Russian Journal of Linguistics 2018 Vol. 22 No.

1 38—53
Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА http://journals.rudn.ru/linguistics

DOI: 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-38-53

EMOTIONS OF JESUS
Anna Wierzbicka
Australian National University
Canberra, 0200, Australia

Abstract
In a book entitled The Sermon on the Mount: The modern Quest for its meaning, theologian Clarence
Bauman (1985) discusses, inter alia, Jesus’ teaching on “anger”. The book opens with a chapter on Tolstoy:
“Leo Tolstoy: The moral challenges of literal interpretation”: “Christ’s first commandment is “Do not be
angry” (Matthew 5: 22—25). Tolstoy noted that the text had been tampered with by redactors. By the fifth
century the word εικη, meaning “needlessly” or “without cause,” had been inserted into the initial uncondi-
tional statement: “Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause...”. But what did Jesus really teach
about “anger”? The term used in Matthew’s Gospel (5:22) is of course not the English word anger but
the Greek word orgizomai — and the two don’t mean the same. The term used by Tolstoy — the Russian
word gnevat’sja — is different in meaning from both anger and orgizomai. But the word used by Jesus was
neither English, nor Greek, nor Russian, but Aramaic. So what did that Aramaic word mean — and what
did Jesus intend to say with it? Tolstoy’s impulse to look for the “literal interpretation” is understandable, but
as this chapter shows, the idea that we can pinpoint what Jesus meant with one word, from a particular lan-
guage (be it Russian, English, Greek or Aramaic) is simplistic. The paper argues that in order to fully under-
stand Jesus’ teaching about “anger” in a precise and unbiased way, we need to go beyond single words
of this or that language, and to try to articulate it through simple sentences couched in universal (i.e.
universally-contestable) words. Furthermore, the paper shows that what applies to Jesus’ teaching about
emotions applies also to Jesus’ “emotional practice”. What did he feel when he saw someone doing some-
thing very bad, or someone to whom something very bad was happening? As the paper demonstrates, the
“Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (NSM) developed by the author and colleagues allows us to replace
crude formulations such as “Did Jesus feel angry?” or “What did Jesus teach about anger?” with questions
which are far more fine-grained, and which enable us to reach far more fine-grained, and more meaningful
answers.
Keywords: emotions, anger, Sermon on the Mount, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, translatability
of emotion concepts

1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

The subject of Jesus’ emotions in the Gospels is of great interest to many people
who want to know what Jesus was like, and there are many books and articles on the
subject (cf. e.g. Law 1915, Elliott 2006, Voorwinde 2011). One question which often
comes under discussion is this: was Jesus angry at times? And if so, how can his “anger”
be reconciled with his teaching against “anger”1? These questions concerning Jesus’
“anger” will be discussed in detail in section 2, and elaborated in relation to “curses”
and “woes” in section 3. First, however, I will make some preliminary remarks on the
semantics of emotions in general and Jesus’ emotions in particular.
1
For an earlier discussion of this teaching, see my 2001 book What Did Jesus Mean?, pp. 61—71.

38
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

In addressing the question of Jesus’ emotions in this paper, I am returning to

a broader issue of the framework within which such questions can be meaningfully
and fruitfully explored. In an earlier paper devoted to Jesus’ emotions (Wierzbicka 2009)
I discussed this broader issue in relation to Jesus’ emotions in Gethsemane, as presented,
above all, in Mark’s Gospel (Mk 14: 33—34). Quoting the key lines in English (Revised
Standard Version, RSV) and in Russian (in Averintsev’s translation), I pointed out that
the interpretation of Jesus’ emotions in these two versions, English and Russian, was
quite different.
English, RSV
33. And he took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be greatly distressed
and troubled. 34. And he said to them, “My soul is very sorrowful, even to death, remain
here, and watch”. (Mark 14: 33—34)
Russian (Averintsev 2007)
33. ... I načal On čuvstvovat’ užas i tomlenie, 34. i govorit im: “V smertnoj muke duša
Moja; pobud’te zdes’ i bodrstvujte”.
As I pointed out in that earlier paper, the English words “distressed” and “troubled”
are very different in meaning from the Russian words “užas” (usually glossed in English
as “horror” or “terror”) and “tomlenie” (roughly, “torment”) — and all of those are dif-
ferent from the Greek words ekthambeisthai and ademonein in the original Greek of
Mark’s Gospel. Further, I argued that to reach a better understanding of what Jesus felt,
we need to go beyond language-specific emotion terms, and try to understand the
thoughts which gave rise to his feelings. In essence, I arrived at the following formula
(I say “in essence” because a decade later, I think this formula can be somewhat im-
proved, and I am adjusting it accordingly):
Jesus began to “ekthambesthai” and “ademonein” (Mk 14:33)
Jesus thought like this at that time:
“I know: something very bad will happen to me in a short time
I can’t not think like this now: “I don’t want it to happen”
I didn’t know before that it would be like this”
when he thought like this, he felt something very bad, as someone can feel when they
think like this for some time
The main idea behind this representation is that feelings can best be described with
reference to thoughts, and also, that thoughts can best be identified in simple and uni-
versal human concepts, in accordance with the semantic methodology known as NSM
(from Natural Semantic Metalanguage) (Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2011 [1998]; God-
dard and Wierzbicka eds. 2002; Peeters (ed.) 2006; Goddard (ed.)).
As many studies in the NSM framework over many years have demonstrated, it is
possible to describe human emotions without relying on the language-specific emotion
terms of any particular language (be it English, Russian, Greek, or any other) if we base
our description of different kinds of emotions on the analysis of prototypical thoughts
which give rise to them, and if these thoughts are formulated in universal human con-
cepts, as it is done in the NSM framework. Since this methodology is well known, here
I will only offer the briefest possible explanation.

