Jesus wept

I wrote this in January 2008. It was my first Greek assignment. Click on the image to enlarge.

“Jesus wept.”

10 observations:

1. The verb in the sentence is in past tense form (εδακρυσεν). Now I could add that it’s in the aorist tense the active voice and the indicative mood. Oh, and of course it’s in the the third person singular.

2. The subject of the sentence is a proper noun (ιησους). Yes, I could now do the same parsing for the noun.

3. The word εδακρυσεν, translated wept in John 11:35, only occurs this one time in Scripture (King James Concordance). The word εκλαυσεν, translated wept in Luke 19:41 and also ascribed to Jesus, should literally be translated sobbed or wailed (Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary).

4. The shortness of this verse could be a literary technique to emphasize the manhood of Jesus. This is inline with a central theme of the forth Gospel set out in John 1:14: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.”

5. This was clearly an emotional reaction and not a mechanical process. The author records in John 11:33: “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled”, and in John 11:38: “Jesus therefore again groaning in himself.”

6. This is the shortest verse/sentence in the Bible.

7. The text does not record the motivation why he wept (sin, loss, empathy), rather circumstances around when he wept. Everyone from Thomas Aquinas to Mathew Henry and in between have an authoritative comment to make about the why.

8. The context of the passage is Lazarus’s death and subsequent raising.

9. Jesus could have come quicker and healed Lazarus, but this was that the disciples might believe (see verse 15).

10. This is a different wept (δακρύω) to the weeping (κλαίω) in verse 31, which literally means to sob.

I’m firmly convinced that a book, a volume of books even, could be writing about these two beautiful words and still that volume wouldn’t be able to capture the entirety of the moment.

Reading the Bible in black and white with a dash of color

The girl in the red coat from Schindler’s List. What a powerful metaphor. Click image to enlarge.

Have you watched Schindler’s List? Can you remember the scenes with the little girl in the red coat? Crimson blood set against black and white. It’s seared an indelible print into my memory.

I feel the same when I read the New Testament in Greek. I’m not proficient enough to do it in full color yet but I’m certainly starting to see dashes of scarlet within the black and white text. Take John 1:1 for example.

¹ In the beginning was the Word…

“was” is a translation of the Greek word “ην”. It’s a teeny tiny word, almost insignificant really, but Greek is a whole lot more exact than English. They have rules upon rules and distinct word permutations for every nuance under the sun. That one little word “ην” tells an entire story.

From school I was familiar with the past, present and future tenses. Well the word “ην” is in an imperfect tense. The imperfect tense is a past tense but it’s a bit more than that. It carries with it the idea of an action, occurring in the past, having been repeated over and over. By saying, “In the beginning was the Word” John is trying to convey to His readers that the Word was consistently, perpetually, abiding. It’s stuff you just can’t glean out of an English text. The English word “was” is a black and white translation of the ruby red “ην”.

What translation do you use? How do you go about interpreting Scripture?

Want to read a movie review? Click any banner.