Who Is This Son of Man
Page 4
Latin was used not only by the Roman imperials, but also by those Jews who worked in their households.61 Nonetheless, Jonathan Price has noted: ‘Those who lived within the administrative confi nes of the Roman Empire had few regular or sustained contacts with the Latin language.’62 Greek, on the other hand, had a much stronger infl uence on Eretz Israel and Coele Syria as a whole.
With the conquest of Alexander, Koine Greek became the administrative language throughout the region, effectively supplanting Aramaic for cross-border trade and any non-parochial purpose. Consequently, the average resident in Coele Syria would have needed to know a not insignifi cant amount of Greek just to interact with their government, never mind traders.
Nazareth was perhaps fi ve kilometres from Sepphoris and was not a mere 60. On the use of Arabic, Ammonite, and Ashdodite in Coele Syria at this time, see Lukaszewski, ‘Viable Approach’, p. 10, n. 31. See also Chaim Rabin, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic in the First Century’ in The Jewish People in the First Century (ed. Samuel Safrai, et al.; CRINT, 2; Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1975), pp. 1010–11.
61. Jonathan J. Price, ‘The Jews and the Latin Language in the Roman Empire’ in Jews and Gentiles in the Holy Land (ed. Menachem Mor et al.; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2003), pp. 165–67.
62. Price, ‘The Jews and the Latin Language’, p. 165.
1. Issues Concerning the Aramaic Behind o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou 15
satellite village, but a signifi cant thoroughfare for trade. The two formed the most direct trade route between the port at Ptolemais and the central city of Scythopolis and the south. It is therefore increasingly likely that its inhabit-ants would need to have more than a passing knowledge of Greek.63 As this knowledge seems particularly strong in Jerusalem,64 the need for familiarity increases due to trade in both directions. Consequently, the likelihood of Jesus being conversant with and even teaching in Greek is quite high. As Greenfi eld noted, ‘[T]here were surely those, even in the rural areas, who could speak Greek freely, just as there were many natives who lived in urban areas who could speak only Aramaic or Hebrew or perhaps in the South, an Arabic dialect.’65
On the use of Hebrew, Casey’s position is simply untenable in light of the textual evidence. The documentary record shows that Hebrew stayed in use for writing throughout the Hellenistic Period. Further analysis, however, also shows that Hebrew never ceased to be spoken in Judaea from the Exile to the Mishnaic period.66 Given the aforementioned effects of trade routes and the effect of pilgrimages by conservative Jewish parents such as Mary and Joseph, one cannot rule out a signifi cant level of Hebrew knowledge in Galilee, as well.
As Aramaic is a common point of assent, the place of the pre-Arabic dialects must also be considered for the sake of completeness. Eretz Israel largely 63. The route from Sepphoris to Scythopolis via Esdrelon contains several milestones, thus indicating that the route was relied upon signifi cantly and was not the equivalent of a country backroad.
64. Cf. Gerard Mussies, ‘Greek in Palestine and the Diaspora’ in The Jewish People in the First Century, pp. 1040–106; Jonas Greenfi eld, ‘The Languages of Palestine, 200 BCE–200 CE’
in Jewish Languages: Theme and Variations (ed. H. H. Paper; Cambridge, MA: Association for Jewish Studies, 1978), p. 150; Stanley Porter, ‘Did Jesus Ever Teach in Greek?’, Tyndale Bulletin 44(2) (1993), pp. 199–235; Jan N. Sevenster, Do You Know Greek? How Much Greek Could the First Jewish Christians Have Known? (NovTSup 19; Leiden: Brill, 1968).
65. Greenfi eld, ‘Languages’, p. 145.
66. Cf. Gary Rendsburg, Diglossia in Ancient Hebrew (New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society, 1990); See also Greenfi eld, ‘Languages’, p. 151 and Rabin, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic’, pp. 1007–39. For the Hebrew of Ben Sira as representing a diachronic development between Late Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew, see Avi Hurvitz, ‘The Linguistic Status of Ben Sira as a Link between Biblical and Mishnaic Hebrew: Lexicographical Aspects’ in The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Ben Sira (ed. T. Muraoka and J. F. Elwolde; STDJ
26; Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 72–86.
