Jesus, Yeshua

I just read... something. I could go off on various tangents describing it, and get even more worked up than I am, but why? It was... I suppose it was a message which was meant in a very positive way. I suppose it's possible that it was meant in a very positive way. I could go all negative and denounce them as hucksters as if I were a New Atheist, but why? Especially when I'm already getting way too upset on linguistic grounds?

They're fine with the conventional English forms of Sophia, Mary, Magdelene, Sarah, Anne, Brigit, Avalon, Ireland, Joseph, Michael, Catherine, Hilda, Cathars and Templars.

But they have to say Yeshua instead of Jesus. Well, what if I just say "Joshua" and "garbled translation," and "Jacob" and "James" while I'm at it?!

 

Or maybe if I quote from a very silly Wikipedia article entitled... "Yeshua."

"The 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was made in Aramaic, used Yeshua as the name of Jesus and is the most well known western Christian work to have done so."

Now, while I certainly have a bone or two to pick with Mel Gibson, him calling Jesus Yeshua in The Passion of the Christ is not one of them. Anybody want to guess why? I'll tell you why: because the whole film was in Aramaic and Latin. You see? You see where I'm going with this? Am I all alone here? They didn't just change one word. They changed all of them.

It would be remiss of me if I ended this rant without mentioning that some people who are much better at Latin than I am, are very upset by what they see as the way that Gibson screwed up the Latin in The Passion of the Christ. I know some people who are rather advanced in Aramaic, but, so far, I haven't heard their opinions of the film. Maybe they'll have something to say about the sequel. That's right: there may be a sequel. Jim says Mel just sent him the third draft of the screenplay. The Passion of the Christ 2: This Time, It's Personal.

"How Many Languages Do You Speak?"

This question, which is naturally frequent in the sort of international groups I like, gave me the topic for this post. The answer to the question, of course, always depends upon how well one must know a language before one is justified in listing it among the languages one "knows," and one always wonders, of course, listening to the group's responses, whether this fellow claiming fluency in 30 languages might not be padding his resumee just a bit, and whether this lady saying she knows only 2 is being entirely too modest by listing 2 languages, her native language and one more, whose native speakers assume she's a native speaker, which is extremely unusual for a non-native speaker. Think of all the people you know who've lived in your native country for decades after having grown up somewhere else, who speak your language wonderfully, with ease and grace and a huge vocabulary -- how many of them entirely lack a charming accent? A foreign actor passing for a native in a movie or TV show doesn't count, even though it's still a remarkable achievement with a script and dialogue coaches and multiple takes.

I'll claim 6: I'll stand here and tell you (I won't look you in the eye and tell you, but that's because I'm autistic, not because I'm a shifty schemer or anything like that.) that I can speak English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, in that descending order of proficiency. I read and write each of them better than I speak them. I have some rudimentary knowledge of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. I've just started on Hungarian and Armenian.

But of course languages come in families, so my familiarity with Latin, French, Spanish and Italian means that Portugese, Romanian/Moldavian, Catalan, Provencal, Rhaeoto-Romanic and Maltese will not be total mysteries to me. Likewise, my native proficiency in English and a long and intensive study of German mean that I can understand some Yiddish, Dutch/Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian and Luxumbourgian, all of which can not entirely unreasonably be considered German dialects; and to a lesser extent the Scandanavian Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. And that is not an abstract theoretical postulate; it's based on some experience with each of those languages, and having discovered that I could understand some of each of them. So should I have said that I speak 24 languages (or 29?) instead of 6? No, I shouldn't have; because, for example, that might've given someone somewhere the impression that I would be of some practical use if someone were needed to act as an interpreter between someone who speaks Provencal but no Faroese and someone else who speaks Faroese but no Provencal. Okay, I wouldn't be completely useless in such a situation, but, depending on the locale, my skills might be much better employed looking for an interpreter than in taking on the steep-uphill challenge of trying to act as one. I would understand enough to figure out, after some effort, that what we would want, ideally, would be someone fluent in both Provencal and Faroese. I would be able, with some effort, to figure out that those were the native languages of the 2 people who needed to communicate with each other.

