Grace
Theological Journal 5.2 (1984) 271-288
Copyright © 1941 by Grace
Theological Seminary. Cited with permission.
Understanding the Difficult Words of
Jesus
WESTON W. FIELDS
Understanding the Difficult Words of
Jesus, by David Bivin and Roy Bliz-
zard.
It was during my sabbatical year in
quainted with David Bivin,
Robert Lindsey, and other students and colleagues
of
David Flusser of the
anticipation that I began reading this book by David Bivin
and Roy Blizzard,
which
popularizes some of the results of a whole generation of research into
the
linguistic and literary background of the synoptic Gospels by Prof. Flusser,
Dr. Lindsey, and their associates in
generally
good, and I can be enthusiastic about most of them. The informal
style and
largely undocumented format in which these ideas are presented,
however, may
for many detract from their ready acceptance.
The Milieu
and Burden of the Book
It is
important to understand that this book was born out of a combina-
tion of circumstances which cannot be found
anywhere except in
which
could not have been found even in
factors
include a rapprochement between Jewish and Christian scholars in a
completely
Jewish University, freedom of study unhampered by religious
hierarchical control, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a growing
appreciation for their bearing on NT study, and most importantly, the fact
that
gospel research in
very
similar in many respects to the Hebrew idiom (Mishnaic
Hebrew)1 of
[1]
See, for example, Jack Fellman,
"The Linguistic Status of Mishnaic Hebrew,"
JNSL 5
(1977) 21-22; Chaim Rabin, "The Historical
Background of
Scripta Hierosolymitana, vol. 4: Aspects of the
and Yigael Yadin (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1958) 144-61; and W. Chomsky, "What Was
the
Jewish Vernacular During the
212; Jonas
C. Greenfield, "The Languages of
Languages. Theme and Variations, ed. by Herbert H. Paper (
tion for Jewish Studies, 1978) 143-54; Herbert
C. Youtie, "Response,ft
in Jewish Lan-
guages. Theme and Variations, 155-57; Joshua Blau,
A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew
(Wiesbaden:
Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), I; E. Y. Kutscher, "Hebrew Language: The
Dead Sea
Scrolls," Encyclopedia Judaica 16: cols.
1583-90; Idem, "Hebrew Language:
Mishnaic
Hebrew," Encyclopedia Judaica 16: cols.
1590-1607
272 GRACE THEOLOGICAL
JOURNAL
Jesus’ day. All of this, moreover, is accomplished in the
midst of growing
recognition
among NT scholars that the key to understanding a number of
sayings in
the gospels has been lost, unless one finds it in Jewish and Hebrew
sources.
The more technical background of Understanding
the Difficult Words of
Jesus is to be found in scholarly literature
authored by Flusser, Safrai,
and
others at
panion to this book are two works by Robert L.
Lindsey, pastor of Baptist
House in
sey's work is integrated here with the
suggestions of Bivin and Blizzard. The
first of
Lindsey's works is entitled A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of
Mark (with a foreword by Flusser)3 and the second a pamphlet entitled
simply, The
Gospels.4
The burden
of these books may be summarized in a few propositions,
which not
only go counter in some respects to the prevailing wisdom of NT
scholarship
outside of
revolutionary than might first appear. These propositions are:
-Hebrew was the primary spoken and
written medium of the majority
of the Jews in
-Jesus therefore did most if not all of
his teaching in Hebrew
2
Many of these articles are available in English. A sampling of Professor
Flusser's
writings
follows (some of them are English summaries of Hebrew articles): Jesus (New
tyrdom in Second Temple Judaism and in Early
Christianity," Immanuel 1 (1972)
37-38;
"The Liberation of
I (1972)
35-36; "The Last Supper and the Essenes," Immanuel
2 (1973) 23-27; "Jewish
Roots of the
Liturgical Trishagion," Immanuel 3
(1973-74) 37-43; "Did You Ever See
a Lion
Working as a Porter?" Immanuel 3 (1973/74) 61-64; "Hebrew Improperia,"
Immanuel 4 (1974) 51-54; "Hillel's
Self-Awareness and Jesus," Immanuel 4 (1974)
31-36;
"Two Anti-Jewish Montages in Matthew," Immanuel 5 (1975)
37-45; "Theses
51 on the
Emergence of Christianity from Judaism," Immanuel 5 (1975) 74-84;
The
Crucified
One and the Jews," Immanuel 7 (1977) 25-37; "Do You Prefer New
Wine?”