16
‘Who is this Son of Man?’
derived its commerce from traders travelling from Egypt and Arabia to India or the northern regions of the empire, and vice versa. Several of the pre-Arabic dialects are therefore attested in Eretz Israel at this time, including Thamudic in the Transjordan.67 There are also several Arabic names among the Greek and Latin inscriptions found in south-east Syria and Transjordan.68
Consequently, when seeking foreign sources to a Greek phrase, one is faced with several candidates. The necessary way forward, as Moulton noted, is that of negative proofs. Given the aforementioned language candidates, any attempt to unearth the Aramaic behind o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou must fi rst justify why an Aramaic source – as opposed to Hebrew or Greek – is necessary. One consequently needs a grammatical touchstone against which to test the phrase.
A touchstone traditionally used to quantify the ‘correctness’ of a Greek phrase is classical Attic. The trouble with doing so is that the Attic in question predates the time of Jesus by 500 years. Five centuries before the date of this article marks the beginning of the Elizabethan period in English literature
– a period coinciding with the English Renaissance.69 One of the religious highlights of that time is Saint Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (written 1534). In the 1951 republication of More’s work, the editor notes that major redaction was necessary to render the work’s language to be ‘more like that of today’. Consequently, it would be widely recognized as absurd to try to judge modern English usage by a grammar deduced from a text of that era.70
67. Thamudic belongs to the proto-Arabian subgroup and is written in a script that comes from the Arabian Peninsula. The presence of the dialect in the Transjordan suggests migration, presumably by traders.
68. Rabin, ‘Hebrew and Aramaic’, pp. 1009–10.
69. Ellen
Crofts,
Chapters in the History of English Literature: From 1509 to the Close of the Elizabethan Period (London: Rivingtons, 1884).
70. The note reads: ‘The fi rst plan was to change only the spelling. It soon became evident that the punctuation would have to be changed to follow present usage. The longest sentences were then broken up into two or three, and certain others were rearranged into a word order more like that of today’ [see the Project Gutenburg version of the work at www.gutenberg.org/
fi les/17075/17075-8.txt (viewed 20 July 2009)]. The situation does not improve if one moves forward by a century, to the King James Version of the Bible in 1611, or even two centuries (300 years ago), to the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719. Descriptions of ancient languages as static – even relatively so – are as groundless as any assertion of the same about English or any other modern language ( Contra Casey, ‘Response to Owen and Shepherd’, p. 5).
1. Issues Concerning the Aramaic Behind o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou 17
Consequently, one must try to use a grammar of a more relevant timeframe and provenance. This pursuit, however, leads to several Greek grammars that are distilled from the New Testament. The most recent of these in English was published nearly 50 years ago; the most recent in German is 30 years old; none has been distilled comprehensively. Given these dated and limited treatments, one can say little authoritatively about the Greek aspects of our phrase except to say that it is consonant with the basic rules of Greek grammar. A search through the New Testament reveals that the structure is quite common.71 The problem with the phrase thus becomes one of context and the religious meaning intended.
As a consequence of this lacklustre sourcing of Greek, philological studies on the Semitic background to the present Greek phrase are forced to assume an origin such as they endeavour to uncover. This is true regardless of whether one attempts to revert the phrase to Aramaic or Hebrew. If (as Casey states) the phrase is not ‘natural Greek’, why must it be ‘natural’ Aramaic?72
; The expression must be demonstrated to be dissonant in relation to the bulk of Greek usage at the time.73 Once shown to be discordant with Greek, a scientifi c approach would require analysing the phrase through the known grammatical phenomena and, if possible, grammars of the other languages in use in the same region and time. For o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou, this means considering the Aramaic, Hebrew and pre-Arabic evidence.
