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Author Topic:   Politcally Correct Christ
arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 27 of 301 (346483)
09-04-2006 4:13 PM
Reply to: Message 24 by Hyroglyphx
09-04-2006 2:33 PM


Re: On translation
No it isn't. The word used is "Abba," which is a very endearing term for someone's father. It denotes a little kid calling their father, "Daddy." Abba is not gender-neutral.
hebrew/aramaic is not a gender-neutral language. everything has a gender.
(for point of reference, though, a group composed of one man and one woman are grammatically male.)


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Replies to this message:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 31 of 301 (346493)
09-04-2006 4:46 PM
Reply to: Message 19 by crashfrog
09-04-2006 1:22 PM


Re: On translation
Well, Paul uses the greek word "arsenkoites" in Corinthinans. It's a word of his own invention, as near as we can tell.
no, it's used in other (non-christian) texts of the period.
quote:
The first is from the Apology of Aristides, chapters 9 and 13. It relates the myth of Zeus, and his relationship with the mortal boy Ganymede. In the story, we are told that the myth is evidence that Greek gods act with moixeia (adultery) and arsenokoites. Similarly, in Hippolytus' Refutatio chapter 5, we are told the story of the evil angel Naas, and how he committed adultery with Adam in the Garden, which is how arsenokoites came into the world. Hippolytus then compares this story with that of Zeus and Ganymede [Petersen, 284]. In both of these stories an aggressor forcibly takes advantage of a weaker individual.
http://www.geocities.com/Pharsea/Greeks.htm (cached)
arsenokoites does mean homosexuality, but a very particular kind: pederasty. as far as i know, there simply was no common practice of two adult males engaged in a consentual relationship in the ancient greek world. but there was a very common custom of older men taking in younger boys as apprentices and lovers. paul is likely advising against this. (though i have no problem with paul being a homophobe. he also trashes the effeminate.)
Scholars of greek see the root "koitai" used in other contexts, some completly normal - referring to couches or beds - and in other context, as synonyms for sex or prostitution.
i'm not sure which verse this is about, but it likely includes another greek word, pornos, which means "prostitute."
In Hebrew, though? The thing is - the Hebrew word for "father" was often used in a gender-neutral sense*, much as some people use "man" in a gender-neutral sense to try to describe both male and female humans. So, "father" could mean "parent" - in Hebrew. Do you see how that could pose an issue in translation? That simply transliterating from "father" in Hebrew to "father" in English means sacrificing a potential alternate meaning of the word as it was used in Hebrew?
no.
(aba) means "father," a singular male parent.
(ima) means "mother," a singular female parent.
(horah or horeh) means "parent," also singular, and the gender depends on the vowels. the plural is:
(horim), or "parents." groups of both genders take the masculine plural. but only in plural.
(adam), more correctly, means "man" as in "mankind" not a singular male. though it is also the name of the first member of mankind. though it's wrong to assume that "mankind" applies to women -- the bible is NOT a feminist text, and women are not given their fair share. adam and eve are refered to as "man(kind) and his woman." while the story starts of with eve being adam's equal, the language is quite in line with the patriarchal society that spoke it.
How is the core experience of Christianity altered if they aren't raised to believe that God has a big cosmic penis?
there is a female presence of god in the torah too, that resides in the holiest of holies.
And if he doesn't have Godly male genitals, what's the justification for asserting maleness when maleness may not have been implied by the original text?
hebrew is not a gender-neutral language. everything is either masculine or feminine. it's not something we're used to in english, but nearly every other language on this planet is like that. things have to be assigned a gender. is there any good reason to assign god a female gender? in most semitic languages, male is the default gender. if you don't know the gender of something (say, an unknown caller on the phone) you refer to him in the masculine. this isn't really a suprise, we do this in english too.
so, if god were of an indeterminant gender (either androgynous, incompatible with our understanding, or just unknown) he would be refered to in the masculine. which might have been what you were meaning to get at.


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Replies to this message:
 Message 47 by Hyroglyphx, posted 09-05-2006 11:19 AM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 55 by crashfrog, posted 09-05-2006 8:12 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 32 of 301 (346494)
09-04-2006 4:47 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Hyroglyphx
09-04-2006 4:20 PM


Re: On translation
Tell this to Crashfrog. It sounds like you and I are in agreement.
sort of yes, sort of no. see above.