39
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a mini-language which corresponds

to the intersection — the common core — of all languages. This intersection of all lan-
guages has been identified empirically, through extensive cross-linguistic studies under-
taken by many scholars over many years (see e.g., Goddard and Wierzbicka eds. 1994,
2002). Describing languages and cultures in NSM, and through NSM, means describing
them in terms of simple and universal human concepts, which can be found as words
(or word-like elements) in all languages (see Table 1). This applies to emotions as much
as to any other domain: by using NSM, we can explore human emotions from a universal
point of view, independent of any particular languages and cultures. (For refer-
ences, see the NSM homepage: <www.griffith.edu.au/humanities-languages/school-
humanitieslanguages-social-science/research/natural-semantic-metalanguage-homepage>
[short URL bit.ly/1XUoRRV]).
Table 1
Semantic primes (English exponents) (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014)

I, YOU, SOMEONE, SOMETHING~THING, PEOPLE, BODY substantives

KINDS, PARTS relational substantives
THIS, THE SAME, OTHER~ELSE determiners
ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MUCH~MANY, LITTLE~FEW quantifiers
GOOD, BAD evaluators
BIG, SMALL descriptors
KNOW, THINK, WANT, DON’T WANT, FEEL, SEE, HEAR mental predicates
SAY, WORDS, TRUE speech
DO, HAPPEN, MOVE actions, events, movement
BE (SOMEWHERE), THERE IS, BE (SOMEONE/SOMETHING) location, existence, specification
(IS) MINE possession
LIVE, DIE life and death
WHEN~TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, time
FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT
WHERE~PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW, FAR, NEAR, SIDE, INSIDE, place
TOUCH
NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF logical concepts
VERY, MORE augmentor, intensifier
LIKE similarity
Notes:  Exponents of primes can be polysemous, i.e. they can have other, additional meanings.  Exponents of
primes may be words, bound morphemes, or phrasemes.  They can be formally, i.e., morphologically, complex.  They
can have combinatorial variants or allolexes (indicated with ~).  Each prime has wellspecified syntactic (combinatorial)
properties.

Using this set of universal human concepts (semantic primes) as their bedrock,
NSM researchers have also developed, in recent years, a new descriptive tool known
as “Minimal Language” (see e.g. Goddard ed. 2017; Wierzbicka 2017 and Forthcoming).
Usually, the term “Minimal Language” is used for a somewhat enlarged version of the
NSM, with some additional vocabulary allowed for a particular purpose. For example,
in my book What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People in Minimal English
(Forthcoming), where the “Christian story” is presented in a narrative form, I permit
myself to use words like “shepherd”, “bread” and “wine”, which are not universal but
which are integral to the theme.
No such additional vocabulary is needed for the domain of emotions, which is dis-
cussed in the present paper, so the analyses presented here do not go beyond “classical

40
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

NSM”. On the other hand, the label “Minimal Language” can also be used as an umbrella
term, covering both the enlarged versions of NSM (such as Minimal English and Mini-
mal Polish) and the NSM itself (as a limiting case). It is in this second sense that I will
be using the term “Minimal Language” in the present paper.

2. THE “ANGER” OF JESUS

2.1. Jesus’ teaching on “anger”
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says (Mt. 5:27, RSV): “I say to you that every-
one who is angry [orgizomenos] with his brother shall be liable to judgment (...) and
whoever says ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.” (In the Revised Standard
Version, this section has the heading “Teaching about anger”.)
Yet when Jesus confronts the Pharisees (in Mt. 23: 13—33), he doesn’t hesitate
to say to them: “You blind fools” (v. 17, RSV) and even “You serpents, you brood of
vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?” (v. 33). Some commentators,
used to different emotional styles, seem discomfited by such an outburst. Thus, speaking
of the “anger” and “indignation” that Jesus showed (according to Mark 9: 38) when his
disciples tried to prevent parents from bringing little children to him (so that he could
bless them), Voorwinde (2011: 106) asks: “Could a reference to Jesus’ indignation im-
pugn his sinlessness?” This would explain, he suggests, the “omission” of such references
in Luke and Matthew’s accounts of the same incident.
Rethinking through Minimal Language the passages where Jesus teaches about “an-
ger”, and also those where he appears to show “anger” himself, we can resolve the co-
nundrum, because Minimal Language allows a more fine-grained analysis of emotions
than a coarse-grained one relying on categories like “anger” and “indignation”.
The first point to note is that words like anger do not match in meaning across
languages, and that there is no point in thinking about Jesus solely through the prism
of the English word anger, rather than the German word Wut, the Greek word orge,
the Russian word serdit’sja, or the Pitjantjatjara word pika, each of which embodies
a different concept. (Cf. e.g. Durst 2001; Goddard 1991; Wierzbicka 1992, 1999, 2014.)
Each such concept represents a culture-specific configuration of several components
amalgamated into one whole.
Different language-specific “anger-like” words can include in their meaning dif-
ferent, though overlapping, combinations of such components (amalgamated into one
whole). I am not going to try here to explicate the English word anger, or any of its
closest counterparts in other languages (see, e.g., Wierzbicka 1998). I will note, how-
ever, that the meaning of such words often includes components like the following ones
(for the sake of simplicity, to refer to the “angry” person I will use the word “he”).
he felt something (very) bad
he felt something (very) bad towards someone
he thought like this about someone: “this person is doing something (very) bad”
he wanted to do something bad to this someone
he wanted bad things to happen to this someone

