Monday, November 4, 2013

The multitudes that followed Jesus - what does it mean?

I got the following from Understanding the Difficult words of Jesus by David Bivin and Roy Blizzard.

Robert L Lindsey writes that when he tried to translate the Gospel of Mark from Greek to Hebrew he found that the syntax of the Greek and the word relationships were as would be found in Hebrew, which could indicate that it was originally translated from Hebrew. (Could it be just a Hebrew writing in Greek - my comment).

Multitudes translates the Greek word "ochloi". Lindsey mentioned in class when teaching on day that 'ochloi' is an odd word since multitude did not fit most of the contexts. An Israeli girl in the class said that the Rabbi's used the word 'ochlosim' to mean the people living in a locality.

So when reading the gospels if you change the work multitude into the 'the people living in the locality' it may make more sense.

2 comments:

  1. Uncle,

    Couple of thoughts/questions come to mind:
    1. Do you think think the formula "ochloi = the people living in the locality" applies to all gospels or only to Mark? If to all gospels, is it fair to infer that the other gospels also have the similar Greek-to-Hebrew syntax & relationships as in Mark?
    2. The term "Multitudes" refers to a vast number, most often implying cross-cultural/lingual/heterogenous crowd, whereas "people living in the locality" would seem to imply a much smaller crowd that would most probably be a homogenous crowd. This is significant, since I have heard messages based on Heterogenous nature of crowd in Jesus' teachings.

    Regards,
    - Daniel

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  2. There has been a theory that the first gospel was written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek. This theory has only a small following, but I have always been a fan of that. Further, I believe that even if written first in a Greek, the thinking process, or sentence structure was Hebrew. This has recently gained strength over.the original Greek understanding of the NT.

    So words like knowledge and know need to be understood in the Hebrew rather than in the Greek.

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