(Naturally there's a very good chance that both of them would speak English well enough to make me fully superfluous.)

Rather than saying that I'm competent in 6 languages, I could say that I have some familiarity with the Germanic and Romance languages families, and that I have made some investigations into the history and development of those languages and their relationships to one another. This proficiency has not been acquired more or less accidentally in the course of a life of constant globe-trotting, but intentionally through a love for books. Many a la-dee-da carefree globetrotter who never had any particular ambitions as a scholar would be much more useful than I in many situations calling for a polyglot, especially if he or she had any proficiency whatsoever in Chinese or Russian or Japanese or Hungarian or Turkish or Swahili or Nahuatl, etc, etc, etc; whereas I would have much more urgent need than the average globetrotter to suppress the urge to be a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all and criticize as ahistorical the combinations of spoken and written languages and other cultural phenomena in "Game of Thrones." (The dragons could be considered ahistorical, too, Steven. Ya big goof.)



Ideally, the question "How many languages to you speak?" will not simply be answered with a number, but will be the opening to a long and fascinating conversation.

Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages

I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?

There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?

Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."

Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.



I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:

The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."

But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.

Multilingualism

If you've been reading my blog and so far been unimpressed by my praise of learning languages besides one's native language, perhaps you will become intrigued when I tell you that learning a language is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument. There are a few lucky geniuses who can master many musical instruments or many languages with ease. For most people, however, certainly including me, studying music and studying languages involves a lot of excruciatingly hard work, especially at first. But if you persist long enough in studying music or a language, eventually you will achieve some measure of mastery, and achieving even a little of that is wonderful and thrilling in a way which is very difficult or impossible to explain to someone who hasn't. So if you can play an instrument, or several instruments, believe me: the rewards of studying a languages, or languages, are comparable.

The term "barbarian" was coined by some ancient Greek who didn't speak any languages other than Greek, wasn't interested in learning any more languages, and didn't listen very carefully to anyone speaking anything other than Greek, because the original definition of a barbarian was someone who didn't speak Greek, but did speak some other language which sounded like "buh-buh-buh," and there is no language that's all b's. When Rome conquered regions from present-day Greece to Egypt to Syria in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, some of which had spoken Greek for over 1000 years and others of which had been conquered by Alexander, the Latin language didn't spread into the eastern part of Rome's dominions, as Latin had become dominant in all of the western regions; the Greeks who were the majority population in some of those areas and the ruling class in the rest kept right on speaking and writing in Greek, and a great number of Romans acquired Greek as a 2nd language. Politically, Rome had conquered Greece, but culturally, Greece conquered Rome.

Paradoxically, the Greeks acquired the disadvantage of monolingualism from this cultural dominance. From the 17th to the early 20th century, French culture dominated Europe, resulting in a similar paradoxical disadvantage for French people: many more English and American people spoke both English and French, many more Germans spoke both German and French, many more Russians spoke both Russian and French, etc, than the number of Frenchmen and -women who spoke French and anything else. And today, the US is the political and cultural leader of the world, resulting in the paradoxical disadvantage for the US and other English-speaking lands of a paucity of people who speak anything other than English, compared to the numbers of, for example, French people who speak both French and English, or the number of Mexicans who speak both Spanish and English, if not an indigenous language and Spanish and English. A century ago it was still considered quite wise for Americans traveling to most other parts of the world to learn at least a little French before they traveled, and ideally much more than a little. Today, not so much.

This paradoxical benefit of being conquered culturally is very real. But as I mentioned above, I don't know any way of telling you how great that benefit is if you don't learn other languages and see for yourself. In the meantime all I can think of to do is to urge you to believe me when I tell you that the benefit is immense.

How Should I Begin To Study Philosophy?

I'm so glad you asked!

If you want to do this right, you should become proficient in Greek, Latin, German and French at the least, because translations of philosophy into English generally suck. If you want to learn still more languages, it would do you no harm and a world of good. Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew are all of great relevance to the study of Western philosophy, and heylookit that we haven't begun to address Eastern philosophy yet. Not that there is one homogenous Eastern philosophy corresponding to Western philosophy. Mandarin is relevant to Confucianism and Tao, and Sanskrit and Japanese to Hindu-Buddhism.

