I'm a missionary in Japan. The name of my mission agency is WEC International. That's supposedly Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ, but I think I have a better idea about what it stands for...
2007-04-10
Graeco-Buddhism
Graeco-Buddhism is a really fascinating thing: it's about how Buddhism came to the Greek empire and the syncretism that took place between Buddhist thought and Greek philosophy between around the 4th century BC and the 5th century AD. Rather an important time frame from Christian theologians, one might think.
So with that in mind, how do we translate James 3:6? The KJV goes for this:
And the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity: so is the tongue among our members, that it defileth the whole body, and setteth on fire the course of nature; and it is set on fire of hell.
But that "course of nature" bit is a little funny. It actually reads τὸν τροχὸν τῆς γενέσεως - literally, "the wheel of life" or, perhaps better "the wheel of becoming". And actually that "iniquity" is a bit odd as well. OK, I'll grant that most of the time "αδικια" means "unrighteous". But looking in TDNT, we see that αδικια can refer to "what is of purely illusory value". Let's translate that as "maya".
So we've got the wheel of life being set on fire, the pollution of the body, and the illusory cosmos. Seen that anywhere before?
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lathos: seriously hating on RapidSwitch at the moment. They're useless.
