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 14:16
Comforter, Helper, Advocate, Counselor, Paraclete. Six versions, six words, one Greek noun nobody can carry.
John 14:16, in every translation this tool compares.
Bring me another chair. Do you mean one more of these chairs, or a different sort of chair entirely? English uses one word for both and lets you work it out. Greek has two, and the speaker has to pick before the sentence leaves his mouth.
Because the noun has no English equivalent at all, and the six versions on your shelf print six different words for it. When translators cannot agree on a single word for a person of the Trinity, that is worth ten minutes of your time. The adjective in front of it is doing quiet work too, and nobody mentions it.
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever.
King James reads Comforter. The ESV and NASB read Helper. The NIV reads Advocate. The NRSV reads Advocate. Older Catholic versions keep Paraclete untranslated, which is the honest surrender.
παράκλητος parakletos · G3875
Two things at once. Parakletos is built from para, alongside, and kaleo, to call: one called alongside. In ordinary Greek it was close to a legal supporter, someone who stands with you in a proceeding, which is why Advocate keeps turning up. And the adjective is allos, another of the same kind, rather than heteros, another of a different kind. Jesus is not promising a substitute of a different sort. He is promising another like himself.
English has no noun that covers legal advocate, personal encourager and one who is summoned to stand beside you. Every version picks the shade it thinks matters most and loses the other two. And English lost the distinction between the two kinds of another somewhere in its history, so the adjective disappears entirely.
When translations scatter this widely on one noun, stop looking for the right English word. There is not one. Learn what the Greek noun covers and read all the renderings as partial views of it.
Comforter was accurate when comfort meant to strengthen, from the same root as fortify, and it has since drifted to consolation. Helper is broad enough to be safe and vague enough to be weak. Advocate captures the legal sense and drops the personal one. Paraclete admits defeat and makes the reader look it up, which is arguably the most honest of the four.
- allos against heteros: compare Galatians 1:6-7, where Paul uses both in two verses to make exactly this distinction
- The same noun at John 14:26; 15:26; 16:7; and of Christ himself at 1 John 2:1, where most versions read Advocate
- Oxford English Dictionary on comfort, from Latin confortare, to strengthen
