If I show the YouTube video I’m about to critique, I will leave myself open to the classic charge, “Pick on someone your own size”—even though the YouTuber in question has double the number of subscribers I do. If I don’t show the video, I will leave doubt in your minds as to whether I am representing her fairly, and I’ll miss out on a chance to create the delicious sense of CONFLICT and HA-HA-I’M-RIGHT-AND-OTHER-PEOPLE-ARE-STUPID to which the internet is so addicted.
Alas, there is no way to win. So I’m going to default to doing what I was taught by one of the key mentors in my life: he said that if you wish to take a properly academic approach to a topic, you don’t directly critique people who are not involved in the academic discussion. You correct only the best and most influential representatives of a given viewpoint.
But in this case, I honestly don’t know who those people are. And yet what this woman says is so common that I believe it needs to be answered. So I’m not going to name the name of the YouTuber I stumbled across. I’ll simply do my best to relay fairly what she said. I think the error of this YouTuber, whom I’ll call “L. Simpson”—no, that’s too obvious… “Lisa S.”—will be instructive for you. It will teach you the most important reflex of my exegetical life. I mean it. A preacher hits me just below my kneecap with that special little triangular red rubber hammer by using a Greek word in a sermon, and my knee instinctively flexes, causing my foot to fly up and press the buttons in my Logos app to do the same thing every time.
You want to learn what one of the top 100 million redheaded Bible YouTubers in the world does when I hear people make appeals to Greek?
Then listen to my critique in this video.
The case
The case made by Lisa S. goes something like this:
- The Greek word mello means “about to”—something is about to happen, something is imminent. It is usually translated that way.
- The Greek word mello is regularly left untranslated in English Bible versions, including the KJV [so we’re not dealing with KJV-Onlyism here], in places discussing eschatology.
- Therefore, these versions are trying to undermine or soften the Bible’s teaching that Christ’s return was viewed as imminent to the apostles.
When I first watched this video, sent to me by a faithful viewer, a former federal judge, as it happens—a viewer who helped me by giving me editorial comments on work I’d done—I saw the first two points clearly but wasn’t quite sure where she was going with the last. We’ll get there at the end of the video: I did figure it out.
Lisa S. showed passages in the New Testament where mello is translated as “about to,” passages where it communicates imminence. Here are some she turned to:
Now a centurion had a servant who was sick and about to die.
“About to” translates mello: death was imminent.
Here’s another:
Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked to receive alms.
“About to” translates mello: the apostles’ entrance into the temple was imminent.
Sufficient for the day are the examples thereof. Mello can certainly mean “about to”; it can certainly communicate imminence.
But then Lisa S. pointed to eight eschatological passages where English Bible translations do not commonly translate mello with “about to,” where they do not commonly communicate any idea of imminence.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Matthew 3:7)
“The wrath to come,” in Greek, includes mello—but the ESV here contains no indication that this eschatological wrath is imminent.
He has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed. (Acts 17:31)
“He will judge the world,” in Greek, includes mello—but the ESV here translates this as a simple future. It contains no idea of imminence.
Then Paul said to [the high priest], “God is going to strike you, you whitewashed wall! Are you sitting to judge me according to the law, and yet contrary to the law you order me to be struck?” (Acts 23:3)
“God is going to strike you,” in Greek, includes mello—but the ESV here translates this as a simple future. No idea of imminence is included in the English.
[Paul] reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment. (Acts 24:25)
You get the drill: “coming judgment” translates a phrase including mello. But the ESV here gives no indication that this judgment is coming imminently, coming soon from Paul’s perspective.
I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead. (2 Timothy 4:1)
Same thing: “who is to judge” has mello but no imminence. And I’ll stop here. Lisa S. gave a total of eight examples. She goes as far as calling almost all English Bible translators “liars,” and she points to extremely literal Bibles such as Young’s Literal Translation as the kind of source one can trust—although even some of these fail her strict mello test.
Is she right? Are Bible translators liars? Or perhaps, to be more charitable, are they blinded by tradition or some other factor?
The problem
Now, I wouldn’t even bring this up if this kind of argumentation were not so common. It doesn’t always end up in charges of base dishonesty against Bible translators. I’d actually say that it usually doesn’t. But it almost always lifts the translation-critiquer up above those translators as a more trustworthy Bible interpreter—and it almost never lets those translators speak up for themselves.
