Mark 14:46-52

Greek Koine and Biblical and Medieval Greek
1

Καὶ εὐθὺς ἔτι αὐτοῦ λαλοῦντος παραγίνεται Ἰούδας εἷς τῶν δώδεκα καὶ μετ’ αὐτοῦ ὄχλος μετὰ μαχαιρῶν καὶ ξύλων παρὰ τῶν ἀρχιερέων καὶ τῶν γραμματέων καὶ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων. δεδώκει δὲ ὁ παραδιδοὺς αὐτὸν σύσσημον αὐτοῖς λέγων· Ὃν ἂν φιλήσω αὐτός ἐστιν· κρατήσατε αὐτὸν καὶ ἀπάγετε ἀσφαλῶς. καὶ ἐλθὼν εὐθὺς προσελθὼν αὐτῷ λέγει· Ῥαββί, καὶ κατεφίλησεν αὐτόν. οἱ δὲ ἐπέβαλαν τὰς χεῖρας αὐτῷ καὶ ἐκράτησαν αὐτόν. εἷς δέ τις τῶν παρεστηκότων σπασάμενος τὴν μάχαιραν ἔπαισεν τὸν δοῦλον τοῦ ἀρχιερέως καὶ ἀφεῖλεν αὐτοῦ τὸ ὠτάριον. καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Ὡς ἐπὶ λῃστὴν ἐξήλθατε μετὰ μαχαιρῶν καὶ ξύλων συλλαβεῖν με; καθ’ ἡμέραν ἤμην πρὸς ὑμᾶς ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ διδάσκων καὶ οὐκ ἐκρατήσατέ με· ἀλλ’ ἵνα πληρωθῶσιν αἱ γραφαί. καὶ ἀφέντες αὐτὸν ἔφυγον πάντες.

Καὶ νεανίσκος τις συνηκολούθει αὐτῷ περιβεβλημένος σινδόνα ἐπὶ γυμνοῦ, καὶ κρατοῦσιν αὐτόν, ὁ δὲ καταλιπὼν τὴν σινδόνα γυμνὸς ἔφυγεν.

–Mark 14:43-52 SBLGNT

This is all rather confused in Mark (though it makes more sense in the other Gospels).

One of Jesus’ followers is flailing about with a sword, and he strikes the slave of the High Priest. The crowd was specifically called out as carrying swords and staves. But why were Jesus’ followers carrying swords (in Mark)? I’ve read Luke 22:36, but Mark sure hadn’t. Who was it that struck the slave? Why did he strike the slave in particular? What happened to him afterwards? There is no explanation given. Jesus, bizarrely, answers the event of one of his followers flailing about with sword with “Why have you come out as robbers with swords and staves?” No miraculous healing of the ear is reported.

The above are all obvious questions. So obvious that Matthew and Luke and John – who are all working from Mark’s passion text – provide various additional details to answer them. However, the original Mark version is just too strange and inconsistent.

I think that the passage “εἷς δέ τις τῶν παρεστηκότων σπασάμενος τὴν μάχαιραν ἔπαισεν τὸν δοῦλον τοῦ ἀρχιερέως καὶ ἀφεῖλεν αὐτοῦ τὸ ὠτάριον” had the original intention of communicating that someone in the crowd, standing around with a drawn sword, accidentally cut off the ear of the slave. This concords well with the Greek and wonderfully resolves all of the narrative questions. Jesus’ statement becomes apropos. It’s easy to see, however, why Matthew and others made the mistake of reading Mark the way that they did.

Another difficulty with this section are the last verses about the naked young man with the linen garment. They have many textual variants and were one of the few sections of the passion narrative dropped by Matthew and Luke and John.

I don’t really know the solution for this part. There is one other νεανίσκος mentioned in Mark’s Gospel. He too has a robe, and appears sitting in Jesus’ tomb at the end. But I just can’t see Mark doing anything this complicated with his narrative. Besides, I would have thought that the “undercover angel” motif in Christian literature dates from Luke’s Road to Emmaus.

