Monday with Mounce

When Jesus was arrested, did he go to Annas (John 18:13) or Caiaphas (Matt 26:57) before going to Pilate? Mark 14:53ff. does not name the high priest. Luke 22:66ff. refers to “elders of the people ... both chief priests and scribes.” So John is alone in specifying that Jesus went first to Annas.

My nephew Dave Gundlach preached an excellent sermon (at 39:00 in the video) this morning (March 24, 2024) that alerted me to something I had never seen before. It's about singular and plurals. James 4:1 says, “What accounts for the quarrels and disputes among you? Is it not this—your desires that are at war in your members?”

My assumption is that Paul’s use of Greek would have been relatively easy for a native speaker to understand. Peter‘s objection (2 Peter 3:15), I assume, would have more to do with Paul's concepts than his use of Greek. But when I see passages like Romans 7:2–3, I am reminded how much is lost by not being a first-century Jew. Our distance from Paul's context should encourage an element of humility as we attempt to exegete his writing.

I received an email asking me about the translation by the Jehovah's Witnesses in John 1:1. Because there is no article in front of the Greek word for "God," they insist that it's translated, "and the word was a god." This shows a significant lack of understanding of how Greek grammar functions relative to the article, I can think of no better response than Dr. Daniel Wallace's "Exegetical Insight" in chapter 6 in my Greek grammar, "Basics of Biblical Greek."

I was reading in Romans this morning and came across a passage that uses ἄνθρωπος in a totally generic sense. I thought that all the translations would use some generic word or phrase. Well, all but one.