I don't really know squat about Eastern philosophy. Back in the West, once you've mastered Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Hebrew, you may begin to keenly feel the lack of Portugese, Catalan, Provencal, Danish, Polish, Coptic and/or Armenian, to name just a very few. And the fact that I've so far mentioned Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic and Armenian only as they related to Western philosophy may have already led you to suspect it, but let me come right out and say it: I know significantly less than squat about Muslim/Arab/Middle Eastern philosophy. Although I may have a vastly greater idea of how much I don't know about it, how much is there unknown by me, than does the average Westerner.

But screw average! Philosophy doesn't have much to do with being average. Not Western philosophy, anyway. So screw the average person giving you advice about studying philosophy and telling you to start with Plato. That advice has cost the world an immeasurable amount of wisdom, because most of us hate Plato. (By "us" I mean "people," whether philosophers or not.) Start with almost anybody except Plato: the Pre-Socratics, or Aristotle, or Zeno, or Diogenes, or Epicurus. Or Machiavelli (Yeah! He'd be a GOOD one to start with!), or Hume, or Nietzsche. Just not Plato. Or Plotinus. Or Hegel.

If you're even the least bit inclined to start with Aquinas, or Augustine, or Barth, leave me alone and go and ask a theologian for advice, and if you want to call what you're studying philosophy, or even the greatest of Western philosophy, that's your own business, and many other theologians will agree with you. Mazel tov.

Okay. Now that we've gotten rid of THOSE jerks -- you're going to have to read Plato at some point if you're to become a great Western philosopher. There's no getting around it because all of the other great Western philosophers from his time to ours also had to deal with him, and if you don't read him you often won't know what they're talking about. Now, if you're unable to summon any enthusiasm for Epicurus or Machiavelli or Nietzsche, you should probably just face the fact that you're not going to become a philosopher. But don't be mad at me, because I saved you from having to study Plato -- and, you're fluent in 15 or more languages, and believe me, that's going to come in handy no matter where life takes you.

And I haven't said a word yet about the cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere! Ah, many more languages here to be studied. Probably most of my readers are from the United States, and may not realize the extent to which the languages of the Aztecs and the Incas and the Mayans continue to flourish in Latin America, with several million native speakers each. The most widespread indigenous language in the US, Navajo, is spoken by fewer than 200,000 people. So you can study the more widespread languages because they're more widespread, or the less widespread languages because they need more support -- or both? Who's stopping you?

Not me! But what I actually know about has more to do with the European and Middle Eastern languages, and besides the ones I've mentioned above, you could learn Icelandic and Norwegian and Swedish, and Basque, and Finnish and Estonian and Hungarian, and Czech and Slovak and Slovenian and Serbian and Croatian and Bulgarian, and Gaelic and Welsh and Breton, and Albanian, and Lithuanian and Latvian, and Turkish, and Ukrainian and Belorussian and Macedonian, and Rumanian and Moldavian, and Kurdish, and Maltese. And Georgian! And I've left out a lot, not intentionally, but because the region between Greenland and the Caucasus is an incredibly rich linguistic quilt. And because translations really do suck, or at least especially most translations of philosophy into English. Being multilingual really will open up new worlds for you in a way which monolingual people simply can't imagine. Which means that monolingual native speakers of English are ironically at a disadvantage because of the power of our language, the same way that monolingual native speakers of French were at a disadvantage as late as a century ago when French held an international dominance similar to that held by English today, the same way that monolingual native speakers of Greek were at a disadvantage 2000 years ago in the Graeco-Roman world because everyone adored Greek culture and Greek was the dominant international language and the monolingual Greek-speakers despised Latin without even knowing anything about it, much as many Americans despise Spanish without having a clue about what they're missing, even with the Nobel Prize committee trying mightily to give them a clue by giving Lit prize after Lit prize to authors in Iberia and to the south of us.

