A collection of writings have come down to us under the name "Dionysius the Aereopagite" (after Acts 17:34) which effectively form the foundation of the tradition of Christian mysticism. Most scholars today believe the writer lived in Syria, c. 500 AD. The general consensus is that he couldn't have written earlier than this because he seems to have been influenced by 5th century Neo-Platonists. All this by way of background; I don't have any particular opinion as to when the writer lived or by whom he was influenced.
The principle work of "Dionysius" is only a few pages long and is called "On Mystical Theology." His surviving book-length works are The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Divine Names. I read "On Mystical Theology" recently, first in the original Greek (available online), and then in the English translation included in Bernard McGinn's The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. The work begins with a discussion of the divine darkness beyond understanding, i.e. of mystical, non-discursive knowledge of God. Predictably, this section is virtually incomprehensible (the English translation doesn't help that much, and if it followed the text more closely it would help even less). What is interesting to me, however, is the discussion of the different types of theologies - that is, of the types of "God-talk" that are possible while preserving God's status as beyond knowledge and intellect. This passage is interesting in and of itself, and when I read the Greek it was the part I felt I understood, so I was even more puzzled when I read the translation and found that the things I thought I understood weren't there! I'm going to first give the very beginning of the treatise in my translation and McGinn's for flavor (I should note that McGinn's translation is an adaptation of an anonymous one published in 1923), and then translations of a large chunk of chapter 3 to see if we can figure out what is going on.
| McGinn | Pearce |
|---|---|
| 1.1 Trinity beyond all essence, all divinity, all goodness! Guide of Christians to divine wisdom, direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical lore, most incomprehensible, most luminous, and most exalted, where the pure, absolute, and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty. | 1.1 Trinity beyond existence and beyond divinity and beyond goodness, guide of Christians to godly wisdom, direct us on [the way] of mystical discourses beyond ignorance and beyond assertions and at the highest peak; inside [of it] the pure, the uncorrupted, the unturning mysteries of theology according to that which is beyond light have been unveiled, a darkness of silent mystical secrets, in the darkest [place], that which is beyond appearance, beyond luminescence, and in the entirely impalpable and the unseen thing of the splendor beyond name, beyond filling the sightless mind. |
The first thing you will notice is, of course, that the McGinn translation is rather more polished. Mine is more literal. (Well, actually, the first thing you might notice, is that I was serious about this being incomprehensible.) I had originally wanted to follow "Dionysius" literally and user the prefix "hyper-" where I have used the word "beyond," since he has the prefix huper in the Greek, but I couldn't get that to make sense in English. At any rate, keep in mind that this whole section is about hyper-this and hyper-that; later I will try to explain why that is and draw an interesting conclusion from it.
"Dionysius" goes on, as I have said, for a page or two in this fashion, before getting to chapter 3 which is, as I have said, what I'm interested in:
| McGinn | Pearce |
|---|---|
| 3 In the Theological Outlines [a lost work] we have set forth the principle affirmative expressions concerning God, and have shown in what sense God's holy nature is one, and in what sense three; what is within it which is called Paternity, what Filiation, and what is signified by the name Spirit; how from the uncreated and indivisible good, the blessed and perfect rays of its goodness proceed, and yet abide immutably, one both within their origin and within themselves and each other, co-eternal with the act by which they spring from it; how the super-essential Jesus enters an essential state in which the truth of human nature meets it; and other matters made known by the oracles [i.e. scripture] were expounded in the same place.
