Ha! Now we are back to comparing to our own experiences/distortions as viewed through our own lenses. :drool:
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Jesus: The Missing Years in the East
- Thread starter godnotgod
- Start date
godnotgod
Thou art That
The Bible comes to us already distorted. It's a known fact. The best thing we can do is to correct our own vision first.
Agreed.
oldbadger
Skanky Old Mongrel!
........... because the varying reports in the gospels help to (both) support each other and (in places) to contend against each other. This helps each one of us to read them and then decide what parts we can believe and which parts we will reject. And so I think that this becomes an individual and personal process. And then we can come to sites like RF to share our ideas and listen to other people's. Like here, and now......
For instance, (IMO) John's report that the crowd that Jesus 'hosted' on the Gerasene coast shows that most of it could embark into available small craft, which reduces it somewhat downwards from the 5000 males plus their womenfolk as reported in the other reports. !!
......And Mark's innocent report of Yeshua tucking into a good meaty meal on two occasions causes me to believe thast he liked his dinners and was a meat eater.
But whether he would forsake the Temple for years........ I don't know.
You don't know much Hindu philosophy, then. "The Father and I are one" and "the kingdom of God is within you" scream Advaita. There's nothing to imply nor infer that Jesus meant he is God, separate from man. Advaita says we are all one with God because we are God. I will grant however, that it may be prisca theologia at work instead of any outside influence other than God working through prisca theologia itself.
Which language? The original Aramaic that was written down, subject to interpretation based on it being tri-consonantal and depending on context and diacritics for vowels? Or NT Greek which itself was rife with opportunity for plays on words because of its inflections. Or English, having been bastardized from the original Aramaic and Greek? Your beliefs are your beliefs, all well and good, but they are only that... your beliefs not binding on anyone else.
The Hindus are trying to steal Jesus?! Back off, you Hindus! Jesus is ours! :ko:
Don't make me come over there! :bunny:
Don't make me come over there! :bunny:
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1) Aramaic was not subject to interpretation based on the triple consonant roots that all Semitic languages are built off of. It's similar to the ways in which Latin and Greek are the basis for many English words and has 0 effect on interpretation.
2) Both Aramaic and ancient Greek were inflected. Inflections are not the basis for "plays on words".
3) English is entirely unrelated to Aramaic. English is Germanic, but is bastardized because of a heavy influx of French after the Norman conquest. Both the Germanic languages and the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) are Indo-European. Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, etc., are all Semitic languages. One can track the sounds of English back through Proto-Germanic all the way to Proto-Indo-European- the "mother" language for all Germanic, Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, etc., language families. Semitic languages are unrelated to PIE. No Indo-European language, whether ancient Greek or modern Russian, has or had verbs with grammatical gender. Semitic languages do. All Semitic languages have that 3-consonantal root for their words that no Indo-European language has.
You don't know Sanskrit do you? Play around with the inflections of the just Maha Mantra, a simple 16 word mantra, then come talk to me.
I know the differences in the language families; I know that Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, which includes Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Mon-Khmer and a host of others are not provably related, and I know how they descend from their proto-languages. Btw, Sanskrit is Indo-European just like Greek. Sanskrit is of the Indo-Iranian branch and highly inflected, lending itself to many plays on words and ambiguity. Additionally and conversely, ancient Greek was so highly inflected and conjugated that the simple phrase μολὼν λαβέ literally meaning "having come take" was clearly understood to mean "come and take them". So please do not talk down to me about it.
My point about English is that there are a thousand different translations of the bible from different times in history, based on translators' agendas. Everyone has their favorite translation and interpretation based on their own agenda and preferences. Moreover, centuries of translations through at least 3 or 4 languages to English (not to mention what it comes out as in Chinese or Lakota) have only served to virtually eradicate the original meanings. And if that rocks someone's faith, tough noogies... their faith can't be that strong that they need it spoonfed and don't know a metaphor if it bit them in the butt.
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Not well. I've studied it, but Sanskrit is too similar to Ancient Greek and Latin to be much use for me from a linguistic POV, and reading the Vedas and similar texts hasn't been enough of a motivation to inspire me to devote the kind of study necessary to master reading the language. Hittite is a different matter.
Do you know what inflections are? The Sanskrit case system is its nominal, adjectival, participial, etc., inflection system. The subjunctive, optative, aorist, perfect, imperfect, and other Sanskrit TAM forms are part of the verbal inflection system.
Ok. But you linked English to Aramaic.
