Luke 16:8: “The sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own genea than the sons of light.” The important contextual clue to the characteristic of the group of people referred to is the word “own” which qualifies genea. I shall go through all New Testament occurrences of genea below (references in parentheses are to parallel passages). The Good News Bible (GNB) often translates it simply as “people.” The characteristic feature of the people referred to is in all cases drawn out from the context. This sense is common in the New Testament. With the word in singular it occurs in Acts 8:33: “Who can describe his genea? For his life is taken up from the earth.” Both GNB (Good News Bible), JB (Jerusalem Bible) and NIV translate genea here by ‘descendants.’ The word occurs in plural in Matt 1:17 with a closely related sense of ‘succeeding sets of descendants, stages in a genealogy’ and is probably best translated generations: Matt 1:17 “So all the geneai from Abraham to David were fourteen geneai.”Ģ The secondary sense is a natural extension of the first sense and can be stated thus: ‘ a group of people with a common bond or characteristic a certain class or type of people’. This primary sense occurs rarely in the New Testament. The purpose of the above remarks was to show that the meaning of the Greek word genea is not at all equivalent to the modern English word “generation.” We shall now proceed to discuss what genea actually means.ġ The primary sense is ‘descendants, family, clan, that is, a group of people with a common ancestor’ (see for instance: New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 2.35). The Oxford Universal Dictionary gives the following, now obsolete (latest attested use 1727) sense of “generation”: “class, kind or set of persons.” The evidence is that the word gennēma ‘brood’ in Matt 3:7 is translated by “generation” in KJV as well as the word genos ‘race, people’ in 1 Pet 2:9. In English there is evidence that the area of meaning of “generation” has narrowed down considerably since the time of the KJV translation. It has the same area of meaning as the corresponding English word, but it is never used to translate genea in the New Testament. In Danish we have the word “generation” as a modern adopted word. But the word generatio is used to translate other Greek words as well, for example, Matt 1:1 genesis (GNB: family record) and Luke 22:18 genēma (fruit). The English word “generation” has undergone a semantic shift so that the meaning today is very much narrowed down as compared to the Greek genea, the Latin generatio and “generation” in the English language as spoken when the King James translation was first made.Įven the Vulgate translation used four different Latin words to translate genea, one of which is generatio. Rather, genea means ‘ a class of people bound together through a common origin or with a common bond.’ In certain contexts genea does have the very restricted sense of the English “generation,” but in most contexts it does not have this narrow sense. This may work in a few places, especially when the word occurs in the plural form, but in the phrase “this genea” it is misleading to use “generation.” It does not seem to agree with the meaning of the Greek phrase or the Hebrew behind it, and it does not make good sense in most places where the word occurs in the New Testament. Who is this generation? Briefly stated, the tradition more or less equates the word genea with English ‘generation’. The short answer to this excellent question is: NO, it is not a good translation.Īs a linguist who has worked in Bible translation for 40 years, I have had to study this phrase in detail many times.
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