In Actual Fact: Thoughts on Ignorance

French squire:  And most importantly, because the Pope himself is French.

Roland:              Well, the Pope may be French, but Jesus is bloody English!

A Knight’s Tale (2001)

Indulge me a moment. I’m irritated and feel like a bit of a rant. Said rant’s key content is probably not news to my aware and astute readers, and I hardly think myself a solitary voice in stating it – but equally, what exactly is the point of maintaining a weekly blog if I can’t make use of it on occasion to unburden myself of the odd irritated rant?

What birthed my irritation was an article published this week on the Independent website, bearing the headline ‘Christmas 2017: One in five Brits do not know Jesus Christ born on 25 December, study finds’.¹

 

Your typical reconstructed nativity scene, with anachronistic electric fairy lights and everything.

Yes, you read that right. “Is this a spoof?” asked someone in the comments, and I thought, you might well ask. Apparently, the Independent would have us applaud the remaining four in five for apparently believing that the reason why the twenty-fifth of December was designated as the feast day for the birth of Jesus was because that was the genuine calendar date of his birth. Hint: it wasn’t. The date of Christmas was selected by Pope Julius I in the mid-fourth century, presumably in an attempt to fashion a smoother tradition to Christianity from pagan religion. The Romans celebrated the Saturnalia from 17^th-23^rd December, and further north, Germanic tribes marked the winter solstice with the festival of Yule. Even today ‘Yule’ occasionally shows up as a synonym for ‘Christmas’ – troll the ancient yuletide carol, fa la la la la et cetera – and a number of customs associated with these festivals persist in today’s Christmas traditions as well, such as the exchange of gifts and the decorating of houses with evergreen foliage. Julius I held the papacy some years after the reign of Emperor Constantine I – whose conversion to Christianity and subsequent decree of religious freedom spelt the end to state persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire – but prior to that of Emperor Theodosius I, whose Edict of Thessalonica established Christianity as the state religion; this, then, was a period in which Christianity was advancing and paganism receding, and making sure that converts would still get to enjoy their midwinter festivities after they forsook the gods to whom said festivities had historically been dedicated, in favour of worshipping Christ, was bound to ease the process. (What you think of that as a strategy for mission is your call.)

Still, even if the average Brit can hardly be expected to know about Julius I and all that – and I’ll freely admit I had to look up the details² – it seems pretty ludicrous for the Independent to marvel in such fashion at the supposed ignorance of this twenty per cent, when the fact of which they are accused of being ignorant is not, in actual fact, an actual fact. And it only got worse for the rest of the article:

“10 per cent were unaware he was born in a stable.” That Jesus was born in a stable is affirmed nowhere in the Bible. I had a peruse of the survey from which these statistics had been gathered, and one of the other possible answers to the question of where Jesus was born was ‘in a cave’, which is actually a well-attested early tradition still going strong in certain branches of the global Church today³ – but of course it flashed up as a wrong answer when I gave it a curious click. We know he was laid in a manger after he was born,⁴ but the stable is pure speculation. Frankly, I’m more concerned that ninety per cent of Brits would affirm its existence than that ten per cent would deny it.

“While 85 per cent believe Jesus spoke Hebrew, just three per cent were aware that he is also said to have spoken Greek.” O my dear Aramaic, how neglected you are, poor thing! I’m not pretending that there isn’t substantial debate still churning about the exact relationship between Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in the Israel of Jesus’ time – though the distinction between Hebrew as belonging to the sphere of religion, Aramaic to that of practical matters like trade and law, and Greek to that of government, seems as useful a delineation as any to start from – but of the three, the one we have the most evidence of Jesus having spoken in certainly Aramaic. The gospel accounts we have are in Greek, but on a number of occasions the writers make a point of recording Jesus’ words in Aramaic (or rather the best transliteration thereof they could manage). Example one: to Jairus’ daughter in Mark 5:22 he says ταλιθὰ κούμ (talithà koúm), a transliteration of the Aramaic טליתא קום (ṭalīthaʾ qūm), which is a feminine form of an adjective meaning ‘young’ followed by a part of a verb meaning ‘stand’, yielding the meaning, ‘young girl, get up’. (In his version of the story, Luke gives Jesus’ words in Greek: ἡ παῖς ἒγειρε (hē paĩs égeire), which is, similarly, a word meaning ‘child’, specified as feminine by the form of the definite article preceding it, followed by an imperative from a verb meaning ‘get up’.) Example two: the nickname he gives his disciple Simon in John 1:42 is Κηφᾶς (Kēphãs), that is the Aramaic (not Hebrew) word כיפא (kēphaʾ), meaning ‘rock’; it’s just had a Greek masculine ending stuck on it so that it declines nicely within the Greek text. The other gospel accounts, of course, skip straight to the Greek-translated form of the name, Πέτρος (Pétros), from πέτρα (pétra) meaning ‘rock’ (hence ‘petrify’ and other delightful words), which comes out in English as Peter, but references in Paul’s epistles tell us the Aramaic form was commonly used to refer to Simon Peter while he was alive.⁵ Example three: perhaps most strikingly, the words Jesus speaks on the cross in Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 - ἠλὶ ἠλὶ λεμὰ σαβαχθάνι (ēlì ēlì lemà sabakhtháni) in the former and the slightly differently rendered ἐλωῒ ἐλωῒ λεμὰ σαβαχθάνι (elōḯ elōḯ lemà sabakhtháni) in the latter, meaning, as I’m sure you know, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ – look pretty dang Aramaic, despite the fact that he’s clearly quoting the opening of Psalm 22, which is of course written in Hebrew. The verb meaning ‘you have forsaken me’ used in the original psalm is עֲזַבְתָּנִי (ʿəzabhtānī), from the root עזב (ʿzb), a nice Hebrew root for ‘forsake’, whereas the verb Jesus uses is from סבק (sbq), a root totally absent from the Hebrew Bible but very common in Aramaic with the meaning ‘forsake’ (among others). In other words, he’s quoting an Aramaic translation, or Targum, of the psalm.⁶ There are more examples I could discuss, but I’ll spare you any more linguistic minutiae and wrap up the point by noting that surely the only plausible reason for the gospel writers to switch from Greek into Aramaic for certain of Jesus’ sayings would be because they wanted, for whatever reason, to record the words that actually came out of his mouth in these instances, rather than a Greek translation of them? Granted, there’s also good evidence of Jesus’ familiarity with Hebrew and, to a lesser extent, Greek,⁷ but that he spoke Aramaic is clearest of all. So why, when I ticked the box marked ‘Other’ as well as those marked ‘Hebrew’ and ‘Greek’ in answer to the relevant poll’s question as to which languages Jesus spoke (there was none marked ‘Aramaic’), was I told I was wrong?

