John 6:60

Last week, I watched the Daily Dose of Latin video on John 6:60 and noticed a grammatical ambiguity that I'd missed when I watched the corresponding Daily Dose of Greek video about two years ago.

Multi ergo audientes ex discipulis eius dixerunt durus est hic sermo quis potest eum audire

πολλοὶ οὖν ἀκούσαντες ἐκ τῶν μαθητῶν αὐτοῦ εἶπον· σκληρός ἐστιν ὁ λόγος οὗτος· τίς δύναται αὐτοῦ ἀκούειν;

Of the English translations I have, I like the NIV the best:  "On hearing it, many of his disciples said, 'This is a hard teaching.  Who can accept it?'"

Almost all of the translations I lookt at understand this in the same way and take "sermo" (λόγος in the Greek) as the antecedent of "eum" (αὐτοῦ), but the antecedent could also be Jesus since, grammatically, Jesus is also a masculine singular.  Consequently, "eum" (αὐτοῦ) could be translated as "Him" instead of "it," resulting in:  "Who can hear Him?" or "Who can accept Him?"

In the immediate context, "sermo" (or λόγος) does seem to be a more likely antecedent, but taking Jesus as the antecedent results in a reading that's similar to verse 41, where the Jews grumble about Jesus because of what He said.  Verse 60 could express something similar and show the crowd dismissing Jesus because it is unable to accept this particular point of His teaching.

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In my French translation, the antecedent is ambiguous:  "Plusieurs de ses disciples, après l'avoir entendu, dirent:  Cette parole est dure; qui peut l'écouter?"  The pronoun is elided into "écouter," and it could be either the feminine la, referring to "cette parole" or the masculine le, referring to Jesus.

John 6:2, 5

Recently, the Daily Dose of Latin started John 6.  I noticed that in John 6:2 and 6:5, the Greek word ὄχλος is translated in the Vulgate as multitudo.

This struck me as a bit unusual.  Most of the time, ὄχλος is translated as turba.  I did a search with the STEP Bible, and while my numbers might not be entirely accurate, it seems that out of 171 occurrences of a form of ὄχλος, 155 of them are translated as a form of turba.

These instances in particular seem odd because "multitudo magna" and "multitudo maxima" are redundant; both mean something like "a great multitude."  (Maxima is the superlative form of magna.)  Perhaps this is intended to indicate the exceedingly great size of the crowd.

As I've been following along with the Daily Dose of Latin, I've been reading the New King James Version.  There, both of these phrases are translated as "great multitude."  In the ESV, they're both "large crowd," and in the NIV, "great crowd."

John 6:41

Last week, I watched the Daily Dose of Greek video on John 6:41:

Dr. Plummer mentions that "Ἐγόγγυζον" (which can mean "grumbled" or "murmured," among other things) is "an onomatopoetic word."

I don't have any particularly significant comment about this; I just found it interesting that in the three foreign language translations that I follow along in, this onomatopoetic quality is retained.

German:  "Da murrten die Juden über ihn, weil er sagte:  Ich bin das Brot, das vom Himmel gekommen ist,"

French:  "Les Juifs murmuraient à son sujet, parce qu'il avait dit:  Je suis le pain qui est descendu du ciel."

Latin:  "Murmurabant ergo Iudaei de illo quia dixisset ego sum panis qui de caelo descendi"

The French murmure and the Latin murmurare both mean "to murmur," but the German murren means "to complain about."