Questions in the Gospels: A Linguistic Approach

Principal investigator: Cecília Sarolta Molnár

The Bible, starting from the Book of Genesis, contains a multitude of questions. The God of the Jewish-Christian tradition is omniscient and omnipotent; the gospels testify to Jesus being the incarnation of this God. In the text of the gospels, Jesus asks a number of questions, just like the other participants. It is an intriguing problem for philosophy, theology and linguistics how these questions should be evaluated. The aim of the current research is to approach this problem from the perspective of linguistics, by studying the questions appearing in early and modern Hungarian translations of the gospels. In the framework of the project a database is to be created that contains the questions appearing in Hungarian translations of the gospels. This database will make it possible to systematically investigate the form and function of these questions in the contexts where they appear. The result of the linguistic analyses of different translations can point to differences in the interpretation of different translation strategies. Thus, the results of the research can even inspire theological considerations.