“One in five had no idea that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were four of [Jesus’ twelve disciples].” Well, call me illiterate, but I can’t seem to find a mention of any Mark or Luke in any of the lists of the twelve given in the gospels.⁸ So again, I’m more concerned about the supposedly clued-up majority here than the supposedly ignorant minority.

“The research, carried out via OnePoll.com, also revealed just three in ten learned their knowledge of Jesus and his story from The [sic] Bible itself.”

Oh. Well, that explains a lot.

Folks, I beg and implore you – don’t believe that things you hear about Jesus are true just because everybody else seems to think they are. God didn’t give us the scriptures so that we could stake our understanding of who he is on tradition and hearsay.

“Oh how I love your law!

It is my meditation all the day.

Your commandment makes me wiser than my enemies,

for it is ever with me.

I have more understanding than all my teachers,

for your testimonies are my meditation.”⁹ – Psalm 119:97-99

The route to having understanding better than that of the fantastically learned, is to obsess over the Bible. Read it. Dwell on it. Wrestle with it. Let it be your constant preoccupation. And test everything you hear people say about God against it. It’s one thing to belong to the minority who are genuinely clueless about what the Bible says on a particular topic; it’s more dangerous, I’d argue – more falsely secure – to belong to the majority who think they know what it says, but turn out to be not much less ignorant. According to the poll cited by the Independent, seven in ten Brits would say they have a good knowledge of the story of Jesus. Perhaps they have a good knowledge of a story of Jesus – but unless it’s the one the Bible tells, that honestly doesn’t count for very much.

I started with the intention of indulging in a rant. I seem to have ended by making an exhortation that applies as directly to myself as to anyone: there’s still way too much in the Bible that I haven’t ever taken the trouble to meditate on, let alone doing so all day, and I don’t doubt there are questions regarding which I still belong to a falsely-secure ignorant majority, thinking I know what the Bible says about the topic at hand, because that’s what everyone else seems to think it says, without actually having read and understood the relevant portions of it for myself. My friends, let’s make the scriptures our obsession, because when we love them such that they are our meditation all the day, God will begin to grant us wisdom and understanding surpassing that of those who oppose us and those who instruct us. Let’s not be content with anything less.

Footnotes

¹ No kidding – here it is: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/christmas-jesus-christ-birthday-25-december-brits-ignorant-nativity-christianity-bethlehem-a8094496.html.

² Not that that involved anything more stunningly intellectual than a bit of online searching.

³ For further details: https://www.christianpost.com/news/christmas-history-was-jesus-born-in-a-cave-111405/. “The idea that Jesus was born in a cave is simply based upon tradition and does not come from the Bible,” quotes the article at its end. True, I grant you; the same may be said for the idea that Jesus was born in a stable.

⁴ That fact is a fairly big deal in the first part of Luke 2: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+2&version=ESVUK.

⁵ Paul refers to the man in question as Κηφᾶς (in English translations, Cephas) eight times, in 1 Corinthians 1:12, 3:22, 9:5, and 15:5; and Galatians 1:18, 2:9, 2:11, and 2:14. By contrast, he only calls him Peter twice, in Galatians 2:7 and 2:8, so in the same chapter in which he calls him Cephas three times.

⁶ A surviving Targum known to the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon uses the exact same form of the verb that would seem to be indicated by the Greek transliteration of what Jesus said, סבקתני: http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/showtargum.php. The same Targum also uses a different expression for ‘why’ to what Jesus said, namely מטול מה (meṭūl māh), literally ‘on account of what’. לָמָה (lāmāh), the word Jesus used for ‘why’, is less frequently used in Aramaic than in Hebrew, but is nonetheless good Aramaic that could quite happily have been used in a Targum.

⁷ I know one very clever and godly person who thinks the beatitudes were originally delivered in Greek, on the grounds of the alliteration that appears in them; see point 10 in this article: https://www.crossway.org/articles/10-reasons-pastors-should-study-the-bible-in-its-original-languages/. Although, you know, the rest of the article’s worth a read too.

⁸ You’re looking at Matthew 10, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+10&version=ESVUK, Mark 3, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+3&version=ESVUK, and Luke 6, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+6&version=ESVUK. Some of the twelve are identified by more than one name in the different accounts, but we still don’t have any Marks or Lukes.

⁹ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+119&version=ESVUK. I won’t tell you to read all of it, but you could check out the מ (mem) section from which I took my three-verse extract, maybe?