Language Holds Memory
Some years ago, a rabbi friend invited me to celebrate Passover with her and her family at their synagogue. I remember feeling honored. Curious. A little underdressed. And, unexpectedly, watched.
There were city police officers standing at the door, eyeing each arrival. I assumed it was a precaution, maybe an overcautious one. This is America, after all. Live and let live. Freedom of religion and all that.
Then I reminded myself that Jews have never had the luxury of casual engagement. The slaughter at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood in 2018 made that heartbreakingly clear. Eleven people killed for gathering. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. What was true in the time of Esther remains true today: there are still those who would do harm when Jews gather.
That made the invitation all the more powerful. Watching the whole community move through the Passover Haggadah, the ritual so thoroughly embodied, so joyfully integrated across generations, reshaped my imagination of the Last Supper in ways I hadn’t anticipated. Jesus and his friends weren’t reciting doctrine in that upper room. They were doing this. Memory as formation, solidarity as story, the body as the place where faith lives.
As we read, I noticed something small that stayed with me. There was English translation for every part of the service: Hebrew prayers, blessings, narrative, commentary. All of it thoughtfully offered in both languages. Every word, that is, except one: מִצְרַיִם (Mitzrayim). Egypt. The land of bondage.
I wondered why that one stayed untranslated. Why, of all words, the oppressor’s name remained in Hebrew.
And then I thought about Ἰουδαῖοι (Ioudaioi).
The Translation Problem
The Greek word Ioudaioi appears over seventy times in the Gospel of John. English Bibles translate it flatly as “the Jews.” That rendering is a theological and historical catastrophe.
It is also why I no longer translate the word at all when I preach or teach from John. I leave it untranslated, and I try to explain why.
Scholars have tried alternatives. “Judeans” narrows the term geographically but misses its religious and communal dimensions. “Jewish authorities” is accurate in some passages but distorts others where the reference is broader. “Jewish leaders” has the same problem. None of these fully resolves the ambiguity the word carries, and each one still risks flattening a complex, internally contested first-century Jewish world into something more convenient than true.
John himself has shown me the way. Sometimes you keep the word in its mother tongue and then explain it. No translation can carry everything it holds. He does it with Rabboni (“which means Teacher”). The sound itself had to be spoken first (John 20:16). He does it again with Gabbatha, Golgotha, Cephas, Hosanna and Thomas. Six words stay in their original Aramaic because Greek couldn’t hold all they accumulated in the Galilean countryside and Jerusalem’s narrow streets. Paul keeps Abba and Maranatha. Mark gives us Ephphatha and Talitha koum in Jesus’s own voice. Matthew remembers Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani from the cross. Luke lets Amen stand.
These writers knew the Greek words. They still let the original stand alongside them. What those words earned over centuries, substitutes could never carry.
So the word stays in Greek for us. And we reckon with it on its own terms.
A Gospel Written in Grief
To understand why the translation matters this much, you have to understand the community that produced this Gospel.
John’s community was Jewish. Deeply, inseparably Jewish. They didn’t read Torah from a distance. They were born from it. Raymond Brown called them the “Community of the Beloved Disciple,” and what marked them was not distance from Judaism but pain within it. Most scholars now understand the Gospel of John as reflecting a moment of acute tension inside first-century Judaism. After the Jewish-Roman War and the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, different Jewish groups were defining themselves more sharply against one another. Followers of Jesus, still identifying as Jews themselves, found themselves pushed out of synagogues, estranged from kin, at odds with neighbors who had once been family.
J. Louis Martyn’s theory of John as a two-level drama first helped me perceive John’s community crying out like separated siblings, not the propaganda of enemies. His insight has been tested and extended by scholars like Amy-Jill Levine, and complicated by scholars like Adele Reinhartz, whose critiques of Martyn’s synagogue-expulsion framework have pushed the conversation further.
All of them ask Christians to sit with an uncomfortable reality: John was written from inside a family argument, and for most of Christian history, we have read it as outsiders cheering for one side. Reckoning with how those readings took root and what they produced is part of what it means to read this Gospel honestly.
So when John writes of the Ioudaioi, we must hear not superiority but grief — the grief of severed relationship. In John 20, the disciples huddle behind locked doors “for fear of the Ioudaioi” (John 20:19). They weren’t hiding from an alien enemy. They were hiding from estranged kin. This is the language of insiders aching for connection even as the doors close.
The fear was real, and the pain was mutual.
What Happens When We Forget That
When Christians read “the Jews” as the villains of the Gospel story, they misrepresent both history and Scripture. And the consequences have been devastating.
Martin Luther, the Reformer, the Old Testament scholar, the man who recovered the doctrine of grace, published a 1543 tract called On the Jews and Their Lies that called for the burning of synagogues. That tract didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was the fruit of centuries of Christian reading that positioned the church as having replaced and surpassed Israel, a theology that treated Jewish faith as obsolete and Jewish people as spiritually suspect. Luther’s legacy has never gone fully dormant. The rhetoric it enables echoes forward through generations of Christian anti-Judaism, surfacing in slurs, in violence, in the weaponizing of texts like Matthew 27:25: “His blood be on us and our children!” That single line was used to justify Christian supremacy and Jewish suffering for over a millennium.
Careless translation is not a minor academic problem. It is the headwaters of that stream.
Anne Lamott once wrote: “You can safely assume you’ve made God in your own image when it turns out God hates all the same people you do.” That line lands hardest when we confront inherited theologies that sanctify suspicion. If we flatten Ioudaioi into a caricature or a weapon, we construct a god made in our image, one who has forgotten that Jesus was Jewish, that his mother was Jewish, that every disciple in that upper room was Jewish, that the Scriptures he quoted and the prayers he prayed came from a tradition that remains alive and sacred and under threat.
We cannot hold the Word made flesh and dismiss the people who gave him language, body, memory, and prayer.
Words That Hurt and Words That Heal
Perhaps the Haggadah leaves Mitzrayim untranslated not because people don’t know what it means, but because its meaning is too deep for easy rendering into English. Too layered to flatten. Too charged to dilute. The word reminds us that slavery wasn’t abstract. It had a name. A place. A time. A cost.
So too with Ioudaioi.
It is not a word to be handled lightly. It carries a first-century community’s grief, two thousand years of painful misuse, and the weight of real bodies harmed by careless readings. If we cannot sit with all that, we cannot truly inhabit the Gospel. If we claim to follow Jesus while ignoring the suffering Christians have perpetuated against the family that birthed our Lord, we are not reading the Gospel. We are denying it.
So I leave the word untranslated. I say it out loud with care. I explain its history. I name its danger. I trace it back to its first-century tension and forward to its twenty-first-century consequences. Not because the text is too complicated for ordinary readers, but because the text deserves that kind of honesty, and so do the people in the room.
The Work Now
The Word became flesh, which means words matter. Handled without love, they become weapons. Handled with reverence, they can become bridges.
This is the work for preachers, teachers, and readers of John: to speak the truth carefully, to walk in repentance honestly, and to remember the family that gave birth to our Messiah. To be disciples of good news and of good language. Slow language. Language that has looked at its own history and decided to do better.
Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, asks us to remember that careless words have consequences. Especially biblical ones.
Ioudaioi. Say it slowly. Know what it cost. And then, with that knowledge alive in you, go back to the Gospel and read it the way it was written: from inside a family that loved God fiercely, argued about it constantly, and never stopped believing that the truth was worth the trouble.