I know. Bopp, Jones, Schlegel, and others founded Indo-European linguistics in the 19th century (mostly; Jones was 18th) thanks to the study of Sanskrit and the comparisons made between Ancient Greek & Latin and Sanskrit. By the time Brugman & Delbruck wrote their Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, Sanskrit had possessed pride of place in Indo-European linguistics for ~100 years. That changed with the discovery of Hittite, which provided a severe counter-example against the dominant view of PIE as fundamentally nominative-accusative with a case system that died out over time (see e.g., From Case to Adposition: The Development of Configurational Syntax in Indo-European Languages and Archaic Syntax in Indo-European: The Spread of Transitivity in Latin and French).
Show me an example of inflection resulting in ambiguity.
1) That's not a phrase, it's a quote.
2) That's not ambiguous if you understand Greek. μολὼν is the masculine singular aorist active nominative participle of βλώσκω, and labe is the 2nd singular aorist imperative active form of λαμβάνω. Greek participles allowed for mini sentences in a way English cannot, as did the verbal inflection system. This isn't ambiguity, but it's opposite- increased clarity via morphological complexity.
How is pointing out that you are incorrect talking down to you? This topic is plagued with the difficulty of technical nuances being lost and replaced with inaccuracies. I hardly see an attempt to stop some of this as talking down.
They haven't. Modern translations into English rely on one degree of separation. They are translated from Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic into English. We can (and do) make use of Latin, Gothic, Syriac, and other texts for textual critical reasons, but not for translations. Modern English translations don't rely on the vulgate nor do German or Chinese translations rely on English.
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I'm talking about nominal inflection, not verbal. And I know what the moods, tenses and aspects are.
No, I did not. I was pointing out how the English versions are bastardized and mistranslated because Modern English does not have the nominal inflections or verbal conjugations of the original languages the bible was transcribed into. Anglo-Saxon didn't even come close.
The Mahā Mantra is the Hare Krishna Mantra. Let's examine what this means:
Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rāma Hare Rāma
Rāma Rāma Hare Hare
Krishna and Rāma are clearly the vocative masculine singular names of the deity.
Now, what is Hare? Well, Hare is the masc. sing. voc. of Hariḥ, another name for Vishnuḥ. But! Hare is also the fem. sing. voc. of Harā, another name for Rādhā, Krishna's consort.
So... is the Mahā Mantra invoking Vishnu by his three names? Or is it invoking him by two of his names, and by his shakti (feminine power)? Depending on the Vaishnava sect one belongs to, it could go either way. Why is it important? Because to Gaudiya Vaishnavas Sri Sri Rādhā-Krishna is the Supreme Godhead, from whom all other avatars and emanations originate. It is theologically important and ambiguous... one little word.
It is a phrase, used in real life, and I thank you for explaining the grammar of it and supporting my point.
Because you proceeded from a false assumption that I did not know what I was talking about, or why I was saying it, and that I was incorrect, which I was not. I was incorrect from your incorrect reading.
That makes it even worse and corrupts the translations even more.
Now, we can continue to lift our legs to see who can **** higher up the tree or we can agree to disagree and/or agree to agree that 2,000 year old texts translated into a completely unrelated language from the original are seriously flawed and misunderstood.
Caladan
Agnostic Pantheist
Not really a mystery to us Galilean and Judean locals. Jesus did what every young Israeli does when they become young adults... he went to the East in search of himself. Traveled all the way from Chennai in the south to Dharamsala in the north, not forgetting to pass through the white sandy beaches of Goa. Experimented with several hallucinogenic plants, took a few Yoga workshops, listened in the classes of several gurus, insisted on traveling Kashmir despite the warnings of the Roman authorities about the unstable situation there, and perhaps did a couple of treks and climbs in the Himalayas.
It's a ritual Holy Land Jews have been doing by the thousands or rather tens of thousands on annual basis. No mysterious missing years really... unless they ask you on a job interview: 'So what did you *really* do in India'?
godnotgod
Thou art That
Thanks for fleshing that question out. I was aware of the custom of Indians leaving home and going out on their own to 'find themselves', and wondered how far West the practice spread, (or was it in the other direction?).
Q. Being a Galilean local, what is your opinion of Yeshu and his family having been associated with the Nazorean Essene monastery at Mt. Carmel, just north of Nazareth?
godnotgod
Thou art That
Again, would Yeshu being a Nazarene, a mystic, be bound to the commandments of orthodox Judaism?
Shermana
Heretic
By "orthodox Judaism" do you mean the Pharisee or the Sadducee version? They were the ones adding artificial concepts into the scriptural interpretation.
Who says Nazarenes were "Mystics"? How do you know they were not the most "orthodox" of all and viewed the Pharisees as the "mystics" painting their own superstitious ideas into the law?
