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 6:63
The flesh profiteth nothing. Said immediately after a discourse about eating flesh.
John 6:63, in every translation this tool compares.
He is my own flesh and blood. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. One English word, two unrelated ideas, and you sort them instantly by context.
Because the word is sarx, the same noun used throughout the preceding paragraph, and the sentence either contradicts what has just been said or is using the word in its other sense.
Every version reads flesh.
σάρξ sarx · G4561
Sarx covers meat, the physical body, and a whole orientation of life. Verses 51 to 58 use it in the first sense; verse 63 uses it in the last. The apparent contradiction dissolves once the range is in view and does not dissolve any other way.
English flesh has the same range, so the ambiguity is preserved rather than created. What English cannot do is mark which sense is in play.
When a paragraph seems to contradict itself one verse later, check whether the shared word is being used in two of its senses.
Flesh is universal.
- sarx in the eating sense: John 6:51-56
- sarx as orientation: Romans 8:5-8; Galatians 5:19
- The pairing with pneuma in the same verse
