Bible talk

[Core Imposter]

This is the condemnation of the religious who think themselves righteous through their works.

 

[Kyriakos]

Well, yes, but that is a general motif in the New Testament.
In this specific parable I feel that the meaning is typically misrepresented (by Kierkegaard too) as being about unconditional love to others, when Jesus very explicitly names only the Samaritan as the "close person" which the judaic law dictated should be loved etc.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Guys I fear you are arguing over a glaring mistranslation. The term in the original text is πλησίον, which means "one next to you". It's not a general (let alone metaphorical) neighbor

1) We're not arguing
2) plesios a on (don't make me dig up Greek characters) is the adjective "near." Treated as a substantive, the nearest English equivalent is "neighbor"
3) please read the thread, where I've treated it as near-one.

 

[Kyriakos]

1) We're not arguing
2) plesios e on (don't make me dig up Greek characters) is the adjective "near." Treated as a substantive, the nearest English equivalent is "neighbor"
3) please read the thread, where I've treated it as near-one.

It's a noun in Greek too (and also an epithet)
I am the distant one here - like the Samaritan - so what I can bring is the translation of the actual text ^^

36 τίς οὖν τούτων τῶν τριῶν πλησίον δοκεῖ σοι γεγονέναι τοῦ ἐμπεσόντος εἰς τοὺς λῃστάς;

There is only one way to translate this: "which of those three do you think has become closer (if you wish to keep the original's syntax: 'has become a close person') to the victim of those thiefs?"

 

[Core Imposter]

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.

 

[Kyriakos]

Imo "neighbor" is too easily taken metaphorically, and people can (wrongly) think that a neighbor is defined strictly by space. On the other hand, a tourist from the other side of the world can one day be closer to you etc.
Besides, if the writers of the New Testament wanted to use the term for neighbor, one would suppose they'd use that instead of πλησίον.

 

[Core Imposter]

Gori, what do you make of the two pence?

And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Oh, we'll get to all of that stuff, Kyr.

Later, Core; I gotta finish this.

people can (wrongly) think that a neighbor is defined strictly by space. On the other hand, a tourist from the other side of the world can one day be closer to you etc.

Neighbor is defined strictly by space, as your immediate use of the word "closer" indicates.

Anyway, like I said, we're going to get to your sense of the word, Kyr. That will play an important part in my interpretation.

But for right now, it has to be a person, right? (someone you could or could not love). And your relation to that person is indicated primarily by proximity.

That is to say, πλησίον, as a Greek translation of the Hebrew "equivalent" (and we'll get to that) has to be essentially what English means by the word "neighbor" (in it's locational meaning, a near-one).

This is the condemnation of the religious who think themselves righteous through their works.

This will come into things. @Samson is patient. All the rest a ya are trying to rush things.

But I'll slow down enough to bring you into it, Kyr, and ensure that my handling of the Greek passes muster.

 

[bernie14]

Agnostic here, I re read the whole parable again (in English). Funny that Jesus did not mention where the man on the road was from. The jist to me is that it didn't matter. So I don't know what the hang up is...why the focus on in and out groups?

EDIT: if Jesus would have said...a priest or a levant or a Samaritan was beat up and left on the side of the road ..but he didn't say that....

EDIT 2: also, he was TOTALLY stripped. That seems telling, in that it is NOT important WHERE he was from.....

 

[Gori the Grey]

I think I can agree to that, though I am not sure what legerdemain means.

And I shouldn't have used it, actually; I was being a bit saucy. It's the kind of tricky hand-motions that magicians use to do their illusions.

So let me ask it without that:

If Jesus, through the parable he's about to tell, converts a word meaning "near-one" to the single meaning that word can't possibly have (namely, "everyone"), that redefinition would represent a pretty impressive rhetorical/conceptual feat, yes?

Take it away from this particular case. A "step" is something that helps facilitate your progress; if somebody suddenly made it mean "obstacle" instead, they would have done a pretty remarkable verbal trick, no?

I care most about your answer to the first of those questions, but I have to recover the rhythm of our exchange.

 

[Samson]

If Jesus, through the parable he's about to tell, converts a word meaning "near-one" to the single meaning that word can't possibly have (namely, "everyone"), that redefinition would represent a pretty impressive rhetorical/conceptual feat, yes?

Yes, it is pretty impressive.

