Nerd alert: 🤓🤓🤓
To supplement my Bible college journey, I have decided to teach myself Biblical Greek. As I write this post, I'm on Chapter 4 in my beginning Greek textbook/video series, which almost certainly means I've learned just enough to be dangerous. 🤣 But I got SO EXCITED today when I realized I could read aloud, and translate, this sentence from my text:
ό Θεὁς αγαπη ἐστἱν
This says "God is love," and is taken from 1 John 4:8. Phonetically, in Koine Greek, it sounds like "haw thee-aws ah-gah-pay es-tin," and left to right it reads, "The God love He is." As a complete aside, this is why I don't take sides in the "word for word" versus "thought for thought" debate in Bible translation. Maybe I'm being rigid in my definition of word for word (or maybe I'm not; I'm not sure), but if the New Testament were literally translated word for word into English, it would be filled with sentences like this--an especially big problem in English because the language relies so much on syntax (word order) to determine meaning (which Greek does not). I would argue that all translations are in essence thought for thought, because the whole point is to convey the true meaning of the original in a form that readers of the target language can accurately decipher. Unless syntax is identical in the two languages, a word-for-word translation will "twist words out of order," sentence after convoluted sentence, meaning readers will become confused and bogged down at best and mistakenly infer inaccurate meanings at worst.
Anyway. I'm grateful to God for giving me the opportunity to unleash my inner scholar in a way I'm not sure has happened before, even though I once earned a degree with honors way back when. I pray He will receive whatever glory there is to be had from this, in whatever form He desires. Meanwhile, I must cop to the fact that this is my idea of fun. 😍
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