You'll see

The devil in the details

It’s pretty rare that reading the New Testament in Greek gives you particularly startling insights.

I know that seems counter-intuitive and isn’t what people think, but having spent a veritable tonne of my life learning Ancient Greek and spending much of my working time now teaching people it, or working on improving resources, and diligently improving my own, this is what I can tell you: knowing Greek does not unlock magical doors of perception.

Most of the time, what a good knowledge of Greek does for you is this, it allows you to see when people make bad arguments from Greek. Which happens a lot. Sometimes it’s because authors don’t know Greek as well as they think they do, sometimes they just turn molehills into exegetical mountains, sometimes they fundamentally misunderstand how language(s) work. I come across a lot of bad takes, at all levels of writing (yes, even in scholarly work on the New Testament).

The other thing that a good knowledge of Greek does for you is this, it helps you understand why differences or difficulties arise. It rarely helps you resolve them. That is, two people look at two different English versions, ask why they differ, you open up the Greek, and then you understand how and why the different translations have gone in different directions, and why it’s not easy to definitively resolve the question.

However, sometimes you do find striking things in the Greek, that you probably wouldn’t notice in the English. One of them I came across today in reading Matthew 27.

Firstly, here’s Matt 27:3-5, my translation:

3 Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that he [i.e. Jesus] was condemned, felt regret and returned the thirty pieces of silver to the high priests and elders, 4 saying, ‘I have sinned, betraying innocent blood.’ They said, ‘What’s that to us? You’ll see.’ 5 And hurling the money into the temple he left, and he went away and hanged himself.

And then, later in the chapter we have Matt 27:24, which is after the exchange where Pilate offers to release Jesus or Barabbas, the crowd opts for Barabbas, and demands Jesus be crucified.

24 Pilate, seeing that it was no use, but rather that an uproar was stirring, took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, ‘I am innocent of this righteous man’s blood: you’ll see.’

When I put the two side-by-side like that, and translate like this, the parallels become more obvious in English. But they are even more striking in Greek. Let me explain.

One of the features of reading a lot of Greek over time, and not just reading New Testament texts, is that you develop a sensitivity to genre, register, dialects, etc.. So, the word for ‘innocent’ here is ἀθῷος (athōos). It’s not really an everyday or common word, and so its presence here is striking. When I read it in the first part, I thought, “huh, interesting choice”; when I read it in the second I thought, “oh really?”

The second thing that is interesting is the phrase I’ve rendered you’ll see. The only difference between v4 and v24 is that v24 is plural. English translations render this variously as ‘you take care of it yourself’, ‘see to it yourself’, ‘that’s your responsibility’. Very woodenly, the phrase means you will see, but when you read that in Greek you ask, ‘see what?’ It’s an idiom, clearly, but what kind of idiom? And when I read it twice, it got me thinking.

Of course, when you find something striking in the Bible, you’re also probably not the first person to have noticed it. The commentaries do comment on these two features. In the case of the word ‘innocent’, they connect it to occurrences in the Greek version of the Old Testament, that is the Septuagint, and particularly to Dt 27.25, 1 Sam 25:31, and Jeremiah. It’s part of a scriptural mosaic that Matthew is weaving in ch 27. I think that’s accurate, but the effect in the moment is that it highlights, by the use of a striking word, not just that Jesus has done nothing wrong (ever), but that he is ‘innocent blood’ that is about to be spilled, and this is a terrible miscarriage of justice, and the key narrative issue throughout these few scenes is the attempt to absolve oneself of responsibility.

Indeed, Pilate’s words in v24 might be rendered ‘I am absolved of this righteous man’s blood.’ Where Judas feels remorse and tries to distance himself from the chain of events he has placed in motion, by returning the blood money, and then the religious authorities try to distance themselves from that tainted money, by excluding it from temple usage, in turn Pilate distances himself from the guilt of justice gone awry, by self-absolution and rendering the responsibility back onto the crowd and the religious leadership.

As for you’ll see, the commentators and grammarians think it’s a Latinism, that is a Latin expression rendered into Greek in a somewhat literal manner. That’s all well and good, but why? And what does it mean? I think that it indeed ‘translates’ tu videris¹, which is an idiomatic phrase that means something like “you will see [the result/outcome/consequence” and bears some sense of responsibility. A little bit like the way we can use you’ll see, or you’ll be sorry. Not quite so much as the translations tend to go with “that’s your responsibility”. I think that’s an inference of the phrase, not the meaning of it more directly.

The combination of these two features in close proximity, within the flow of the whole chapter, is that of the blame game. Judas tries to absolve himself, but the religious leaders will have none of it, casting it back on him. The crowd and leaders demand Jesus’ blood, and Pilate acquiesces, but literally and metaphorically washes his hands of the whole affair. And yet his implicature remains, does it not? The only one who stands innocent and blameless here is Jesus, and the guilt for the unjust death he is subjected to, rests on all these parties.

Photo by Rapha Wilde on Unsplash

1. This is, in fact, a future perfect tense form, not just a future.