A palindrome is a word or sentence that reads identically forward and backward, e.g., “Do geese see God?” The Greek palindrome inscription:

ΝΙΨΟΝΑΝΟΜΗΜΑΜΗΜΟΝΑΝΟΨΙΝ

is from the Hagia Sophia. (In Greek, Ἁγία Σοφία is short for Ναός τῆς Ἁγίας τοῦ Θεοῦ Σοφίας, “Church of the Holy Wisdom of God.” This was an Eastern Orthodox church building in Constantinople, constructed in the fourth century. For over a thousand years it was the Patriarchal Basilica of Constantinople. It is now a museum.)

Written in modern orthography the palindrome reads,

Νίψον ἀνόημα μὴ μόναν ὄψιν

and means, “Wash your sin, not only your face.” I first found this palindrome in Bruce Metzger’s Reminiscences of an Octogenarian, 23.

The word palindrome is itself a Greek word, παλίνδρομος, a compound of πάλιν, “again” and δραμεῖν, “to run”/δρόμος, “a race, race course.” There were apparently many Greek palindromes current in the ancient world. Another example that I’ve run across is:

ἀμήσας ἄρδην ὀροφόρον ἥδρασα σῆμα.

“Having reaped I established a lofty-roofed monument.”

(This one I found in Lloyd W. Daly, “A Greek Palindrome in Eighth-Century England,” American Journal of Philology 102 [1982]: 95–97.)

I was sent a link to this post by someone whom the DOJ is pursuing a similar action against. Check out this story from the Daily Caller:

For several months now the Obama administration has been abusing our judicial system through a concerted political intimidation campaign via the federal courts. Obama has instructed the Justice Department to sue a number of pro-life counselors and volunteers for allegedly violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrance (FACE) Act.

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. . . the Justice Department has just faced an embarrassing smack down on the highest profile of these cases. It has dropped an appeal in Holder v. Pineagainst pro-life sidewalk counselor Mary “Susan” Pine, who is represented by the civil rights firm Liberty Counsel. The DOJ has agreed to pay $120,000 for this frivolous lawsuit which, as the evidence indicated, was intended to intimidate Ms. Pine and send a shot over the bow of pro-lifers around the country.

Mr. Holder unsuccessfully sought thousands of dollars in fines against Ms. Pine, as well as a permanent injunction banning her from counseling women on the public sidewalk outside the Presidential Women’s Center (PWC) abortion mill (or any other “reproductive services” clinic).

After 18 months of litigation, the DOJ’s case was thrown out of federal court, and the department was chastised in a scathing ruling by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp for filing a case with no evidence.

Judge Ryskamp wrote that Holder’s complete failure to present any evidence of wrongdoing, coupled with the DOJ’s cozy relationship with PWC and their apparent joint decision to destroy video surveillance footage of the alleged “obstruction,” caused the court to suspect a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration. “The Court is at a loss as to why the Government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place,” wrote Judge Ryskamp. “The Court can only wonder whether this action was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and PWC, which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities rather than to vindicate the rights of those allegedly aggrieved by Ms. Pine’s conduct.”

Jeffery Leonard: Identifying Inner-Biblical Allusions: Psalm 78 as a Test Case. It’s quite an interesting and helpful study which he divides into two parts: evaluating evidence for textual links and determining direction of influence. Here are the points that he considers under the two parts.

Evaluating Evidence for Textual Links

1. Shared language is the single most importantfactor in establishing a textual connection.
2. Shared language is more important than nonshared language.
3. Shared language that is rare or distinctive suggests a stronger connection than does language that is widely used.
4. Shared phrases suggest a stronger connection than do individual shared terms.
5. The accumulation of shared language suggests a stronger connection than does a single shared term or phrase.
6. Shared language in similar contexts suggests a stronger connection than does shared language alone.
7. Shared language need not be accompanied by shared ideology to establish a connection.
8. Shared language need not be accompanied by shared form to establish a con­nection.

Determining Direction of Influence

1. Does one text claim to draw upon another?
2. Are there elements in the texts that help to fix their dates?
3. Is one text capable of producing the other?
4. Does one text assume the other?
5. Does one text show a general pattern of dependence on other text?
6. Are there rhetorical patterns in the texts that suggest that one text has used the other in an exegetically significant way?

