LandonWillis

Category: Biblical History

  • Golgotha, Calvary, And The Place of The Skull

    The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John all tell us that Jesus was crucified in a place called Golgotha.

    They also all tell us that Golgotha is a Hebrew word meaning “place of the skull”. (Technically, Golgotha is an Aramaic word, but Aramaic is commonly called Hebrew, since it was the common language of the Hebrew people at the time).

    Plus, the Gospel of Luke simply tells us that they crucified him at a place called “The Skull”.

    Every time we see the word “skull” in these passages, it is a translation of the Greek word Kranion, which means “skull” and is also where we get our modern word “cranium”.

    But, where do we get the word “Calvary” out of all this?

    Well, when the translator Jerome was compiling all the Bible into Latin in the late 300s AD, he properly translated that Greek word Kranion into the Latin word for “skull”, Calvaria.

    Then, as the centuries went by, some people translated the Latin Bible into English. When they did this, they just borrowed the Latin term and called the place “Calvary”, from Calvaria.

    Most modern English translations actually use the original manuscripts (Greek) when translating The New Testament though. So, now most Bibles will call it “the place of the skull”.

    But, we still have the word “Calvary” now, which is entirely unrelated to an army of horses, a “cavalry”.

    And, as for the place where Jesus was crucified, there’s been a whole lot of guessing about where it is and why it’s called the place of the skull.

    First, as a quick note, in the original Greek it’s more accurate to say “of the skull” and not “of a skull”.

    Anyhow, all four Gospels just call Golgotha/Calvary a “place”. Tradition has said that this was probably a hill, but we don’t really know for certain.

    A lot of people seem to think the place was called Golgotha because it was on a hill that kind of looked like a skull. Some other people say that it might have been because it could have been close to some tombs. And there are a good deal more guesses that scholars have made over the years.

    The gist of it is all pretty simple though. Jesus was crucified at a place called “place of the skull”. The Hebrew (Aramaic) term for “place of the skull” is Golgotha. And “Calvary” is just pretty much the Latin word for the same thing.

  • What on Earth is Mount Zion?

    Zion is a fun little word, because it’s got a big ‘ole history of being confusing.

    The earliest record we have of the word is 2 Samuel 5:7:

    “7 Nevertheless, David captured the fortress of Zion—which is the City of David.”

    So, the fortress of Zion was a stronghold of the Jebusites (a people who controlled the city of Jebus, more famously known as Jerusalem). And so, the whole mountain/hill that the fortress was on started to be called Mount Zion (also associated with the “Ophel”, but that’s a word for another day).

    What does the word “Zion” mean? No clue!

    Alright, well I have some clue. Pretty much, the current best guess seems to be that the word Zion comes from Hebrew ṣiyyôn, which means “castle” or “fortress”. This would make it literally be “the fortress of fortress” or “Mount Fortress”. It seems like a logical enough explanation, especially since plenty of languages name places like that (think of the Sahara Desert, where “Sahara” is just the Arabic word for desert). However, there are plenty of other guesses, and nobody really knows for sure where the word “Zion” comes from.

    So, we’ve got this mountain that had a fortress called Zion, so that mountain is called Mount Zion. Is that the end of it? No, of course not!

    There was another mountain, located just a couple thousand feet away, which was called Mount Moriah. This is the same mountain where Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, and where Solomon built the first temple.

    After Solomon built the temple on Mount Moriah, it started to be called “the Temple Mount”. However, for whatever reason, the term “Zion” also started to refer to the Temple Mount/Mount Moriah.

    So, we’ve now got two mountains being called “Mount Zion”, one because there had been a fortress called Zion on it, and the other because of some sort of symbolic reason.

    Then, about a thousand years later, just after the time of Jesus, the Jewish historian Josephus was writing his books. And, by that time Jerusalem had grown a whole lot bigger. Thanks to this growth, Josephus mistakenly started calling a bigger mountain near the center of Jerusalem “Mount Zion”. And guess what? The name stuck.

    So, now we’ve got three mountains called “Mount Zion”.

    And, in addition to all of that, the term “Zion” started to refer symbolically to: Jerusalem, the entire land of Israel, the spiritual Kingdom of God, the people of God, and the coming New Jerusalem.

    Alright, that was a confusing word to write about, but that’s the gist of it. Zion can mean a lot of different things.

