On the Road

I will try to find hot spots and places I can plug in and blog from: I'm taking my lap top. Among other things I am writing a sermon for my examination committee on Hebrews 11:27 - 12:2. Good stuff about faith and Jesus. An interesting exegetical note is that in verse 37, there's a word the NRSV translates as "sawn in two" but supplies in a note that other texts say "tempted." Tempted doesn't fit the context very well: it would be like saying that some people had various limbs amputated and this one fellow here, who we're equating with these other fellows, has a bad comb-over. So "tempted" is untenable. "Sawn in two" is attested in many manuscripts, but so are other words that mean "pierced" "mutilated" "strangled" "sold""broken on the wheel""impaled""burned" and my favorite, though with hardly any great attestation, "pickled." I think Metzger, who wrote the textual commentary, liked pickled too - he supplies an exclamation point to the word. Hetaricheuthesan is the koine Greek word for pickled for those of you playing at home. I can see some of them, when you read about them made to wander (not their choice) in deserts among mountains and in caves and cracks in the earth, who, given the opportunity, might relish the chance to get pickled. It could be that the other words are ancient idioms for hitting the sauce: Last night Bob was sawn in two, someone might say. Suffice it that the word implies its own punctuation mark or else is a study in fractions. Having to choose between the groups is picklish.