

EthnAlln

Yup, I certainly am. That's part of the difficulty with translating in general. To translate is to betray, as the French say. It is quite likely that the original intent of the author is unrecoverable after two thousand years. I'm not a deconstructionist, though. Some translations are plausible, others not. I think those who now interpret ancient texts should keep more than one possible interpretation in mind.

As a good example, take the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19. Traditional translations have Zacchaeus saying, "I will give half my goods to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone, I will restore to him fourfold." That makes the story one in which Zacchaeus turns his back on a life of greed. But Alan T. Dale turns the story on its head and translates this as, "I always give half of my goods to the poor and I always make fourfold restitution if I discover that I have overcharged." Hence, according to Dale, the real point of the story is that the man's neighbors had misjudged him. Jesus' final comment about salvation having come to him only meant that Zacchaeus had been accepted as a member of Jesus' fellowship.

Now that's a real stretch. It's true that there are no future tenses in the Greek. Everything is in the present indicative except the "overcharged" bit, which is aorist active (esykophantesa). But I'm sure I've seen examples of the present tense used in Greek to refer to decisions made to be implemented in the future. I'm inclined to favor the traditional interpretation here. It seems to me that Dale's interpretation would have required a general conditional clause (ean + aorist subjunctive or ei + aorist optative), rather than the straightforward ei + aorist indicative, which is particular rather than general.

Chris Weimer

To my ears, "What is truth" can very well mean "what matter is the truth anyway". In the same way, we say, "who is this guy" when someone insignificant offers their opinion.

Clivedurdle

Would a modern paraphrase be "what's that to do with the price of chips?" Imagine trying to translate that one!

(chips = french fries but the British Fish and Chip type - not Macdonalds!) (Were there different varieties of greek as there are English?)

EthnAlln

Oh certainly, there were many varieties, and of course probably a lot of short-lived slang that we can't recover. There is Homeric Greek (origins in Ionia), then Ionic proper, Attic (Athenian), Doric, and Koine (the language of the New Testament). Ionic, for example, says "es" for "into", where Attic has "eis" (although some Athenian writers use the Ionic). It also uses eta in places where other types use alpha. Athenian, in turn uses eta in some places where Doric uses alpha. For example "eis ten polin" (into the city) is Attic, "eis (or es) tan polin" is Doric. (This seems to be the origin of "Istanbul", by the way, which I had always thought was a Turkish word.) Attic uses -tt in places where other dialects have -ss, in words like thalatta (thalassa, sea) and pratto (prasso, I act), just as English has settle where German has Sessel, better where German has besser, and so on.

Koine means "common" and it was the Greek that spread to a lot of non-Greek speakers, who consequently didn't observe all the grammatical niceties when writing it. The New Testament standard texts are full of editorial corrections of the manuscripts from which they were prepared.

sunspark

Body language also plays a huge part in what people mean their words to convey, and we can't recover that (if he did, indeed say those exact words).