Lecture

June 15, 2024

There is a funny insult in the New Testament: "σπερμολόγος"/"spermologos", literally "seed-picker". It's funny to me because 1) I'm immature, and "sperm" just always makes me laugh, and 2) calling someone a "seed-picker" sounds quaint and foreign to me — it reminds me of when Leia calls Han a "nerf-herder" in Empire Strikes Back (what's a nerf?).

("Spermologos" also makes me imagine the janitor on Scrubs getting into some situation where he has to pretend to be a doctor and sputtering something like "why yes, I'm a spermologist". I had that thought, and then I wondered: "is there such a thing as a 'spermologist'?" I looked it up, and it seems a "spermologist" is "one who treats of or collects seeds", and not a sperm doctor.)

The word "σπερμολόγος" occurs in Acts 17:18, where Paul is in Athens preaching to some heathens. In the King James Bible, the word is translated as "babbler":

Then certain philosophers of the Epicureans, and of the Stoicks, encountered him [Paul]. And some said, What will this babbler [σπερμολόγος] say? other some, He seemeth to be a setter forth of strange gods: because he preached unto them Jesus, and the resurrection.

In the Vulgate, the Latin rendering of "σπερμολόγος" is "seminiverbius", which also makes me laugh because "semen". "Seminiverbius" loses something of the original Greek (though less than "babbler"): "semen" means "seed", but "verbum" just means "word" and has no connection with picking/gathering. In fact, there is a Latin word "legere", which like its Greek cognate "λέγειν"/"legein" means both "read" and "gather" (or "collect"). (An "eclectic" is someone who "picks out" — ἐκ-λέγειν — what he likes from various sources. Another cognate is German "lesen", which can also mean both "read" and "gather/pick", as in "picking grapes". (When I lived in Germany, I got to witness the Traubenlese and to use a refractometer to measure the sugarfulness of some small, beautiful, delicious wine grapes.)) Douglas G. Kilday suggests that Jerome, or whoever, was just a lousy translator, and he could have used "seminilegus" instead of the weird "seminiverbius" ("seed-talker"?).

I encountered the "σπερμολόγος" passage because I was reading about Acts for some reason. I was surprised to see Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the Bible because in my mental model of Western thought, O.G. Christianity is something completely distinct from and very far from philosophy, and only later did Christians like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas try to reconcile the two and weld them together — so I had to take a peek at the original text to see the odd encounter up close. This might have been the first time I read Acts, although I was supposed to at some point when I went to Catholic school.