I was listening to a sermon on James 2 last night, and I was thinking about how much clearer the passage would be if pistis and it's cognates were translated consistently by "trust" and its cognates rather than by "faith" in the noun form and "believe" or "have faith" in the verb. Let me demonstrate. Here is my translation of vv. 14-25:
What good is it, my brothers and sisters[1], if someone claims to trust, but does not perform [any] actions? Is that 'trust' able to save him? If there exists a brother or sister and they[2] are naked and lacking daily food and someone among you says to them: "Go in peace, be warm and filled," but does not give the necessary things to them what good is that?But someone says: "you have trust, and I have actions: show me your 'trust' without action[3], and I will show you my trust by my actions." Do you 'trust' that God is one? Good job! The demons also 'trust' [in this way] - and tremble!
Do you want to know, senseless person, that 'trust' without action[3] does nothing? Wasn't Abraham our father judged to be on the right side of the law on account of [his] actions when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? You see that trust was working together with his actions and that by action[3] trust is brought to completion, and the Scripture was fulfilled which says, "Abraham trusted God and it was credited toward his being on the right side of the law" and he was called a friend of God. You see that a person is judged to be on the right side of the law because of actions and not because of 'trust' only. Likewise, wasn't Rahab the prostitute judged to be on the right side of the law on account of her actions when she received the messengers and sent them out by another way? For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also 'trust' without action[3] is dead.
[1] I translate adelphoi, plural, as "brothers and sisters" as it does typically refer to a mixed group, but adelphos, singular, as "brother," as it does not typically refer to a female.
[2] Yes, this is the singular "they." The ESV uses singular "they" here too. Why? Because there's a switch from singular to plural in the Greek. James is not a native speaker.
[3] Lit. 'actions' (pl.)
John at Locusts and Honey is wondering where the NASB's translation of 1 Peter 2:2 ("long for the pure milk of the word") came from, as compared with the NRSV which has (like many other modern translations) "long for the pure, spiritual milk." The NASB translation led John to suppose correctly that some reference to logos was present in this verse, and I'm sure that's exactly what the NASB translators intended in translating logikos as "of the word." This is precisely what the Greek suffix ikos (from which we get "ic") does: it forms an adjective meaning "having to do with." Now, the thesis of this post is that that word doesn't mean "spiritual."
Now, I confess to being biased by my background in classical philosophy: in Plato and Aristotle (and friends) the word certainly means "reasonable" or "rational" or "intellectual" or, occasionally, "linguistic," but never "spiritual." However, there is a good explanation of why logikos is often translated "spiritual" and that is given in BDAG (the big New Testament/ante-Nicene lexicon): BDAG (I'm working with the second edition; I don't have the third to compare) cites some examples, all of them questionable, for the reading "spiritual," and most of these rest on conflating the faculty of reason with the spirit - something Paul, at least, would never do (though other writers might). However, more importantly, BDAG says "it is to be borne in mind that logikos means spiritual ... also in contrast to 'literal' with the meaning 'metaphorical.'" I hope at some point to write a whole post on the contrast between logos (as in "the Word became flesh") and rhema (as in "the word spoken through the prophet"), but for now suffice it to say that rhema means a specific form of words, whereas logos means "the intelligible content of speech or writing" or some such. Mystical interpreters of Scripture, such as Origen, used the word logikos to describe the inner, mystical meaning found in the metaphorical content of a passage, as opposed to the literal, or rhematikos (I don't think they actually use that Greek word, but it is a real word) sense. Hence it means "spiritual" - that is, related to the deep, inner truth of a thing. I guess "spiritual" sort of means that...
Really, however, the word means "reasonable," "rational," "intellectual," or perhaps "linguistic." What the Origen example shows is that it also means "related to content" (as opposed to form). It simply doesn't mean "spiritual" in the sense I get from this English translation. It only means "spiritual" in the sense mentioned above which, I claim, is not a normal meaning of the English word "spiritual."
Two places where this is important are Romans 12:1 and 1 Peter 2:2, the verse John mentioned. In connection with Romans 12:1, BDAG does cite some previous examples of the phrase "reasonable act of service" (or "spiritual worship" in some translations), including Philo who says that God desires "the sacrifice of a rational spirit" rather than animal sacrifices. Perhaps the idea is that these other uses of logikos derive from that one?
