How Bible Scholars and Translators Miss It

Several months ago, Jane Stranz blogged here and here on how "helpful" one particular book is:  Tom Thatcher's study Jesus The Riddler: the Power of Ambiguity in the Gospels.  I want to give a longer quotation from the book here that seems important.

The only thing I'll add first is this:  Thatcher is a Southern Baptist bible scholar in the USA who's engaging with folkloristics (i.e., the cross-cultural study of folklore) as he tries to get at whether Jesus fits into a larger practice of riddling.  Folkloristics, for Thatcher, just barely touches on Greek rhetorics (in other words, he hasn't recognized the discipline of rhetoric although folklorists have dabbled in it; and Thatcher has no idea how Aristotle - who worked through his own classifications for what's Poetic and what's Rhetoric - so despised riddles and riddling (and riddlish ambiguity and riddlish parables) as strange sophistry and as mere rhetoric, although such riddling ironically stumped Aristotle more than once); so there's much work yet to do (perhaps a dissertation topic for anyone working in biblical studies, historical Jesus work, historiography, rhetorics, feminisms, translation studies, and the like; if you want to do some publishable research with me on this, then just let me know).

Now, here's longish quotation of Thatcher (from page 47) that gives a bit of a definition to "riddle" and a bit of an explanation why so many so far have missed it:

The fact [is ...] that riddles don't necessarily stand out as "riddles" in obvious ways....  Riddles generate intentional ambiguity, and this ambiguity can, in turn, be harnessed to serve a variety of objectives (entertainment, teaching, test of wits, etc.).  But those objectives do not depend on any particular style or form; as noted earlier, any statement of any shape or size can function as a riddle.  Riddles come in a wide variety of forms in many cultures (like mine) simply because variety fosters ambiguity; they're more ambiguous if they don't always look or work the same way.  For the same reason, riddles do not evidence a consistent content.  Even within a single culture, there is usually no narrowly limited set of terms or themes to which they appeal again and again.  As an example, the children's book to which I alluded in the preface, Bennett Cerf's Pop-Up Riddles, includes questions about ducks, bananas, kangaroos, eggs, 200-pound mice, and a host of other unrelated topics.  Riddlers use this license to generate confusion; the more different things a riddle could potentially refer to, the better.  Because the form and content of riddles are necessarily inconsistent, specimens of the genre are most easily identifiable by the way people use them and by the way that other people respond to them.  But this makes the task of locating riddles as the sources for Jesus especially difficult, simply because we are not now in a position to ask Jesus or the Pharisees exactly what they were trying to do with their words on various occasions.  As a result, riddles have fallen below the radar of the typical criteria utilized in historical Jesus research.

What Thatcher is doing is fairly radical.  It's Mary Daly-ish if you ask me.  But if you yourself are anti-feminist-ish, please don't let that scare you off.  Thatcher is really putting Jesus in a very large class of Jewish rhetors, including those who translate and who write some of the Jewish scriptures.  This very large class also includes riddlers in Greek history (which linguistically, of course, intersects with Jewish scriptural histories in a grand way).  But don't let that scare you off either if you're more Christian-ish, even more English Christian-ish of the Anglo, Australian, American, Canadian, New Zealand, Western-World varieties; maybe what Thatcher sees in Jesus can help with better Christian English Bible translation on difficult sayings such as “Ears to hear…” which might be seen (and translated) as a riddle marker.

and in three days

Λύσατε τὸν ναὸν τοῦτον

καὶ ἐν τρισὶν ἡμέραις

ἐγερῶ αὐτόν

When the enemies of Jesus asked him to give them a sign of his authority, he gave them a riddle instead (see John 2:19). These opponents were still puzzling over it when the imperial Romans had him pinned naked to the executioner's cross (see Mark 15:29 and Matthew 27:40).

Now if we translate John's Greek translation of Jesus's Hebrew-Aramaic riddle into English, then we have decisions to make, don't we?

1) If we want the English to be natural (i.e., the translator's idea of what "our natural English" must be), then it would go something like "GOD'S WORD® Translation (©1995)" has it:

"Tear down this temple, and I'll rebuild it in three days."

