Learning the original languages is often presented as the point at which interpretive disputes come to an end. Once a reader can identify the form of a Greek participle or the stem of a Hebrew verb, the reasoning goes, the text will say what it says without interference from translators. That expectation holds up reasonably well much of the time, since a great many disagreements do dissolve as soon as the underlying language is examined. The trouble begins when grammatical knowledge is treated as sufficient on its own, because a reader with a lexicon and a parsing guide can easily produce a confident reading that the first audience would not have recognized.
The gap between knowing a language and knowing how its speakers used it is where comparative reading is most useful. Setting a difficult phrase beside the wider literature in which it circulated can show that the phrase was a stock expression rather than a precise formulation. That recognition guards against the most common failure in close reading, which is to overinterpret, to draw more out of a phrase than the people who used it ever put into it.
What a Lexicon Can and Cannot Do
A dictionary entry lists possibilities rather than meanings. A word taken outside of any context is not carrying a meaning at all, only a range of things it could be used to indicate, and the situation together with the syntax then selects among those possibilities. Once a word appears in a specific context it ordinarily has one meaning there rather than several, which is why gathering every sense a term carries elsewhere and importing them all into a single passage produces a reading no first audience would have arrived at.[1]
An ordinary English example shows how little the accumulated senses matter. A sentence reporting that a hall was taxed to capacity uses a verb that elsewhere means to demand payment, to accuse, or to assess, and none of those senses is relevant. Nobody works out what those uses have in common, decides the shared idea is burden, and concludes that the hall was burdened by its occupants. Everyone simply understands that the hall was full.
Ancient texts come with no living speakers to consult. An interpreter has the grammar, the lexicon, and whatever other texts happen to survive, and the third of those is the only one that can show how an expression was actually used.
The Particular Problem of Idioms
An idiom is a fixed expression whose meaning cannot be assembled out of its parts. Nothing in the grammar of such a phrase signals that it should be read as a unit, which is exactly what makes idioms invisible to grammatical analysis. A reader who parses each element correctly and combines the results will produce a translation that is defensible word by word and wrong as a whole. Overinterpretation of this kind comes from rigor rather than carelessness, since it is the product of taking every element seriously on its own.
The difficulty gets worse when a text crosses into a culture that no longer shares the original habits of speech. An English writer who complains about red tape will be understood immediately by readers today and will baffle a reader two thousand years from now who has learned the language from grammars and dictionaries but has no record of everyday usage to consult. That future reader might reasonably decide the phrase concerns ribbon, and might build an elaborate argument on the decision. Early Jewish and Christian texts present the same problem in reverse, since their authors shared a way of speaking that now has to be reconstructed from whatever documents remain.
A Verse That Grammar Has Not Settled
Acts 13:48 has been one of the most heavily contested sentences in the New Testament. The narrative describes the response at Antioch in Pisidia after Paul and Barnabas turn to a non-Jewish audience, and the closing clause reports that all who had been appointed for eternal life believed. The verse figures prominently in arguments over predestination, and its interpretive history follows the confessional divisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Calvin took the appointing to refer to an eternal counsel and read the verse as teaching that faith depends on election. A Baptist confession of 1655 cited it in support of persons chosen to life and salvation before the foundation of the world. John Wesley cited the same clause to argue the reverse, that Luke describes an ordination taking place at the moment of hearing rather than one issued in eternity.[2]
Grammar does not decide between these readings, and part of the reason is that the Greek itself is ambiguous. The participle behind the English "appointed" belongs to a form in which the passive and the middle look identical, so the clause can describe people who were placed in a certain position by someone else or people who placed themselves in one. Appeals to the participle therefore tend to repeat an interpreter's prior commitments rather than limit them, and one reference work asserts that the grammar makes a given reading next to impossible while another asserts the opposite.
