Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
John 1:41-42
John stops the narrative twice to translate a word for you, which tells you who he thought was reading.
John 1:41-42, in every translation this tool compares.
He grabbed the bonnet, which is what the British call the hood. You just learned two things. What a bonnet is, and that the writer assumes you are American. Writers who stop to translate are telling you who they expect to be reading.
Because it is the author telling you, inside his own narrative, who he expects to be reading. Very little else in the New Testament gives you that directly, and it costs you nothing in translation, which is why nobody notices it.
We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ. … Thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.
Versions keep the glosses because they are in the text. Some smooth them into parentheses.
Μεσσίας Messias · G3323 / Κηφᾶς Kephas · G2786
Messias and Kephas are Aramaic words carried into a Greek sentence, and John immediately supplies the Greek equivalent. He does the same thing at 1:38 with Rabbi, at 9:7 with Siloam, and at 20:16 with Rabboni.
There's no translation loss here. The point is what the habit reveals: the writer is working from an Aramaic-speaking setting and writing for readers who are not in it.
When a biblical writer translates a word inside his own sentence, he is telling you about his audience. Those glosses are some of the most direct evidence in the New Testament about who a book was written for.
There is nothing to choose. The entry is here because it is the clearest example in John of the seam between the language of the events and the language of the book.
- John's other glosses: 1:38 Rabbi; 9:7 Siloam; 19:13 Gabbatha; 19:17 Golgotha; 20:16 Rabboni
- Mark does the same at 5:41 and 15:34, which makes it a habit of the tradition rather than of one writer
