Revelation testament said : We also have Him saying John 8:47 47 He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God. Here the word Θεοῦ in singular form is being used for "God." But I believe Jesus may have said JHWH ie ye are not of JHWH. But frustratingly, I cannot prove that from our existing texts....
While I doubt from what you have said that you can help me here, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.
Hi RevelationTestament :
1) I agree that I do not think I will be of any help in this for you. I think any significant, truly accurate back-translating cannot be done given the limitation of back-translating in general, and specifically, for Jn 8:47, there are no extant greek variants for this word in ANY greek manuscript considered by critical texts.
2) My point in saying "be careful" terms of trying to add words together is that, while greeks LOVED to add words onto other words to make other words and meanings, even in their language, the resultant meaning may not resemble the two words one combines. Also, there are a lot of symbolic nuances in texts that cannot be seen in English.
While English may say “He that is of God hears the words of God; therefore, you hear them not, because ye are not of God.”, the hinted hebrew-greek implication may be toward obedience (rather than simply "hearing") , since hearing and obedience are very close linguistically (in greek).
Greek Jn 8:47 uses ακουω as the verb "to hear" in this sentence, yet "to obey" is created by simply adding a prefix, creating the greek word υπακουω. I have not bothered to look up the entymology but I am guessing the relationship is that hearing “underlies” obedience and thus υπ is the prefix, which, added to ακουω, creates the word used for “obedience” in this case.
However, someone simply adding the two word-symbols together might assume that υπ (“under”
and ακουω (to hear), might mean that the word means to “whisper”, or “hard of hearing”, etc. instead of “obedience”. While one can follow the logic of creating “whisper” or “hard of hearing” out of the first two word-symbols, it still results in error.
3) I forgot to clarify regarding erasmus’ first printed greek. Erasmus actually did not have a Greek text for the ENTIRE book of revelations and so “back translated” from Latin to Greek. Even for him, the result was messy and resulted in so many errors that other translators knew immediately that the greek translation that resulted from this back-translating, was not correct. This same problem will, I think, exist for you if you attempt a backwards translation. Not impossible, but I don’t know how it could be done, especially for such a contextually symbolic language such as religious Hebrew.
In any case, Good luck in your journey and, I think it is actually very, very good to break words down and try to look at them in the way you are looking at them since, generally, there is an association between the separate words and the words they create. There are a lot of exceptions but the mental exercise is good.
Clear
While I doubt from what you have said that you can help me here, any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.
Hi RevelationTestament :
1) I agree that I do not think I will be of any help in this for you. I think any significant, truly accurate back-translating cannot be done given the limitation of back-translating in general, and specifically, for Jn 8:47, there are no extant greek variants for this word in ANY greek manuscript considered by critical texts.
2) My point in saying "be careful" terms of trying to add words together is that, while greeks LOVED to add words onto other words to make other words and meanings, even in their language, the resultant meaning may not resemble the two words one combines. Also, there are a lot of symbolic nuances in texts that cannot be seen in English.
While English may say “He that is of God hears the words of God; therefore, you hear them not, because ye are not of God.”, the hinted hebrew-greek implication may be toward obedience (rather than simply "hearing") , since hearing and obedience are very close linguistically (in greek).
Greek Jn 8:47 uses ακουω as the verb "to hear" in this sentence, yet "to obey" is created by simply adding a prefix, creating the greek word υπακουω. I have not bothered to look up the entymology but I am guessing the relationship is that hearing “underlies” obedience and thus υπ is the prefix, which, added to ακουω, creates the word used for “obedience” in this case.
However, someone simply adding the two word-symbols together might assume that υπ (“under”
and ακουω (to hear), might mean that the word means to “whisper”, or “hard of hearing”, etc. instead of “obedience”. While one can follow the logic of creating “whisper” or “hard of hearing” out of the first two word-symbols, it still results in error.3) I forgot to clarify regarding erasmus’ first printed greek. Erasmus actually did not have a Greek text for the ENTIRE book of revelations and so “back translated” from Latin to Greek. Even for him, the result was messy and resulted in so many errors that other translators knew immediately that the greek translation that resulted from this back-translating, was not correct. This same problem will, I think, exist for you if you attempt a backwards translation. Not impossible, but I don’t know how it could be done, especially for such a contextually symbolic language such as religious Hebrew.
In any case, Good luck in your journey and, I think it is actually very, very good to break words down and try to look at them in the way you are looking at them since, generally, there is an association between the separate words and the words they create. There are a lot of exceptions but the mental exercise is good.
Clear
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