What happens in English when you put two negatives together? They cancel each other out.
I can’t not go to the movies tonight.
For an English speaker, this means you must go, and it sounds weird to say it that way with the can’t not. This is the classic double-negative. In biblical Greek, however, a double-negatives don’t function in the same way. Instead of canceling each other out and emphasizing the opposite, they emphasize what they negate. This leads to their incredibly clever name: emphatic negations.
As you might imagine, this becomes fun for those who spend their time working on English translations of the Greek New Testament. What’s the best way to translate an emphatic negation from Greek into English? Should a translation stick close to the original even though it would sound funny or should it have the freedom to change the wording to get at what the original most likely means?
We have a good example of how the translators have tried to balance those options from John’s gospel.
The Greek of John 11:26 looks like this: καὶ πᾶς ὁ ζῶν καὶ πιστεύων εἰς ἐμὲ οὐ μὴ ἀποθάνῃ εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. Roughly translated it reads something like: And everyone who is living and believing in me will not not die for eternity.
The translation sounds a little off.
Part of that’s because of the emphatic negation οὐ μὴ (ou mé). What’s the best way to translate οὐ μὴ? In it’s literal form the individual words mean no or not. And, as you can see from the rough translation above, it sounds weird in English to translate those to words as not not in the text, because that’s not how English speakers speak. Additionally, translating οὐ μὴ as not not ends up making the text say the opposite of what John intended.
This is smoothed out in English by taking the Greek emphatic negation and showing what it’s emphasizing. Thankfully, because we have so many great English translations, we can quickly see how different decisions have been made to get this point across.
NIV: and whoever lives by believing in me will never die
NLT: Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die.
ESV: and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die.
KJV: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
NASB: and everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.
CSB: Everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.
For what it’s worth, I love those translations but, if I had to make my own, it might look something like this: And every person who lives and believes in me will never, never, never, never, never die—forever.
That’s an emphatic negation.