Tag Archives: Greek

Can you trust Greek?

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I just received this question from one of this blog’s readers. Since I’ve never been asked this before, and found it to be an interesting one, I thought I’d answer it on the blog.

Shalom,

My husband has been questioning why you have been using Greek explanations when he thought we were doing everything Hebrew.

Or can you give him an explanation as to why sometimes you use the greek meanings to words in the NT and sometimes you also give a hebrew meaning to words in the NT?

First, I’d like to address a common misconception among some folks who are new to the Hebrew roots movement. Some thing there is something wrong or evil with the Greek language. If so, then why did YHVH allow the Testimony of Yeshua (New Testament) to come down to us in the Greek language? Obviously, he didn’t think it was evil.

Second, why do I use definitions to Greek words when teaching from the Testimony? Simply this, all we have is Greek. We don’t have the Testimony in Hebrew. I can’t give a definition in Hebrew when all we have is the Greek.

Some Bible teachers will go back into the Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Hebrew language Tanakh (Old Testament) translated into Greek more than a couple hundred before the birth of Yeshua to try to figure out what words in the Greek Testimony of Yeshua might be the same as the Greek words in the LXX, and then go from there back to Hebrew. The problem with this is that it’s usually a guess as to a Greek word’s potential meaning. The problem is that the LXX translators lived hundreds of years before the Testimony of Yeshua writers, and languages evolve and some word meanings change over the centuries, so one has to be careful when doing this. Colloquial expressions and figures of speech also change with time. Many times we don’t know what Hebrew word is behind the Greek word in the Testimony even with the LXX available to us.

For these reasons, I primarily stick with the Greek language and word definitions when teaching from the Testimony because that’s all I can do. I have no other choices.

I can go to the Aramaic language New Testament Peshitta, but most of us don’t know how to read Aramaic, and I’m not aware of any Aramaic lexicons or word dictionaries. So we’re still stuck with the Greek.

Having said all this, it is my belief that some if not much of the Testimony of Yeshua was written originally either in Hebrew or Aramaic. This, however, is hard to prove since we don’t have any autographs in Hebrew, and the there’s a debate raging alone scholars about the age and the origin of the Aramaic texts, so their reliability has been called into question. Nonetheless, the Testimony writers were probably all Jewish, knew Hebrew and/or Aramaic and thought and wrote using Hebraic thought patterns (as opposed to Greek) and Hebraic terms and idioms. Knowing this is essential when reading and trying to understand the Testimony.

In summary,we do our best to understand the Testimony of Yeshua from a Hebraic perspective, even though we only have the Greek language to work from. This isn’t always easy to do, and it’s sometimes easy to add two and two and get five. This is why we have to be so careful when handling the Word of Elohim, so that we don’t make it say something that it didn’t mean.

Thankfully, Yeshua sent us his Holy Spirit who he promised would guide us, convict us of sin and lead us into all truth (John 16:5–15). I believe that if a person is Spirit-filled and Spirit-led, and wants to serve and obey YHVH unconditionally, that the true meaning and intent of a scriptural passage will be revealed to the person regardless of the language it was written in.

 

New Wine… New Wineskins

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Matthew 9:17, New wine… new wineskins. Sadly, the translation as found in most of our English Bibles —“New wine into old wineskins… new wine into new wineskins”— is a muddy translation from the Koine Greek, and therefore doesn’t give us the proper understanding of Yeshua’s words. Here is the verse from Matthew 9:17 with the Greek words following in parenthesis:

Neither do men put new (neos) wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new (neos) wine into new (kainos) bottles, and both are preserved. (KJV)

In English, the word “new” can mean “brand new, never been used before” or it can mean “new to you, although it may have been used by someone else.” It can also mean “renewed, reconditioned new.” In Koine Greek, there are two words for our one word “new”. They are neos and kainos.

The Greek word neos means new as in brand new. The Greek word kainos means new in the sense that something is “renewed or reconditioned,” so it‘s not brand new.

Both Mark and Luke in their accounts use kainos in the same way Matthew does in his account (Mark 2:22; Luke 5:38).

This verse would have been better translated as:

Neither do men put new (neos) wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new (neos) wine into reconditioned (kainos) bottles, and both are preserved.

Stern captures this meaning in his Complete Jewish Bible where he translates kainos as “freshly prepared wineskins.” J. P. Green in his Bible translates kainos as “fresh.”

Interestingly, Luke adds a statement that the other two Gospel writers (see Matt 9:17 and Mark 2:22) omit:

And no one, having drunk the old wine, immediately desires new; for he says, “The old is better.” (Luke 5:39)

What is the meaning of this? One commentator states that in ancient times, aged wine (i.e., being fully fermented, and thus having a higher alcohol content) was generally preferred over new wine (not fully fermented, thus having a lower alcohol content). He suggests that Yeshua is probably indicating why the religious people were objecting to the joy of Yeshua’s disciples (verse 33): because it was something new (The IVP Bible Background Commentary, p. 203, by Craig Keener). So depending on the context of Yeshua’s usage of the new/old wine analogy, sometimes the new is better, sometimes the old is better.