I do, however, want to take issue with both Köstenberger’s characterization of my approach to biblical theology and his commendation of J. P. Gabler’s.

Köstenberger has this to say of God’s Glory in Salvation through Judgment: A Biblical Theology,

Are your assumptions about the people who hear you preach and teach an affront to the reality that they are made in the image of God?

Here’s the intro:

Solid exegesis, biblical theology, and systematic theology are necessary for preaching and teaching. We don’t exercise these skills merely for our own excellence in sermon delivery, but because the people in the pews have the ability to think, analyze arguments, read the Bible for themselves, and formulate answers to questions that we may never even address from the pulpit.

The whole thing.

Does this do justice to the actual details of the texts in question? I don’t think so. Consider Revelation 19:20,

“And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the beast and those who worshiped its image. These two were thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur.”

What John says about the beast and the false prophet here is intended to identify the beast and the false prophet as the characters we know from Revelation 13:13–18. Let’s take it phrase by phrase:

Rev 19:20a, “And the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs”
Rev 13:13a, 14a, “It [the false prophet] performs great signs . . . and by the signs that it is allowed to work in the presence of the beast”

Rev 19:20b, “by which he deceived”
Rev 13:14b, “it deceives those who dwell on earth”

Rev 19:20c, “those who had received the mark of the beast”
Rev 13:16–18, “…it causes all…to be marked on the right hand or the forehead…the mark…the name of the beast or the number of its name”

Rev 19:20d, “and those who worshiped its image”
Rev 13:14b, 15a, c, “telling them to make an image for the beast . . . allowed to give breath to the image . . . cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain”

John has piled up these phrases from Revelation 13 to identify the beast and the false prophet captured in Revelation 19:20. These phrases from Revelation 13 that are reused in 19:20 refer back to the persecution of Christians seen in chapter 13, and in my view, that persecution refers to the satanic persecution of Christians in all of church history. Jesus ascended into heaven in Revelation 12:5, Satan was cast out of heaven because of the cross and resurrection of Jesus (Rev 12:7–12), and he went off to make war on the woman and the rest of her seed, Christians (12:13–17).

Satan went about making war on Christians by summoning a fake christ from the sea in Revelation 13:1. God has a Lamb standing as though slain, Christ (Rev 5:6). Satan twists this with his knock-off many-headed beast that has a head that seemed to have a mortal wound, but the mortal wound was healed (13:1–3). Satan has faked the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus with his un-lamb-like beast. The world responds to Satan’s parody the way it should respond to Jesus–all but the elect worship Satan and his beast (13:4, 8). Then the beast uses his authority to kill Christians (13:7, 15).

Note that John expressly says that Satan, the beast, and the false prophet (the satanic parody of the holy Trinity, cf. Rev 16:13) deceive those who dwell on earth. In other words, they’re doing throughout church history what they’re not able to do during the millennium.

Jesus comes and puts a stop to that deception by casting the beast and the false prophet into the lake of fire in Revelation 19:20, and the angel puts the dragon, Satan, into the pit for a thousand years “so that he might not deceive the nations any longer” in 20:1–3.

So it seems that John has referred back to the persecutions of Revelation 13 in Revelation 19:20 to show how all that has come to an end with the coming of Christ. Then Christ reigns for the thousand years in Revelation 20:1–6.

Some amillennialists think that the end of Satan’s ability to deceive in Revelation 20:3 means that the gospel can now go to the gentiles. That is, they think we’re in the thousand years now, and that Satan’s ability to deceive the nations has been stopped in the sense that he can no longer keep the true knowledge of God from the nations now that Christ has come, done his work, and sent his disciples to make disciples of all nations.

I submit that this explanation does not fit the narrative of the book of Revelation. I’m not imposing this narrative on the book. John himself highlights it by means of the kinds of details I’m pointing out: in the reuse of phrases from Revelation 13 in Revelation 19:20.