41
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

If we use Minimal Language, we don’t have to rely, in our interpretation of Jesus’

emotions, on complex language-specific emotion terms; rather, we can talk about them
in a language-independent way, using individual semantic components expressible
in universal words. For example, we can ask about a particular episode in the Gospels
in which Jesus appeared to be “angry”:
Did Jesus feel something bad?
Did he feel something bad towards someone?
Did he want to do something bad to someone?
Did he want something bad to happen to this someone?
Was he saying to someone: “you are doing something bad”?
Was he saying to someone: “you are doing something very bad”?
Was he saying to someone: “I don’t want you to do this”?
To illustrate how the use of such components can help us to achieve a more fine-
grained interpretation of Jesus’ emotions, I will discuss four scenes where Jesus appeared
to be “angry”.

2.2. Did Jesus feel something bad towards the disciples?

And they were bringing children to him, that he might touch them, and the disciples
rebuked them. But when Jesus saw it he was indignant [heganaktesen], and said to them:
“Let the children come to me, do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of
God”. (Mk. 10: 13—14, RSV)
The verb aganakteo is glossed by the Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testa-
ment as ‘be indignant or angry’, but this is not a very accurate statement of this verb’s
meaning (if only because indignant doesn’t mean the same as angry). Using Minimal
Language, we can portray Jesus’ attitude more precisely (as well as more cross-trans-
latably):
[A] I think like this now: You are doing something bad.
I feel something bad because of this.
I don’t want you to do it.
This formula is quite consistent with Jesus’ words, and there is no need to add to
it a further component along the lines of: “he felt something bad towards them at that
moment”.

2.3. Did Jesus feel something bad towards Simon Peter?

In Matthew’s chapter 16, Jesus asks the Apostles: “Who do men say the Son
of Man is?” and when Peter replies: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God”,
Jesus entrusts him the “keys of the kingdom of God”:
Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona! (...) And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock
I will build my church, (...), and I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven. (Mt. 16:
17—19, RSV)

42
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

In the passage that follows, however, in which he foretells his suffering and death,
Jesus apparently gets very “angry” at Peter:
And Peter took him and began to rebuke him, saying: “God forbid, Lord! This shall
never happen to you”. But he turned and said to Peter: “Get behind me, Satan! You
are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men”. (Mt. 16: 22—23)
Here, Jesus’ attitude to Peter can be portrayed as follows:
[B] I think like this now: When you say this, you are doing something very bad to me.
I feel something very bad because of this.
I don’t want you to say things like this.
The difference between “you are doing something bad” (in hindering the children
from coming to Jesus) and “you are doing something bad to me” (in tempting Jesus to
abandon his God-given mission) is significant, and may suggest to readers of the Gos-
pels a stronger feeling. There is no reason, however, to assume that at that moment,
Jesus felt something bad towards Peter, let alone that he wanted to do something bad
to Peter. Jesus’ reaction here is different from that in the previous vignette, but this dif-
ference appears to be sufficiently accounted for by saying “bad” in the first case and
“very bad” (as well as including the phrase “to me”) in the second.
2.4. Did Jesus feel something bad
towards the scribes and the Pharisees?
When confronting the scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem and pointing out their
hypocrisy, Jesus uses strong language which has often been interpreted in various com-
mentaries in terms of “anger”, “indignation”, or “wrath”. Voorwinde (2011: 78) speaks
here of “anger”, and Law (1915:97), of “indignant wrath”).
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven
against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those would enter to go in. (...)
You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel! (...) You serpents, you
brood of vipers, how are you to escape being sentenced to hell?
To fully understand Jesus’ speech, we need not only to grasp his message but also
to know something about Jewish “cultural scripts” (cf. Wierzbicka 2004), to which I will
turn very shortly. For the moment, however, let me try to model Jesus’ message to his
interlocutors:
[C] I think like this now: You are doing something very bad.
I feel something very bad because of this.
I don’t want you to do things like this.
If one said to someone “You hypocrite!” in a modern English-speaking society such
as Australia, this would certainly be understood as conveying the message “I feel
something bad (indeed, very bad) towards you”. But speech culture in first-century Pales-
tine was different. In the context of that culture (in which Jesus could say to one of his
closest friends: “Satan!”), Jesus’ utterance conveys the message “You are doing some-
thing very bad, I feel something very bad because of this, I don’t want you to do things
like this”, and not: “I feel something very bad towards you”.

