I have gotten into a debate with a creationist over the meaning of the geneology of Jesus given in Luke 3:23. I was wondering if anyone here who can read New Testament Greek could tell me if the (biological) father of Joseph, is Heli. The relevant thread is here:
Is there any substance to Ark Guy’s explanation, or is he just desperately trying to explain away an obvious contradiction?
It appears that “son” is implied.
vs 23 specifically adds the phrase “being son as it was being opined” refering to Jesus and Joseph
My Greek letter map for my keyboard is gone, so I’m going to approximate the letters: UIOS = son, WS = as, EVOUILETO = it was being opined.
Everything else rendered “son of” is actually TOU (= of the)
(this is from the 1881 Westcott and Hort text)
Sorry for the lack of being able to type Greek. Someone will be along shortly to help.
Now, I’m going to read the other thread. I didn’t want any bias (other than what I already have) in this answer
After reading that thread, I don’t think any Greek transliteration is going to aid either side of the argument.
Greek transliteration:
[symbol]enomizeto[/symbol] (enomizeto).
Luke is inserting some what of a editorial note here. It says, “He was the son (as it was believed) of Joseph, son of Heli.”
In other words, Luke was trying to say that people believed that Jesus was the son of Joseph even though (in Luke’s mind) he was not.
DtG, can you point me to a Greek character keyboard map?
This is the third time in a couple of months that I’ve been unable to type out what I’m looking at in Westcott and Hort.
Thanks in advance (or to anyone who points me in the right direction)
You can code the regular letters with the tags [symbol][/symbol]
Most of the the transliteration is just the obvious corresponding English letters (A = Alpha, B = Beta, etc.). Some of the less obvious transliterations include w for omega, f for phi and q for theta.
I haven’t been able to find a map for everything and I had to figure out the letters through trial and error. A good way to do it is to open the tag (symbol) type every letter on the keyboard in order. Close the tag (/symbol), then preview. You’ll have yourself a makeshift map. That you can copy in longhand.
I haven’t discovered everything. I can’t figure out how to code an ultimate sigma, for example, (though I’ve seen others do it) and there doesn’t seem to be any way to code breathings. But if you goof around with some tagging and previewing you should be able to nail down most of it.
Sorry, my tag example vanished. Change the parentheses to brackets and it’s (symbol) (/symbol)
Gotchaya! Thanks
Glad to help. 
But could the “as it was believed” part apply to the relationship between Joseph and Heli, or would this require that all the people listed were sons “as it was believed” of each other?
In my opinion the Greek states that the Joseph was the actual son, not the son-in-law of Heli. Ark Guy claims that it is obvious that Joseph is Heli’s son-in-law, while Heli is the actual son of Matthat, the actual son of Levi… etc.
Here is the relevant chapter, by the way:
http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~fisher/cgi-bin/gnt?id=0303
Also, one other question… Isn’t that a smooth breathing mark on Heli? Why does it have an “h” in the English translations?
I think the [symbol]Ioshf tou Hli[/symbol] construction (and the succeeding geneology) is pretty unambiguous. The equivocation is about whether Jesus himself is part of that geneology. I’m pretty certain that would be the plain reading of the Greek. it would be an awkward, misleading and grammatically anomalous way to write it if the [symbol]enwmizeto[/symbol] was meant to indicate Joseph’s descent from that bloodline.
You’re right about the breathing. It looks like it should be Eli in English. I have no idea why it would be transliterated with a rough breathing. Maybe someone else knows.
Oops, I mispelled Joseph’s name in Greek. That should be [symbol]Iwshf[/symbol] with an omega, not an omicron.
The patriarchal geneology thing sort of shoots itself in the foot, given that Mary is believed to be the only human blood relative of Jesus. Therefore, the only way to trace a bloodline back to Abraham etc is via her ascendants. Though I do remember reading that Mary and Joseph would almost certainly have been related in some way themselves too.
Do you mind if I repost what you stated for Ark Guy at creationtalk, just so he can see a second opinion that says Joseph is not the son-in-law of Heli (or Eli)?
By the way, is there a word for son-in-law in Greek?
My last post was directed at Diogenes, by the way.
Charmap, set to the Symbol font, gives you the list of characters that match the ASCII codes. All you need do is remember that they’re in Roman-alphabet order, uppercase first, to identify what matches what. Terminal lowercase sigma, by the way, is the totally nointuitive capital V.
Here’s the symbol font characters corresponding to the Roman alphabet, uppercase first:
[symbol]A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z[/symbol]
Here’s an easy trick I use for words and short passages when I’m feeling energetic enough. It works on most boards, and should be displayed properly on all recent browser versions on all OSs, platforms and regionalization.
Just use the HTML special character entities. For Greek, it is particularly easy to remember: it’s &<lettername>; for lower case and &<Lettername>; for upper case. The final sigma is &fsigma;. Don’t forget the closing semicolon for each symbol. You could also use the Unicode and Latin-1 number codes but those are uglier to code (you have to memorize or look up the numbers) and may not display properly on foreign computers that aren’t set to use Latin-1 as the native default.
Example:
αβγδ…
ΑΒγΔ…
If you’re confused by what I’ve said, hit the “quote” button on this post to see the code for my example in your quote window. Then back out without posting. (It’s really amazingly simple once you “get it”.)
Thanks for the help, Poly. That terminal sigma’s been driving me nuts.
quelquechose:
It’s ok with me if you use my post but I think there’s a rule against reposting content from SDMB onto other MBs (except for your own posts, of course).
Just say what I said in your own words.
I doubt it will matter much to someone like that anyway. He sounds like he’s got his mind made up.
The Greek word for “son-in-law” would be [symbol]gambroV[/symbol] (thanks again, Poly). That doesn’t just mean “son-in-law,” it’s kind of a generic term for any male related by marriage, but son-in-law is probably it’s most common application.
As I said before, the construction of [symbol]Iwsef tou Eli[/symbol] (literally, “Joseph of Eli”) would really have no other meaning than “Joseph, son of Eli.” The grammatical implication is that Joseph was “from” or “begat” by Eli. If Joseph ws Eli’s son in law it would not have been phrased in the way that it is. It would not have been worth noting at all, in fact. If Joseph’s bloodline was important than it would have been silly to detour through Mary’s. If Mary’s was important (which it wasn’t in Jewish tradition) there would have been no point in starting with Joseph.
The placement of [symbol]enomizeto[/symbol] between Jesus and the contiguous geneology of Joseph make it pretty difficult to argue that it really applied to Joseph.
Ark Guy is really stretching to make his argument. The only way to extract his unlikely interprettaion of the text would be if one were deliberately trying to reconcile it with Matthew. It would not lend itself to a plain reading.
Erratum: the terminal sigma is ς not &fsigma;
The Unicode/Latin-1 method I disparaged above is useful for symbols and dingbats, or to approximate languages like Aramaic.