Perhaps, however, Mark includes it to heighten the narrative tension. This scene is very tight in Mark, compared to the other Gospels. Jesus begins with “Let us flee! They’ve come to arrest me!” There is a lot of tension. It’s possible that the only real trouble with this section is the paragraph break. Remove the paragraph break and Mark is just adding more detail to the “καὶ ἀφέντες αὐτὸν ἔφυγον πάντες.” He is adding the detail to describe the nature of their flight. However, Mark is a Gospel of many short scenes This confused the other evangelists, who removed much of the tension from this scene anyway, and despite not having paragraphs to confuse them saw the natural break after 14:50 in the same way as modern editors.

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To start off with, you are assuming a particular source theory is valid without question. That’s wrong. Consensus on that topic doesn’t exist. The synoptic gospels probably all used some form of written tradition, not Mark’s gospel. This will account for similarities. Beyond that assume nothing and start over.

The Mark + Q song and dance is just “group think” on a grand scale.

It is kind of difficult to find your question in your post. Perhaps if you highlight it in red someone might address your concern.

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I don’t have a question. I’ve made a case for something that I expect others here to disagree with or agree with. I very much agree with you as far as Q song and dance goes. However, Marcan priority is just too obvious.

As far as the motivation for this post, I was reading the chapter aloud to my wife (translating it for her as I went), and was thinking about it afterwards.

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OK I’ll bite. What strikes me is how when confronted with an account like this, which provides no clue as to identity of the “one of the bystanders” or that of the linen-clad νεανίσκος, the immediate impulse is to try to identify them and to uncover more than we’re told.

The bystander drew his dagger and struck the high priest’s slave, cutting off his ear—a graphic and memorable detail. (He wasn’t “standing around with a drawn sword”: he drew his knife and struck.) We infer he’s a supporter of Jesus, but beyond that we can hardly go. The narrative has gaps, and the impulse to fill them in is practically irresistible. You ask who, and why, and what happened to him—natural enough questions, but quite unanswerable—and not only because no answers are provided, but because there’s no reason to suppose that the guy has any existence outside of this particular detail. The import is that someone put up resistance on J’s behalf. It serves as foil to J’s own resigned non-resistance. In any event, the narrative continues as if the incident had not occurred. The gospel writer makes no attempt to integrate it, just leaves it standing there on its own. J’s words leapfrog right over it.

I don’t know where you get “Let us flee!” from, btw. With ἐγείρεσθε ἄγωμεν he’s trying to stir his dozy companions from their continual dropping off. He has no intention of running away or evading the foretold betrayal.

I’d agree that the Matt. and Luke versions are dependent on this narrative, and that basically John’s is too, though he clearly follows a variant of it which answered some of the questions. We need to account not so much for similarities as for differences, and some views are more plausible than others. But I don’t care too much about that.

The mystery man who fled in the nude could be an appendage to what’s gone before. We should always disregard paragraphing, and all other extratextual articulation. I’d note that συνηκολούθει is not chronologically fixed—it’s unclear whether or not it’s to be taken as subsequent to the flight of “everyone.” It’s another graphic but unintegrated detail, enhancing the drama of this momentous night scene. The other canonical gospel writers just drop it, wanting a more coherent account, while modern commentators make earnest and conflicting identifications, misguided and futile.

That would be my take on this mildly interesting narrative, anyway. The so-called Judas gospel is a very interesting counter-narrative. Perhaps we should not talk of the handing-over as “betrayal.”

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Ὡς ἐπὶ λῃστὴν actually means “as if against a robber”. I think ἐπί in the sense “against” can already be found in Homer. The idea, at least originally, is to evoke the idea of jumping on someone.

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Good point about μάχαιρα, “a large knife or dirk”, as LSJ would have it (whatever a dirk is). That makes much more sense than “sword” to me, as it is usually rendered. It always seemed strange to me that a disciple of Jesus would be walking around with sword.

