As I mentioned in Freaks don’t want no Greek, I’ve been working my way through 1 Timothy in Greek. It is slow going. Ideally, I would just pop open my Greek New Testament and read the text awash in a glow of holy light. But it doesn’t happen that way. Going back to the example of ἐπιταγή. Do you think I knew what that word meant? No. I was reading along just fine, “Paul Apostle of Christ Jesus by the ??? of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope…” Then I had to look it up somewhere. Either an interlinear, or a parallel translation or one of the amazing Bible tools that I use on my computer. In this case, the software I used told me with one click that the noun means “command,” it’s accusative, feminine, singular and occurs seven times in the New Testament, and five times in exactly this form. With another click I could jump to the entry in any of three Greek lexicons for more in-depth information.

Now, I must confess that I felt frustrated and a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know what that word was. After all I am a Bible translator! (Here everyone removes their hat out of respect.) Shouldn’t I just know it all?!? But think about it a minute. This word only occurs seven times in the whole Bible. Is it really reasonable to expect that such a rare word among the more than 5000 distinct words in the New Testament should be stored away somewhere in my brain? The answer is no. In this digital age it would be madness to expect everyone to keep track of things that they can look up with two clicks of the mouse. Suzanne McCarthy brilliantly illustrated this in a recent post at Better Bibles Blog. She was feeling a bit embarrassed that she didn’t know the meaning of Iyov’s name. And she also didn’t know what the tagline on his blog meant since it was written in Hebrew. What did she do? She copied the phrase. Pasted it into the search box for Google and had her answer instantly. It was Job 1:1 in Hebrew. [Corrected. See comments below]

Do you know where your car keys are right now? Do you know your mother’s cell phone number? Can you keep track of every identification number required by your government? How about Internet identities and passwords? Birthdays of your children? Who is the President of Pakistan? What is the national dish of Peru? What is the verse reference for the Golden Rule?

Gone are the days when the human mind could keep track of all the information it is exposed to. The 21st century global citizen thrives in a flood of information and is a master of sifting through it for the the right info at the right time. He or she can sniff out insincerity and hidden agendas in a page of Google results at lightning speed.

In my early days of overseeing the Nyungwe translation, on two different occasions I had translation consultants show up at the table to work with nothing but a UBS Greek New Testament. And in both cases, their copies were completely unmarked. They didn’t need to scribble anything in the margin because they knew the whole thing. Every word. But both of those consultants were in their late-60’s and we will never see their kind again. The Bible translation consultant of today memorizes less but knows more. He or she shows up at the table not with a burgundy bound New Testament but a laptop computer.

So, my final act in this article is to release you from the guilt of Biblical language ignorance. You don’t know it. But you know where to find it when you need it. 

Dear digital denizen, thou art loosed.

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P.S. How long would it take you to identify the literary allusion “thou art loosed”? Ready, set, go. (Hint: Γύναι, ἀπολέλυσαι τῆς ἀσθενείας σου)

More posts in the series Grasshopper Greek

«The Third Text“The Greeks Don’t Want No Freaks”»