Most (not all!) of the ancient Greek philosophers had little knowledge of languages other than Greek. This shows us that progress has occurred in philosophy as in other things. Some people might tell you that I'm yankin' ya here, that the title of this post has promised you something I have failed to deliver. But those people are wrong. And the best advice they'll give you is something like urging you to read Will Durant. And that's not very good at all. If you want to have a chance at learning philosophy deeply, and even a chance at becoming a significant philosopher yourself, I'm the kind of guy you need to listen to. Listen up very carefully, kids, here comes the punchline, and it's a good one:

Look at ALL of the great modern Western philosophers: Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Shaw, Heidegger, Santayana, Russell, Sartre -- there is very, very little that all of them agree about. About the main tenets of their various philosophies they are often in the bitterest disagreement: you've got devout Christians alongside atheists, some far Left politically, some far Right, and some with a hearty contempt for both Left and Right. What do they all have in common?

They were all multilingual, that's what. Boom.

Worldwide Application

I'm guessing that in order to speak with the majority of the people on Earth easily enough that there would be no practical need for an interpreter, it would suffice to be fluent in 4 languages, in roughly this order of importance: English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic. If they were listed by the number of native speakers, then of course Chinese would be way out in front, but of course English is the second language of a huge number of people. Each one of those 4 languages is spoken by a significant number of people other than native speakers. The number of people one could reach with English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic might actually be much more than a simple majority of the Earth's inhabitants. It's hard to tell exactly about these sorts of things, keep in mind that I'm guessing and beware of people who claim to know the figures involved in these sorts of questions with anything close to actual accuracy.

What are the 5th- and 6th-most important languages for our hypothetical polyglot, the ones which would most effectively, in terms of sheer numbers, further shrink the parts of the human population with whom he could not speak without help? I'm guessing Swahili and French. Then maybe Russian -- lots and lots of people with Russian as a second language -- and then Portugese: less people with Portugese as a second language, but so very many native speakers there in Brazil. But maybe the speakers of Japanese, native and not, outnumber the speakers of either Russian or Portugese. I don't know. (And neither do you.)

We're up to 9 languages now. Not very many people are actually fluent in 9 or more languages, not using my standard for fluency of making an interpreter superfluous. Bear in mind, whenever people talk about how fluent they are, that there is no universally-understood standard for how fluent you have to be to legitimately call yourself fluent. My standard of not needing an interpreter is more exact than the usual standard, which is: no standard at all, but it too is a subjective call.

So what's number 10? Maybe Hindi. Or maybe Hindi is 9th, or 8th, or even 7th. Especially if one considers Hindi and Urdu to be one spoken language. That's another subjective call. There are many subjective calls when one talks about language, I can't imagine how it would be avoidable.

And then there are Indonesian and Punjabi and German and Italian. Don't ask me whether I got them in the right order, or if I've got the right top 14. For example, there's Dutch: Holland used to have vast colonies, and I don't know what sort of linguistic footprint they left behind around the world. Add that to the former huge colonies of Belgium, and the completely subjective question of whether Dutch and Flemish are 1 language or 2.

And my goodness, let's not forget Turkish. Or Amharic. But if you can become fluent in English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, French, Russian, Portugese, Japanese, Hindi (including Urdu), Indonesian, Punjabi, German, Italian, Dutch (including Flemish), Turkish, Amharic -- and my goodness I completely forgot Bengali, didn't I? It should probably be in the top 10 or close to it. So if you can master those 19, or 20, or 21 languages, depending on how we're counting, plus a couple more spoken by huge populations which I undoubtedly have also forgotten -- if you're fluent in those 25 or so languages then maybe you might be justified in claiming that you, as an individual, have something like a global reach in your mind. Until then you're basically stumbling around in the dark and at the mercy of strangers like the rest of us.

This has been today's It's a big world out there kid-lecture. Thank you for your kind attention.

An Open Letter to Professor Bart D Ehrman

Dr Ehrman, it has been less than a year since I began to pay more than passing attention to your work. I read Did Jesus Exist? which was the number-one topic of conversation among my circle of acquaintances for months, and then The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, which I think is greatly admired by everyone I know who's read it, and now I've started in on your new book, Forgery and Counterforgery.

