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Tag Archives: Greek

How Jesus Talked

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on How Jesus Talked

Tags

Amos, Bible, Biblical Hebrew, Calling of St. Matthew, Caravaggio, Christianity, Close Encounters with the People of the Past, Essay, Etymology, Greek, Hebrew, Hebrew Bible, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Judaism, language, lecture, linguistics, Mark, New Testament, Old Testament, religion, speech, Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, The Calling of Saint Matthew, The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, Thomas Cahill, Translation, Writing

The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.

When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:

Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k’nachal eytahn,

which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…

If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…

In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Cahill’s speech “Close Encounters with the People of the Past”.

Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The image: a section of Caravaggio’s 1599 masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew.

Related reading:

  • Does the beauty of the Bible attest to its truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and others answer)
  • Cahill ponders why the Christian worldview was revolutionary
  • Cahill’s brief, brilliant introduction to Saint Augustine

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The Christian Worldview Versus the Greek

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Andromache, Christians, Faith, fate, Fideism, God, Greek, Greek History, Greek philosophy, Hector, history, hope, Jews, New Testament, reason, Roman History, Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter, Scripture, the Bible, The Roman empire, Thomas Cahill, Worldview

Raphael's School of Athens

“The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

__________

From chapter 7 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

Any loyal visitor to this blog will be aware that much of my reading over the past year has orbited around the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem. Fideism, which has been the most compelling idea I have encountered in that time, explicitly locates itself in the murky terrain between — or above — faith and reason. I’ve not forgotten that I’m past deadline on some paragraphs about this subject and the other central themes of the past year, and I can only excuse my laziness by saying that part of my distraction has come in the form of Cahill’s incredible book.

I find this particular section pretty intriguing, and though I’ve been mulling it over for the past few days, am not exactly sure what to make of it. In the context of Cahill’s entire narrative it takes on some added shadows and contours, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll merely supplement it with a selection from Arthur Schlesinger’s biography of Robert Kennedy, in which he writes the following about Robert’s spiritual response to his brother’s death:

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy…

The fact that [Robert] found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.’

Hence, the Greek emphasis on fate, which was the foundation of Robert’s reflexive view of the world, absorbed tragedy as an unavoidable consequence of the unchangeable cards one is dealt in life. On the contrary, the Christian perspective, with its emphasis on hope (and its cousin possibility), assessed negative events with an eye to past decisions and potential future choices: not only could it have been different, but I now can choose how to react.

Read another fragment from Cahill’s book:

Greek SymposiaPartying with the Greeks

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‘Through the Haze of Pain’: Robert Kennedy Rises from the Depths

25 Monday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Bobby Kennedy, campaigns, Camus, Corridors of Grief, existentialism, future, Government, Greek, Greek tragedy, history, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, plans, politicians, politics, President, RFK, Rita Dallas, Robert Francis Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, stoicism

Robert Francis Kennedy

“With all he had striven for smashed in a single afternoon, [Robert] had an overwhelming sense of the fragility and contingency of life. He had never taken plans very seriously in the past. He could not believe in them at all now…

Robert Kennedy at last traveled in that speculative area where doubt lived. He returned from the dangerous journey, his faith intact, but deepened, enriched. From Aeschylus and Camus he drew a sort of Christian stoicism and fatalism: a conviction that man could not escape his destiny, but that this did not relieve him of the responsibility of fulfilling his own best self. He supplemented the Greek image of man against fate with the existentialist proposition that man, defining himself by his choices, remakes himself each day and therefore can never rest. Life was a sequence of risks. To fail to meet them was to destroy a part of oneself.

He made his way through the haze of pain—and in doing so brought other sufferers insight and relief. ‘For the next two and a half years,’ wrote Rita Dallas, his father’s nurse, ‘Robert Kennedy became the central focus of strength and hope for the family…. Despite his own grief and loneliness, he radiated an inner strength that I have never seen before in any other man…. Bobby was the one who welded the pieces back together.’ As his father had said so long before, he would keep the Kennedys together, you could bet.

He was now the head of the family. With his father stricken, his older brothers dead, he was accountable to himself. The qualities he had so long subordinated in the interest of others—the concern under the combativeness, the gentleness under the carapace, the idealism, at once wistful and passionate, under the toughness—could rise freely to the surface. He could be himself at last.”

__________

A passage pulled from Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

I promise this is the last section from Schlesinger or Dallek that I’ll post — at least for awhile.

RFK / JFKRobert Kennedy FamilyRobert Kennedy and ChildrenRobert Kennedy and daughterJohn F. And Jacqueline Kennedy With Baby Caroline Kennedy

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The Odyssey Home

07 Thursday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

battle, Chris Hedges, classics, conflict, epic poetry, Greek, home, Homer, Iraq War, literature, Military, New York Times, Odysseus, poetry, PTSD, Speak Memory, Stanley Lombardo, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Trojan War, Vladimir Nabokov, War, Western Civilization, Writing

D-Day InvasionSPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero,
The wanderer, blown off course time and again
After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.

Of all these things
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.

By now, all the others who had fought at Troy—
At least those who had survived the war and the sea—
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.

__________

Book I, Lines 1-18 of Homer’s Odyssey (Stanley Lombardo’s translation).

These lines were composed in the 8th century BCE. Other than the Iliad, the work which these words set off is the oldest extant work of Western literature.

As a reminder to those who’ve forgotten their 10th grade English curriculum, the Iliad is the story of the final few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the decade-long tale of its hero, Odysseus, as he returns home to his wife and son in Ithaca, where he is king. Odysseus is noted for his brilliance, perseverance, and cunning; he devised the Trojan horse, the winning ruse which, after ten years of warfare, led the Greeks to “plunder Troy’s sacred heights”.

The larger narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey is an immortal one, vibrating with harsh and immediate lessons for our own age. Philosophically, it relates the pitfalls of pride, the capriciousness of fate, the pulls of romantic love, and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s great dictum to be careful what you wish for — you may get it. On a practical level, however, it tells of war’s horrors and pities, its moments for heroism and glory, and the fact that, oftentimes, the settling of the dust marks only half the battle, because it’s the return home that often proves most perilous. It was true in the day of Patroclus, and true in the age of PTSD. As Chris Hedges noted, in his New York Times review of the Lombardo translation, “every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey.”

Some brief notes about SPEAK MEMORY:

The opening words are essential. Homer’s poems would not have been codified on tablets or parchment; instead they were orated to an audience and set to some form of rhythmic music, such as the slow beat of a griot’s drum. For this reason, it’s important to try to hear his words spoken, either by yourself or by a performer such as Stanley Lombardo, who penned the above translation and reads them in the video below.

“Speak Memory” is also crucial because although we don’t know whether Homer was an actual person, folklore tells us that he was real and that he was also blind. So the “memory” part was something he would have only been able to express through his tongue. What’s more, like Shakespeare, he may never have existed; like Milton, he may never have actually seen the works over which we now pore.

Third, “Speak Memory” is notable because it is also the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir. In a strong field, one of the most compelling titles I know of for an autobiography.

Watch Lombardo perform this portion of the Odyssey, as well as an extended discussion about the work, here:

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