John 8:44, Richard Lattimore agrees with April D. DeConick

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lsayre
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John 8:44, Richard Lattimore agrees with April D. DeConick

Post by lsayre »

Richard Lattimore, a scholar best known for his famous translations of the Illiad and Odyssey, agrees with April DeConick that a proper and literal translation of The Gospel Of John at 8:44 reveals that the devil has a father. Here is John 8:44 as seen in Richard Lattimore's translation of the New Testament:
The father you come from is the
devil and you wish to do your father's will. He has been a
man killer from the beginning, and he does not stand
upon the truth because there is no truth in him. When he
speaks his lie he speaks from what is his own, because he
is a liar and so is his father.
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Joseph D. L.
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Re: John 8:44, Richard Lattimore agrees with April D. DeConick

Post by Joseph D. L. »

And of course, the devil's father, is YHWH.
Charles Wilson
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Re: John 8:44, Richard Lattimore agrees with April D. DeConick

Post by Charles Wilson »

John 8: 44 (RSV):

[44] You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.

Allow me to supply a different interpretation:

This is a rebuke of Nero. The Chosen of Claudius was to be Britannicus. Recall John 3: 16

[16] For God so loved the world that he gave his only ________ Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Lotta grief and looking over the shoulder at this one. "Isn't it 'only begotten son...'? Well...It might be. If it is by implication God's only begotten/true/actual son in John then there is another alternative.

Nero's father by adoption was Claudius. Nero's bio-father was an evil man:

Suetonius, 12 Caesars, "Nero":

He had by the elder Antonia a son Domitius who became the father of Nero, a man hateful in every walk of life; for when he had gone to the East on the staff of the young Gaius Caesar, he slew one of his own freedmen for refusing to drink as much as he ordered, and when he was in consequence dismissed from the number of Gaius' friends, he lived not a whit less lawlessly. On the contrary, in a village on the Appian Way, suddenly whipping up his team, he purposely ran over and killed a boy; and right in the Roman Forum he gouged out the eye of a Roman knight for being too outspoken in chiding him. He was moreover so dishonest that he not only cheated some bankers of the prices of wares which he had bought, but in his praetorship he even defrauded the victors in the chariot races of the amount of their prizes. When for this reason he was held up to scorn by the jests of his own sister, and the managers of the troupes made complaint, he issued an edict that the prizes should thereafter be paid on the spot. Just before the death of Tiberius he was also charged with treason, as well as with acts of adultery and incest with his sister Lepida, but escaped owing to the change of rulers and died of dropsy at Pyrgi, after acknowledging Nero son of Agrippina, the daughter of Germanicus.
...
Nero was born at Antium nine months after the death of Tiberius, on the eighteenth day before the Kalends of January, just as the sun rose, so that he was touched by its rays almost before he could be laid upon the ground. Many people at once made many direful predictions from his horoscope,a and a remark of his father Domitius was also regarded as an omen; for while receiving the congratulations of his friends, he said that "nothing that was not abominable and a public bane could be born of Agrippina and himself."

CW
lsayre
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Re: John 8:44, Richard Lattimore agrees with April D. DeConick

Post by lsayre »

Charles, are you telling us (above) that the implication of Jesus is that the father of the Pharisees is Nero? That makes good sense from the standpoint of the Pharisees willingness to get along with their Roman dominators (or perhaps to be "seekers of smooth things"). It also just about wipes any high Christology (or more likely any Christology at all) away from these words of Jesus. It also likely places Jesus in the camp of the revolutionaries, or as Josephus called them, the fourth philosophy (or the robbers). And lastly it potentially secures a very early date for the Gospel of John, placing its writing within the time of the reign of Nero.

An admirably down to earth reading of what I had presumed to be evidence of a high/gnostic Christology. It makes these words have a much higher probability of being the words that may have actually been spoken by a living person of the time.
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