Defending the Faith: Original languages can shed light on scriptures

Published: Thursday, March 14 2013 5:00 a.m. MDT



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I once saw a cartoon showing a bearded man standing at a pulpit. “As a Mormon intellectual,” he said, “I would indeed be ungrateful if I didn't stand on my feet this day and bear my testimony in the original Greek.”

Greek and Hebrew are neither required for understanding the gospel nor essential to salvation. But they can sometimes be useful for more than merely showing off.

For example, missionaries often cite 2 Thessalonians 2:1-8 in order to illustrate the concept of an apostasy from the primitive church:




The word that the King James translators rendered as “falling away” here is “apostasia,” which might more accurately be defined as “rebellion” or “revolution.” Paul proceeds to describe the “man of sin” as someone “who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God ….


What on earth does the phrase “only he who now letteth will let” mean?

The crucial Greek word here is “katechon,” or “holding back.” How did it become “letting”? In Anglo-Saxon, the verb “laetan” meant “to permit.” It survives in modern English as “to let.” But Anglo-Saxon also featured an antonym or opposite, “lettan,” which meant “to prevent.” And it survived for centuries in English as (guess what!) “to let.” “I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!” exclaims Hamlet when his friends Horatio and Marcellus try to restrain his pursuit of the ghost of his murdered father.

The old sense of the term lives on still in the redundant legal phrase “without let or hindrance,” which simply means “without impediment,” and perhaps even in tennis, where a “let” results from an illegal serve or something that interrupts play.

Paul’s prophecy in 2 Thessalonians 2:7 can be retranslated more clearly as follows: “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; but the one now holding it back will continue to do so until he is taken out of the way.” In other words, the apostasy is already coming, and, when the apostles are removed, will proceed unrestrained.

Another passage where a glance at the original language can help is 1 Corinthians 15:29, which Latter-day Saints happily (and correctly) use to defend the idea of vicarious baptism for the dead: “Else what shall they do which are baptized for the dead, if the dead rise not at all? why are they then baptized for the dead?”

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