In doing so, however, one must first consider translation technique in 71. Outside the Gospels and Acts, Revelation tops the frequency list for occurrences of the structure article-noun- article-noun (genitive) in which the genitive modifi es or otherwise relates directly to the preceding noun. It contains 219 such occurrences. However, the frequency cannot be said to relate to its style. Romans has 91, Hebrews 62, 1 Corinthians 60, 2 Corinthians 57, 1 John 31, and Galatians 30. James, an epistle clearly written by a bilingual author with high Greek skills, has the construction only 13 times. It is worth noting that none of this data was available in the grammars. Rather, it is distilled from my work incorporated in the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, n.d.).
72. Casey notes: ‘It is widely agreed that [o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou] is not natural Greek, and that it represents some form of the Aramaic ())#n()) rb’ (‘Response to Owen and Shepherd’, 3). As Moulton’s comment on this subject implies, however, it is agreed so widely because it is so widely assumed ( A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 2, p. 16). In fact, the philological evidence for this point of the debate has never been developed suffi ciently to support agreement much beyond assumption. See also Lindars, Jesus Son of Man, p. 17.
73. To ascertain this, a bell curve approach works best to classify superior Greek and inferior Greek relative to the form and syntax employed by the majority of language users.
18
‘Who is this Son of Man?’
antiquity. In the literature surveyed above, the only scholar again who has taken up the matter of translation technique is Maurice Casey. Unfortunately, Casey consistently relies on translation studies that analyse modern languages and then extrapolates from those studies to address the problem of retroversion, summarizing the Septuagint’s translation techniques only in terms of overliteral translation to the point of transliteration.74 This does not do justice to the vast array of translation techniques manifest in the Septuagint and further anachronistically interjects modern language issues into a strange milieu.
Ancient translations are known to have ranged from the very literal (so the LXX Pentateuch) to the very fl uid (the rendering of Ben Sira from Hebrew).75
At most, translators in antiquity are thought to have used a primitive glossary; there is no concrete evidence for the use of dictionaries or word lists.76 The literalness of the translation in the fi rst books of the LXX is recognized as not indicative of highly developed translation techniques. Rather, as Olofsson and others have noted, it indicates reverence for the text.77 Consequently, the literalness of any retroversion of o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou into Aramaic needs to be justifi ed by the level of authority accorded to the text and the strictness required.
Historically, Hebrew has been viewed as a second-string source for the phrase – even when understood to be still in use colloquially during Jesus’ time.
The known Hebrew speech centres are located in Judaea.78 The understanding follows that, because Jesus came from Galilee, he would have been conversant in Aramaic alone, not Hebrew. Therefore, if the Son of Man sayings are to relate back to Jesus, they must originate from his mother tongue, Galilean Aramaic.
74. Casey,
Aramaic Sources, pp. 93–98.
75. Cf. Benjamin G. Wright, No Small Difference: Sirach’s Relationship to its Hebrew Parent Text (SBLSCS 26; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), p. 26; Erik W. Larson, The Translation of Enoch: From Aramaic into Greek (unpublished doctoral dissertation; New York University, 1995); Vincent T. M. Skemp, The Vulgate of Tobit Compared with Other Ancient Witnesses (SBLDS 180; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2000); Ètienne Nodet, ‘Jewish Features in the
“Slavonic” War of Josephus’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the SBL, Nashville, TN, 21 November 2000), p. 26.
76. Staffan
Olofsson,
The LXX Version: A Guide to the Translation Technique of the Septuagint (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1992), p. 7.
77. Olofsson,
The LXX Version, pp. 33–34. For more on the literalness of translation as correlative to the authority of the text, see Lukaszewski, ‘Viable Approach’, pp. 72–75.
78. Greenfi eld, ‘Languages of Palestine’, pp. 145–50.
1. Issues Concerning the Aramaic Behind o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou 19
This, however, underscores a second assumption necessary for retroverting the phrase to Galilean Aramaic: a Sitz im Leben of Galilee. Two dynamics of the problem mitigate against this infl uence, however.
First, if one accepts the Son of Man phrases as authentic, one may also accept Jesus’ quotations from the Old Testament as authentic and statically handed down as part of the Jesus tradition. This being the case, Jesus is then seen to be quite conversant with Hebrew, preferring it over any Aramaic paraphrase. When combined with the Son of Man sayings in Ezekiel, there is both a religious and linguistic framework on which to argue for a Hebrew background.