Immanuel 9 (1979) 26-31; "The Hubris of the
Antichrist in a Fragment from
Immanuel 10 (1980) 31-37; "At the Right Hand
of the Power," Immanuel 14 (1982)
42-46;
"Foreword" in Robert Lisle Lindsey, A
Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of
Mark (Jerusalem: Dugith,
1973) 1-8. Flusser and Safrai
together: "The Slave of Two
Masters,"
Immanuel 6 (1976) 30-33; "
Period,"
Immanuel 6 (1976) 43-45; "Some Notes on the Beatitudes (Matthew
5:3-12;
Luke
6:20-26)," Immanuel 8 (1978) 37-47. "Who Sanctified the
Beloved in the Womb,"
Immanuel 11 (1980) 46-55; "The Essene Doctrine of Hypostatis and
Rabbi Meir,"
Immanuel 14 (1982) 47-57. Safrai
alone: "The Synagogues South of Mt. Judah,"
Immanuel 3 (1973-1974) 44-50; "Pilgrimage to
3
Robert Lisle Lindsey, A Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark
(
Dugith, 1973).
4
Robert Lisle Lindsey, The Gospels
(Jerusalem: Dugith, 1972). Also important are
his
articles "A Modified Two-Document Theory of the Synoptic Dependence and
Interdependence,"
NovT 6 (1963) 239-63; and "Did Jesus Say Verily
or Amen?"
Christian News from
FIELDS: DIFFICULT WORDS OF JESUS 273
-the original accounts of Jesus' life were
composed in Hebrew (as one
might conclude
anyway from early church history)5
-the Greek gospels which have come down to
us represent a third or
fourth stage in
the written6 transmission of accounts of the life of
Jesus
-Luke was the first gospel written, not
Mark7
-the key to understanding many of the
difficult or even apparently
unintelligible
passages in the gospels is to be found not primarily in a
better
understanding of Greek, but in retroversion to and translation
of the Hebrew
behind the Greek (made possible by the often trans-
parently
literalistic translation methods of the Greek translators).
Although many of the same ideas have been
proposed for some time on
the
basis of Aramaic NT originals,8 the insertion of Hebrew into the
picture is
becoming more
and more accepted, especially among speakers of Modern
Hebrew,
perhaps because a conversational knowledge of Hebrew makes it
5
Among early Christian writers who speak on the subject there is
unanimous
agreement that
Matthew wrote his gospel in Hebrew. The testimonies include Papias
(Fragment
6); Irenaeus (Against Heresies 3.1); Origen (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History
6
Lindsey, The Gospels, 4; A
Hebrew Translation of the Gospel of Mark, xix-xx.
7 This is developed much more at length by
Lindsey on the basis of the order of the
stories or
units in the Synoptics. There are 77 units found in
all three of the gospels. 60
of
these are in the same order in all three gospels. Mark contains 1 unit unknown
to
Matthew and
Luke; Matthew contains 27 units unknown to Mark and Luke; Luke
contains 46
units unknown to Mark and Matthew. These "extra" units occur, usually
in
groups, in between the 60 units which the Synoptics
share in common. Most
remarkable is
the fact that Matthew and Luke contain 36 units which are unknown in
Mark,
"yet only in one of these units do Matthew and Luke agree as to where to
place
them
among the 6O-unit outline they share with Mark" (The Gospels, 6). Lindsey
continues:
"When we put these and many other facts together we see (1) that it is
improbable that
either Matthew or Luke saw the writing of the other and (2) that
Mark's
Gospel somehow stands between Matthew and Luke causing much of the
agreement of
story-order and wording we see in the Synoptic Gospels. We also see that
whatever be
the order of our Gospel dependence it is probable that each had at least
one
source unknown to us" (Ibid., 6). Lindsey suggests that it is the
vocabulary of
Mark that is the key to priority. The unique story units show that Mark
used either
Matthew or Luke. The book which shows uniquely Markan
vocabulary was probably
dependent upon
Mark and the one which does not contain Mark's unique vocabulary
probably
preceded Mark. It is Matthew that carries over many of Mark's unique
expressions,
while they are usually missing from Luke. Hence, the order of composi-
tion seems to be Luke, Mark, Matthew (Ibid.,
6-7). The numbers in the statistics and
quotations
above have been slightly corrected to coincide with those in A Hebrew
Translation
of the Gospel of Mark, pp.
xi-xiii.
8
Cf. Gustaf Dalman, The Words of Jesus Considered in the Light of
Post-Biblical
Jewish
Writings and the Aramaic Language, trans. by D. M. Kay (
of the
New Testament (London:
Geoffrey Chapman, 1971); and Idem, "The Contribu-
tion of Qumran Aramaic to the Study of the New
Testament," NTS 20 (1974) 382-407.
274 GRACE THEOLOGICAL
JOURNAL
easier to
see the Hebrew syntax behind a document.