I left graduate school, not for the first time but for the last, in 1992, and since then I have continued pursuits very similar to what would be considered academic. You might say that I'm in Independent Studies -- so independent that I can no longer officially involve a university in my work. In 2007, only because I was fortunate enough to know a psychologist personally who specialized in diagnosing autism, who for years had persistently suggested I undergo testing, I was diagnosed as autistic -- which explained many things in retrospect, including my difficulties in pursuing an academic career despite my passionate interest in academic subjects. Since 1992 I have been an autodidact, studying a wide range of subjects, most especially Latin literature of all eras. My Latin is completely self-taught. How good is my Latin? In the complete absence of tests to measure my progress, instructors to criticize my work and fellow-students against whom to measure myself, it's very hard to say. But having studied German and French as a student, the process of language acquisition was not entirely foreign to me. How many languages can I read, write or speak? As with anyone, the answer depends on how low the bar is set. My native language is English, I'm fluent in German, and I know some Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of some other languages.

Including, lately, Greek and Hebrew, because in 2010, entirely by chance, I happened upon some Internet communities made up of academic Biblical scholars and academics in related fields and interested amateurs, and I feel I must become more familiar with the primary languages of the Bible in order to be able to participate with anything approaching competence in some of the discussions going on among my new acquaintances. Up until then I knew the Bible almost entirely in the form of the Vulgate and the KJV and the Greek Church fathers hardly at all. I had already been dipping my toe, lazily, into the study of Greek, because the more I knew of pre-Christian Latin literature the more keenly I felt my lack of knowledge of Greek, because the literature and other aspects of the culture of the ancient Romans is to such a large degree merely an imitation of and homage to that of Greece.

But of course the beginnings of Christianity are recorded almost entirely in Greek. And now that I've suddenly met all of these people who seriously study Greek and Hebrew, I must make an attempt to keep up. I've reached that wonderful stage of language study where it truly is more fascination than drudgery, and on those occasions when I still become weary of it, I just think of I F Stone: began a course of study in ancient Greek in his 60's, and at the time of his death in his early 80's, so the story goes, he had begun energetically to study Hungarian.

So. Yeah. I'm about polyglotism. So you could dismiss my point by telling yourself that I'm crazy, if you don't know very much about autism, or that I'm obsessed, if you know a little more about it. Just laying out some options for you, trying to be helpful here, before getting to my point, and yes I have rambled a bit before getting to my point. Here it comes now: On page x of Forgery and Counterforgery you mention that originally you had intended to leave all citations of non-English texts untranslated in the main body of the page, with translations consigned to footnotes, but that everyone who talked to you about this was against it, and so you relented, and non-English citations are now in the footnotes and translation in the main text.

I wish that you had gone against the advice of every single person who advised you on this. As you point out on page x, Forgery and Counterforgery is, indeed, a scholarly book. But many more non-scholars read your scholarly books than read most of the scholarly books published in your field. Was this an argument for consigning the non-English passages to the footnotes? For me, it's an argument that you should have done what you wanted to do, and left them in the main text. You and Crossan and Paigels and a few others are the public face of your academic specialty. For centuries, academics in the English-speaking world, and especially academics in the United States, have steadily, disastrously followed a course toward monolingualism. (Thankfully, in the past few decades more and more English-speaking Americans are acknowledging that the US is multilingual, seeing at the very least that tens of millions of Americans speak Spanish as their native language, and realizing some of the benefits of learning at least a little Spanish, and sometimes other languages still. This is happening outside of academia as well as inside, I'm not sure how much credit academics can take for this healthy and natural trend.) Not so many decades ago every Bachelor of Arts in the US, or almost every single one, was still expected to have passed some courses in foreign languages. Now Biblical studies is one of a rapidly-shrinking number of disciplines in which monoligualism is still unacceptable. Yes, many non-academics will read this book. It would have been very good if you had emphasized to them the multilingual character of your work to them, the importance of not relying on translation. If you had shown them a truly scholarly example in the best sense of the term.

Best regards, and Forgery and Counterforgery still seems so far like an excellent book. Like apparently absolutely everyone I know personally who's read it, I found Orthodox Corruption to be excellent. I forgive you for Did Jesus Exist? and for appearing as a talking head on at least one program produced especially for the so-called "History Channel."