There was a cartoon when I was a kid that aired on Saturday mornings. It was on Fox. Fox back then was a UHF station, so you had to use the second dial on your TV to get Fox to come in. And I loved it because it was an adaptation of my favorite comic book, The Uncanny X-Men. And this cartoon stood out from all the other cartoons because it was so adult. I mean the themes were heavy. And as a kid, I don't think I understood why I appreciated it, but that show took huge swings with the goofiest, cheese ballest animation and line deliveries. I don't know. It worked for me. In one episode, the there's this demon kind of looking character who's actually a good guy named Nightcrawler. He's a German Christian in the tradition of Martin Luther. And he's got a buddy who's this little ball of rage superhero named Wolverine. And in the episode, Nightcrawler talks about forgiveness and the forgiveness of God. And through that, he evangelizes Wolverine, and Wolverine becomes a Christian in a Saturday morning cartoon in the 90s. Are you kidding me? Well, there's this one other episode there that I think it's pretty early on. It starts out, and there's some protesters out in the street, and they don't like the superheroes. The superheroes are called mutants. They're holding signs that say things like humans, yes. Mutants, no. Get it? That was the protest. And then you cut inside, and one of the superheroes is talking with some concerned parents whose kid is turning out to be a superhero. And he's explaining that people fear what they don't understand. And he uses that phrase against a backdrop of people being very upset and not getting what's going on because of fear and lack of understanding, right? And implicit in what that superhero, his name Cyclops, is saying in that scene, it's that these people outside have got a couple of emotions, a couple of problems going on at once in relation to the powers of the various superheroes. One, they don't get it, that it's just foreign to them. It's not their experience, it's not their life, so they don't know what to do with it. And that makes them angry, but also they're afraid because in this case, the thing they don't understand is more powerful, and they feel that they could not overcome it. They view the mutants as a threat. So both of these things are true at once. They don't get it, also, they are threatened by it and fear they cannot overcome it. Likewise, we are working on a concept that has this exact same dual meaning and relationship in John chapter one. And for those of you who are like, wait, did that seriously just happen? Uh-huh. That happened. Yes, that's the example I'm going with, and I think it makes perfect sense. So today the exercise is going to be that we're going to go dig into the original language to try to figure out whether overcome is the better translation or understood is the better translation, or maybe to discover that really either would get the job done here. So to do that, we're going to use some resources. Now, look, I know that at this point, some of you are saying, uh, Greek is very intimidating to me. There's literally a saying, it's Greek to me. And I totally get that. Also, you're smart. And if you wanted to have this, you could get to a place where you could sound out the Greek for yourself, like a, you know, like a kid very quickly. I'm not even kidding. I think a week of taking a half an hour, an hour before bed to just memorize the alphabet and learn what sounds the letters make, and then figure out how to deploy that. You could pick up a Greek copy of the New Testament and start sounding stuff out. And yeah, most of it's going to be really foreign, but every now and then you're going to come across a word because Greek and English are related where you sound it out and you go, hey, I think I know what that one is. Well, I think that one is angel. Oh, I think that one is probably church. Oh, I think, I mean, you'll just start to catch it and you'll start to think, yeah, I wonder if that word is and and that word is the equivalent of the or like an article. It'll just start to pop. You can do this if you want to. If you don't want to, you can get the full meaning of the Bible from these reliable English translations. It's cool. There, there's my speech. We don't do this a lot, but I never want to give you the impression that if you don't go do the Greek, you're not doing real Bible. Settle down now. Okay, so I'm using a resource that you can use too called blueletterbible.org. It's incredibly accessible, and you can understand it even with no Greek whatsoever. So I'm starting here and it breaks down the passage. It's giving it to me in English and in Greek. John 1.5, the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. Okay, understood is our key word. I'm gonna click on that word, and here it is in Greek, and I can sound this word out. Kata lambano. There we are. I'm gonna let the man read it for us now. Strong's G 2638, kata lambano. Kata lambano. Kata lombano, good enough. All right. I remember from school enough of this Greek business to know that that looks like a compound word. It looks like the first half of the word is kata, according to after, against, or in. The second half of the word, I didn't know this one, lombano, to receive, take, have. Well, I'm I'm sure I learned that along the way somewhere. So it's a compound word. We have these in English. Interestingly, overcome and understood, the two English translations in question, are both compound words. So right off the bat, it looks like the English translators have got at least that much, right? This word in Greek has two parts, and both understood and overcome have two words mashed together. So they're compound words. Now we can scroll down on this entry and learn a little bit more. And I am seeing that this word gets used 15 times. And wow, it gets used a lot of different ways. Okay, I'm seeing the ambiguity of this word from ancient Greek right here. In the New Testament, this word, which has a code, maybe you caught the guy saying it, G2638. There are different ways of cataloging all the Greek words that are used at any point in the New Testament. That code right there is one way, G2638 is katalombano. Okay. It gets used to communicate the idea of take, apprehend, comprehend, perceive, come upon, attain, find, overtake, and obtain. All right. Well, I mean, it's all in the same zip code, but you know, you you can see there's some variety there in how that's being deployed. All right. So when I run into words like this, one of the things that I like to do is to use various internet resources I have to go and dig around in extra biblical stuff to say, all right, well, how did people outside the Bible use that particular word? Maybe that'll give us some hints. And so in digging around, I found the following Herodotus, the historian who tells us about the era of the