Matthew 19 verse 12

[OldGreyEagle]

Matthew Chapter 19

 

12

There are eunuchs born so from their mother's womb, there are eunuchs made so by human agency and there are eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom of Heaven. Let anyone accept this who can.'

 

So, a eunoch made "by human agency" means someone was castrated. Someone who has "made themselves so", are those who have adopted a celibate lifestyle. But those who "Are born so from their mother's womb" just who are those? Remembering that the word eunoch used to mean a male who had no interest in women or procreating.

 

This may have been covered before, but I missed it

[BDPT00]

Well ... here comes 20 pages.

BDPT00

[NJCubScouter]

I'll be interested to see what the 20 pages are about. I should probably remain relatively quiet about it, since my religion's Bible does not include the Book of Matthew.

[Papadaddy]

From Wikipedia:

 

"There is some confusion regarding eunuchs in Old Testament passages, since the Hebrew word for eunuch, saris (סריס), could also refer to other servants and officials who had not been castrated but served in similar capacities.[51][52] The Egyptian royal servant Potiphar is described as a saris in Genesis 39:1, although he was married and hence unlikely to have been a eunuch. The prophet Nehemiah may have been a eunuch.

The reference to "eunuchs" in Matthew 19:12 has yielded various interpretations."

 

So, unless we know what the original author(s) meant by the term, I guess we'll never know.

 

 

[OldGreyEagle]

But Pappadaddy, how do we know what any of the biblical authors meant? We can be sure of other passages but not this one? What other ones are suspect to what they mean and what others are known for sure?

 

Surely this can not be the only one which is a head scratcher(This message has been edited by oldgreyeagle)

[NJCubScouter]

OGE says:

 

Surely this can not be the only one which is a head scratcher

 

This is still me being relatively quiet, but I had to respond to that. When I read the initial post, since I am unfamiliar with the passage in question, I Googled it to see if I could find any interpretations. Before I even got to that, I found a site that had the same passage from 18 different versions of the Bible. http://bible.cc/matthew/19-12.htm I found 18 different translations, or whatever you would call them, of the same short passage, and some of them are very different. So before we even get to other "head scratchers", or any interpretations of this particular head scratcher, the question is, what does this passage even say?

 

I was focusing mostly on the last sentence, an interesting little statement that seems to endorse some sort of individual (or could we say "local"?) option. Some of the 18 different versions of this sentence are very, very different. And that does not even get into what they mean, it's just about what they say. If there is no agreement on the words in the passage, how can anyone possibly know what it means? And I assume there are many more than 18 versions of the Book of Matthew, those are just the ones on this web site. And I also assume that if I looked up other verses in the Bible, I would find the same thing. It's probably even worse for the Old Testament (known by some as the Jewish Bible), since there has been more time for people to translate it differently.

[CalicoPenn]

It most likely means someone who was born with a congenital birth defect that would not allow them to procreate.

[eisely]

I thought the term applied to bureaucrats employed by the European Union in Brussels.