43
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

2.5. Did Jesus feel something bad towards the sellers

and moneychangers in the Temple?
...Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and
sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers at their business. And making a whip of cords,
he drove them all, with the sheep and the oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the
coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. And he told those who sold the pi-
geons, “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s house a house of trade”.
His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for thy house will consume me”.
Arguably, here, Jesus’ attitude can be portrayed as follows:
[D] I think like this now:
You are doing something very bad,
something very bad is happening in this place because of this.
I feel something very bad because of this.
I want to do something because of this.
In this scene, unlike in the case of the scribes and the Pharisees, it is not the actions
of the sellers and the money-changers as such that make Jesus “feel something very bad”,
but the resulting state of affairs: the degradation of the Temple (“his Father’s house”).
This is highlighted in the Gospel by the quotation from Psalm 69 (“Zeal for thy house
will consume me”).
As I see it, there is no need here to posit bad feelings towards the sellers of oxen
and sheep, or the money-changers, on Jesus’ part. Rather, he feels very strongly about
what is happening to the Temple, and wants to do something because of this. Hence
the overturning of the money-changers’ tables, and the driving of the sellers, together
with their oxen and sheep, out of the temple.
Is there any evidence suggesting that Jesus felt something bad towards those money-
changers and those sellers, and that he wanted to do something bad to them? As I read
John’s account of this event (as well as those of Matthew, Mark and Luke), I do not find
any such evidence. Jesus’ attention was on the degradation of the Temple, not on the
people who were responsible for it, and on his strongly felt need to restore the Tem-
ple’s dignity.

2.6. Comparing the four vignettes with Jesus’ teaching

To compare these four vignettes with Jesus’ teaching about “anger” (mentioned
briefly in section 2.1), we need to understand that teaching, too, in terms of precise and
cross-translatable semantic components. Thus, in the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 5: 24)
we read:
You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill; and whosoever
kills shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his
brother shall be liable to judgment.
As one commentator (Crenshaw 1993: 533, in The Oxford Companion to the Bible)
puts it, “Jesus broadened the prohibition of murder to include anger (Matt. 5. 21—22)”.
This is consistent with the following formulation:
It is very bad if someone wants to do something very bad to someone else.

44
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

But what about the verse in the same section that immediately follows: “...and
whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to hell fire” (Mt. 5: 22)? What was wrong,
from Jesus’ point of view, with saying to someone “You fool!”? Given the context,
which contrasts a person’s outer behaviour with their inner disposition (“the heart”), it
is likely that he was referring here to the speaker’s feelings, rather than his or her words.
The most likely hypothesis seems to be that these words represent a warning against
giving in to bad feelings towards another person. The strongest argument in favour of
this interpretation is Jesus’ overall emphasis on “forgiveness”, that is, essentially, on the
need to let go of any bad feelings that one may have towards someone because this per-
son has done something bad to us.
As any readers of the Gospels will know, Jesus’ listeners were repeatedly urged
to “forgive” — that is, essentially, not to feel something bad towards someone else when
such a feeling might seem to be more justifiable than in any other circumstances. This
implies that they were strongly encouraged to try not to have bad feelings towards other
people under any circumstances. (Or, as my “Story of God and People” puts it, “it is bad
for you if you feel something bad towards someone else”).
In his teaching about the “defilement” (Mk 7:14, Mt 15:10), Jesus says that the “de-
filement” comes from within; from “evil thoughts”, and this includes “murder”. (“For
from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, mur-
der, thefts (...)”, Mark 7:6.) What exactly does it mean, that murder comes from the
heart? The clearest semantic component is the warning against thinking about some-
one: “I want to do something bad to this someone”; but since the Greek word kardia
(‘heart’) implies both thoughts and feelings, it seems likely that Jesus is also warning
here against “feeling something bad towards someone”.
Of course the clearest warning against such feelings comes from the teaching about
“forgiveness”, that is, roughly, about “not wanting to feel something bad towards some-
one for some time”. But since people are told to forgive someone who has sinned against
them “seven times a day” (Lk 17: 3) (and according to Matthew (8: 21), seventy-seven),
evidently Jesus is warning his listeners against even short-term bad feelings towards
their offenders.
Jesus’ teaching about “forgiveness” and “turning the other cheek” can be misun-
derstood (along the lines of the prayer “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” mocked by Ches-
terton (1908: 118). It is good to acknowledge, therefore, that Jesus did express some
forceful messages, such as the following ones:
You are doing something very bad.
I feel something very bad because of this.
I don’t want you to do it.
I want to do something because of this.
It is also good to be able to distinguish such messages, with precision, from messages
like the following ones:
I want to do something (very) bad to you.
I want something (very) bad to happen to you.
I feel something (very) bad towards you.

45
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

In the light of the Gospels as a whole, it seems clear that Jesus was warning people,
above all, against “feeling something very bad towards someone”. Undoubtedly, he was
also enjoining people not to want to do anything bad to anyone, and not to want any-
thing bad to happen to anyone; but since such “wants” often result from bad feelings
towards people, he saw bad feelings towards someone or some people as dangerous and
damaging, too.
As demonstrated, for example, in my book Emotions Across Languages and Cul-
tures and other NSM-based work (see, e.g. Goddard 2014; Goddard and Ye eds. 2016;
Ye 2001), a combination of components based on the universal prime FEEL (such as “to feel
something (very) bad” and “to feel something (very) bad towards someone” with de-
tailed cognitive scenarios based on the universal prime think give us truly fine-grained
description of emotions and emotional attitudes. Minimal English (or any other NSM-
based Minimal Language) helps us to clarify such differences in a precise, transparent,
and language-independent way.

