Wesley Huff is a Toronto-based apologist and popular YouTube presence with considerable experience in public debates on behalf of the Christian faith. Ammon Hillman is an American classicist who was raised Baptist, but apostatized from the faith in his early twenties and has been passing himself off as a public intellectual and serious Greek scholar ever since.
Bernie sent me one of Huff’s YouTube shorts last week in which he comments on Hillman’s bizarre assertion that the word “Christ” actually means “to be stung by a gadfly”.
Really? Really? Okay, let’s play …
A Gadfly You Say?
Speaking of irony, a gadfly is someone who is always annoying or criticizing other people, a provocateur, a troublemaker and an insect in the ointment. You will probably not be surprised to find that Ammon Hillman’s Wikipedia page reads like he’s shooting to become the poster boy for gad-flight. Fired from Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota for a production of Medea that unsettled the school’s faculty with its phallic props, and alleged to have given “unwanted attention” to underage students, Hillman is classicism’s equivalent of a shock jock; the intellectual’s Howard Stern.
That’s not me being mean, by the way. Wikipedia is about as far left an enterprise as you can find, and even they refer to Hillman’s views on Christianity and the Bible as “fringe”. I won’t list all the outrageous claims he’s made on the basis of his studies of ancient Greek medical texts, especially about the Lord Jesus; they are sufficiently repulsive and incredible to be unworthy of repetition.
Hey, I’m all for engaging with serious critics of scripture when they raise a valid point, but this is not that. In his video, Hillman makes the following claim:
“Christ. It’s a Greek word for applying a drug to your eyes so that they may be open. It’s from the verb chriō, ‘to be stung by a gadfly’.”
Classic gadfly provocation, if you ask me.
Stupid and Amateurish
Huff replies, also not in a mean-spirited way, that such an interpretation is “linguistically stupid and amateurish”. He calls this an example of the “etymological and linguistic carry-over fallacies”, and swiftly and logically rebuts Hillman’s nonsense.
That’s all it is: nonsense. Hillman is looking to get a reaction, and he gets one by packing as many far-out and offensive claims into an interview as possible. This is just one among many, and it puts Wes Huff in the unpleasant position of (politely and dialectically) answering a fool according to his folly. Sometimes you wonder if it’s even worth it.
I suppose there is marginal value in rebutting even the most
absurd claims of
A Broad and Useful Principle
But let me suggest there is a broad and useful principle we can draw from this exchange about ancient languages to answer people like Ammon Hillman and any of his ilk with greater credibility (which would be almost all of them). Here it is: Nobody knew these languages better than those who spoke and wrote in them at the time. Nobody, nohow, no chance. No modern expert, from a distance of thousands of years, can compare to the level of understanding of lettered men and women from the first century. We can only understand their language by looking carefully at the way they used it themselves and the context in which they did so, which was always completely serious.
If the first century usage of the Greek term “Christ” had any of the negative connotations that Hillman alleges flow from its etymology (as he understands it), the writers of the New Testament would never have used it. Being mostly Hebrews, they could easily have transliterated “Messiah” into Greek instead, as happened with the word “amen”. Instead, the designation “Christ” appears 559 times, 43 times from the pen of Luke.
Stop and think about that for a second. Luke was a physician. He also had a Gentile name, and tradition makes him Greek. As one of the more literate men of his day and an expert in the field of medicine, he would surely have known all about the appropriate and inappropriate usage of the verb chriō (which our English Bibles translate as “anoint”, a term with both medical and theological applications). My uneducated guess is that Luke understood then-current medical terms a whole lot better than Ammon Hillman pretends to.
Doctor, Doctor, Give Me the News
Luke puts the term “Christ” in the mouth of angels and demons, he has Peter confess it and the Lord Jesus use it of himself. He has the religious leaders of the day, the chief priests and scribes, make it the crux of their case against the Lord: “If you are the Christ, tell us.” He has Peter use it at Pentecost, when thousands put their faith in Jesus. He makes it the focus of later apostolic preaching, and has men risk their lives to proclaim it.
To suggest that 2,000 years after all this, some class
clown classicist has found a secret meaning to “Christ” that Luke, the
apostles and every educated student of scripture in the Greek languages from
the church fathers on for a period of two millennia have all managed to miss in their combined
ignorance is an assertion of staggering hubris, as anyone who has genuinely studied language is most certainly aware. Hillman is winding us up ... and he knows it.
But it’ll get you interviewed and on YouTube. That’s about all it’s worth, and our young men need to know that debating a guy like Ammon Hillman seriously is not worth five minutes of their time. Or an hour of mine.
If Hillman’s not serious, why should we be?
No comments :
Post a Comment