I had a conversation once with a person who was part of a comity consisting of members of different rather conservative Christian movements working on a new translation of the Bible into Finnish. The translation was supposed to be more literal (and therefore more “accurate”) than the new 1992 translation considered official by both the Lutheran and (at least as far as the New Testament is concerned) the Greek Catholic Churches. What transpired was that in general it was more a question of comparing a great number of older translations and trying to find a balance between contemporary idiom and what was considered “theologically correct” than earnestly trying to bring the translation as close to the Greek as possible or to take account of progresses in textual scholarship. I wonder if other Bible translation comities work in a similar manner. At least cases like this, where μάχαιρα is systematically rendered “sword” whichever translation I look, seem to show that infelicities can be brought over pretty systematically from older translations without further consideration. I also remember a case (but can’t remember where) where a δέ was systematically rendered a disjunctive “but” in every Finnish translation since at least 1776, but equally unanimously a conjunctive “and” in every English one.

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whatever a dirk is)

A sgian-dubh, I believe.

The translation was supposed to be more literal (and therefore more “accurate”)

Very amusing!

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Yes. Stupid mistake on my part. I was trying to quote from memory.

This is exactly the thing that bugs me. This just doesn’t happen in Mark. There are a few times that you see it in Matthew and Luke, but usually you can see where they’ve changed the context around something they lifted from Mark. In Mark, the narrative is very tight. Everything that happens has a story-telling purpose.

Lattimore translates it as “Rise up, let us go.” Truthfully though, I don’t know the exact sense of αγωμεν there, so I wouldn’t mind being enlightened. But it fits Jesus’ character in Mark for this scene (though Jesus doesn’t fit into a single literary character in Mark, as he does, say, in John). Mark’s Jesus has prayed for the cup to be taken away from him if possible. The last words of Mark’s Jesus are “God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yes, that feels like what Mark is doing here with it, and enough of an explanation, in my opinion.

Well that’s another story. The general outline of the motivations and sources behind the writing of “Gospel of Judas” are more clear to me, and it is derivative literature, so that is not as interesting a question to me.

However, there is something wrong with the betrayal story in Mark, though I have a hard time putting my finger on it exactly. But witness how the other gospels all add in more motivation and pathos. In Mark, there is a betrayal because there has to be. That is very non-integrated!

EDIT: Has anyone ever answered Richard L. Arthur’s argument about the Gospel of Judas? See the section on Coptic grammatical forms.

http://www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Publications/JournalUnificationStudies9/JUS9-03.html

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Well…! But in some points I sort of agree with them. There’s a point in not modernizing too much in some points. For example, obsolete concepts of sexual ethics might be best translated with obsolete words. 19th century pre-contraception mores are probably closer in some respects to Antiquity than they are to us.

I wonder if mwh meant that… :wink:

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For example, obsolete concepts of sexual ethics might be best translated with obsolete words.

I think there is a can of worms here. Whether you translate “literally” or not you have to accept that some/most things dont map onto contemporary ideology, which is I guess what you mean by “obsolete concepts” . Using obsolete words just means that someone has to translate/map those “obsolete words” and “ideas”. I was amused because being literal is so simple minded. Our discussions on the deficiencies and merits of various dictionaries show some of the pitfalls of literalism.

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19th century pre-contraception mores are probably closer in some respects to Antiquity than they are to us.

Well it depends on what exactly you mean by Antiquity and where in the 19th century you are looking for “pre-contraception mores”. Dont forget that both the Greeks and Romans practised abortion although I think we know more about elite practises rather than the majority.

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Lattimore translates it as “Rise up, let us go.” Truthfully though, I don’t know the exact sense of ἄγωμεν there, so I wouldn’t mind being enlightened.

Souter says ἄγω "especially in first person pl subjunctive intr. let us depart (eg Mk.i38). Good job I found my copy today when I was sorting some stuff out.

edit: So to make is clear its an intransitive use of the verb.

