The interrogative in Greek sometimes comes upon you unexpectedly. You may think you are reading a statement which seems counterfactual until you get to the end of the sentence and find the Greek question mark. It looks like a semicolon. Only then you get the sense of it. As an example you might read “Elephant do fly” until you come to that semicolon and realize that it was “Do elephants fly?” For a short sentence like that there is little chance of confusion but Greek sentences tend to run on a bit.
At other times Greek leaves no doubt that a question is being asked and even gives you the kind of answer the one who asks it expects to hear. Such is the case when Jesus told the attendees of the Last Supper, “Amen I say that one from you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” The disciples began to be grieved or perhaps aggrieved. A lot of translations soften this verb to “saddened” or “sorrowful” but I believe the force of it is more like “vexed,” “annoyed,” or distressed. In the Septuagint the same verb is used to describe how Eve will suffer in childbirth.
If you’ve ever seen a Middle Eastern person grieve or become aggrieved you know it’s not done quietly. So there was likely a great uproar in the room during which one by one each of the disciples asked Jesus, “Μήτι ἐγω;” [Matey Eggo is essentially how this is pronounced]. The first word is “an interrogative particle in questions expecting a negative answer” and the last is “I.” So, “Not me, right? It’s one of the other people here.” And after the hubbub dies down and they’ve all declared their innocence, just to be clear Jesus goes on to say, “One of the twelve, one who is dipping with me in the bowl.” (As an aside “dipping” is the same root word as “baptizing.”) Some people interpret this to mean there were other people beside the twelve at the table that night and Jesus was narrowing down the suspect list. Whether that is so or not he was telling one of the “Not me, right?” guys,”You know it is you, right?”
The inevitability of the betrayal is brought out in the next few sentences which use a common Greek construction called μέν…δέ. It often gets left out in translation because the sense of it is generally evident in context. It connects sentences with the idea that the first one is “on one hand” and the second one “but on the other hand.” Thus Mark 14:21 is more literally: “On the one hand the Son of Man departs just as it has been written concerning him, but on the other hand woe to the man through whom the Son of Man is betrayed. Better to him if that man had not been born.”
How often do we say, “Not me, right?” knowing that it is inevitable that we are going to fail, to sin, to miss the mark? How often are we aggrieved when someone points out our failings? Everyone of the twelve who said, “Not me, right?” betrayed the Son of Man to some extent during the darkness of the night to come and in the days afterward. They went into hiding because they were embarrassed or afraid and had no faith in the countless times he had told them he would rise after three days, a prediction that was so well known that his enemies took measures to prevent it being faked. Are we not sometimes embarrassed by the Gospel? Do we not sometimes hide our faith? Is it faith if we hide it?
We have been given a powerful prediction about what will happen when Jesus returns and yet we often behave as if it’s not going to happen instead of doing what he told us must be done before it would happen. “And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
Who is supposed to do this proclaiming? Not me, right? But, you know it is you, right?