The Same Language in Rabbinic Sources
Set beside rabbinic literature, the clause looks less like a technical statement about how election works and more like a familiar way of speaking. The expression rendered "appointed for eternal life" matches a stock Hebrew phrase meaning destined for the life of the world to come, and that phrase turns up repeatedly in the Babylonian Talmud in stories that have nothing to do with decrees issued before creation.[3] A heavenly voice pronounces it over Rabbi Akiva as he is being executed. Another pronounces it over everyone who attended Rabbi Judah's funeral, and then over a launderer who arrived too late and died of grief on the spot. The Jerusalem Talmud preserves the same formula in similar settings.
The phrase functions in these passages as a way of saying that someone has a share in what is to come. It carries no information about when the share was assigned or on what basis, and the storytellers who use it show no interest in either question. Recognizing the expression in Acts does not by itself resolve what the author of Acts meant, and it certainly does not settle a dispute that has been running for four centuries. It does change the question, though, from what a single participle says about how election works to what a hearer familiar with this way of speaking would have taken the sentence to mean, and grammar has no way of raising that second question at all.
Want to learn more about this? Gospel and Rabbinic Sayings
Idioms That Translations Quietly Resolve
Some idioms have been recognized long enough that modern translations render the sense rather than the language, which hides how much interpretive work has already been done. The saying about the eye as the lamp of the body in Matthew 6:22-23 contrasts an eye described in Greek as sound or whole with one described as evil, and English versions frequently render the pair as healthy and diseased. That rendering turns a moral expression into a medical one. In its own setting the evil eye was standard language for a grudging, self-serving attitude toward the prosperity of others, and the good eye for generosity, a usage documented across Second Temple and rabbinic sources and consistent with the surrounding material in Matthew about wealth and treasure. People who believed literally in the harm a hostile look could inflict and people who did not could both use the phrase idiomatically, much as an English speaker who does not believe in ghosts can still tell someone they look like they have seen one.[4]
Luke 6:22 offers a case where the underlying expression is invisible in English altogether. Luke's Greek says something close to "cast out your name as evil," which is awkward in Greek and ordinary in Hebrew, where bringing an evil name upon someone is the standard way of saying that a person has been slandered. The same expression appears in the Temple Scroll from Qumran and in the Mishnah's discussion of a husband who defames his wife, in neither case with any possible connection to early Christian usage. Failing to recognize it as an idiom has led interpreters to treat "the name" as a reference to the Christian name that followers of Jesus now bore, and to look for a setting in later conflicts between synagogue and church, when the phrase means nothing more than being slandered.[5]
Where the Method Runs Out
Comparative reading can go wrong in its own ways, and treating a similarity as a conclusion rather than a starting point is the most common. The first question to ask of any proposed match is whether the two passages are actually related or merely use similar language, since shared vocabulary can hide large differences in what that vocabulary is doing. Rabbinic sources make this harder, because most Jewish literature from the first century did not survive, and what remains comes largely from the legal discussions of a small group who lived through the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Reading their usage back into the first century is often reasonable and occasionally wrong, and the two cases are hard to tell apart from the surviving evidence alone.[6]
A quieter mistake comes from correctly identifying a source while missing the route a phrase took to reach the author who used it. A phrase with a literary origin may have passed through so many hands that its first context no longer governs how it is used, and a reader who traces it back to that origin and interprets accordingly will overinterpret it. The same problem arises when an expression became a common saying whose coinage was forgotten and only one or two written instances happen to survive, which makes a distant reader see a direct link where there was only a shared commonplace.[7]
The evil eye is a good test of how much the comparative material has to prove on its own. The sense of the phrase can be established from the Septuagint and from the Greek of the New Testament itself, where a good eye and generosity are linked without any help from rabbinic texts. There the outside evidence confirms a reading the text already supports rather than creating one, which is the strongest case a proposed idiom can have. Where the comparative material is doing all the work by itself, the reading stays provisional, and saying so is more useful than pressing grammar for a certainty it cannot give.