I’ve been studying Ancient Greek for over thirty years. Niche? Maybe. As someone for whom Greek has therefore become an engrained part of who I am and how I think, it has also had a profound effect on how I read and understand the New Testament. In my readings, linguistics and translation theory become their own vehicles for prayer and exegesis. This isn’t quibbling over vocab, it’s exploring how the Word is indeed incarnate and transformative. In this post, therefore, I give a reading on Mark 4:21-25. The passage is well-known, but the Greek is unexpected, fiendish, and awkward, and in trying to unpack its potential, offers what I have found to be a rich array of diverse but positive readings. Elissa has already written about translation and the liturgy, about its structural impact on our faith, with great theoretical clarity. Learning to read, to translate thought into words, let alone between languages, will never be irrelevant. In this piece, I take a different approach, honing in on a short passage, drawing on the theoretical frameworks without citing them directly.
A ”straightforward” reading of the verses might read something like this:
And he was saying to them, “No lamp comes in order that it might be put under a basket, or a bed, does it? Surely you’d put it on a lampstand, wouldn’t you? For there is nothing hidden that might not yet be revealed, nor has anything arisen in secret that won’t come to the light. Let the one who has ear to hear, hear.”
And he was saying to them “look at what you hear. Measure by the measure with which it will be measured unto you, and set down for you. For he who has, more will be given him; as for he who has not, even what he has will be taken from him.”
I find this profoundly unsatisfactory. It doesn’t sound much like English, and smooths over a number of awkward Greek issues. By keeping it so bland, we leave room for a reader to understand more, but we also risk alienating readers who can’t make sense of it.
How can a lamp come or go anywhere, given it’s an inanimate object? The basket is often glossed as a grain basket. How much does that matter to us? Does it help us read more contextually, or put a barrier in place given that an average reader isn’t going to know what a grain basket looked like? There are four instances of the Greek word ἱνα (hina, “so that / in order to”) in quick succession. One could not possibly read four clauses like that in a row; it makes no sense. The cumulative impact is of linked events, however; the breakdown of grammar requires one to read and not translate, to intuit and not think. It makes this an even more impactful image.
There are two “slanted questions” in a row – those are the kind ending in “do you / don’t you” where a reader is manipulated linguistically into agreeing yes / no, which may or may not be what their logic and heart say. Two in a row (the first assuming the answer no, the second the answer yes) read clumsily in English. The Greek has hammered home a point though. This is teaching with both full linguistic force, and full linguistic ambiguity.
The repeated “measure” is impossible to reflect adequately in Greek. It’s a literary device (polyptoton) that works well in Hebrew, okay in Greek, and badly in English. In any case, what are we measuring? Using what units? What is it actually trying to communicate?
After the injunction that the one who has ears to hear should listen (the repeated “hear” in Greek not working in English), we are told to “watch what we listen to”. How can one look at hearing? What does listening have to do with things being hidden? My sense is not that this is synaesthesia gone mad. Remembering that the Greek word “idiot” means “private citizen”, that is, someone who didn’t engage in democratic practice, we can see that hiding and remaining quiet may also both be about denying one’s duty, one’s performed humanity, one’s reality in a relational world that the hingeword “hina” pointed at. “Watch what you listen to” becomes a gentle way of giving the command and drawing one from the hidden darkness into the light. “Listen”, is bald, but “be careful with your listening” much more gentle, much less triggering of demand avoidance, for example, much more face-saving. After the initial direct command, we are gently reminded to be careful and not strident in applying it.
There is also something profoundly passive about the giving / taking away of things from people, the lamp being placed somewhere but the placer unknown. The Greek is lyrical, with the repeated passive verb endings offering an almost poetic feel to the text. We know God is the agent par excellence, but in this passage, we’re also asked to engage our agency and unhide.
“He was saying” is a standard Markan idiom; he uses it 46 times, to the point it becomes a verbal tic. Or does it? That verb form (the imperfect) can convey trying, keeping on, starting, or being used to doing something. The two examples in quick succession force a point: Jesus just keeps on teaching, trying to get through to us in any way he can.
So, if I were going to push the boat out a little, I might translate it like this:
He used to say things like, “nobody brings a lamp and then puts it under a basket or a bed. You’d bring it to put it on a lampstand, wouldn’t you? Nothing exists that is hidden and can’t one day be revealed; nothing has come into being so hidden that it can’t come into the light. Whoever has the capacity to listen, they should listen.”
He also used to say “pay attention to what you listen to. Judge those in the same way you will be judged. The man who has plenty will find himself gaining more. The one who has nothing, will find whatever he does have stripped away.”
Moving from a formal (word for word) representation of the Greek, I’ve reconfigured it to bring in agency and sense. I’ve tried to express just how much the imperfect tense can do (it’s my favourite tense), to express the oddness but also the power of the images. I’ve lost “faithfulness” and in flattening out the problems perhaps done a disservice to the text (wherein problems are part of the reading experience). What, however, have I gained? That may not be for the author to assert, so much as the reader to experience. That is also part of the point. The Word remains alive, ready for our multisensory, cognitive and emotional, iterative engagement. In leaving space for ambiguity, and in not asserting my specific reading, I am not simplistically agnostic, or problematically non-directive. I’m picking up on what a Jesuit colleague once said to me: he described the Bible as a privileged place for an encounter with God. While the scaffold of the text keeps us within the parameters of our faith, the open-endedness of our linguistic enquiry leaves room for our individual relationships with God to flourish.
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