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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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By the way, the "truth" Jesus claimed to be was not material factuality, but aletheia -- literally non-concealment and non-forgetting (or, to put it positively, revelation and remembrance). This is the Greek word that is translated as "truth" in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament, etc. In Greek, aletheia is typically not a property of sentences, but a property of the way someone communicates with another person on a given occasion. The modern English equivalent would be something like, "being straight with someone". For example, when Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinski", his statement was materially factual, but he was not speaking with aletheia, because he was either concealing something or forgetting something (almost certainly concealing something).

The English word for this is 'honesty'.

I agree that "Honesty" is closer than "truth" as a translation, though I don't think it catches the whole thing. Someone can be honest even when they forget something important, or forget everything (as the dead do, in Virgil's Aeneid, when they drink from the river Lethe). Aletheia connotes being able to give a clear picture of the subject you are talking about, and then actually giving it.

Note that truth is a property of sentences while honesty is a property of a person or his conduct on a given occasion -- whose presence is a virtue and whose absence is a sin. So the Greek concept of aletheia is more like "honesty" in that it is more ethically weighted, and carries that ethical weight into more contexts, than the English conception of truth. But it is stronger than honesty because it also suggests knowing what you are talking about.

Aletheia also just means 'truth'.

People have been doing translation and Biblical criticism for some time now.

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