Some of the other ideas
are old
ones now revived, and some of the propositions, especially those of
Lindsey are quite new. At
first glance, some evangelicals will undoubtedly be
inclined to
say that such an approach represents something dangerous for or
incongruous with
certain modem conceptions of inspiration and formulations
of
inerrancy, especially when taken together with the inferences which are
commonly
drawn out of them by American Christians. But such fears would
be
unfounded, and objections based on such misgivings should be held in
check,
until it becomes clear whether the problem is with the theory of
Hebrew
backgrounds for the Synoptics (to which one might
easily add the
first half
of Acts and the book of Hebrews, although Bivin and
Blizzard do
not), or
with the theories of composition and authorship and notions of
literary
convention that are sometimes attached to accepted notions of the
inspiration of
these ancient documents of the Church.
The Language
of Jesus
Bivin and
Blizzard first take up the question of the language of Jesus.
This
question is not settled as easily as one might expect from reading the
unfortunate
translation of [Ebrai~j and [Ebrai*sti< as
"Aramaic" in the NIV
(John 5:2;
expected a
little more reticence in changing the text on the part of these
particular
translators. In their defense, however,
it must be said that they are
following in
part the suggestion of the Greek lexicon available at that time,9
but the
more recent lexicon10 which was published the year after the
complete
NIV, adds that "Grintz,
JBL 79, '60, 32-47 holds that some form of Hebrew
was
commonly spoken." Had either Gingrich and Danker or the translators
of the NIV
been aware of the large amount of literature published between
1960 and
1978 which supports Grintz's contention, they
undoubtedly would.
have
taken more seriously the NT's statement that these words were Hebrew11
It is a
little unfair, for example, that the NIV takes "Rabboni"
in John 20: 16
as
"Aramaic" when the text says that it is Hebrew, and it is in fact
equally as
good
Hebrew as Aramaic.12 Even if it were Aramaic, it undoubtedly could
have been
described as Hebrew as legitimately as "Abba" and "Imma" can be
9 William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New
Testament
and Other Early Christian literature (A translation and adaptation of
Walter
Bauer's Griechisch-Deutsches Worterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testa-
ments ulid der ubrigen urchristlichen
literature, fourth
revised and augmented edition,
1952;
10 William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New
Testament
and Other Early Christian literature (Second edition revised and augmented
by F.
Wilbur Gingrich and Frederick W. Danker from Walter Bauer's fifth edition,
1958;
11 See nn. 1, 2, and 3 of this article for a listing of some of this literature.
12
M. Jastrow, A
Dictionary of the Targumim. The
Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi.
and the Midrashic Lliterature, (reprint;
seems to
use "language of the fathers" J. W. 5.2) and "Hebrew" (J.
W. 6.2.1) to refer to
Hebrew and
not Aramaic as the spoken language of the people during the siege of
FIELDS: DIFFICULT WORDS OF JESUS 275
today,
though in fact these last two may also be described as "Aramaic loan
words."
NIV reverts to "Hebrew" for Ebri*sti< in
there is
no choice but to understand the words "Abaddon"
(a synonym for
hell in
Rabbinic literature)13 and "Armageddon" as Hebrew. Somewhat less
defensible is
the NIV's insertion of the Aramaic words Elwi, Elwi" in
Matthew's
account of the crucifixion (27:46), with little important textual
support.14 These translations of the NIV show the bias which Bivin and Bliz-
zard oppose.
Their first chapter reminds the reader
that 78% of the biblical text as we
have it
is in Hebrew (most of the OT). If one
grants to Bivin and Blizzard for
the
moment their assertion about Hebrew originals for the gospels and adds
to the
OT the highly Hebraic portions of the NT (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
Acts
1:1-15:35, which together constitute 40% of the NT), the percentage of
the
biblical material with a Hebrew background rises to 87% (subtracting the
1% that is in Aramaic in Daniel and Ezra).
When one further adds the 176
quotations from
the OT in John and from Acts 15:36 to the end of the NT,
this
percentage rises to over 90%. To this Bivin and Blizzard might have
added the
entire book of Hebrews, which early Christian writers who speak
on the
subject agree was written by Paul in Hebrew and translated into Greek
either by
Luke or Clement of Rome.15 This would bring the percentage of NT
books with
a Hebrew background even closer to 100%.16 All of this leads
13 Ibid., 3.
14
The textual support in favor of the
Aramaic phrase is: x B 33 copsa, bo eth, but as
Metzger
points out, this was undoubtedly an assimilation to
the Aramaic reading in
Mark
literated Hebrew hml (why?) as well as yniTaq;baw; (forsaken), with Codex Bezae charac-
teristically giving a completely Hebrew reading of the
quotation from Ps 22:1, -------
representing the
Hebrew yniTab;zafE. Thus the NIV strikes out on its own here, rejecting the
reading of
the Byz family, most other manuscripts, and the UBS
text as well (Bruce M.
Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament
[
Bible Societies, 1971] 70,119-20).
15
Eusebius speaks of this tradition several
times, indicating his preference for
Clement of
but also
recording that there was a strong tradition in favor of Luke. Both Clement of
tion
(Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History,
16
To this many would add the Gospel of John.
Cf. C. F. Burney, The Aramaic
Origin of
the Fourth Gospel
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1922) and The Poetry of
Our Lord
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1925). What is proposed here for Aramaic might even more
cogently be
proposed for Hebrew. In addition to this, even W. F. Howard (James
Hope
Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek,
vol. II: Accidence and Word
Formation, by W. F. Howard [
solution of
the tangled problem of the language of the Apocalypse is said to be this:
(a) The
author writes in Greek, thinks in Hebrew; (b) he has taken over some Greek
sources
already translated from the Hebrew; (c) he has himself translated and adapted
some
Hebrew sources." On the basis of "the instances of mistranslation
corrected by
retroversion"
Howard leans toward the latter two suggestions. However, it appears
that,
when new advances in understanding the Hebrew of the period as well as early
historical
references about the composition of the Apocalypse are taken into account,
the
first of these suggested solutions is nearer the mark. The very Hebraic style
of
Revelation
is most transparent.
276 GRACE THEOLOGICAL JOURNAL
rather
inescapably to the conclusion that Hebrew is as important for the
study of
the NT as it is for the study of the OT (though certainly not to the
exclusion of
other languages and cultures which were influential in the period
of the
It is interesting that the authors connect
the theories of Markan priority
and
Aramaic backgrounds as well as the idea that the Greek Gospels repre-
sent
"late, faulty transmission of oral reports recorded by the Greek speaking
Church far
removed from the unsophisticated Judean and Galilean scene"
(p. 26) with "liberal" scholarship. It
might be more to the point to say that
the
first two are almost universally assumed by NT scholarship of every
brand,
while at the least the oral aspect is tacitly assumed by many, both
"liberal" and "conservative" alike. Bivin and Blizzard
imply (though the point
is not
made as forcefully as it could be) that the gospels we have rest on
written
records, and that these records were made in the
language of
Jesus by people surrounded by the culture and religion of Jesus
very
shortly after the life of Jesus. This,
in their opinion, makes the study of
Hellenism
and things Hellenistic (not to speak of Roman language, religion,
and
culture) very secondary indeed for the understanding of the gospels.17
Of
course, it
must first be established that Hebrew was the primary spoken
medium of
Jesus and his followers. Certainly
Aramaic was used, but not as
much as
it was four or five centuries earlier by the returning captives from
Aramaic-speaking
was
well-known and used among scholars for certain purposes. But most of
the
literary indications extant today about the language of the common people
of
Jesus' day point toward Hebrew as the primary language in an undoubtedly
bi-,
tri-, or quadrilingual society (and no one living in
multilingual
today can
doubt the possibility and feasibility of such a thing in Jesus' day).
The
linguistic situation during that time is probably best described by the
term
"diglossia." This term is used to describe the well-known
habit of multi-
lingual
speakers of speaking their various languages in different religious,
social,
economic, or political situations, which may vary as well with the
particular
geographical setting in which an utterance is made. The indications
in
favor of Hebrew are: (1) the languages used in the inscriptions on the cross
(Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew); (2) the large number of Hebrew words surviving
in the
NT (many more by actual count than Aramaic words); (3) the now
better-understood fact that Hebrew works from the time (just as modern
Israeli
Hebrew scholarly works) contain Aramaisms, but that
these do not
point to
Aramaic originals; and (4) most especially the astounding fact that
much of
the day-to-day
17 The debate about the
"Hellenistic" or "Non-Hellenistic" background of the
writers of
the NT (including Paul) continues.C.F. e.g., on the
Hellenistic side, Samuel
Sandmel, The Genius of Paul (Philadelphia: Fortress,
1979), and on Jewish side,
W. D.
Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (4th ed.;
a most
stimulating recent approach to the religion of Paul, see E. P. Sanders, Paul
and
Palestinian Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977) and Idem, Paul. the law and the
Jewish People
(Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).
FIELDS: DIFFICULT WORDS OF JESUS 277
Massada is
in Hebrew. All of this, and especially the last point, is so over-
whelming that
even Matthew Black has had to concede that "if this is a cor-
rect