The marketplace Greek of the New Testament — koine (“common denominator”) Greek — is not elegant. When Alexander the Great conquered his huge patchwork quilt of different peoples speaking different languages, the only way the defeated could communicate with Macedonian officers, and with other parts of the empire, was in fumbling attempts at the rulers’ Greek. When the Romans succeeded the Greek imperial forces, they had to use the language in place, not their own Latin. As Cicero said of the Roman empire, “Greek is read in practically every nation, while Latin is hedged within its own narrow confines.”
In koine, as in any pidgin language, niceties tend to be lost. Words are strug together, often without connectives to get across a basic meaning. Most of the gospels are written in this basic language, used equally by Romans like Pilate and by Aramaic speakers like Jesus and his followers. Sentences sometimes fumble clumsily at meaning. “What to me and to you, woman?” says Jesus to this mother (John 2.4). “Nothing to you and to that just man,” says Pilate’s wife (Matthew 27.19). “The law and prophets up to John” (Luke 16.16). “I must be at my father’s” (Luke 2.49) — his father’s what? Commentators quarrel. Definite articles, used according to subtle rules in classical Greek, come and go confusingly in koine: the Lord’s Prayer open with an address to “Our Father in the heavens,” but a little later in the prayer we get “in heaven and on earth.” Tenses shift randomly.
When the meaning is obscure in such a simple language, it is less often because of any sublime meaning conveyed than from mere linguistic clumsiness. Grammar can be muddled, if not neglected altogether. The Book of Revelations is especially ungrammatical — Nietzsche, a trained classicist, said that if God wrote the New Testament, he knew surprisingly little Greek. Except in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the complex sentence structure of classical Greek is rarely evident. We get a simple stringing-on of independent clauses (parataxis) linked repetitively with the boring kai (“and”). Dialogue has no elegant variation. It is a matter of “And X say… And Y says… And X says…”
Most of the words used are common. The infant Jesus is laid in a hay trough (phatne). But translators know that people expect a “biblical English” in the gospels. They make the hay trough more dignified by using a foreign word (French manger, for food) instead of “hay trough.” When Jesus answers Pilate, “So you say,” they try to find a more elegant form of answer — though “So you say” exactly replicates the Greek. Translators try to give more churchiness to the evangelists, to teach them their linguistic manners. Jesus should not say to his mother, “What to me and to you, woman?” So they do not let him. Almost every translation into English tries to hide the “faults” of the New Testament. They straighten out the grammar, make the tenses more uniform, break up the repetitions.
—Garry Wills
What Jesus Meant
I do understand why people would have this impression of decay. And I have it too, particularly when I’m surfing the internet or reading a corporate report. But are things really worse than they used to be? Maybe it is just that I’m getting old and cranky. Complaining about English has always been an old man’s game. I say man — curmudgeon is an interesting word: it’s not a word we apply to women; only men can be curmudgeons. It occurs to me that maybe a lot of this stuff was going on when I was younger but I was too busy to notice or too mellow to care. It would be hard to prove it one way or the other. In fact, people complain about the language but they never really document the claims the way they would if they were economic complaints. People don’t say:
It is a positive thing that the beltway crowd is starting to talk about wages. After all, the paper we released at the launch of our Raising America’s Pay initiative was titled “Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge.” Wages are central for the simple reason that the vast middle class, as well as low-income households, rely primarily on their wage income to support their spending. And policies can restore wage growth. Let us start with Federal Reserve policy assuring a strong jobs recovery that gets unemployment down to where real wages grow at least as fast as productivity growth (which means nominal wage growth at least 3.5 to 4.0 percent). Large scale infrastructure spending would be wise as well. Yes, President Obama should allow millions of undocumented workers to work legally, thereby eliminating their vulnerability to exploitation and consequently raising their wages, which would then lift up other workers’ wages as well. Low wage workers (the bottom fifth) earn less than they did in 1968 despite a doubling of productivity and far more education simply because we have failed to adequately increase the minimum wage. We can end wage theft, raise overtime eligibility for six million workers, and end the misclassification of employees into independent contractors. We can use federal legislation to restore collective bargaining for those who want it and we can oppose the actions in the states that have weakened collective bargaining, initiatives that are expected to continue this year. And why do we need new global trade agreements that will serve to put more downward pressure on wages? (I don’t see any effort of the “winners compensating the losers” from trade.) Most of all, economic policy should take creating good jobs and lifting wages as its central concern. This is not what happened in the four decades of “flexible, innovative, American-style capitalism” that the Washington Post looks so kindly toward.
The presence of a mandate is where the similarities between the ACA and the Heritage Plan end, and the massive remaining differences reveal the disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about the importance of access to healthcare for the nonaffluent. The ACA substantially tightens regulations on the healthcare industry and requires that plans provide medical service while limiting out-of-pocket expenses. The Heritage Plan mandated only catastrophic plans that wouldn’t cover basic medical treatment and would still entail huge expenditures for people afflicted by a medical emergency. The Affordable Care Act contained a historic expansion of Medicaid that will extend medical coverage to millions (and would have covered much more were it not for the Supreme Court), while the Heritage Plan would have diminished the federal role in Medicaid. The ACA preserves Medicare; the Heritage Plan, like the Paul Ryan plan favored by House Republicans, would have destroyed Medicare by replacing it with a voucher system…
In an age where business dominates our governments and writes our laws, every technological advance offers business an opportunity to impose new restrictions on the public. Technologies that could have empowered us are used to chain us instead.
If you’d never watched Fox News, the 24-hour cable network that caters to Americans who self-identify as conservatives, you might expect its entertainment coverage to focus on culturally conservative, family-friendly matters — fare some conservatives feel is ignored in a media run by social liberals. Where else to turn for such news if you’re a Republican grandparent who wistfully remembers the days when network TV put married couples in separate beds, or a red-state dad who wrote a letter to the FCC when Janet Jackson’s nipple emerged from her Superbowl costume, or a megachurch or Christian college attendee who shares the lament that our culture is hyper-sexualized?
I. AN AGNOSTIC
It’s the fourth anniversary of September 11, and Americans are getting restless about the war in Iraq. Republicans are challenging the President, activists and bloggers are pressing the Democrats and liberal hawks are reconsidering their support for the war. Everyone, it seems, is asking questions.
In a recent experiment by psychologists Russell Fazio and Natalie Shook, a group of self-identified liberals and conservatives played BeanFest. And their strategies of play tended to be quite different. Liberals tried out all sorts of beans. They racked up big point gains as a result, but also big point losses — and they learned a lot about different kinds of beans and what they did. Conservatives, though, tended to play more defensively. They tested out fewer beans. They were risk averse, losing less but also gathering less information.
In contrast to European and Asian nations, which fund schools centrally and equally, the wealthiest US school districts spend nearly ten times more than the poorest, and spending ratios of three to one are common within states.