  • Word of the Week No 4: Amen

    This is one of my favorite etymologies just because it’s so nice and easy. So, where do we get the word “Amen”? We get it from the Old English word “Amen”, which got the word from Latin “Amen”, which got the word from Greek “Amen”, which got the word from Hebrew “Amen”.

    Isn’t that just amazing? Over thousands of years, the word is still the same. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any word go through so much time and so many languages without any changes.

    But, what did this word “Amen” mean in Hebrew? Well, it seems that it could be used as a noun, an adjective, or an adverb. So, it could mean “truth”, “true”, or “truly”.

    It’s related to the Hebrew verb aman, which means “to be firm”. So, if you have “Amen” soil, it’s firm soil. Or if you make an “Amen” statement, you are making a true/firm statement.

    Whenever we see Jesus in the Bible saying “Truly, truly I say to you” or “Verily, verily I say unto you”, He’s just using the word Amen. It would be a perfectly correct translation to write that Jesus said “Amen, amen I say to you”. That’s what the Greek authors did when they included the Hebrew term Amen in their writings of what Jesus said. They just wrote it with Greek letters instead of Hebrew letters.

    However, Luke’s Gospel is very fascinating on this front. Apparently, when he wrote the phrase “Truly, truly I say to you”, he actually translated the word Amen into the Greek word Alethos, which also means “truly”.

    Every English Bible I’ve ever seen takes the same strategy that Luke did. They translate all those “Amen”s as “truly” and “verily” and “faithfully” instead of just keeping the word as “Amen”.

    This also explains why people will sometimes shout out “Amen!” when they agree with something. It’s like shouting “absolutely!” or “that’s true!”.

  • Word of the Week No 2: Samaria

    The Bible is full of interesting words and etymologies. And, surprisingly often, it actually explains them to us.

    One example is found in 1 Kings 16:24, where it says:

    “24 He [Omri, King of Israel] bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for two talents of silver and built a city on the hill, calling it Samaria, after Shemer, the name of the former owner of the hill.”

    So, if you’ve ever wondered what “Samaria” meant, there you have it. It’s named after some guy (or maybe a family/clan) who owned the hill on which Samaria was built.

    And, over time the name for the city spread to also mean the region surrounding the city. Eventually, it even became its own politically recognized region.

    But, in 27ish BC, right before the time of Jesus, Herod the Great renamed the city to “Sebastia”. And while I believe that Jerome only ever uses the word Samaria in the Vulgate, Sebastia was the official Latin name. In fact, Sebastia is still the name of the village that exists in modern-day Samaria.

    So, where did Herod get the name Sebastia? Well, it was actually a pretty common place name for new cities at the time. This is because it comes from the Greek word sebastos, which means “revered” or “holy”. This is just the Greek translation for the Latin word Augustus, which was what the emperor Octavian liked to call himself. So, Herod renamed the city to “Sebastia” as a sign of respect to the practice of emperor worship, seeing the emperor as “revered” and “holy”.

  • Word of the Week No 1: Targum

    Back when the Jews in the Old Testament were worshipping God, they spoke a language we call Hebrew. But, through a whole bunch of historical twists and turns, by the time Jesus was born, the common language of Judea was something called Aramaic.

    Aramaic is very similar to Hebrew, but it’s still a different language. One way I heard it described is to compare them to the Romance languages of Europe. For example, Italian and Spanish are both very similar languages because they come from Latin. But they’re still different languages. It’s the same way with Hebrew and Aramaic, different languages, but very similar.

    However, The Old Testament was written almost entirely in Hebrew, so the Jews needed some sort of translation to really understand it.

    This is very similar to how the Catholic Church would have their services in Latin during the Middle Ages. At a time when no one spoke Latin as a native language, the Catholics still taught in Latin and then translated verses later. Many religious traditions throughout history have tried to hold on to ancient languages and difficult to understand writings.

    So, the Jews came up with a solution for this language barrier. During their Synagogue services, one teacher would read a small section of scripture in Hebrew (think a verse or two), then some other guy would translate that into Aramaic for everyone in the crowd.

    That other guy who would translate the Hebrew into Aramaic was something called a hammeturgem, literally “a translator”. And the translation he gave was called a Targum. You can see that root word Targum in the word hammeturgem.