3. “CURSES” AND “WOES”

Jesus’ teaching about “not wanting bad things to happen to anyone”, with a special
focus on one’s enemies and persecutors, is quite explicit:
...bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (Lk 6: 28)
In Minimal Language, this can be formulated as follows:
[E] If someone does something bad to you,
it will be bad if you want something bad to happen to this someone because of this;
it will be good if you want something good to happen to this someone.
Arguably, such sayings in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels suggest more general
formulations:
[F] It is bad if you want something bad to happen to someone else.
It is good if you want good things to happen to other people.
This raises some interesting questions about the meaning of the “woes” (In New
Testament Greek, ouai) in Jesus’ speech, such as those that we have already seen ad-
dressed to the Pharisees: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”
The wild and comical hyperbole of “straining out the gnat and swallowing the
camel” should be a warning to the modern reader not to try to interpret Jesus’ speech
according to modern (and especially Anglo) cultural norms such as moderation, pre-
cision, consistency, “rationality”, or emotional restraint (see Wierzbicka 2006). More
generally, such hyperboles underscore the potential for cross-cultural misunderstandings
between the Gospel writers and the modern readers of the Gospels. The point is that
in trying to understand Jesus’ emotions through emotion terms in our own languages, we
have to beware of interpreting them in accordance with the cultural scrips of other soci-
eties (Wierzbicka 1994, 2006). The scripts of Jesus’ culture were very different. This
applies in particular to “scripts” for expressing emotions — as documented in James
Matisoff’s splendid book Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psychoostensive expres-
sions in Yiddish (2000). Expressing “bitterness” through “curses” is one such Jewish

46
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

cultural script, as illustrated in the following passage from an English translator’s In-
troduction to a volume of Sholem Aleichem, quoted by Matisoff:
There are as many types of curses as there are people cursing, but the hardest to ex-
plain is the mother cursing her child. The child may be crying because he is hungry. The
mother bursts out ‘Eat, eat, eat. All you want to do is eat. May the worms eat you. May
the earth open up and swallow you alive’. This mother loves her child, she is only pour-
ing out the bitterness that’s in her heart in the only way she knows. But in translation she
sounds like a monster. (Butwin 1958: 9).
As discussed in my paper, “Jewish cultural scripts and the interpretation of the
Bible” (2004), such cultural scripts, characteristic of Yiddish, have their roots in biblical
culture. “Jewish woes” are not exactly the same as “Jewish curses”, although the two
are close in meaning. But a “curse” says (literally), so to speak: “I want something very
bad to happen to you”, whereas “woes” (which can be addressed to oneself, as in one
Paul’s letters in the New Testament (1 Cor 9:16) or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament
(6:4), say “it will be good if something very bad happens to this person”. In their original
cultural context, both these speech genres are expected to be interpreted as “I say this
because I feel something very bad, I want someone to know what I feel”.
Thus, when Jesus seemingly threatens his opponents the Pharisees with hellfire
(using at the same time a characteristically Jewish rhetorical question, cf. Rosten 1968),
he is indeed expressing a “bad feeling” (“I feel something very bad”), but not “ill will”
(“I want something bad to happen to you”). To think that he wanted something bad to
happen to those Pharisees would be a case of cross-cultural misunderstanding. The im-
pression that he was feeling something bad “towards them” is sufficiently accounted
for by the combination of components “you are doing something very bad”, “I feel some-
thing very bad because of this”.
When modern readers come across utterances such as “Woe to you scribes and
Pharisees, hypocrites”, they need commentaries of two kinds: semantic, and cultural, and
both such commentaries can be provided with the help of Minimal English. The strictly
semantic question is: what does “woe to you” actually say (in its “dictum”, see Goddard
and Wierzbicka 2014), and the cultural one, how were those who shared Jesus’ speech
culture expected to interpret it? Using Minimal English, we can answer these two ques-
tions as follows:
[G] [I say:] it will be good if something very bad happens to you [or: me; or, someone else]
I say this because I want you to know what I feel at this moment
Such “woes” are related to the Jewish ritualized “curse”, or klole (Hebrew): “petitive
expressions that [on the face of it, A.W.] call down misfortune, disease, or death on their
intended victims” (Matisoff 2000: 72). As Matisoff further points out, “Needless to say,
the malo-petitioners would often be appalled if the dire eventuality actually came to pass”
(Matisoff 2000: 72). What Matisoff is saying here is that it is part of Jewish culture to
say that one wants something bad to happen to someone in order to express what one
feels at a particular moment.
The Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament glosses the Greek word ouai!,
rendered traditionally in English translation as “woe to you”, as “how horrible it will be!”