And do you think that when Jesus told the Leper to "make a sacrifice as Moses commanded" that this part was interpolated as well?
Fine. Do you have an example of the case system of Sanskrit, Greek, or Latin used that supports your assertions about inflection and "word play"? Because so far, your one example contains a verb and a participle and isn't word play or in any other sense ambiguous due to inflection.
They aren't mistranslated or bastardized. And nominal inflections are easily rendered into English. Despite the various categories of genitives, for example, if you stick and "of" in front of just about any genitive from Latin, Sanskrit, or Greek, you've got a good translation. Same with "to/for" and the dative in all three languages. Our prepositional system is directly related to the evolution from case to adposition from PIE through Greek, Latin, Into-Aryan, Hittite, and other ancient IE languages. Same with abstract grammatical constructions like the impersonal, which are nightmares to translate into non-IE languages like modern Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
All translations are imperfect. Period. This has zero to do with inflection.
It did, especially with respect to the case system (Anglo-saxon had nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive cases).
You might want to give context, then. This is the answer to a question. Also, it's utterly irrelevant that these words have cases. They're names. The fact that they may or may not refer to two different characters/deities/names of deities (a modern interpretation) has zero to do with the fact that the words are in a particular form (vocative). The vocative adds clarity by letting us know these are to be understood as spoken by Brahma in the text. The ambiguity (such as it exists) is related to what the names actually refer to which is completely and utterly unrelated to inflection.
How is this world play that relates at all to inflection? These are names. It doesn't matter what language or case they appear in as the ambiguity would be there if they weren't vocative.
Yes, a lot can ride on a word, whether it's logos or rama. What doesn't matter is the inflection (least of all nominal; simple prepositions can convey the semantics of case while entirely different words are required for different verbal inflections).
Yes, in the 300 and on gun rights paraphernalia among other things. It's still a quote from Thucydides. It's like "the game's afoot" which most people, if they know a work of literature it's from, identify it as a quote from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories when in fact it's from Henry V by Shakespeare (Conan Doyle quoted Shakespeare). King Leonides is said, by Thucydides, to have responded to the request to surrender his arms (and those of his 300 followers) with molon labe. That's where it's from. It's a quote. And again, there is no word play and nothing ambiguous because of cases or translations.
And so far that seems to be the case.
That they are translated from the original languages into the target languages (e.g., Greek to English) makes them worse than if they were translated from e.g., Greek into Latin into German into English? How?
It's not completely unrelated and unless you can read ancient Greek and Hebrew than how do you know how good (or bad, or flawed, or whatever) the translations are? My Hebrew leaves something to be desired (it's still better than my knowledge of Sanskrit and Arabic, but not as good as most of the languages I am familiar with). This is not true of Greek. Of all the languages I know, I've spent the most time studying all aspects of ancient Greek and my thesis was on the grammatical construal of modality in ancient Attic Greek. I've translated lines from the NT on this forum alone time and time again. I have yet to see how inflection somehow allowed for word play that was ambiguous.
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godnotgod
Thou art That
...the Christian theological establishment has decreed that Greek is the "original" language of the NEW TESTAMENT, despite the existence of voluminous proof that the Gospels were written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke and the language of the Biblical lands at the time. My preliminary consideration of this project presents the obvious fact that of the thousands of poetic verses in the Bible, none rhyme in Greek or any other language and yet all rhyme in Aramaic.* Surely to consider this coincidence is preposterous....
...the major reason for the insistence of Western Biblical theologians that Greek was the original language of the Gospel can be traced to the original controversies between the Greek converts to Christianity and the founding Jewish Christians.
The most accurate original texts are of course the Galilean Aramaic that Jesus, the disciples and apostles spoke and wrote in. These are the primary texts. They are preserved only by the ancient Church of the East theologians.
Victor Alexander
Aramaic Bible Translation Project by Victor Alexander
*Pe****ta primacists report that the various versions of the Pe****ta all agree with one another with accuracy beyond 99%. Not so with the various Western translations.
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A
angellous_evangellous
Guest
That's what I was thinking. It looks like our friend forgot what s/he was arguing: that s/he knew what s/he was talking about with respect to languages and chose a very poor example for another point.
It's not complex though.
A
angellous_evangellous
Guest
Which comic book did you get that from?
It would make a fantastic bumper sticker.
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You should at least plagiarize someone who knows what they are talking about.
Signs of the Cross = page 810
By Andrew Gabriel Roth
http://books.google.com/books?id=hN...anguage and yet all rhyme in Aramaic.&f=false
The entire post is a fraud.
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