Rarely do I find a translation that makes no sense to me, and since this particular one is replicated in all the translations, I am assuming I am missing something, but I have no idea what it could be. Can you help?

Jesus has just announced his public ministry, and in Mark 1:16 Mark writes, “As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net (ἀμφιβάλλοντας) into the lake, for they were fishermen (ἁλιεῖς)” (NIV).

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One of the fundamental lessons everyone who does word studies needs to understand is that words have a range of meaning. When students memorize Greek vocabulary, we have to give them the basic meaning (or meanings) of the word, but it is a mistake to think that the most common use of a word is somehow its “literal” meaning.

σάρχ does not mean “flesh”; it means many things. One of its “glosses” may be “flesh,” but the word means so much more than just “flesh.”

So whether you are in a church learning Greek for your Bible study, or a first year Greek student, at some point you will need to make the transition from glosses to a full definition of a word and understanding how to use context to determine meaning.

A good example of this is the word καρπός. Its glosses are “fruit, crop, result.” You can see the relationship among the options. A tree has fruit and a field has a crop, and just as the result of a farmer’s work is fruit and a crop, so also the result of other types of activity can be a “crop” metaphorically.

But this is where things can get tricky. Consider Philippians 4:17. Paul has been thanking them for their gift, but he has to be careful. In his culture, gifts were given so that another gift would be returned. Quid pro quo. If you gave something to someone, there was a cultural expectation that something would be given back.

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In first year Greek we historically do just one wooden, word-for-word translation. This way the teacher knows that the student knows the tense of the verb or case of the noun. The problem is that the students leave first year class thinking that word-for-word is acceptable English and is the most accurate translation method, neither of which is accurate.

Take Matt 13:11 for example. “And (δὲ) answering he said to them (ἀποκριθεὶς εἶπεν), ‘because (ὅτι) to you it has been given (δέδοται) to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven (οὐρανῶν), but to them it has not been given (δέδοται).’”

1. But translating δέ in this context is redundant. In v 10 the disciples asked a question, and v 11 is his answer. No connective is necessary in English, nor is it stylish English.

2. Since “answering he said” is not English by anyone’s measure, and since the idiom simply means “to answer,” why not say that?

3. In the rush to translate every Greek word with a specific English word, did the student miss the fact that ὅτι introduces direct speech and is translated by quotation marks, as most translations do?

It is often said that translators are traitors. They are traitors because they either over- or under-translate the meaning of the original text. Either they say too much in an attempt to convey the full meaning of the Greek, or they say too little and leave some of the meaning untranslated.

A typical example is the Greek construction of οὐ μή and the aorist subjunctive. It coneys an emphatic negation, not just “no” but “no no no” (as one of my children used to say when he was little). Of course, you can’t say “no no no” in translation, and we do not have a grammatical construction in Engish similar to οὐ μή plus aorist subjunctive. So are we to try and bring the emphatic nature of the negation into English, or do we leave it out?

A good example is Mark 10:15. “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter (οὐ μὴ εἰσέλθῃ) it” (NIV, also CSB, NET, NRSV, NLT). In general, the use of “never” is too strong a translation (over translating) since that is not what the emphatic negation is saying. Think of Jesus saying v 15, and either pounding a fist or stamping his foot or raising his voice. That’s οὐ μή plus aorist subjunctive. However, the reason “never” works in this verse is that as long as a person does not become like a child, he or she will absolutely not enter God’s kingdom (hear my fist pounding). The statement is always true and hence the use of “never” works.

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I am thinking quite a bit these days about sequencing, and how different Greek is from English, which then raises interesting problems for the translator. I am also wondering more about how students should be translating in first year.

Look at the series of participles in the Greatest Command (Mk 12:28).

προσελθὼν εἷς τῶν γραμματέων
ἀκούσας αὐτῶν συζητούντων,
ἰδὼν ὅτι καλῶς ἀπεκρίθη αὐτοῖς
ἐπηρώτησεν αὐτόν· ποία ἐστὶν ἐντολὴ πρώτη πάντων;

The basic sentence structure is εἷς ἐπηρώτησεν αὐτόν. “One (of the scribes) asked him.” As a side note, my friend Dan Wallace told me that he prefers his students to find the verb–subject–direct object, especially in a complicated sentence, and then see where the rest of the words fit in relation to that structure. This is instead of just going word for word. A good idea.

In first year Greek, in order to let your teacher know that you know the difference between a present and aorist participle and understand the concept of relative time, you might translate something like this.