47
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

But this sounds like a prediction or a lament rather than a “wish” of any kind. Taking
into account Matisoff’s work on ritualized Jewish “curses” and related speech acts, and
using Minimal English, we can try to get closer to the real meaning of such exclamatory
utterances with formula [G], bearing in mind that such “curses” can be directed at the
speaker him- or herself, or at some other person or place, as in Jesus’ “woes” directed
as the “unrepentant cities” in his homeland Galilee:
Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works done in you
had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and
ashes. (Mt 11:21)

4. THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREEK EMOTION TERM “TETĀRAKTAI”

In this paper, I have argued that if we want to understand Jesus’ emotions, we need
to go beyond the emotion terms of any particular language and try to understand, on the
basis of his words and the context, his underlying thoughts. Before closing, I will illus-
trate this general tenet with the challenge of the Greek word tetāraktai, used three times
in John’s Gospel — a term which the NRSV renders with the phrase “troubled”, and
the Russian synodal translation, with the words “voskorbet’ (duxom)” (roughly,
“to grieve”) and “vozmutit’sja” (roughly, “perturbed”). To show this, I will first adduce
three relevant passages from the NRSV, and then, an extended comment from Bene-
dict XVI, in which the Pope tries to explain, in discursive prose, what Jesus felt on those
three occasions.
1. Speaking about his death
Jesus answered and said: The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very
truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just
a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. (...)
Now my soul is troubled. [Duša moja teper’ vozmutilas’.] (John 12:27)
2. Talking to Mary, the sister of Lazarus
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died!” When Jesus saw her
weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved [voskorbel duxom i voz-
mutilsja.] He said, “Where have you laid him?” (John 11:33)
3. At the Last Supper, speaking of Judas’ betrayal
After saying this, Jesus was troubled in spirit [vozmutilsja duxom], and declared,
‘Very truly, I tell you, one of you will betray me.” (John 13:21)
Speaking of Mark’s and Luke’s accounts of Jesus’ emotions in Gethsemane, just
before his arrest, Benedict XVI writes:
We may distinguish three elements in this prayer of Jesus. First there is the primordial
experience of fear, quaking in the face of the power of death, terror before the abyss of
nothingness that makes him tremble to the point that, in Luke’s account, his sweat falls
to the ground like drops of blood (cf. 22:44). In the equivalent passage in Saint John’s Gos-
pel (12:27), this horror is expressed, as in the Synoptics, in terms reminiscent of Psalm 43:5,
but using a word that emphasizes the dark depths of Jesus’ fear: tetáraktai — it is the same
verb, tarássein, that John uses to describe Jesus’ deep emotion at the tomb of Lazarus
(cf. 11:33) as well as his inner turmoil at the prophecy of Judas’ betrayal in the Upper
Room (cf. 13:21).

48
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

In this way John is clearly indicating the primordial fear of created nature in the face
of imminent death, and yet there is more: the particular horror felt by him who is Life it-
self before the abyss of the full power of destruction, evil, and enmity with God that is now
unleashed upon him, that he now takes directly upon himself, or rather into himself, to
the point that he is “made to be sin” (cf. 2 Cor 5:21).
The Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament (1971) glosses the word tar-
assein as “trouble, disturb, upset; terrify, frighten; stir up (of water)”. These glosses sug-
gest a feeling that is both “very bad” and “sudden” (as in “stir up”), and they are helpful;
but they do not try to capture the invariant semantic component of the word. Nor do they
enable us to find a plausible common core of Jesus’ experiences described with this word
in John’s Gospel. Using Minimal English, I would tentatively propose the following
characterization of the common core:
[H] Jesus felt something very bad at that moment.
People can think about it like this:
He thought like this: “very bad things can happen to people,
people can do very bad things.
When he thought like this, he felt something very bad.
This formula doesn’t affirm that we know Jesus’ exact thoughts on those three occa-
sions, but it invites the reader to imagine what one would feel if one thought like this.
Since Benedict XVI links the experience in question with thoughts about death (“Each
time, it is a question of Jesus’ encounter with the power of death”, p. 163), we might
consider adding “people die” after “very bad things can happen to people”. I have re-
frained from doing so, however, because I don’t think this would fit Jesus’ words re-
lating to Judas’ betrayal. In fact, in the case of Lazarus, too, it is not clear whether the
presumed thought “very bad things happen to people” would apply to Lazarus himself
(who died) or to his sister Mary (who had lost her brother). Furthermore, if we refrain
from including the component “people die” in the explication, we leave the possibility
open that Judas’ betrayal is viewed not only as “something very bad that Judas did”,
but also, as “something very bad that happened to Judas”; and this would seem to be con-
sistent with the tenor of Jesus’ words. (I will note in this context that Alexander Men,
in his book The Son of Man, describes Jesus’ feelings in the Lazarus episode with the
untranslatable Russian word “volnenie”, as “glubokoe volnenie”, “deep volnenie”).
The exact phrasing of formula [H] is of course open to discussion. I should add that
this formula is not necessarily an accurate semantic explication of the Greek word te-
táraktai (tarássein) as such. Rather, the aim of this formula is to provide a plausible
characterization of Jesus’ emotions which one of those who were with Jesus at the time
(John) sought to approximate with this Greek word. What seems to me to be really con-
clusively established is the inadequacy of complex and language-specific terms: “horror”,
“fear”, “troubled”, “turmoil” and “užas”. Terms like this are bound, to some extent, to
distort Jesus’ emotions. In different translations of the Gospels, such distortions are no
doubt unavoidable. They can, however, be avoided in the commentaries and explana-
tory notes, if we base our interpretation of Jesus’ emotions on simple and cross-translatable
words such as “think” and “feel”, “good” and “bad”, “do” and “happen”, that is, on what
appear to be fundamental and universal human concepts.