How does the narrative go? Satan, the beast, and the false prophet are deceiving the nations to worship the beast, and they’re killing Christians throughout church history (Rev 11–17). Christ comes and ends their deception of the nations (19:20; 20:3), raises the Christians they’ve killed from the dead (20:4–6), and reigns for a thousand years. Then Satan is loosed for the final rebellion (20:7–10) before the great white throne judgment (20:11–15) which is followed by the new heaven and new earth (Rev 21–22).

Note that it is only after the thousand years that Satan is thrown into the lake of fire, where the beast and false prophet already were. Revelation 20:10 states,

and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

Beast and false prophet thrown into the lake of fire at the second coming of Christ (Rev 19:20). Satan bound for a thousand years (20:1–6), released to deceive a last time (20:7–9), then he too is thrown into the lake of fire, where the beast and false prophet already were (20:10).

There is a chronological progression that unfolds here, and Revelation 19:20 contributes to it. It’s a symbolic chronology, but it is a chronology.

—

See further Revelation: The Spirit Speaks to the Churches, Preaching the Word. Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.

The fact that she’s drunk with the blood of the saints means that the wicked world has been killing Christians. Why do Christians get martyred? How does it happen?

These are the enemies of God who are troubling God’s people: governments that put Christians to death or imprison them; social networks and dynamics among groups of people that build a plausibility structure in which the truth of the Bible is regarded as backwards and shallow and for the weak; and these are powers at work in the world to make Christianity seem negative or weak or foolish or not respectable (Revelation, 327).

Here are the excerpts:

The Historic View
Marriage as a comprehensive union: Joining spouses in body as well as mind, it is begun by commitment and sealed by sexual intercourse. So completed in the acts by which new life is made, it is specially apt for and deepened by procreation, and calls for that broad sharing of domestic life uniquely fit for family life. Uniting spouses in these all-encompassing ways, it also calls for all-encompassing commitment: permanent and exclusive. Comprehensive union is valuable in itself, but its link to children’s welfare makes marriage a public good that the state should recognize, support, and in certain ways regulate. Call this the conjugal view of marriage.

The Revisionist View
Marriage as the union of two people who commit to romantic partnership and domestic life: essentially an emotional union, merely enhanced by whatever sexual activity partners find agreeable. Such committed romantic unions are seen as valuable while emotion lasts. The state recognizes them because it has an interest in their stability, and in the needs of spouses and any children they choose to rear. Call this the revisionist view of marriage.

President Obama has made it clear that he favors the second view. He hasn’t offered any arguments for it, merely pointing to his feelings and those of his children.

—

Now that the president has disclosed his view, he — like all revisionists — must confront some tough questions. And he, like they, will run into a problem. Something must set marriages as a class apart from other bonds. But on every point where most agree that marriage is different, the conjugal view has a coherent explanation — and the revisionist has none.

—

The president has now created a platform for this very discussion; and it is a discussion we look forward to having. For as Obama himself implied, this is not a dispute featuring “bigots” on one side, any more than it has “perverts” on the other. It is a debate of reasonable people of goodwill who disagree about the nature of the most basic unit of society. In saying that he supports letting states decide the definition of marriage for themselves, Obama indicated that this issue shouldn’t be settled by judicial fiat. On this, we agree. Our national conversation shouldn’t be brought to an undemocratically abrupt end. But as it continues, advocates on all sides must contend with, and answer, the central question in this debate, without which we can’t know the what or the why of legal recognition, much less what justice demands: What is marriage?

God help us.

Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.

Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
While there’s always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we’re going,
We can never go astray.

To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.

Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.

Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
‘Goodness = what comes next.’
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.

Oh then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be).

Source

HT: John O’Sullivan

Some highlights:

Time was when everybody understood a translation to be a more or less word-for-word transfer of meaning from one language to another—”or less” because grammatical constructions differ in languages foreign to each other and therefore sometimes require renderings looser than word-for-word. On the other hand, everybody understood a paraphrase to be recognizably freer: more thought-for-thought than word-for-word. But translation of the Bible increasingly into languages featuring grammatical structures far different from those of biblical Hebrew and Greek, and carrying cultural freight far different from that of the Bible, made word-for-word transfer a lot less feasible.