The solution
Well, that’s what I’m here for. And here comes my promised knee-jerk response. It comes in three steps—with step two being the most important one. I don’t have cat-like reflexes, except at special moments in ultimate frisbee—like when an inexperienced player throws a disc behind me and I have to reach backward while running to snag it out of the air. I have nerd-like reflexes.
1. Check the translations
If all I have is a single moment, I’ll use only step 1. I’ll just check the translations. Take Matthew 3:7, for example, where this YouTuber said that “the wrath to come” should be translated “the wrath that is just about to come.”
Most translations, including historic translations like Tyndale and the Vulgate, are simply not with her at Matthew 3:7. They don’t speak of “the wrath that is about to come” but “the wrath that is to come.” Dozens of translations, just in English, say “the wrath to come.” Are they all part of a conspiracy? There’s simply no way that translators deceitfully failed to translate _mello_ in these places she’s listed, the way she has charged. These translators may have—I think they arguably did—employ their views on eschatology to influence their understanding of the contexts she listed. But she is doing the same thing, a point I’ll get to at the end of the video.
2. Observe the Greek
The most important reflex I have, one I’d love to see others adopt, when someone makes a YouTube video insisting that the a certain Greek word means X and that this has a big impact on theology, is what I’d make step two: I go look at uses of this Greek word for myself. With so many nice computer tools, this has never been easier. I want to go see whether contexts consistently indicate that the word means what the Bible interpreter says it means. I usually use the Logos Bible Word Study to do this, but the Literal Word Bible app is also excellent for this. Marble.Bible is another place I like to send people.
You can look at other passages using mello so easily. Even if you don’t know Greek, I think this kind of thing can be generally accessible to you. Stay humble, my friends: if you don’t know a language, you’re limited in what you can say about it. But I think the particular strategy I’m about to demonstrate is usable in principle by non-specialists. It may take some practice—and some reading up on semantics, pragmatics, and lexicography would not hurt. Listen to linguist John McWhorter. Or lexicographer (dictionary maker) Anne Curzan in some videos on YouTube. If you want to be protected from bad uses of Greek and propelled to good ones, it’s the best way.
So let’s look. I will indeed use the Logos Bible Word Study.
The ESV does most often translate mello using “about” or “about to.” You can see that on the ring graph here, which shows all the different ways mello is translated in the ESV.
We already know the word can be translated this way; we’ve already looked at examples. Let’s look at other parts of the ring graph now instead.
If I click on “come, coming” in the ring graph, I run into some of the very passages Lisa S. complained about. What right do the ESV translators have to “remove” imminence from these passages that speak of “the wrath to come” or “the age to come” or “the coming judgment”?
I have to admit that nothing in these contexts tells me clearly that Jesus did not intend to communicate imminence, that the wrath or age or judgment was to be put off into the indefinite future.
But wait. What about this passage?
Death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. (Rom 5:14 ESV)
Adam was a type of the one who was to come. “The one who was to come” translates mello, sure enough. And yet we know that the one who was to come—the second Adam, Jesus—did not come imminently after Adam’s transgression. There was a multi-millennium gap. So mello apparently does not always communicate imminence, or we’d have an impossibility here, a one-wheeled bicycle, a married bachelor, a beautiful Pontiac Aztec.
Same goes for this passage:
There will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust. (Acts 24:15)
“Will be” translates mello here. Did Paul believe that the resurrection of the just and the unjust was imminent. Should the ESV have said, “There is about to be a resurrection of the just and the unjust”? No.
Or take Hebrews 13:14:
Here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city that is to come. (Heb 13:14)
Has that city come? Did the author of Hebrews think it was imminent? I don’t want to allow a wedge to be driven between those two questions. That city has not come; we’re not in it yet. So the author of Hebrews must not have thought it was imminent. Given that mello need not always communicate imminence, it does not communicate imminence here.
3. The lexicons
I just tried to show you what I do almost literally every single time anyone makes a strong argument for the Greek word. I go look at that Greek word and see how native speakers used it. Depending on my needs for a given study, I often also then go to step three: I check the experts to see what they’ve seen in the usage of that Greek word. They’ve always done more homework than I have. Specifically, they look in ways I am not skilled in at Greek beyond the New Testament. I’m pretty good with the Septuagint, but not with Thucydides and Philo.