49
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

5. CONCLUDING REMARKS
To conclude, the Gospels tell us a great deal about Jesus’ emotions, but what they
are telling us cannot be fully captured with emotion terms of any particular language
(e.g. English, Russian, or Greek). We can get much closer to an understanding of Jesus’
emotions if we think about them with the help of simple and cross-translatable words
such as “feel”, “think”, “good” and “bad”, and cross-translatable phrases such as “feel
something bad towards someone”, “feel something good towards someone”. Using such
words and phrases we can ask clear questions such as 1 and 2:
1. Did Jesus sometimes feel something very bad?
2. Did Jesus sometimes feel something very bad towards someone?
We can also give clear answers to these questions: Yes to question 1, and No to
question 2. These answers are entirely consistent with Jesus’ teaching preserved in the
“Sermon on the Mount” and elsewhere in the Gospels. Jesus never taught that it was
bad “to feel something very bad”, but he did teach (though not in these words) that it
was bad “to feel something very bad (and even something bad) towards someone”.
What about question 3, then: Did Jesus teach (in some form) that it is bad to say
to someone: “you are doing something very bad, I feel something very bad because of
this”? Here, too, we can provide a clear and unequivocal answer with Minimal Language:
No, he didn’t teach that. On the other hand, he did teach (not in this form) that it is
bad to say to someone: “You are doing something very bad, I feel something very bad
towards you because of this”. To see how important such distinctions are, it is enough
to recall a commentator’s question quoted earlier: “Could a reference to Jesus’ indigna-
tion impugn his sinlessness?”
In a sense, the question is absurd, but it is also instructive. It is absurd because for
Christians (and by no means only for Christians), Jesus shows us what a perfect human
life looks like: people are “sinful” to the extent to which they are not like Jesus. “What
is sin?” (Čto značit grex?), asks Mary Magdalene in Pasternak’s poem which bears her
name; and for Christians, the answer must be: being not like Jesus — not so much
in one’s actions (which depend, to a very large extent, on one’s circumstances) as in one’s
thoughts, wants and feelings (which are more subject to one’s will). But the commen-
tator’s wistful question is also instructive, because it shows how easy it is to be confused
about what Jesus was really like.
I submit that an important part of the answer to the question of what Jesus was like
lies in the distinction between, on the one hand, “feeling something very bad” and, on the
other, “feeling something very bad towards someone” — a distinction which Minimal
Language allows us to make clearly, precisely, and “cross-translatably”.

© Anna Wierzbicka, 2018

REFERENCES
Averintsev, Sergej (2007). Sobranie sočinenij [Collected works]. Kiev: Dux i Litera.
Butwin, Frances (1958). Translator’s introduction to Sholom Aleichem [Rabinowitz], The Old Country.
London: Andre Deutsch.
Chesterton, G.K. (1908). The Everlasting Man. Radford, VA: Wilder Publications.

50
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

Crenshaw, James L. (1993). Murder. In Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, The Oxford Com-
panion to the Bible (532—533). New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Durst, Uwe. 2001. Why Germans don’t feel “anger”. In Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.),
Emotions in Cross-linguistic Perspective, 115—148. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Elliott, Bianca (2006). The Emotions of Jesus. Martinsville, IN: Airleaf.
Goddard, Cliff (1991). Anger in the Western Desert: A case study in the cross-cultural semantics
of emotion. Man 26 (2): 265—279.
Goddard, Cliff (2014). Interjections and emotions (with special reference to “surprise” and “disgust”).
Emotion Review 6 (1): 53—63.
Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (2014). Words and Meanings: Lexical Semantics Across
Domains, Languages, and Cultures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.) (1994). Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and
empirical findings. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff and Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.) (2002). Meaning and universal grammar: Theory and
empirical findings (Vols. 1—2). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff and Zhengdao Ye (Eds.) (2016). “Happiness” and “Pain” across Languages and Cul-
tures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Goddard, Cliff (Ed.) (2017). Minimal English for a Global World: Improved Communication in Fewer
Words. Palgrave.
Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament (1971). London: United Bible Societies.
Law, Robert (1915). The Emotions of Jesus. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.
Matisoff, James (2000). Blessings, Curses, Hopes and Fears: Psychoostensive expressions in Yiddish.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Rosten, Leo (1968). The Joys of Yiddish. New York. McGraw-Hill.
Voorwinde, Stephen (2011). Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels. London: T&T Clark.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1992). Semantics, Culture and Cognition: Universal human concepts in culture-
specific configurations. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1999). Emotions Across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2004). Jewish cultural scripts and the interpretation of the Bible. Journal of Prag-
matics. 36(3), 575—599.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2009). Language and metalanguage: Key issues in emotion research. Emotion
Review. 1 (1) 3—14.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2014). Imprisoned in English: The hazards of English as a default language.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna (2017). W co wierzą chrześcijanie? Opowieść o Bogu i o ludziach [What Christians
Believe: The Story of God and People]. Cracow: Znak.
Wierzbicka, Anna (Forthcoming). What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Ye, Zhengdao (2001). An inquiry into sadness in Chinese. In Jean Harkins and Anna Wierzbicka (eds.),
Emotions in Cross-linguistic Perspective, 359—404. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Article history:
Received: 09 August 2017
Revised: 12 September 2017
Accepted: 20 September 2017

51
 Вежбицкая А. Вестник РУДН. Серия: ЛИНГВИСТИКА. 2018. Т. 22. № 1. С. 38—53

For citation:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). Emotions of Jesus. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22 (1), 38—53.
doi 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-38-53.