At any rate, Romans 12:1 is correctly translated by the NKJV (following the original KJV), "your reasonable service." The central idea of that passage is that, when you consider the mercies of God, the only reasonable thing to do is to offer your body as a living sacrifice. Logikos. Reasonable.
In 1 Peter 2:2 things are somewhat more difficult, but my point still stands. The translations "of the Word," especially with a capital W, may be a bit much for St. Peter (if it was St. John I wouldn't hesitate), but "reasonable" or "rational" remains the correct translation: the milk we desire is milk for our reason as opposed to milk for our bodies. The translation "spiritual" also has the drawback that it conflates logikos with pneumatikos, which actually does mean "spiritual" and appears in v. 5.
These are, incidentally, the only NT occurences of this word.
Now, I must confess that I have departed somewhat here from the principles of humility and charity I normally try (with varying degrees of success) to follow in disagreeing with Bible translations by simply insisting that these translations are wrong, despite the fact that most modern translations agree, but I just can't see how logikos could possibly take this meaning. The evidence in BDAG mostly consists of these two references (the rest of the citations are either obscure, much later than the NT, or secondary articles, with the already mentioned exception of Philo). Furthermore, BDAG's arguments generally connect the meaning "spiritual" with the meaning "suitable to a creature endowed with reason" or some such, which makes it seem to me to be a misunderstanding of English rather than of Greek. ("Spiritual" doesn't mean that!) By contrast, the meaning I am talking about has dozens of citations in LSJ, from Plato and earlier to Plutarch (a contemporary of the New Testament) and later. Why invent new meanings when the most well-attested central meanings of the words can account for all the evidence?
On the other hand, it is only recent translations, for the most part, that have this translation, and they rely, I'm sure, mostly on BDAG3. Is there new evidence in BDAG3 that I'm missing?
So I suppose, John, that I'm in the opposite situation from you: I can't figure out where all the modern translations got the idea that it means "spiritual" instead of "of the word" (i.e. "rational"). Maybe if you tell me why you thought the NRSV's translation was closer to the Greek, then we'll both be able to figure out what's going on.
Over at Better Bibles Blog, Wayne Leman is discussing the difficulties involved in producting coherent English from Hebrews 11:1. I want here to produce some considerations on the use of a couple of unusual (in the NT) words in this verse that will hopefully help us to produce a better translation of the word. Wayne made it clear that his post was primarily about the coherence of the English. However, I think part of the reason we have difficulty rendering this verse in English is that we're not totally clear on what we are trying to communicate, so I will try to deal with both at once here. I am unfortunately suffering from two handicaps in this task at the moment: (1) I am at my parents' house for the holidays and don't have all my books with me - most importantly, I am missing BDAG and my Greek concordance of the NT, so I will have to make due with online resources. (2) I had my wisdom teeth removed this morning and am on pain medication, so I may be slightly less lucid than normal. Still, I have thought about this verse quite a lot, particularly in the last 4 or so months since I finished reading through Hebrews in Greek, so hopefully I can share some thoughts I had back when I was thinking more clearly, and hopefully I can successfully communicate them. I'll look back over this post and see if it makes sense (and fix it if it doesn't) in a couple days when I'm off the meds. In the meantime, please bear with me.
Hebrews is widely acknowledged to be written on a significantly higher linguistic register than the rest of the NT. The author of Hebrews apparently had a strong education, both Greek and Jewish, and the epistle is actually consdidered by many experts to contain the best Greek prose in all of the Koine dialect. To put it more simply, the language of the epistle is rather fancy and often highly rhetorical. His grammatical constructions are more complex than is common in other NT writers (though Paul and Luke use enough sophisticated grammatical constructs to show a strong grasp of the language - Luke, for instance, makes frequent use of the articular infinitive, and Paul uses large numbers of circumsantial participles in complicated ways), and its vocabulary is wider.
Hebrews 11:1 is an excellent illustration of the latter. It contains two terms which are very rare in the rest of the NT and are definitely words which are at a high linguistic register. What is interesting to me, is that both of these words have technical uses in Greek philosophy. They also have non-technical uses but, as I will show below, the most straightforward non-technical uses (at least the ones listed in LSJ) don't make nearly as much sense of the passage as the philosophical ones. Since they are uncommon terms, and since the author of Hebrews is highly educated and writing in a high linguistic register, I see no reason why they couldn't be used in their philosophical significations.