2) If we're a "relevance theory" bible translator (i.e., focusing on the message, the content so pragmatically communicated), then we might need to make sure the reader knows that "temple" really doesn't mean just temple but rather Jesus's body.  And we're relieved to find, then, that the gospel writer, John, has gone on to do just that.  So we can keep "temple" there in John 2:19 and let his 2:21 explain for us in English with footnotes as the NET Bible translators do:

"But Jesus47 was speaking about the temple of his body.48"

47tn Grk “that one”; the referent (Jesus) has been specified in the translation for clarity. This Greek term is frequently used as a way of referring to Jesus in the Johannine letters (cf. 1 John 2:6; 3:3, 5, 7, 16; 4:17).

48tn The genitive “of his body” (τοῦ σώματος αὐτοῦ, tou swmato" autou) is a genitive of apposition, clarifying which temple Jesus was referring to. Thus, Jesus not only was referring to his physical resurrection, but also to his participation in the resurrection process. The New Testament thus records the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as all performing the miracle of Christ's resurrection.

3) If we're a Jesus Seminar type, then this isn't very satisfying at all.  And so you might write a section of an essay and entitle it "Proto-John 2:19" and then go on to make and give warrants for your claim 

"that Mark 14:58==John 2:19 is a claimed saying of Jesus in a shared narrative source of Bethsaida-Mark and John."

Hence, in all three cases (i.e., [1] in natural English translation, and / or [2] in Relevance Theory translation, and / or [3] in historical Jesus de-/ re- construction non-translation), you can avoid the riddle.

You can avoid Jesus's very likely allusion to the Hebrew book called (עֶזְרָא) Ezra, which might mean in English something like an abbreviated form of "G-d helps."  You can avoid the likely fact that Jesus is not only saying something about himself (i.e., his body, as John 2:21 tries to make clear) but that he is also getting his enemies to identify things about themselves (i.e., that they might be like those temple-destroyers in the narrative of G-d Helps). 

You can avoid having to go to the Jews' own translation of Ezra from Hebrew to Hellene (i.e., the "Septuagint" or "LXX"), which no doubt Jesus and his enemies were aware of.  There, of course, in Ἔσδρας Βʹ (or Esdras 2) one may read this:

αὐτοῖς ἀφ’ ὅτε δὲ παρώργισαν οἱ πατέρες ἡμῶν τὸν θεὸν τοῦ οὐρανοῦ ἔδωκεν αὐτοὺς εἰς χεῖρας Ναβουχοδονοσορ βασιλέως Βαβυλῶνος τοῦ Χαλδαίου καὶ τὸν οἶκον τοῦτον κατέλυσεν καὶ τὸν λαὸν ἀπῴκισεν εἰς Βαβυλῶνα

But after that our fathers provoked the God of heaven, he gave them into the hands of Nabuchodonosor the Chaldean, king of Babylon, and he destroyed this house, and carried the people captive to Babylon. (here Englished by Lancelot Brenton in 1851)

In this Hebrewish Greek, there's freedom for John the gospel writer to put Jesus's riddle into Hebrewish Greek as noted above.

You also can avoid the allusions to Joshua.  This Joshua (aka "Jesus") is giving his enemies a riddle for a sign, but you can avoid that he is also by his riddling making further allusions to his sweet namesake, his very violent predecessor.  What's with this three days imperative thing?  And who crosses to the other side?

עִבְרוּ בְּקֶרֶב הַמַּחֲנֶה, וְצַוּוּ אֶת-הָעָם לֵאמֹר, הָכִינוּ לָכֶם, צֵידָה:  כִּי בְּעוֹד שְׁלֹשֶׁת יָמִים, אַתֶּם עֹבְרִים אֶת-הַיַּרְדֵּן הַזֶּה, לָבוֹא לָרֶשֶׁת אֶת-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם נֹתֵן לָכֶם לְרִשְׁתָּהּ.

