To very roughly paraphrase, Revelation 5:13 says ‘I heard [every creature in Heaven and Earth] saying….’
Is there anything in the Greek of this that indicates whether the ‘saying’ verb (λέω) is in the first person plural (so ‘I heard [us] saying…’) or the third person plural (so ‘I heard [them] saying…’)? Or does the Greek construction not allow such a distinction? Would a reader of Revelation in the second century have seen John as being a participant in the stuff he describes, or merely as an observer of what others were doing?
Not knowing Greek I look at other versions for help and guidance.
The German Luther Bible reads:
Und alle Kreatur, die im Himmel ist und auf Erden und unter der Erde und im Meer, und alles, was darinnen ist, hörte ich sagen: Dem, der auf dem Stuhl sitzt, und dem Lamm sei Lob und Ehre und Preis und Gewalt von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit!
Which DeepL com translates as:
And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying: Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.
A random Spanish translation I found in the net reads:
Y a todo lo creado que está en el cielo, y sobre la tierra, y debajo de la tierra, y en el mar, y a todas las cosas que en ellos hay, oí decir: Al que está sentado en el trono, y al Cordero, sea la alabanza, la honra, la gloria y el poder, por los siglos de los siglos.
Which DeepL com again translates almost identically, and funnily archaic too:
And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying: Blessing, honour, glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.
And there are pages that compare different translations in English, like this one:
All the languages and versions I read seem to say “I heard them saying”. It looks like John is merely describing what he sees the animals do.
Now just out of curiosity: Why does this seem relevant to you? What (theological?) difference would it make if John was participating in the stuff he describes?
https://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/NTpdf/rev5.pdf has a nice, detailed explanation of each Greek word. As far as I can see, λέγοντας is a participle, which is marked for gender (masculine) and number (plural), but not for person. I think the “us” (masculine plural) reading might be stronger than the “them” reading because κτίσμα is neuter. The linked document has αὐτοῖς as neuter, as well, though the form could be masculine—it makes sense that it would refer back to the various κτίσμα-s.
It makes no theological difference to me, since it isn’t my religion. But I’m curious as to whether the formation of the Greek makes it clear that John is an observer versus a participant, or leaves it ambiguous, or perhaps wouldn’t have been seen as a real distinction in the second century.
I don’t put much faith in machine translation to capture nuance in ancient Greek texts, I’m afraid. For example - why is λέγοντας masculine here, when ‘creatures’ are neuter? I have no idea. Is it referring to some other group noun? There are clearly ‘some’ translations that phrase this as ‘I heard them saying’, but others don’t, and I wondered how ambiguous the Greek is.
A note: the Koine Greek of John’s Revelation is the obvious effort of someone writing in a language they aren’t comfortable with. It isn’t obvious from almost all translations because the translators/revisers want it to flow smoothly and put it in better English than it was in Greek. Grammatical concerns in individual verses abound.
David Bentley Hart, who tried to show the difference in the various levels of Greek in his translation (2017), has this for the end of chapter 5:
11And I looked, and I heard the noise of
many angels in a circle around the throne, and around the animals and the
elders, and their number was myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands,
12Saying with a loud voice, “The suckling lamb who has been slaughtered is
worthy to receive the power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and
glory and blessing.” 13And I heard every creature that is in heaven and on the
earth and below the earth and on the sea, and all the things among them,
saying, “To the one who sits upon the throne and to the suckling lamb be the
blessing and the honor and the glory and the might unto the ages of the ages.”
14And the four animals said, “Amen,” and the elders fell down and prostrated
themselves.
You are correct in that. I am an interpreter myself and know the limits of this technology. It is just that I am lazy: I know German and Spanish and can vouch that the translation was correct enough, and both came from Greek originally. I just had to correct some punctuation marks, no words (and I found it funny that the machine tried to sound archaic).
So I tried to answer your question despite not knowing Greek by looking at the languages I personally know that translated the Bible based on the Greek version. I searched for Offenbarungen 5:13 and Revelaciones 5:13 and compared them to the English versions.
And it is not my religion either, and I wondered at the sense those texts do not seem to make, and how to translate something so weird. That is where my laziness came into play and I went the machine way. Which surprised me as better than I thought.
Is the Greek Bible we are talking about the septuaginta, the Bible 70 or 72 scholars translated independently from one another and still came up with the same result, word for word, according to myth and legend, inspired by the Holy Spirit? Or are there other canonical Greek translations apart from that one? Is improving the weak Greek not correcting Godott herself? Is that sacrilege? Excuse my very peripherical knowledge of the Bible, I may be talking crap, but I am astonished about this obscure interest in archane linguistic details.
The Septuagint is a translation of the Tanakh, aka. Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. In fact, the Septuagint proper only translated the Torah aka Pentateuch, i.e. the first five books of the Bible. But subsequent revisions and translation efforts for the rest of the Tanakh are often lumped in.
The mythology you cite is about the Torah translation. It is generally accepted as false, coming from a letter written in 150–100 BC. The initial translation is known to date from the 3rd Century.
All of the books of the New Tesatment were originally composed in Koine Greek.
(There is reference in one early letter of a Matthew gospel that was written in Aramaic first, but that gospel does not correspond with our current Matthew gospel. The gospels didn’t get their current names until later.)
I’d be interested to hear more about this, if you’re inclined to share.
ISTM that there are three options - the Greek is clear that the creatures are saying this, or it’s clear that John and the creatures are saying this, or it’s ambiguous in the Greek.