Now, if we believed these words were used in their philosophical significations, and were creating a New Testament translation intended for use by students and scholars fo ancient philosophy who would be familiar with these terms, it might make sense for us to transliterate the words, and come up with the following very literal translation (I have included v. 10:39 to get it to make better sense, but haven't looked at that verse too closely since it isn't the focus):
But we will not be the ones who fearfully shrink back [so that we are] destroyed, but the ones who trust [him so that our] souls [are] preserved. There is a trust [which is] the hypostasis of what is hoped for and the elenchus of the things that are not seen.
Note that I have translated pistis as 'trust' rather than the traditional 'faith,' simply because I think it is more accurated. Also note that the position of esti at the beginning of the sentence probably intdicates that it is the "existentical is" (i.e. "there is" or "there exists") rather than the "predicative is" (i.e. "x is y"), even though there is a predicate nominative in the sentence.
But what do these words, "hypostasis" and "elenchus" mean? Well, the NKJV gives hypostsasis as "substance" for a reason: it often means 'substance' in the sense in which that word is used in metaphysics. However, the HCSB's rendering "reality" is probably more accurate since the word 'substance' in English now has a variety of popular uses, not to mention its unrelated use in chemistry. Interestingly, the word is etymologically equivalent to John Locke's word "substratum" (which, in Locke's philosophy means the thing that has properties, which I believe, though I'm not entirely certain, is how Aristotle uses our word hypostasis). Both have the etymological meaning "to stand under." As such, LSJ lists a number of literal meanings, which obviously cannot be applicable here (neither trust, nor things hoped for, are physical objects located in space, so faith cannot literally stand under things hoped for).
A more promising idea might be LSJ's B.II.2: "ground-work, subject-matter, argument." Trust, one might think, is the ground-work or foundation for our belief in what we hope for: that is, we can believe in things that we hope for because we trust God (presumably, we trust him ot fulfill his promises).
LSJ does also produce some references in favor of the translation "confidence" (including our verse). These include Polybius 4.50: "At first the Byzantines entered upon the war with energy, in full confidence of receiving the assistance of Achaeus..." That writing is somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 years before the writing of Hebrews. The word can also mean "undertaking" or "promise."
However, the philosophical meaning seems to be primary, and here it means something like "substance," "essence," "reality," or "essential nature." In philosophical terms, the hypostasis of a thing "stands under it" in the sense of being its ontological basis. The hypostasis is the underlying reality, the ontological ground floor.
Elenchus is, as I have said, another term of interest in ancient philosophy. Famously, it is the Socratic method of refutation by cross-examination. That is, in the early dialogs of Plato, a pattern is followed: Socrates meets someone who is supposed to be some kind of expert, begins asking that persons questions related to his expertise, and by his questions leads the person into contradiction and general confusion. This process is called elenchus. However, it is not a purely negative process. It is a piece of the search for positive truth. The hope is that eventually we will find a foundation that cannot be torn down in that way. If we interpret the verse according to this usage, we would say that our trust in God is this foundation when it comes to our belief in unseen things. That is, trust allows us to examine our beliefs in things unseen and rightly come to the conclusion that they are indeed real. It is in this sense that it is evidence. The Socratic example is the famous one, but this particular word is almost always used in this sort of way in Greek literature.
Before trying to produce a 'plain English' translation, we should take a final step of examining the usage of these words elsewhere in the NT.
Hypostasis is used five time sin the NT: twice in 2 Corinthians, and three times in Hebrews. In some manuscripts, both of the 2 Corinthians uses, at 9:4 and 11:17, occur in precisely the same phrase: en te hupostasis tes kuacheseos, which translates literally as "in the hypostasis of our boasting" (the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Sociteties texts lack the tes kaucheseos in 9:4, but the vast majority of manuscripts contain it and, even if it isn't original, it is probably part of the implied meaning of the phrase). In this case, hypostasis as confidence makes a lot of sense, and, given the precedent in Polybius, is probably the correct translation.