Pass through the midst of the camp, and command the people, saying: Prepare you victuals; for within three days ye are to pass over this Jordan, to go in to possess the land, which the LORD your God giveth you to possess it. (here Englished by the JPS translation team of 1917)

So the point I'm getting at here is that the riddle of Jesus is a very serious inside joke.  It's a Jewish insider riddle.  He's not going to explain it.  He's not going to explain it to you, especially.  His followers (i.e., the male disciples) won't get it until it's too late (or unless they're female perhaps).  And his enemies to his dying day will pretend like they didn't get it.  And it's radical wordplay that involves the listener and the reader (okay, yes you and me this time) who must construct of it what can be constructed.  And better bible translations really had best get some of that without trying to avoid it or to give it all away all too soon.

Riddle me ree: Here's one for you

Let me just warn you that I'm writing very quickly this morning.  I almost entitled this one "Jesus: the feminist rhetorical translator" (since recently I finished Tom Thatcher's important book Jesus the Riddler:  the power of ambiguity in the gospels). 

But let me start this particular post by saying that, after very careful study of Aristotle in his own Greek writings, it's become apparent to me that he was neither feminist nor rhetorical -- that is, he rather despised females and denigrated ways of knowing and of communicating that were not "logic."  Aristotle wanted translation, but only in one direction:  his.  That is, he taught his powerful elite male students - such as Alexander the Great - to conquer, even by logic and by the Greek language.

Which is all very different (and maybe ironically opposite) from an odder and later figure in our histories:  Jesus.

The problem that many of us have in writing and reading history now is that we forgo the sort of methods Jesus used for Aristotle's logic.  (but to be clear, Aristotle never intended for any of us of any less-educated, un-Greek, or fe-male species to translate his logic as ours).  One method Jesus used, which needs substantial recovering, is "the riddle."  (to be clear, Aristotle taught his students very directly against riddling.)

As mentioned earlier, I was reading Tom Thatcher's book Jesus the Riddler while re-reading Mary Daly's book Gyn/Ecology and it occurred to me for the first time:  wordplay (i.e., the sophistry that ARistotle and Plato and Plato's Socrates rails against -- the "rhetoric" and the "riddling" they so dispise) is a sort of methodology or is a set of methologies that many poets, sophists, women, and rhetoricians have used down through the years.

And there is much resistance to if not just ignorance about the cross-cultural and historical uses of wordplay.  (A respected contemporary new testament Greek scholar, such as Bill Mounce, for example, confesses he isn't familiar with Dissoi Logoi, the pluralistic sophistic reviews of what goes on in various societies who construct knowledge and being by language in radically different - sometime ambiguous - ways.)

Let me leave this post, then, because i'm nearly out of time.  Let me leave you with just a quick example of the riddling of Jesus (from Thatcher's very careful but not yet exhaustive study).  Thatcher notes how Jesus (according tot he various gospel writers translating him into playful Greek) would mark a riddle with the statement:

"Whoever has ears to hear let him or her hear"

or would ask rhetorically, "having eyes, don't you see and having ears, don't you hear?"

[οἳ ἔχουσιν ὀφθαλμοὺς τοῦ βλέπειν καὶ οὐ βλέπουσιν καὶ ὦτα ἔχουσιν τοῦ ἀκούειν καὶ οὐκ ἀκούουσιν]

Through Aristotle's (non-sophist, non-rhetorical) eyes and ears, the contemporary translator would guess and speculate and suggest it means something like:

Let this be a word to the wise 

Thatcher rather playfully says this sort of logic has the Greek phrase [ος εχει ωτα ακουειν ακουετω] "as a functional synonym for the modern maternal admonition 'Pay attention!'" (page 31).  But when one listens for Jesus as a riddler telling riddles (a kind of dialectic of wise sophistry among Jewish rabbis) then you might hear the Greek translated phrase as "functionally equivalent to 'Riddle me ree' or 'Here's one for you,' although the subject matter [in the public conversation and teaching] is obviously more significant than the pub jokes [where] we [might] introduce those phrases today" (page 40).

This Riddle Fooled Aristotle Twice

ἄνδρ’ εἶδον πυρὶ  

χαλκὸν ἐπ’ ἀνέρι 
κολλήσαντα

See his Poetics (1458a) and his Rhetoric (1405b). 

Go figure; it's April 1.