Poking around through the contents of Raphael Lataster’s Was the New Testament Really Written in Greek? (which supposedly can be found, though apparently with some difficulty, freely distributed from this website, www.aramaicpeshitta.com, but which one of our commenters, JeffA, has made more easily available for download at his own site here), I noticed an entry in one early chapter, on “semi-split” words, that supposedly recovers the original meaning of Mark 9:49. (As an aside, I am not sure how this case would count as an example of a “semi-split” word; but possibly this is explained at the beginning of the chapter.)
Since this is one of the few entries so far that seems to address a scriptural text regarding universalism, I thought I’d page ahead to find and report on the author’s (or compiler’s) rationale for the variant translation.
In the vast majority of Unical Greek manuscripts, as well as the Greek miniscules (plus Syrian-s and Coptic-sa), the verse reads {pas gar puri halisthe_setai} with an additional {kai pasa thusia hali halisthe_setai} in many Unical and many miniscule families of those manuscripts. In one Unical (D) and five Old Latin scripts, the verse only has the latter phrase.
The translation of either phrase into English is not much in debate: “for all shall be salted with fire”; “and/yet/but every sacrifice shall be salted with salt.” Minor phrasing variants could be used instead, with no significant difference. (As is also the case in some Greek manuscripts.)
One Unical features the phrase “for all will be consumed with fire” instead; one Unical features “for every sacrifice will be consumed with fire” instead; one miniscule features “for all will be tested by fire” instead; and Old Latin k appears to witness to an otherwise unknown Greek manuscript reading “and all substance shall be consumed with fire”.
The author’s hypothesis is that the Aramaic root word behind the Greek means both “salted” and “scattered”. The author thus concludes that “obviously” Jesus meant “scattered” in the first phrase (i.e. destroyed), and “salted” in the second phrase.
The first problem with this theory is that a substantial number of older Greek manuscripts (and older manuscripts in other languages, notably Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian) only contain the first, problematic phrase; and very few manuscripts of any language or date indicate destruction instead of salting in this phrase. (And then the term, at least in Greek and its subsequent translation into other languages, is not “scattered” but “consumed”–a different kind of destruction metaphor.) The author doesn’t bother giving or reporting even a hypothetical explanation for how an easily understood pun on words was first mistranslated into a phrase that continued to give subsequent generations great interpretive difficulties, and then largely lost in its second much-less-difficult to understand phrase. (A circumstance equally difficult to explain assuming the textual priority of the longer Greek phrasing as well.)
Notably, the author doesn’t bother addressing the spread of phrases in the manuscript tradition (Greek and otherwise) at all. He only reports that the King James Version and its underlying Greek source (i.e. the Textus Receptus, a compilation notorious for being based on few and late Greek manuscripts despite its successful marketing during its initial publication) have the full double phrase. He simply concludes, without explaining the rationale for its superiority, that the proper translation must be, “For everything will be destroyed with fire, and every sacrifice will be salted with salt.”
This leads to the next problem: the first phrase doesn’t really make sense in connection with the next phrase or its following material. On a superficial level it seems to protect the idea that Gehenna involves hopeless punishment, but the blunt “everything” was clearly troubling enough in its scope to suggest modification by some late scribes: everything may be “tested” (but not destroyed) by fire, or their essences (i.e. those in Gehenna, but not “all”) will be consumed by fire. This “beautiful wordplay”, as the author describes it, is a jump from an absolute nihilism to a denial of absolute nihilism (or at least to a claim that has to implicitly deny the absolute nihilism of the first phrase.)
Nor is there any obvious thematic connection between his two phrases. A scribe, trying to make a guess about what the first phrase could mean (while keeping the hopelessness of the punishment) might fetch up on the idea that all Temple sacrifices must be salted before being consumed in the holocaust, and so reference Leviticus 2:13 (which the second phrase seems to be doing, as the author himself agrees). The explanatory gloss is seized upon as a phrase accidentally omitted and the copy-process proceeds from there. But what scribe, seeing both phrases (even in Greek, much less in Aramaic) would suppose that the first phrase should be kept (and as “salting” no less, if the Aramaic contained both phrases and a word that might mean either idea) and the second phrase abandoned? (The known history of the Greek manuscript transmission for this verse demonstrates that if anything the opposite would happen!–one family of later texts very understandably omits the difficult-to-understand phrase.) Furthermore, the reconstruction by the author omits any point of contact between the two ideas by eliminating the idea of “salting” (which is ideal, and leads to peace in our hearts).
This is even more peculiar, as the author waxes rhaphsodically about the beautiful double-meaning of the term–without bothering to see whether (or at least without explaining why) the double-meaning wouldn’t be applied to the first phrase. In that scenario, Jesus would be taking an expected understanding (Gehenna fire is only for those people over there, and hopelessly destroys), and instructing His disciples on the true purpose of Gehenna by means of the double-meaning pun: you expect Gehenna to mean the scattering of those sinners-over-there; but it really means the salting of everyone. And salting is ideal, etc. Notice that in this case, the commonly testified second phrase is no longer needed, being at best redundant. (Unsurprisingly, the author doesn’t bother trying to address verse 50; possibly because the huge topical gap he has proposed utterly isolates it from any topical relation to the material of 49a–the only connection now being a venial pun.)
If Jesus is understood to be speaking Aramaic to His disciples in this scene (as the scene’s narrative details would lead us to expect), then the double-meaning of the proposed underlying Aramaic root does help explain the manuscript difficulties as they actually exist; but not quite in the fashion that our author presents. (And quite regardless of the question of whether GosMark originally existed for transmission in written Aramaic.)
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If so, that would increase the problems with his theory, since there would be one more reason for why someone translating from Aramaic to Greek wouldn’t use a single Greek word for both occurrences.
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