However, the uses in Hebrews are quite different and, while Hebrews is certainly 'Pauline' in its content and use of theological language, there are many reasons to suppose that someone other than Paul was its author (we can by studying the letter come to a number of conclusions about the characteristics of the author, and it is my opinion that the description of Apollos at Acts 18 and 19 shows that he had all of these characteristics, but it is still all speculation), so that the author of Hebrews should use this word somewhat differently (remembering also the higher linguistic register) is unsurprising.
Hebrews 1:3 says that Christ is "the character of [God's] hypostasis," where character is the transliteration of a Greek term that can mean 'character' in the sense of a type of person, but also has numerous other meanings. This remark is, in my opinion, more confusing than 11:1, and so 11:1 should be shedding light on it, rather than the other way around! If, however, hypostasis is given its philosophical meaning, then character might take the meaning "image" or "distinctive mark" so that Christ is the means by which we are able to recognize and understand the fundamental essence of deity. (That sounds pretty good in the context, doesn't it?) Hence we get the HCSB's rendering "the exact expression of His nature."
Hebrews 3:14 also, in my view, makes good sense with the philosophical understanding of hypostasis. It may also be relevant that it is juxtaposed with metochoi, the noun form of metecho which is one of two roughly synonymous technical terms for the participation relation in Platonist metaphysics - the word literally means "to have a share of," but having a share of Christ doesn't work literally, since Christ is not divided (cp. Plato, Parmenides 365b-d for a related metaphysical problem). Christ would then be conceived of as a sort of Platonic form of the new humanity (cp. Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:45). This cannot, of course, be too literal, as Christ is a person and took on a body, etc., but the analogy may be useful to consider, and may even have been intended by the author (though this is a bit speculative). On this view Hebrews 3:14 would read as:
"For we have become participants in Christ[1], if we hold the fundamental principle of the hypostasis firmly until the end."[1] i.e., by being related to Christ Himself in a particular way we have become Christ-like in our own finite and imperfect way; see Plato, Phaedo 100c-e.
(I have italicized the word 'if' to communicate the emphasis indicated by the use of eanper rather than just ean.)
Here, the context makes the "fundamental principle of the hypostasis" "the boldness and boasting of hope," which we are also told to "hold firmly" to earlier in the same chapter (v. 6). Both these phrases must, in the context, refer to absolute trust in God's promise to bring us into his rest. We can see then that the philosophical meaning of hypostasis is quite likely to be the correct one in all three uses in the book of Hebrews.
What about elenchus? This word has only one other NT usage, and that is 2 Timothy 3:16, in the list of purposes for which "every Scripture" (or "every divinely inspired writing," depending on where you put the implicit copula, and whether you see the word graphe here as having its ordinary sense of 'writing' or its "proper noun" sense within Judaism of "Scripture") is useful. Fortunately, this word's philosophical usage is not unusual - LSJ doesn't really cite any other usage than that one.
To return to our initial question, how can we create a 'plain English' translation of this verse? Well, first, let me comment that I believe that an ideal translation would reflect the difference in register between, say, Matthew and Hebrews, and so the language in Hebrews can be a little fancy, but that doesn't mean it should be confusing or archaic, and it especially doesn't mean it should contain 'category mistakes' or anything of that nature. So, based on my above exposition, here is my attempt at a (somewhate loose) translation of Hebews 10:39-11:1:
But we will not be the ones who shrink back in fear so that we are destroyed, but the ones who trust him so that our souls are preserved. There is a trust which provides the foundation for the existence of that which is hoped for and makes the critical examination of invisible things possible.
The English could be cleaned up some more, and it could be made to follow the text a little more literally, and, of course, my interpretation is subject to dispute, but my purpose here is to spark discussion, and not to publish a professional Bible translation, so I will leave it as it is. The biggest problem, as I see it, is probably that in many English dialects, the term "a trust" refers primarily to "a trust fund" or something of the sort, but hopefully context would take care of that in a longer translation (or we could go back to 'faith' if we thought our target audience would understand that correctly).
I rather like these philosophical definitions, and I wouldn't put it past the author of Hebrews to use them, but I should perhaps be a bit cautious as my own background in ancient philosophy probably biases me. What does anyone else think?
I'm leading a Bible study this summer on the book of Hebrews, and I've just switched to using the HCSB as my primary Bible translation, so right now I'm studying Hebrews in preparation, and comparing the HCSB (and some other translations) with the Greek. There will probably be more posts related to the translation of Hebrews over the course of the summer. Today, I want to deal with Hebrews 2:2, and maybe some of you can help me figure out what it means!
