follow the shepherd and the believers are supposed to turn away from
other ideologies.
In this manner, the mutual cognition expressed in John 10:14
and Gal. 4:9 fulfils the formal conceptual requirements of religious
recognition, expressing cognition, attachment, and availability. The
translator of the Vulgate, Jerome, expresses this idea in hisCommen-
tary on Galatians, referring to both these verses. He concludes that
although God in some sense knows everything, he‘knows’in this
strong sense of embracing only those who are his own and who
abandon their errors. God says to the sinners that he does not
‘know’them in this sense.^3 ‘Knowing one another’in texts like John
10:14 and Gal. 4:9 expresses a robust upward recognition that also
involves some mutuality, as the speaker’s‘knowing God’is condi-
tioned by his being known by God or the Father. As the Greek verbs
in these contexts speak of knowing in general, it would nevertheless
be premature to draw too definite a conclusion.
In the New Testament Greek, bothginoskoandepiginoskoare often
used to depict generic‘knowing’. While the two verbs are basically
synonymous, there are at least three reasons to ask whether, in
addition to their cognitive content, they involve the idea of attach-
ment in distinctive ways. First, Rudolf Bultmann claims that, in
biblical writings, both the Hebrew verbyadaand the Greek verbs
ginosko/epiginoskomean an acknowledgement in which will and
election are involved. We will treat this claim as part of our inter-
pretation history (section 3.4). Second, in early patristic Greek the
substantivesgnosisandepignosisstart to be differentiated so that
epignosisbecomes a distinctive religious term.^4
Third, the Latin verbscognoscoandagnoscoare clearly different
with regard to the component of attachment:cognoscomeans know-
ing in general,agnoscooften adding an aspect of reactive attachment
to it. If there is a pattern of translatingepiginoskobyagnosco, the
Latin pattern might be read back into the Greek verbs. While the
present study cannot treat the interactions between Greek and Latin
terms in the depth they may deserve, we need to mention the most
obvious New Testament case of this kind. It concerns the Pauline
phraseepignosis aletheias,‘knowledge [or recognition] of the truth’,
(^3) Comm. ad Gal.2, 403.
(^4) See the evidence collected inLampe, 519. Lampe translates even early Patristic
epignosisas‘knowledge, esp. of divine truth’.
44 Recognition and Religion