Second, while Jesus spent a signifi cant amount of his ministry in Galilee, his last days and the earliest years of the post-resurrection Christian community were based in Judaea. Consequently, even if the phrase comes from Galilee, it was formalized in Judaea and was subjected to linguistic pressure from the speakers there.79
Consequently, one cannot rule Hebrew out of the linguistic milieu behind the Son of Man sayings.80 Rather, a scientifi c enquiry into the linguistic origins and possible nature of the saying must reason from the grammatical practices manifest diachronically in the texts from the Dead Sea: Qumran, Masada, Wadi Murabba(at, Nah}al H}ever, Nah}al S9e)elim, and Nah}al Mismar.81 The phrase
‘Son of Man’ is heretofore unknown from those corpora and such a study is outside the realm of this discussion. But there is a need for an assessment based on the grammar (especially the construct phrases) therein attested, to provide the scientifi c underpinning of any alleged Aramaic forerunner to o( ui(oj tou=
a)nqrw/pou.
A similar study is necessary with respect to the pre-Arabic dialects manifest in Judaea and the Transjordan. Again, attestation of the precise phrase ‘Son of 79. For this reason, attempts at reconstructing a Galilean form of the phrase appear unnecessary and may be misguided.
80. The fact that Babatha’s archive does not include Hebrew texts should not be misconstrued as a comprehensive refl ection of the linguistic milieu of the region. See Lukaszewski,
‘Viable Approach’, p. 8, n. 25.
81. For a sketch of Hebrew as found in the scrolls from the Dead Sea, see T. Muraoka.
‘Hebrew’ in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls (ed. Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C.
VanderKam; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 340–45. See also E. Y. Kutscher, The Language and Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll (1Q Isaa) (STDJ 6; Leiden: Brill, 1974), pp. 23–30.
20
‘Who is this Son of Man?’
Man’ is not necessary as much as the morphological and syntactic dynamics of the attested genitival expressions. An awareness of genitival expressions in other Semitic languages contributes to the degree to which one can attribute the phrase to one of them, none of them, or all of them.
After excluding the phrase from Greek and justifying its origin as being particular to the Aramaic of the time, it is necessary to justify one’s chosen morphology. As noted above, studies as recent as 1965 showed an unnecessary reliance on Jewish Palestinian Aramaic and sources well outside the period of the earliest Christians.82 Again in 1979, Fitzmyer drew from a text of the eighth century BCE to illustrate the earliest occurrence of the phrase in Old Aramaic.83
Rather, one must restrict one’s corpus to the closest dialects possible and as close as possible to the same or similar genres.84
As Fitzmyer has noted, the time of Jesus and the earliest Christians is in the period of Middle Aramaic, a period from about 200 BCE to about 200 CE.
These dates are certainly not fi rm,85 but the relevance of the texts even within that range, never mind outside it, varies considerably. The texts from Coele Syria with provenance closest to the earliest attested post-resurrection communities are of three kinds: texts from Qumran, the Bar Kokhba letters, and the epigraphic material. Obviously, accepting the post-resurrection Church as the approximate centre, the relevance of each text is in direct correlation to its proximity in terms of date, geography and genre. The nature of the epigraphic material renders it unsuitable for the present problem except to clarify how 82. Vermes, ‘Use’, pp. 310–30.
83. Fitzmyer,
A Wandering Aramean, p. 147.
84. For this reason, the Aramaic from 11Q10 is not as relevant to the present problem as it may seem. There is no indication that such a form as that evinced in 11Q10 26.3 (#n) rb) was the only way that the phrase could be constructed.
85. Fitzmyer,
A Wandering Aramean, p. 77, n. 32. It is worth noting that the natural start for Middle Aramaic is around 300 BCE, with the conquest of Alexander the Great. However, as Fitzmyer here notes, the Aramaic of Daniel suggests a degree of persistence in the older form called Biblical Aramaic. The degree to which this linguistic conservatism is a forerunner of the Atticising school of the second century CE is unclear.
1. Issues Concerning the Aramaic Behind o( ui(oj tou= a)nqrw/pou 21