The HCSB renders vv. 2-3a as "For if the message spoken through angels was legally binding, and every transgression and disobedience received just punishment, how will we escape if we neglect such a great salvation?" NKJV says, "For if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast, and every transgression and disobedeince received a just reward, how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" An ultra-literal translation might be, "For if the message, having been spoken through angels, became certain, and every departure [from it] and [every] disobedience received just wages, how will we escape, [when we are] neglecting so great a salvation?"
The HCSB and NKJV have two problems in common: first, neither of them makes sense of the use of ginomai: it is sometimes ok to translate ginomai as "is," but usually in the perfect tense (gegona), remembering that it literally means "has become." However, in this case, ginomai is in the aorist (simple past), and it should mean "became." So, on the HCSB's translation, where it is translated "is," it should read "if the message spoken by angels became legally binding..." I guess that makes sense. Perhaps it became binding by virtue of having been spoken by angels? The NKJV rendering should be "the word spoken through angels became steadfast," but their translation of "proved" is probably ok: bebaios (the word for "legally binding" or "steadfast" or "certain," which we will get to next) has epistemic ideas attached to it, so the idea would then be that the hearers became certain about the word, even though bebaios technically matches case with the word.
The second problem is the word bebaios itself. In modern Greek, the adverb is very common and means "of course" (the adverb is spelled with an omega and pronounced veh-VAY-ohs). The adjective generally means "certain" in ancient Greek, for which the NKJV's "steadfast" is ok (that is another meaning of the word, and the meaning "certain" probably began as a metaphor based on this). The HCSB's "legally binding" seems to be based on the parallel text Hebrews 9:17 about the legal force of wills. This meaning is not found in LSJ (I don't have access to BDAG - does anyone know if that lexicon has citations for this meaning?), and I can't find any other parallel text for it, so we should probably try to interpret the more normal meaning into both passages, even though that is difficult in 9:17. In 9:17 the word "reliable" might work.
Of course, there is another level of interpretive difficulty. What on earth is the message "spoken through the angels?"
To solve all of these problems, I propose that we might take egeneto and elaben as "gnomic aorists" (Smyth 1931 - "[the gnomic] aorist simply states a past occurence and leaves the reader to draw the inference from a concrete case that what has occurred once is typical of what often occurs: pathon de te nepios egno 'a fool learns by experience' Hesiod, Works and Days, 218") or something along those lines. This would treat this clause as a sort of proverb (which is where the term "gnomic" comes from). In this way we can successfully deal with the above difficulties, leading to an 'essentially literal' translation like this: "For if a message spoken by angels becomes certain, and every departure [from it] and disobedience [to it] receives [its] just wages, how will we escape if we neglect so great a salvation?" or a looser translation like this: "no one doubts the truth of something he's been told by angels, and if anyone disobeys messages from angels, he will be justly punished. If this is so, how can we expect to escape punishment if we ignore the message of salvation?"
This translation also makes a lot of sense in the context, since the author has just been talking about Jesus (who is later identified as the bringer of salvation) being greater than the angels. One objection will be that the gnomic aorist is a rare construction even in classical Greek, and Smyth's examples come from Hesiod, some 800 years before the writing of the New Testament. This does indeed concern me, and I would like to know how many other examples of gnomic aorists there are out there, and when they date from. It seems likely that, even if there were a lot of them, because they relate to proverbs Smyth would be likely to cite Hesiod as his prime example of Greek proverbs.
Alternative interpretations: All the commentaries I looked at, including John Wesley, the Geneva Bible, and John Gill, think that the word spoken by angels is the Mosaic Law. They cross-reference Acts 7:53 and Galatians 3:19 for support.
The only problem I see with this interpretation is that we don't start really talking about the Law in earnest until significantly later in Hebrews. This makes the big question, "when Greek-speaking Jews in the first century saw the phrase 'the word spoken by angels,' did they immediately connect that with the Law?" and this is a question I can't answer. If the answer is yes then the standard interpretation is definitely better than mine, since it uses the plain and simple grammar which is the norm in the NT, but if this phrase wasn't common as a reference to the Law, then my gnomic aorist idea may be better, depending on whether there are, in fact, many gnomic aorists after Hesiod. I have more questions than answers. Any help?