On Noticing

Adventures in the gospel according to Matthew

Since I’m on a roll of oblique observations generated from last term’s classes, here’s another in the same vein. I ran two classes this last term both looking at Matthew; in one class we read chapters 1-10 in Greek; in the other we read chapters 11-20 in Latin (Jerome’s Vulgate)¹.

One of the very nice things about having spent years and years mastering Latin and Greek, is that a text like Matthew isn’t really a problem to understand; I don’t have to sit around trying to figure things out. Which leaves the brain free to ask questions like, “Why does Jerome translate it like this?” and “Why does Matthew write like this? Why this word, this syntax, this expression?”

And this is some of the real pay-off of learning Greek well, that is internalising a language and not ticking boxes in a grammar compendium. You learn to swim in it, you feel the currents of the water around you, you know how water moves - like a fish, not a fluid mechanics physicist.

One of the discussions I enjoyed was around Matthew 8:5-9 where it’s highly ambiguous, or I would say ‘underdetermined’, about whether the centurion is asking Jesus to heal his child, or his slave. The word in question (παῖς), you could basically think of like ‘boy’ or ‘lad’, and is chronically underdetermined - there’s no way from the text in front of you that you could say with certainty which it is.

Another fun moment is shortly on, when Jesus refers to the ‘encampments’ of the birds in 8:20. It’s then that you realise that our concept of a specific word for ‘nest’ is not what’s going on.

In chapter 9, vv 16-17 we had an enlightening discussion of the process of fulling, and of why new wine has to go into new wine skins.

In 9:28 there’s another great example of under-determination, where Jesus goes into ‘the house’. Whose house? Which house?

What’s the point of this all? Just to say that noticing is a function of familiarity; the more you get familiar with anything, or anyone, the more you can also notice what’s odd, unusual, out-of-place. That’s true of Greek², but it’s true of lots of things, including the people in our lives. The only way to read a person well enough to know when things aren’t right with them, is to know them deeply and long-enough to know the contours of their life and heart.

Photo by Dalton Caraway on Unsplash

1. The Vulgate is an interesting text in and of itself; as the class went on, we often made comparison’s to Sebastian Castellio’s translation, which on the whole is a much more elegant, understandable, and Latin translation. So much so that I have a class on Castellio’s translation running next term.

2. And it’s why most seminary graduates can never tell you anything interesting about Greek they didn’t read in a commentary.