Persians and the Greeks. He wrote about the era that would have included Queen Esther. Here we've got him in his book, The Histories. So this is written almost 500 years before the time of John that we're looking at. So, I mean, language evolves a lot in 500 years, but let's see what he does. He's got a phrase here where he's talking about the fall of Sardis. He says, having gone up by this steep path, they rushed into the city and caught the Lydians by surprise. Having gone up this steep path, they rushed into the city and Catalambano, the Lydians, by surprise. Okay, that to me sounds more like the darkness has not overcome it version of the translation. But let's keep looking. Okay, here's also Herodotus about the Persians getting interrupted by circumstances as they're sailing. They were overtaken by night and were forced to abandon the march. They were Catalombano by night and forced to abandon the march. Well, that certainly doesn't sound like understand in that context. That sounds like overtake. So I'd say that's two so far that we have that sound more like overtake. Here's one from Thucydides, which I just think is an awesome name. This guy wrote about stuff that happened after the Greeks fended off the Persians in the eras of Darius and Xerxes in the early 400s BC. So again, he's writing a little less than 500 years before the stuff in John that we're looking at here. All right, here we're debating over seizing a strategic position. The original text says, for they thought they could easily seize the city unless aid should come from the sea. For they thought they could easily catalombano the city unless aid should come from the sea. So there again, I'm hearing more overcome, overtook. I'm gonna rapid fire these now. More Thucydides. The disease overtook them, and many were dying as they lay in the marshes. The disease catalumbano them, overtook them. But now we have Plato, who is also, as you know, writing about 500 years before the time of John. And here he's got Socrates discussing whether the lover of sights and sounds can fully grasp the form of beauty itself. The one who beholds the many beautiful things would not grasp the beautiful itself. Grasp is catalombano here. The one who beholds the many beautiful things would not catalombano the beautiful itself. Okay, then we've got more Plato here. He says, Do you understand what I'm saying, or does it seem otherwise to you? Do you catalambano what I'm saying, or does it seem otherwise to you? Okay, so in a military sense, it seems like all of these ancient Greek writers are deploying this concept, katalambano, in the context of seizing or overcoming. But when talking about beauty or reason or rationale, this same idea is working for understanding. So to lay siege to something, to grasp it, to hold it. That translation right there, the word grasp to me seems like a very helpful word for us to imagine as we try to make sense of how Catalombano could be deployed as overcome, but also understood. Two more examples I found. I have a lot more than that, but we gotta be done. Two more. Philo, writing just a few years before John, and not even probably a hundred years before John, says, For the nature of God is not easy to comprehend by human reasoning. Comprehend there being the use of the word in question, catalambano. And then Josephus, writing around the same time as John, talks about a military action in Jerusalem. He says, the rebels seized the city and killed those who opposed them. The rebels catalambano the city and killed those who opposed them. Okay, so we got to land the plane here. Having done a little bit of work, having looked at the grammatical breakdown of the word itself, seeing the two parts that make up the word, knowing how else the word is deployed across the New Testament, and then going and looking at a pretty broad spectrum of ancient Greek writers and how they used the word. With that in mind, how would you translate it here in John 1.5? Here's the context once again to help you out. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it or overcome it. I kind of think both work. The not understanding it, just like the example from the old X-Men cartoon, is the source of the threatenedness that would cause them to try to defeat the light. But in light of everything we've looked at together, I'm just as good with the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. And I'm cool with both of these, one, because of the complexity of the source word that we've explored, but two, because of the context, there's a story being told here. There's a story, a description of a reaction being told. There's darkness, light comes into the darkness. Remember, I think it's kind of a nod to the cave illustration and the philosopher king idea. And the darkness doesn't like it. They reject the light. They recoil from the light. It makes them uncomfortable. And then they react against it. But you can't beat light. And the darkness doesn't beat light. The light is a threat to the darkness. The darkness doesn't get it. It can't grasp it. It can't lay hold of it mentally, but it also can't lay hold of it physically. It can't lay hands of it. It can't defeat it. It can't thwart it. In a way, the same word, it's almost like a play on words. I don't know that that's necessarily what's going on here, but grasp really gets it done. Like, I don't grasp what you're saying, pal. So I'm gonna grasp you by the shoulders and rough you up a little bit because I fear what I don't understand. The two ideas at first may appear to be in conflict. Those are totally different meanings. But when we dig into it a little bit and retrace the steps of the geniuses who did this translation work in the first place, what we find is a lot of reassurance about the quality of the English translation we're working through and the robust beauty of the language that God inspired this in in the first place. This is not cheap, childish writing. This is multi-layered, multifaceted stuff, and that is coming through in the English translation. So why did we just do this exercise over these last two days? One, because some of you asked. Two, because it is important to understanding what's going on here with this passage in this very important prologue. But three, and I think you can see what I'm doing here, right on the front end of John, this gave us a good chance to talk about how translation works, the relationship between the original Greek and modern English, and to take some of the mystery out of how the English Bible we have in front of us happened so that we can move forward in confidence together with our various English translations working on the book of John, which I happen to think is from God and unbelievably reliable. And over the course of this season, I intend to let it speak into my life and change how I think. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.