Take it away from this particular case. A "step" is something that helps facilitate your progress; if somebody suddenly made it mean "obstacle" instead, they would have done a pretty remarkable verbal trick, no?

This I am less sure of. A step can also be a change, and break in the consistency. A step gets in the way of a wheel chair.

 

[Kyriakos]

Oh, we'll get to all of that stuff, Kyr.

Later, Core; I gotta finish this.



Neighbor is defined strictly by space, as your immediate use of the word "closer" indicates.

Anyway, like I said, we're going to get to your sense of the word, Kyr. That will play an important part in my interpretation.

But for right now, it has to be a person, right? (someone you could or could not love). And your relation to that person is indicated primarily by proximity.

That is to say, πλησίον, as a Greek translation of the Hebrew "equivalent" (and we'll get to that) has to be essentially what English means by the word "neighbor" (in it's locational meaning, a near-one).



This will come into things. @Samson is patient. All the rest a ya are trying to rush things.

But I'll slow down enough to bring you into it, Kyr, and ensure that my handling of the Greek passes muster.

The problem is that a neighbor is someone who already lives near you. A πλησίον is simply one who is near you at a specific moment - one has to assume, anyway, that the Sarmatian didn't typically live near the person; he only met him in a long trip. If I came to visit you for an hour, and then return to Greece, you couldn't call me your neighbor but for that hour I'd obviously be a πλησίον.
As for assuming a jewish original term, afaik the New Testament was written in Greek from the start, so that shouldn't be an issue.
Πλησίον, lastly, can be used for inanimate objects too, and the spelling remains the same; the article gives away what it is.

If I was to assume, I'd say that (apart from the other subtext) Jesus wanted to say that someone is to be termed "close" in the religious law-sense only if they prove to be close by their actions, and not by likeness of culture/tribe or by literally living next to you. In this sense, the "near" one indeed can be (in theory) "anyone", as long as they act kindly to you and so on. And only ideally (if all were good etc etc) it can mean "everyone".

I haven't paid close attention to preceding posts, but maybe Samson also refers to this metamorphosis of "close" to mean "not just if close but also if (positive quality)" and with the further conjunction of "normally distant people in space can be close under this redefinition, and the opposite also is true".

 

[Gori the Grey]

I haven't paid close attention to preceding posts

Go do that, and I think you'll see that I've been handling the Greek in a way that you will find acceptable.

It's just that I'm proceeding through the narrative more slowly than you want to, so this

that the Sarmatian didn't typically live near the person

is jumping the gun. We're just at the point where the lawyer asks "Who is my neighbor?" We aren't even in to the parable proper, yet, just the set-up. Be patient.

As for assuming a jewish original term, afaik the New Testament was written in Greek from the start, so that shouldn't be an issue.

It will be an issue. Not a huge one, but we do have to confront it. In fact it's one of the next things I'll take up.

This I am less sure of. A step can also be a change, and break in the consistency. A step gets in the way of a wheel chair.

Ha ha. Good for you. Yes. For an able-bodied person, I meant. But I'll pick a different example, and it's not really material to the core point. Your other answer is the one that really matters to me.

But I can only take this up again in about a half an hour at the earliest. Hang on.

 

[Kyriakos]

Hm, the problem imo is this, Gori:

If you wish to stick to the original term being "neighbor" (or, if you will, something πλησίον to neighbor ) in judaic law, you'd find it difficult to account for why the lawyer didn't tell Jesus that the great judaic law speaks explicitly of neighbors, which are set by space

 

[Gori the Grey]

I have no idea what that last post means, Kyr. And @bernie14, I missed a post of yours. A lot of that stuff will come into my interpretation as well.

So, now we should confront the issue of translation. The commentary you cited in post 1086, @Samson, says that the Hebrew word from the passage in Leviticus that the lawyer is citing means "people with whom you associate" (I know zero Hebrew, so I'm just going to take that on trust). That's not an exact equivalent of "people you're near." Now, I think we have to assume that the conversation between Jesus and the lawyer originally occurred in Hebrew. But we're getting it in Luke's Greek, and presumably the closest word in Greek that he could think of πλησίον, near-one, neighbor. It's not an exact equivalent, is it? The Venn overlap between people-near-you and people-with-whom-you-associate might be considerable, but would likely not be complete. For example, I associate with Kyr, but fortunately, he is very far away.

