Titus 2
Bible Study
I was looking at some Bible study material on Titus 2 and I notice that the KJV uses a verb form "to deny" while in effect the NIV attaches adjectives "no" this or that. (Titus 2:12) "Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;"(KJV). "It teaches us to say 'No' to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age," (NIV). It seems to me, first of all, that while the emphatic denial of the KJV comes across spoken as well as written, the capitalized "No" of the NIV is emphasized only in print. Be that as it may, saying "no" is more modern usage while denial sounds old fashioned, which is why, I suppose, they made a New International Version.
I hope my reader doesn't think I'm nitpicking, as how language conveys ideas is an important subject.
Writing forty years ago, the linguist Sapir started the ball rolling by demonstrating that in language man created an instrument that is quite different from what is commonly supposed. He states:651
The relation between language and experience is often misunderstood ... [it] actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience. ... [L]anguage is much like a mathematical system, which ... becomes elaborated into a self-contained conceptual system, which previsages all possible experience in accordance with certain accepted formal limitations. ... [C]ategories such as number, gender, case, tense, mode, voice, "aspect" and a host of others ... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it. ...(italics added)
Sapir's work, which predates McLuhan by thirty-five years, not only makes a stronger, more detailed case than McLuhan that "the medium is the message," but can be extended to include other cultural systems as well. In the process of evolving culture, the human species did much more than was at first supposed.
The usefulness of Sapir's model was demonstrated in a practical way by Kluckhohn and Leighton in their pioneering book The Navajo,652 Which illustrates the difficulties the verb-oriented Navajo children experienced when they attended white schools and were confronted by English--a loosely structured, adjective language. Kluckhohn and Leighton's basic point, however, was not only that differences in emphasis on adjectival and verbal forms caused difficulties in school, but that the total orientation of the two languages was different, forcing the two groups to attend and fail to attend entirely different things in nature. Having lived and dealt with the Navajos for a number of years, I have no doubt that they think very differently from the white man, but that much of this difference is at least initially traceable to their language.--Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture653
I don't think it should be that much of a surprise to Christians that language is a powerful molder of human thought, as God specifically broke up the languages at the Tower of Babel in order to have a Semitic language line producing eventually the Hebrew (Aramaic) and Greek which God chose to reveal his word in. The KJV dialect most closely conveys it to us, being a dialect never spoken in 1611 or at any other time as the common language, only as a sacred dialect to convey God's word. Trying to transpose God's word back into a common (adjectival) language is to revert to the unifying tongue at Babel that God disapproved of.
Okay, let's take the examples from the Bible study. A janitor at
a school had trouble scrubbing off the lipstick from the mirrors in
the girls room where the females had pressed their lips. The principal
gave the girls a lecture to no avail, so the janitor called them in
to demonstrate his cleaning method: dipping the sponge in the toilet,
he then proceeded to wipe the mirror with it. After that demonstration
the lipstick smears stopped!
First there was the lecture about the lipstick on the mirrors which would have done no good except that an action accompanied it that motivated the girls to concede. It was the action, not the verbal correction, that did the trick, the janitor's dipping his squeegee in the toilet and wiping the mirror with it, not the words of the principal.
A similar lesson can be seen in the recent movie The Forty Year Old Virgin in which a man's cronies discovered that at forty he was still a virgin, so they made it a project to help him overcome this "failing." First they took him to a bar to pick up a drunk girl to help him solve his problem. Well, the girl was so drunk that she vomited on him, then told him she'd still go to bed with him, but then he didn't want to, of course. Shades of toilet water on the mirror.
Then he was coached to pick up a fast girl at the music store. Yes, she was willing, but she was altogether too crazy for a sane man to get involved with.
Finally he meets a girl, a divorcee whom he really loves. They are interrupted in the bedroom by her teenage daughter who doesn't understand why she isn't allowed to have sex with her boyfriend if her mom can have sex with hers. He continues as a virgin to be a good role model.
Toward the end of the movie, they get married, the priest telling them, "For God's sake consummate this marriage," which they proceed to do. But then it is something special, and we are altogether in sympathy with the no-longer-virgin who waited until then. I mean, at no time in the movie is he told to say no to premarital sex. In fact his goal is to say yes. But we so identify with how it works best when he waits until his wedding night, that that's the message conveyed despite the lack of moralizing.
We have a Bible that gives us one good formula (KJV) and we've changed it (NIV) to conform to our more
modern language, but in the process we've changed the formula to reflect
our modern values where we don't have "good girls" of modest dress and
behavior, but lots of willing girls with a vocabulary that includes "no."
bibles.n7nz.org