Welcome to B-Greek. I have allowed your post through, but make sure that you contact a moderator to make sure that your screen name matches your real name fully, per B-Greek policy.m_bauer wrote: ↑May 28th, 2018, 11:59 am Hi Everybody,
The direct, direct translation (Dative object) should be still the best: "Blessed be the poor (given, sacrificed= done as such) to ghost!"
This is my first post. I got a different opinion on the first sentences, thus highly meaningful, radical and erosive, of a or the Christian base text, their is another thread about the same topic early and:
this is a little late to connect to this thread, maybe I should open a own post, with a reference to the questioner's thread.
Μακάριοι οἱ πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι, ὅτι αὐτῶν ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.
is the sentence in question. I think we are mislead.
So ghost says: give me unvenality, that is when we leave -supposedly- as cut. Do not sell me, the thinking, as a ware for a profit, it does not matter, what a society tells. So that's all thievery of those, who want otherwise. One imagines, how deep was and is the conflict with societal practice.
They turned it around into being "humble" (well, to anything uncertain) which gets its contradiction from the word "splendid" twice in the same phrase,
- even though no reason to get rigid, as verse 5 "praeis" tells, how to really distract the profit of it, no?
Or even: "stupid" (which gets it contradiction by the warning against a μωρανθῇ, that is being made stupid, few sentences later). The questioner did not came without reason.
I am not the first one who detects this: Th. Adorno, member of the Frankfurt School, in Minima Moralia, Aphorism 127 Wishful Thinking. - Intelligenz ist eine moralische Kategorie. Die Trennung von Gefühl und Verstand, die es möglich macht, den Dummkopf frei und selig zu sprechen ...
He criticises, that it is found an ideology effort: to turn it some how as Greeks did: You are herd, we are the shepherds. Keep stupids but harmless.
We are not open to it, so we change meaning. That is what happens to us.
I am assuming that English is not your first language? With the possibility that I may be reading you to say something else other than what you are actually saying:
1) "ghost" is an archaism in English when translating πνεῦμα, and should not be used at all in modern usage for most contexts. For the writers of the NT, it really meant normally what we mean by spirit. A ghost was a φάντασμα, Matt 14:25, Mark 6:49, although admittedly Luke uses πνεῦμα in a similar sense in 24:37. But that's about the only context in which one could justify such a translation, and "spirit" works just as well for modern English.
2) τῷ πνεύματι above is a dative of reference, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, not a dative of indirect object. You also don't seem really to understand what μακάριοι, "blessed" means, although exactly what you think it means is not clear to me.
3) Remember that we discuss Greek as Greek on this forum, usage, meaning syntax, discourse and the like, but our primary language to do so is English. If you cite German or another modern language, please provide a full translation for everyone's benefit.
4) Along those lines, remember that we don't discuss theology on the forum, but Greek. It strikes me that you may have a theological agenda in posting, which is fine, as long as we stick to the Greek. You might say it's all Greek to us, to turn a common platitude on its head.