Bionote:
ANNA WIERZBICKA is a Professor in the Linguistics Program, School of Languages, Literature
and Linguistics, Australian National University. Her work spans a number of disciplines, including
anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy and religious studies as well as linguistics,
and has been published in many journals across all these disciplines. She has published over twenty
books and edited or co-edited several others. Her latest book is What Christians Believe: The story of
God and people published in Cracow, Poland in 2017 by Znak. Professor Wierzbicka is a Fellow
of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the winner of
the International Dobrushin Prize for 2010 and of the Polish Science Foundation’s 2010 prize for the
humanities and social sciences. Contact information: [email protected]

DOI: 10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-38-53

ЭМОЦИИ ИИСУСА ХРИСТА

Анна Вежбицкая
Австралийский Национальный Университет
Канберра, Австралийская столичная тер. 0200, Австралия
В книге The Sermon on the Mount: The modern Quest for its meaning (Нагорная проповедь:
современная интерпретация ее значения) (1985) теолог Кларенс Бауман, помимо многого другого,
касается вопроса об учении Христа о “гневе”. Книга начинается статьей, посвященной Толстому
“Leo Tolstoy: The moral challenges of literal interpretation” (Лев Толстой: Моральные проблемы бук-
вального толкования). Одна из заповедей Христа — Не гневайся (от Матфея 5: 22—25). Толстой за-
метил, что в процессе редактирования проповеди ее текст был искажен. К пятому столетию в пер-
воначальное безусловное утверждение было вставлено слово εικη, означающее «бесполезно» или
«без причины»: «Всякий, гневающийся на брата своего без причины...». Но чему действительно учил
Христос, говоря о «гневе»? Термин, использованный в Евангелие от Матфея (5:22), это было, разуме-
ется, русское слово «гнев», и не английское слово «anger», а греческое слово orgizomai. Слово,
употребленное Толстым — русское слово «гневаться» — отличается по значению и от английского
anger, и от греческого orgizomai. Но Иисус использовал не английское, не греческое и не русское
слово, а арамейское. Что означало это арамейское слово, и что же хотел сказать Иисус, употребляя
его? Вполне понятно желание Толстого найти «буквальное толкование», но, как показано в данной
статье, пытаться определить, что хотел сказать Иисус, одним словом из того или иного языка (будь
то русский, английский, греческий или арамейский), — значило бы чрезмерно упростить проблему.
В статье утверждается, что для того, чтобы полностью понять учение Христа о «гневе» точным и бес-
пристрастным образом, нам нужно выйти за рамки отдельных слов того или иного языка и попы-
таться сформулировать простые предложения, используя универсальные слова, то есть слова, кото-
рые имеют точные эквиваленты во всех языках. Кроме того, в статье показано, что то, что относится
к учению Христа об эмоциях, относится также и к «эмоциональной практике» Христа. Что он чув-
ствовал, когда видел, что кто-то делает что-то очень плохое или когда с кем-то что-то очень плохое
происходит? Естественный семантический метаязык, разработанный автором и коллегами, позво-
ляет заменить грубые формулировки, такие как «Испытывал ли Иисус гнев?» или «Что говорил
Христос о гневе?», более тонкими вопросами, позволяющими получить более точные и содержа-
тельные ответы.
Ключевые слова: эмоции, гнев, Нагорная проповедь, естественный семантический метаязык,
переводимость эмоциональных концептов

52
 Anna Wierzbicka. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 2018, 22 (1), 38—53

История статьи:
Дата поступления в редакцию: 09 августа 2017
Дата принятия к печати: 20 сентября 2017

Для цитирования:
Wierzbicka, Anna (2018). Emotions of Jesus. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22 (1), 38—53. doi
10.22363/2312-9182-2018-22-1-38-53.

Сведения об авторе:
АННА ВЕЖБИЦКАЯ — известный лингвист, профессор Института языка, литературы и лин-
гвистики Австралийского национального университета. Помимо лингвистики, ее научные инте-
ресы охватывают целый ряд дисциплин, включая антропологию, психологию, философию
и религиоведение. Она опубликовала более двадцати книг, среди которых — Semantics, Сul-
ture and Сognition: Universal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations (N.Y., London:
Oxford University Press, 1992), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: The Semantics of Human Interaction
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991/2003), Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and
Universality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), English: Meaning and Culture (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), What Christians Believe: The Story of God and People (Cracow:
Znak). Профессор Вежбицкая является членом Австралийской академии гуманитарных наук,
Австралийской академии общественных наук, Российской академии наук, Польской академии
знаний, лауреатом Международной премии имени Добрушина (2010 г.) и премии Польского
научного фонда (2010 г.). Контактная информация: [email protected]