Kyr himself can say whether there is a better word Luke might have used. English has the word "associates"; I don't know how well that gets at the Hebrew word here.

Anyway, I don't think it matters terribly much to the interpretation I'm advancing, but we should recognize it that there is this difference between the word used in the original conversation and the record of that conversation from which we're working.

In either case, the lawyer is trying to get defined the group of people to whom Leviticus 19:18 obligates him to love. A lot's at stake. His opening question had been, "What do I have to do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus turns the tables and asks him what. He gives his answer, and Jesus says "correct." But now he's asks "Who is my neighbor?" We know he doesn't already have the answer "everybody," because then he wouldn't ask the question. And anyway, we've said that the word "neighbor" can't really mean "everybody" because you can't simultaneously be near to everybody (can't really associate with everybody, either). Would you feel comfortable saying the lawyer is trying to establish an in-group, a limited number of people to whom the Levitican injunction applies. (and by extension an out-group, even if that might not be his express purpose)?

Edit: Oops, I skipped a step. Not really crucial. We can back up. There was just one thing I wanted to treat before I raised this.

 

[Kyriakos]

I am simply stating that since the term (plesion or whatever else) was already in some judaic law book (since Jesus asked the lawyer to recite a text...), you cannot explain why the lawyer wouldn't simply have attacked Jesus' parable by retorting that the judaic law explicitly talks of a neighbor and therefore not something which does not have to be limited by living close to you => dismissing Jesus' parable.
The lawyer certainly wanted to speak against Jesus, so he wouldn't have missed so simply a retort.
(maybe @Plotinus can help us)

To me, that alone is enough to dissuade us from thinking the term wasn't something like plesion, and instead something like neighbor.
I have to feel confident that the Greek writer of that part of the New Testament obviously chose the term πλησίον because the story makes no sense if it was 'neighbor' (the story becomes far less believable).

By the way, I don't think the correct term for the other person is "lawyer" either; he was clearly a teacher of the judaic law. Did they even have lawyers in Judea at that time?!

 

[Gori the Grey]

The lawyer certainly wanted to speak against Jesus,

For right now, we're taking the lawyer as being in earnest, really wanting to get the answer to the question he's asking: what group of people does Leviticus 19: 18 obligate me to love.

We have some suspicion he might be motivated by wanting to make that group as small and tight-knit as he can. But we haven't even really accused him of that yet.

 

[Kyriakos]

For right now, we're taking the lawyer as being in earnest, really wanting to get the answer to the question he's asking: what group of people does Leviticus 19: 18 obligate me to love.

That isn't at all supported by the text* either, though
And also notice that he wasn't what you think as a lawyer today, but a religious teacher/interpreter. The term in the original is "νομικός", and the nomos (law) there is the judaic one, not something secular.

*Even the first sentence of the story tells you that: Τῷ καιρῷ ἐκείνῳ, νομικός τις προσῆλθε τῷ Ἰησοῦ ἐκπειράζων αὐτὸν καὶ λέγων· ie: "In those days, a lawman came to Jesus to tempt him and said to him".
He remains antagonistic later on: 29 ὁ δὲ θέλων δικαιοῦν ἑαυτὸν εἶπε πρὸς τὸν Ἰησοῦν· καὶ τίς ἐστί μου πλησίον; ie "and the other person (the 'lawyer'), wishing to promote himself as the just one, asked Jesus who his plesion would be".

 

[Gori the Grey]

Yes, Kyr. That's all in the mix. As a part of getting yourself up on the discussion, did you read the commentary Samson provided? We're taking that whole commentary as our starting point.

This guy is an expert on the Jewish law, the Torah. When Jesus asks him to give his answer he cites that Law. The whole discussion that follows is about what that law obligates him to do (to inherit eternal life).

