Thursday, April 30, 2020

being within and among simultaneously



First century BCE Palestine had been Hellenistic for centuries. So, Greek influence surely created a hybrid sense of Aramaic understanding.

When Jesus—a well-educated rabbi—“said.” according to the Gospel of Luke, that “the kingdom of God is within you,” Luke’s Greek is confusing (according to Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, p. 146): Luke allegedly means ‘among’, but uses a Greek meaning for ‘within’. So, Luke’s Jesus is “saying” an ambiguity: The kingdom of God is at once within “you” (singular) and among “you” (plural). “In other words,” Mitchell notes, “the ultimate reality, though it is revealed in history, essentially belongs to the spiritual order…”