This and That
From A collection of short essays. Project references reflect the source essay; see our current status.
godloveandneighbouryourasyourselfthisdoandwillenteryouthekingdomofgodobeythosewhoauthorityoveryouhaveandobeythemastergodthennext
That’s similar to how our New Testament manuscripts were written: no spaces between words, no capital letters, and no punctuation or verse numbers. So what does the above (fictitious example) mean? We’ll help you:
1 Love God and love your neighbour as yourself.
2 Do this and you will enter God’s kingdom.
3 Obey those who have authority over you and obey God the master.
That’s much easier to read because we’ve
added spaces between words and added verse numbers
rearranged the words into the normal English order
capitalised the first word in each sentence and added a period at the end
capitalised God as per English tradition (yes, that’s an added feature)
But there’s still another question: according to the above text, what do you have to do to enter God’s kingdom? You’ll probably answer with either
Love God and your neighbour, or
Obey God and those in authority (especially if we’d put a colon after kingdom in v2).
It all depends on the meaning of ‘this’ in v2! Does it refer to what came before (a), or does it refer to what comes next (b)? It turns out that in English, ‘do this’ usually refers to what follows. ‘Do that’ would be how we’d refer to what came before. But that English rule doesn’t necessarily apply to Greek discourse.
See Col 3:20 or Eph 1:15 for a genuine Biblical example where most translations assume ‘this’ applies to what comes before (in which case, they should have changed it to ‘that’). Most modern Bible translations are done by highly-qualified seminary graduates who studied theology but didn’t necessarily study linguistics, and especially not discourse structure. The Open English Translation is not confined to doing it like everyone else who came before. So we’ll probably make new mistakes instead. Please come (with an open mind) and help us check this new translation from the Hebrew and Greek into the language that you actually speak.
Robert Hunt, 1 September 2023