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I’m sorry for highjacking your thread, Joel…

Seneca: Of course I agree about what you are saying about translation. I was thinking about a few specific instances rather than the general principle. A literal translation is a naive concept to begin with. But there are borderline cases: sometimes it’s better to pick a somewhat obsolete word that everyone still understands. For example, the distinction Miss/Mrs is getting obsolete very quickly in most European countries (I don’t know about the UK, but many people consider calling a grown-up “mademoiselle” offensive in France). Though probably you don’t use the word Miss a lot in every day speech (though how should I know…), if you were translating an older French work, like Proust, into English, you’d certainly respect the distinction. Yet I think it’s quite likely that in 2116 or in 2216 this choice might seriously make you scratch your head.

As for contraception, I think you miss the point. Readily available, effective and safe contraception is very new, especially methods that allow women to be in control. Of course we have Onan here and lambskins there since time immemorial, but that’s hardly the same thing.

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ἄγωμεν brings to my mind English “carry on”. The sense (not that this is any different from what Seneca said) must be something like “let’s move on”. It’s strange that I couldn’t find this intransitive use in LSJ, although I’m sure I’ve seen it before.

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Paul thanks. I momentarily forgot the on line audience here is more sophisticated than I am used to.

Miss/Mrs in the Uk is a minefield to which we must add Ms, although this is probably very dated now. Fortunately the English have always been somewhat informal in their introductions so titles only really come up when writing.

In a previous post you mentioned “swords” and it made me think about it. It is interesting that this word refers to a variety of weapons from something to fence with to a huge double handed sword for splitting people in half. When we translate using sword we all probably have something quite different in mind. In fact I had always thought of something quite substantial was involved in cutting off the ear here. But perhaps a short thrusting sword or dagger is along the right lines.

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II 2. lead, guide, esp. in war, “λαόν” Il.10.79; ἄ. στρατιάν, ναῦς, etc., Th.7.12, 8.59, etc., cf. X.An.4.8.12; henceabs., march, “θᾶσσον ὁ Νικίας ἦγε” Th.7.81, cf. X.HG4.2.19, etc.: > simply, go, “ἄγωμεν” Ev.Marc. 1.38; > of the gods, etc., guide, Pi., Hdt., etc.; “ἐπ᾽ ἀρετήν” E.Fr.672; “διὰ πόνων ἄγειν τινά” Id.IT988.

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LSJ suggests that μάχαιρα was also used of a curved sword in opposition to a straight one (ξίφος). Perhaps we should think about something like this.

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So ἄγωμεν means “let’s go.” And in context, it seems to be spoken in an urgent manner. Would this punctuation make sense? ἐγείρεσθε! ἄγωμεν! ἰδοὺ ὁ παραδιδούς με ἤγγικεν.

And while it may not make great character sense (something that I don’t look for in Mark), it does make great narrative sense. Jesus has told his disciples to stay alert three times while he prays. They have failed him three times. And now his disciples have failed, Judas has sold him out, God has not answered his prayer that the cup be taken away from him, and we have the catastrophic narrative moment.

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Wasn’t it in the news ten (or so) years ago that Judas didn’t really betray Jesus but only (as mwh hinted) handed him over? Do you know what the scientific context and indeed background for those news back then is? I’m pretty sure I didn’t merely imagine this…

As Seneca insinuated, it’s a Scottish-style dagger, of especial prevalence in the Highlands.

The impossibility and possibility of translations. The newest Swedish Bible, Bibel 2000, translates at Genesis 1:2 »en gudsvind», which is an apt choice. I don’t know how King James translates it. English does have an unfortunate connotation for the corresponding word.

Aren’t there actually two different English words, comity and committee? I hesitate.

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You’re probably thinking about the text mentioned in this thread, the Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic text only recently translated into English from Coptic – I think mwh has some hidden knowledge which I tried to bait him into revealing to us. See this topic as well.

Thanks. I suppose I was thinking about French comité. Litterature & litérature, who can remember this stuff… :confused: By the way, with “insinuated” you must have meant “hinted” – to insinuate is to “say something bad in an indirect way”. “Are you insinuating that I cheated?”