translating Greek indicative verbs

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A mnemonics and memory improvement resource

from BUILDYOURMEMORY.COM: "So if you wanted to commit this particular word to your long-term memory, in a way that will make it easy to recall, then the first thing that you would need to do, would be to transform it into a form that you can immediately visualise."

An interesting idea. And some of us in Greek last year used this technique to remember some of the trickier words ... words whose meanings in English come immediately to mind now when we read them!

Mark 5:23

The phrase referring to the daughter of the synagogue leader translated as at the point of death (NRSV) occurs only once in the New Testament, and it's in this verse. The only way we know escatws ecw as an idiomatic expression for being about to die is from its use in ancient Greek medical writings. Escatws is an adverb meaning finally. Literally, the leader's daughter had finally had [it].

This is a tricky verse to translate. What the leader literally says is, "My daughter is finally having it, in order that, having come, you might place the hand on her, in order that she might be saved/healed and she might live." Such a literal rendering of the leader's request makes it sound like the leader sees the situation of his daughter being at death's door as an intentional opportunity for Jesus to display his power. This speaks not only to the faith of the leader but to the leader's worldview with regards to suffering.