    However, the word in Hebrew can mean a little more than just “translate”. It can also more broadly mean “to interpret”. This is because the men who gave the translation into Aramaic would commonly add their own opinions of what the text actually meant.

    For this reason, the Jews did not allow anyone to write down any Targumim (plural of Targum), so that no one would start treating them as equal with scripture. But, over the centuries, some Rabbis broke this rule and wrote down massive Targumim, or interpretations, of The Old Testament.

    We also see this word used in Ezra 4:7, when it says:

    “The letter was written in Aramaic and translated.”

    That word “translated” is a form of the word Targum. And, if you read Ezra, you’ll see a footnote telling you that 4:8-6:18, which quotes the letter referenced in 4:7, is in Aramaic. This is one of the few sections of The Old Testament that was written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

  • What does “disciple” even mean?

    When you read through the Gospels, they are constantly talking about how Jesus’ disciples did this thing or that thing… but what is a disciple? I mean really, if someone says the word “disciple” is there anything you think of other than those twelve guys that followed Jesus around? Is there anytime you would use the word “disciple” in a nonreligious context? Probably not.

    But that’s not how it was for first century Christians who heard about Jesus and his disciples. Why? Well, to understand that we have to dive into a bit of Greek, Latin, and English.

    First of all, the word that is commonly translated into English as “disciple” was originally the Greek word Mathetes. However, this was not a brand new word used to describe these men. Instead, it was simply the word for “student”.

    Now, Mathetes really means something a bit more specific than just “student”. It typically refers either to an apprentice or a philosophy student. This makes sense though, because those were just about the only two kinds of students in the ancient world. There were plenty of Mathetais (plural of Mathetes) who were studying how to be doctors, or leather workers, or stone masons. And there were also Mathetais who studied philosophy, like the students of Aristotle or Plato.

    This idea of a Mathetes being a student goes even a bit further though. Think for a second; in first century Israel what sorts of people would be students of philosophy or religion? The Pharisees! We actually see this clearly laid out in Matthew 22:15-16:

    “15 Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap Him in His words. 16 They sent their disciples to Him…”

    In the original Greek, the word used in these verses is a form of the word Mathetes. This makes perfect sense. The Pharisees had their own students, as did individual Rabbis. Followers of John the Baptist and Moses were also called Mathetais/disciples/students.

    With this in mind, everything about the Gospels makes just a bit more sense. Consider these verses from Matthew 5:1-2, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    When translated more accurately as students, we read:

    “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His students came to Him, 2 and He began to teach them.”

    So, if first century Christians would have recognized the followers of Jesus as “students”, why do we use the obscure word “disciples” when talking about them?

    Why we Use the Word “Disciple”

    Like so many things in English, this goes back to Latin. You see, back in the 100s and 200s and 300s AD, when people like Jerome were translating the Books of the New Testament into Latin from the original Greek, they translated the word Mathetes quite literally. These men used the Latin word Discipulus when translating Mathetes.

    And Discipulus is just the Latin word for “student”. So, props to the Romans. They translated it well.

    Then, a thousand years later, in maybe the 1200s or 1300s or so, English started to be something like what we know today. And as some English speaking Christians wanted to talk about the students of Jesus, they looked at the Bible to see what His students were called. But, since the Catholic Church was in absolute control at the time, the only Bibles available (for the most part) were in Latin. So, these Christians looked at the Bible, saw it said that Jesus’ followers were called discipulus, and decided “Nice, that’s difficult to pronounce. Let’s call ’em disciples. It’s close enough.”

    Now, that is obviously not entirely accurate, but I feel like it paints the picture quite nicely. The Catholic Church was generally not in favor of translating the Bible into any language other than Latin. So, languages began to stop translating certain words in the Bible, but just transliterate them from Latin. (Transliterate pretty much means to just steal a word from another language and maybe change its spelling a little.)

    This is exactly what happened with this word. It went from Mathetes->Discipulus->Disciple. The Greek was translated into Latin, and the Latin was transliterated into English. This happens with plenty of words from the Bible. It commonly goes

    Greek Original->Latin translation->English transliteration.

    Overall, I think it’s very fascinating to understand the original meanings behind these words. It helps us to more clearly understand just what Jesus is doing and saying. The word “disciple” obviously isn’t incorrect, but it does give us a poor idea of just what these men truly were: students.