And this matters, because words mean what native speakers use them to mean. And the New Testament is not its own language; it used the language spoken by countless people at that time.
The approach to mello that I saw in that YouTuber assumes a very disputable premise, and I see this all the time: it assumes that a given Hebrew or Greek word always carries the same meaning. This is what James Barr could call “Illegitimate Partiality Transfer.” It’s taking one sense that a word does have and applying it everywhere.
We didn’t look at countless passages together, but we saw several, at least, where mello did not communicate imminence.
If we were to look at all the passages in the Greek New Testament where mello appears—and if we were then to go on and look at numerous uses of this word in the Greek of the time, what would we find?
Well, again, that’s the work the lexicographers do. And the standard is BDAG. BDAG offers various senses for the word that stop short of “imminent.” They summarize what we’ve already seen:
In a weakened sense it serves simply as a periphrasis for the future.
A periphrasis, in this case, is like our words “going to”—they can mean “proceeding toward something,” as in, “He just hopped in the car; I think he’s going to Walmart to buy a copy of BDAG.” Or “going to” can be used periphrastically to indicate future, as in, “I’m going to be at Walmart tomorrow afternoon looking for the BDAG in their Greek lexicon bargain bin.” Mello was sometimes what Greek speakers used to communicate “going to.”
BDAG puts Matthew 3:7—the passage in which Jesus speaks of “the wrath to come”— underneath sense 3, which it describes this way:
The participle [that’s the form used in Matthew 3:7] is used [as an] absolute in the meaning (in the) future, to come.
It seems that _mello_ often leaves precise timing unclear. And all my resources are saying so. The NIDNTTE—revised by Silva, in whom I have a lot of trust—sees different nuances in various contexts:
The use of the vb. to indicate intention or purpose is clear in a good number of passages.
And:
In some contexts, esp. those dealing with events that happen according to God’s decree, μέλλω implies certainty, necessity.
One of the places where mello seems to indicate “intent” is when the angel tells Joseph, “Herod is intending to search for the child.” Herod’s search was imminent, it’s true, but that’s not the nuance contributed by mello in this case.
Sensitive lexicographers who are trying to pick up on tiny variations in meaning are saying that _mello_ doesn’t always convey imminence. Context tells you whether or not it is. Judgment calls are called for; these YouTubers could argue that various translators have made poor choices with regard to _mello_, but if they’re going to say that mello always conveys imminence, they’re going to have to show more careful work in the Greek than looking up Strong’s on BibleHub. Please do not hear me say that dismissively, just straightforwardly: Strong’s is a rough-and-ready tool that can be helpful. But it isn’t a serious tool used by the people who’ve given their lives to ferreting out what Greek words mean.
Conclusion
I’m decidedly unconvinced by this woman. It’s not just that she’s lined up against countless scholars (for countless scholars can surely be wrong, and it’s rude and arrogant and anti-plowboy to just “go with the scholars”); it’s that she seems to have lined up against them without listening to them or even being aware that they might have spoken to the question she raises. If she wants to be persuasive to the Bible translators whom she is calling liars, she needs to show that she has listened—and she needs to provide some kind of counter to their viewpoint that will weigh with them. This she did not do or even attempt.
As I got into Lisa S’s exegetical arguments, and as I saw her claim that serious English Bible translators are liars who were dropping words out of Scripture when those words didn’t fit their preconceived theological notions, it began to dawn on me: she’s got some preconceived theological notions of her own. Hey: we all do. I mean that sincerely. The question is whether our exegetical skills—and our hearts—allow us to correct those notions. My friends, this is why I bothered to pick up the skills you see me demonstrate in this video. I want to be able to let the Bible correct me.
What preconceived theological notion was Lisa S. bringing to the uses of mello in the New Testament? A tiny bit more digging showed me that Lisa is a preterist, someone who believes that certain of the prophecies of the New Testament have already happened. I’m not an expert on this group, and I won’t say more. I don’t feel ready to get into the theology of the preterists. What I’m good at is evaluating lexical arguments, arguments about Greek words. On this one, mello, Lisa S. was unpersuasive. And I think that
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