 

[Angst]

God doesn't condemn anyone to hell. Every person on this planet has the choice of accepting or not. I'm not sure how things work with those who have never heard of God but I'm pretty sure He judges those cases fairly. Satan wants us to believe that God sends people to hell when in reality it is Satan who deceives many into going to hell of their own accord.

god is primary within christianity. satan and hell work as part of his design, so to say. so is the case with freedom of choice.

let's say i have a son. within my house, i have the jurisdiction over the kid. i also made the kid's actions possible by virtue of putting him into this world. i then tell my son that if he's a good boy, i'll feed him, make him happy and give him candy. if he's a bad boy, i'll cut off his arms and legs and chain him in the basement. this is not love. importantly, neither rewarding my son or punishing him in this case is love. it's transactional authority. if we trust the scriptures that god loves us, what love means on a divine scale can mean something different, but it's so inexplicable to us that we might as well call it blogblzorgluntizking. it has no connection to earthly commands. the only earthly thing this love reflects is authority, and a particularly cruel one at that.

anyways, let's elevate my house into the level of reality, which god made, y'know. dude made the universe. he made the principles of physics, the principles of life, and the principles of thinking beings, and the sheer ability to commit moral failure. it's not just the question of a dad putting a kid into the world, allowing choices, but god making it so that the very nature of anyone putting anything ever into the world is able to act cruely and fail, by intention. god made free will possible, by intent. god made bad actions possible, by intent. god made an infinite hell prison (also infinitely, cosmically worse than the grim device i set up in my house). god made it possible for us to end there. this is not love.

and gesturing towards satan means nothing. satan being a fallen angel is a literary invention that has been retrofitted into scripture. and even so, within a cosmic order, and within scripture, satan was always subservient to god. part of the creation.

except one point, which is important here. again, early forms of judaism grew out of an environment where the jews were indeed the chosen people with their own god. but it was written with an understanding where gods of other people definitely existed. some of the blame of evil of scripture unto other powers makes sense if you look at scripture this way. but it can literally not fit within the modern development of christianity. you either need to believe melek, shiva and odin also exists but that you must turn away from them; or you need to believe that neither exist, and that the question is god but one of authority; or you need to embrace the cognitive dissonance and embrace the leap of faith, believing in divine love in spite of what everything tells you, from reality to scripture. as i noted elsewhere in this thread, i think most christians do best with the latter.

*

on transactional authority and how dangerous this actually is. again, i started rereading the book of job recently. it's a weird one. and probably my favorite passage. so summary for everyone; job is a just and faithful man, who is rewarded on earth with wealth and a huge family. satan goes to god and is like, this dude only prays to you because he's wealthy and happy. and god is like, cool satan bro, go and ruin his life then, but don't kill him. and then job has his life absolutely destroyed, everything is lost, his family dies, and he's infested with leprosy to top it off. he still kind of swears by god but kind of questions the nature of belief. he believes god has forsaken him, yet he still believes in god. then a few of his friends pass by him and they get into a dialogue, where his friends i believe try to reaffirm job's faith, even in all his suffering.

that's how far i made it in my current rereading. i know it ends with job perservering through suffering, still believing in god, and he's rewarded with getting all of his happiness back through magic. all the material and health is rewarded, good ending.

now, i need to answer a phone call within a few minutes lmao, but i'll just do one note on how that's ABSOLUTE BULLDUCKY AND THE WORST LESSON EVER.

see, i couldn't help reading this dialogue and recognize several people from my life. they were dependent on someone they loved and swore to loving, no matter how tough it got. they swore to me that this someone was actually lovely and nice and that i should recognize that when that someone was lovely and nice, they were lovely and nice. they were rewarded by this someone when they acted how the other wanted them to act! how much love they received. now try and recognize this situation - one of my friends in an abusive relationship with material dependency, with my friend often bloodied up.

imagine now that i was a friend that instead of trying to get my friend out of this situation, i told them, nono, they actually love you, you have to stay with them. suffer the wounds you are inflicted in this world, because "in truth", behind concrete action, they love you. and then i pressure them into staying throughout. this is... horrifying.

now, i don't mind media portraying toxic behavior or cruelty. but the problem with the ending of the book of job is that it rewards this situation. the lesson is to get bloodied until your abuser suddenly decides to reward your loyalty with gifts. let alone how awful this is, try and think about this in the context of god's "love", or the supposed "love" of the abuser. if i were to write something similar to the book of job (which i do a lot), i'd end it one of two ways; either have job further embrace his piety, only to perish; or to make the Everything Is Good Now Ending a tone of absurdity, undercutting the structure of this whole line of logic. again, it is not love. it's transaction.

&&and sidenote, if you say that satan did these things to job, i'm gonna get awfully miffed. satan was liberally allowed by god to do these things to job. let's leave aside the things in pt1 of this post; if i had a friend who asked me whether he could shoot my wife, i would not love my wife if i told my friend to just go ahead and shoot her. like what are you talking about <3