This message is a reply to:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 34 of 301 (346498)
09-04-2006 5:01 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Hyroglyphx
09-03-2006 2:08 PM


son of man
while i agree that most of these are silly, this one's actually close to being right:
quote:
# Avoiding another traditional phrase, "Son of Man," the Oxford text reads: "Then they will see 'the Human One' coming out of the clouds with great power and glory." (Mark 13:26)
the phrase in hebrew is ‘- (ben-adam), but mark quotes daniel 7:13, written in aramaic. the phrase used there is (ki-bar enash). (man) comes from (enosh, mankind/mortal), which in turn comes from (anash) which means sick, frail, or weak.
the phrase, "son of man" here and in ezekiel is god's particular way of referring to his prophet, or perhaps the prophet himself being humble (equivalent to "your humble narrator" in english). idiomatically, it means "lowly mortal" but that tends to lose the sense of prophecy, self-identification, and the (post-ezekiel) messianich connotation it seems to have gained.


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Replies to this message:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 35 of 301 (346502)
09-04-2006 5:05 PM
Reply to: Message 33 by nator
09-04-2006 4:53 PM


Re: Eclectics of the world rejoice!
I hope your pique causes you to raise your awareness of the sexism inherent in the English language, and in Christianity.
if we changed the gender neutral pronoun to "it" people (especially women) would get offended at being portrayed as objects and/or babies.
if we changed the gender neutral pronoun to "she," women would get offended that their gender now lacks meaning and distinction. see for instance the feminist take on calling boats by female names.
Edited by arachnophilia, : typo


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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 41 of 301 (346592)
09-05-2006 2:39 AM
Reply to: Message 36 by nator
09-04-2006 6:25 PM


Re: Eclectics of the world rejoice!
We can use "they" as a gender neutral pronoun.
"they" is plural. but then again, so is "you" ...


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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 54 of 301 (346819)
09-05-2006 8:04 PM
Reply to: Message 47 by Hyroglyphx
09-05-2006 11:19 AM


Re: On translation
And as far as "arsenokoites" meaning Greek pederasty, I have no reason to doubt it based on the culture of that era. I've read a few articles concerning this and all about the subtle rules with it.
yes. that said, i have little doubt that paul never have approved of modern consentual homosexual relationships -- it was considered an abomination by the jews of the time. but we can't make an actual case for this, based upon this very, and the other ones are almost as sketchy.
How is that you use Abba to mean a singular male parent and then give three other descriptions, one succinctly female, the other gender-neutral, only to say that Abba is gender-neutral? That doesn't make much sense to me. If Abba is really an ambiguous term then how is that all Hebrew speakers instantly recognize that you are talking about a father?
i didn't mean to imply that was gender-neutral. it's not, and neither is the singular of . means father, and nearest i can tell, only a male parent. it's actually something of a childish word, too, most hebrew speakers use (ab) to mean "father" and translates to something similar to "daddy."
i would like to point out two things, though.
1: i'm not particularly making a case, i'm just trying to give the best description of the language and how it should be translated. and i agree that translating a highly gender-specific word like "father" into something other than the gender-specific equivalent isn't exactly accurate. it loses the sense of the intamacy -- how would someone not know which parent they're talking, in terms of gender?
2: i don't believe that horim exists in biblical hebrew. it's a modern word, and i don't know where it comes from. and i can't seem to find it in the bible. i'll look a little harder if you want. it's entirely possible that the authors meant a gender-neutral god, but had no better word to explain the relationship than "father."
that said, i still think we should faithfully translated what they said, not what we think they might have maybe thought. leave the interpretation to the interpreters.
According to Josephus, the original literal name for the meaning of Adam has come to be known as man, but literally means, 'One who is red.'
uh, sort of. this is one of those context things.
(adam): Adam, man, mankind
(adamah): soil/clay (from which man was made)
(dam): blood, life.
(edom): red
(edom): "Edom"/Esau
they're all related to the color red, and most have slightly different vowels. "edom" means "one who is red" (he was named because of his red hair), but "adam" likely comes from "adamah" the soil god made him from, but not from "red" directly.
But none of this is the point of my post. This is a side issue. I don't mind discussing it lightly but I'd like the topic to steer back into the direction of questioning the motives of the translators and to figure out what, if any, implications they have.
it's actually sort of qabalistic. but i don't think it fits the text very well, and it distances the personal quality, especially between jesus and his god, whom he called "daddy."
Edited by arachnophilia, : broken tags galore!