Along came the dynamic (or functional) equivalence theory of translation. For the sake of languages and cultures exotic to those of the Bible, this theory incorporated paraphrase into translation, so that even in English versions of the Bible the boundary between translation and paraphrase became as porous as the border between the USA and Mexico. You can even hear Eugene Peterson’s The message, a paraphrase if there ever was one and self-identified as such, quoted as a “translation.” The incorporation of paraphrase into translation may best be illustrated by the shift from the marketing of Kenneth Taylor’s The Living Bible originally as “a paraphrase” to its being marketed now as The New Living Translation, though those who revised it (I was one of them) were told at the start to keep it recognizable as a paraphrase by Taylor.

In the wake of this development arrives The Kingdom New Testament (from here on KNT) by N. T. Wright, identified effusively in its back ad as “the world’s leading New Testament scholar (Newsweek)” and accurately in its gatefold as “one of the world’s leading Bible scholars.” Duly distinguishing between translation and paraphrase, Wright asks, “Is this new version really a translation or a paraphrase?” and answers, “It’s a translation, not a paraphrase.” Why a new translation? Because language is constantly changing, so that “translating the New Testament is something that, in fact, each generation ought to be doing.” (I leave aside the question whether for the present generation enough new translations have already been produced.)

KNT originally appeared in Wright’s series of popular commentaries on the New Testament—Matthew for Everyone et al.—and therefore sports a colloquial style. I’ll call Everyone “Joe the plumber” and “Jane the hairdresser.” Or to suit today’s American culture, should I say “Jane the plumber” and “Joe the hairdresser”? Either way, “J&J.” And since Wright calls me “Bob,” I’ll call him “Tom.” Colloquialism all around, then, so that KNT is to be evaluated at the level of J&J’s everyday speech.

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“She will, however, be kept safe through the process of childbirth” adopts one of several possible interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:15 by translating “She will be saved” as “She will … be kept safe” and by injecting “the process of” into “through childbirth.” Perhaps the most obvious example of a translation slanted by interpretation appears earlier in 1 Timothy 2:11-12, which Tom renders as follows: “They [godly women] must study undisturbed, in full submission to God. I’m not saying that women should teach men, or try to dictate to them; rather, that they should be left undisturbed.” Tom first replaces learning (from men) in quietness with studying undisturbed (by men). Then he imports “to God,” with no support in the Greek text, to make God rather than men the object of women’s submission—against the making of men, especially husbands, the objects of women’s submission according to Tom’s own translations of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; Ephesians 5:22-24; Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:1, 5. Finally, he changes Paul’s “I don’t permit [a woman to teach men or dictate to them]” into a wishy-washy “I’m not saying that ….”

—

Does KNT work, then, as a translation in the sense taken for granted by J&J when reading both KNT’s subtitle, “A Contemporary Translation,” the back ad’s description of KNT as “modern prose that stays true to the character of the ancient Greek text … conveying the most accurate rendering possible,” and Tom’s own statement of having “tried to stick closely to the original”? No, not even by the standards of dynamic/functional equivalence, of which J&J are ignorant anyway. Too much unnecessary paraphrase. Too many insertions uncalled for. Too many inconsistencies of translation. Too many changes of meaning. Too many (and overly) slanted interpretations. Too many errant renderings of the base language.

But there is a body of religious literature characterized by all those traits, viz., the ancient Jewish targums, which rendered the Hebrew Old Testament into the Aramaic language. So KNT’s similar combination of translation, paraphrase, insertions, semantic changes, slanted interpretations, and errant renderings—all well-intentioned—works beautifully as a targum. Which apart from the question of truth in advertising isn’t to disparage KNT. For the New Testament itself exhibits targumizing, as when, for example, Mark 4:12 has “lest … it be forgiven them” in agreement with the targum of Isaiah 6:10 rather than “lest … one heals them” (so the Hebrew), and as when 2 Timothy 3:8 has “Jannes and Jambres” in agreement with a targum of Exodus 7:11-8:19, which in the Hebrew original leaves Pharaoh’s magicians unnamed. Hence, Tom’s Targum. Trouble is, J&J won’t know they’re reading a targum.

Read the whole thing.

HT: Bobby Jamieson