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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 56 of 301 (346824)
09-05-2006 8:13 PM
Reply to: Message 48 by Hyroglyphx
09-05-2006 11:32 AM


Re: son of man
One of the aspects most talked about concerning Jesus is His divnity, however, sometimes the least discussed was His humanity.
aside from the all prophet and messiah connotations, "son of man" somewhat literally means "not god." "lowly human" is a good rendering. the jps chooses to use "o mortal." this is an acceptable translation, idiomatically.
Whether the Human One and the Son of Man aren't synonymous or not really isn't the point.
"son of man" in hebrew very much precludes deity.
Scriptures say what they say and if Daniel, Ezekiel, and Jesus used this terminology, what purpose does it serve to change it?
the point i mean to make is that it's not a change. a few translations already render the phrase something like this in ezekiel and daniel. that's actually what it means.
The only time a translation is made is to accomodate a different language or to update to the most recent style of that language. As long as it doesn't lose the original meaning, all should be okay.
well, there are two kinds of translations. literal, and idiomatic. idiomatic ones try to be as consistent to the ideas and translate the thought instead of the language. it tends to lose the original wording and is subject to translator's biases. but word-for-word literal renderings often tend to lose the original meaning. pros and cons on both sides, really.


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Replies to this message:
 Message 59 by robinrohan, posted 09-05-2006 8:49 PM arachnophilia has replied
 Message 61 by NosyNed, posted 09-05-2006 9:14 PM arachnophilia has replied

arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 57 of 301 (346825)
09-05-2006 8:16 PM
Reply to: Message 55 by crashfrog
09-05-2006 8:12 PM


Re: On translation
That's what I meant. Hebrew might have to use the masculine to refer to a gender-indeterminant, but we don't, in English. So who's to say that "Father", which means just males in our language, is the proper translation?
because the word in hebrew means "father" as in just one male parent.
it might have been the word they were forced to use to render a concept for which they had no word -- but that's the realm of interpretation, not translation.


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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 60 of 301 (346844)
09-05-2006 9:08 PM
Reply to: Message 59 by robinrohan
09-05-2006 8:49 PM


Re: son of man
yes, i think that's a good way to go too.
linguistic context and familiarity helps, and the more information the better.


This message is a reply to:
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arachnophilia
Member (Idle past 1343 days)
Posts: 9069
From: god's waiting room
Joined: 05-21-2004


Message 72 of 301 (347012)
09-06-2006 3:41 PM
Reply to: Message 61 by NosyNed
09-05-2006 9:14 PM


Re: types of translations
I'm sure not an expert but I can already see that a literal translation is one or more of meaningless, wrong or too unwieldy (as RR in Re: son of man (Message 59)).
You have to translate the meaning.
there's an additional problem with translating ancient texts, such as the bible. we can't go back and ask the authors. the "cultural context" part of translating idioms isn't exactly easy to come by. we can make educated guesses, but we'll never exactly what the authors meant by some things. so with new research and more information, more (and hopefully better) idiomatic translations will come out. the literal translations only need to change with the english language.
the other factor that makes the bible in particular different is exactly how compatible hebrew is with english -- which is something i was really suprised to learn when i began studying hebrew. it is nowhere near as wholly different as i expected it to be. and it seems to me the reason for this is because, ironically, of the bible. one of the single most influential works in early modern english is the king james bible -- a literal translation of a hebrew document. and so some very weird hebrew idioms have worked their way into the english language over the last 400 years.
those two factors balance the literal v. idiomatic debate a little, though i still personally feel that idiomatic translations are better for the average reader.
Edited by arachnophilia, : typo, addition.


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