Again, in the treatise on Divine Names, we have considered the meaning, as concerning God, of the titles of Good, of Being, of Life, of Wisdom, of Power, and of such other names as are applied to him [Divine Names, chpaters 4-8]. Further, in the Symbolic Theology [another lost work] we have considered what are the metaphorical titles drawn from the world of sense and applied to the nature of God; what is meant by the material and intellectual images we form of him, or the functions and instruments of activity attributed to him; what are the places where he dwells and the raiment in which he is adorned; what is meant by God's anger, grief, and indignation, or the divine inebriation; what is meant by God's oaths and threats, by his slumber and waking; and all sacred and symbolical representations. And it will be observed how far more copious and diffused are the last terms than the first, for the Theological Outlines and the discussion of the divine names are necessarily more brief than the Symbolic Theology. (Brackets McGinn's) | 3 Therefore, in the Theological Hypotyposes we praised the most dominant things of the cataphatic theology: how the divine and good nature is called 'simple' [i.e. 'one']; how [it is called] 'triune;' what [nature] is called 'paternal' and what 'filial;' what the theology of the Spirit wants to clarify; how the lights in the heart of the [nature] of goodness grow out of the immaterial and indivisible good, and [yet], subsisting in it and in themselves and in one another, remain alone without growth moving about; how Jesus, [though] beyond existence, took on existence with the truly human growths; and however many other things concerning the discourses have been made clear in the Theological Hypotyposes, were praised. But in On The Divine Names, how [the divine nature] is called 'good,' how [it is called] 'being,' how [it is called] 'life,' and 'wisdom,' and 'power,' and however many other things of the understanding are divine names, [were praised]. ['divine names' = Gr. 'theonyms' – what a nifty word!] And in the Symbolic Theology, certain metaphorical names [Gr. 'metonyms' – another nifty word] for the divine nature from sensible things, certain divine shapes, certain divine outlines and parts and tools, certain divine places and worlds, certain desires, certain sufferings and wraths, certain drunkennesses and carousings, certain oaths and imprecations, certain sleeps and certain wakings and however many other forms are holy falsehoods of symbolic God-patterns.
And I think you have seen how very many more words the last things take up than the first things: for also it was necessary that the Theological Hypotyposes and the exposition [lit. 'unfolding'] of the divine names should be a shorter discourse than the Symbolic Theology. The general view given by thought [must] account for [lit. 'set up'] as much as is denied of the opposite: just as even now when we were entering the darkness beyond thought we did not find a short discourse but, [rather, it was] entirely non-discursive and without understanding. |
Now, I think that what I am about to say is compatible with the McGinn translation, so I'm not too worried about my interpretation being out to lunch, but I sure wouldn't have thought of this if I hadn't also read the Greek, and I didn't understand it very well, so I'm waiting to be corrected in terms of my interpretation of "Dionysius," but I'm nevertheless going to tell you what I think, if for no other reason than that it is independently interesting, regardless of historical accuracy.
Traditionally, especially in Eastern Christianity, theology is divided in apophatic and cataphatic forms. Apophatic theology says what God is not (he is infinite, atemporal, unlimited, immaterial, etc.), and cataphatic theology says what God is (he is good, loving, powerful, three, one, etc.). Now, it seems to me that Dionysius uses these terms rather differently (well, he actually doesn't, in this work, use the word apophatikos, but he uses some cognates). That is, traditionally the words are interpreted with the etymologies "affirming away from" and "affirming toward," whence saying what something is not vs. saying what it is. But there is reason in this passage to suppose that what Dionysius really means is not "affirming away from" but "away from affirming," and, similarly, "toward affirming" - that is, he means discursive and non-discursive knowledge of God. In my translation I consistently used "discourse" and its cognates for logos and its cognates, and transliterated the word "cataphatic" (and also "hypotyposis," but I'm coming to that).
This, then, is the first distinction in theology: the mystical theology in which we know the unknowable and speak the ineffable in the cloud of brilliant darkness beyond light, existence, understanding, and language (note that if this made too much sense, it would mean that I had actually succeeded in giving a discursive account of what can, according to "Dionysius," be known only non-discursively, and so his theory would be false, so you shouldn't get too upset if you didn't understand it), and the discursive theology of the understanding. In God's true nature he is understood to be beyond the understanding, and so only accessible to this non-discursive knowledge-beyond-knowing, insofar as he is accessible at all. We cannot speak literally of God. (The debate on whether we can speak literally of God continues to this day, with the majority of traditional monotheists on the side of "Dionysius" to date.)
This is where things get really interesting. Although we cannot speak literally of God, nevertheless not all ways of speaking of God are equivalent. This seems intuitively true: it is very different to say that God is good or loving than to say that God is our Father, or that Christ is the Bridegroom of the Church, or - in an even more extreme example - that "a mighty fortress is our God." But, if we deny that we can speak literally of God, then what is the distinction here? "Dionysius" actually gives an analysis of this, having written books on each of the three divisions.
The first division is that of the "Hypotyposes." This word usually means outlines or some such, and so McGinn has translated it as such, but I'm not sure that's what it means in "Dionysius," exactly, because I think there's reason to suppose that "Dionysius" is playing on the etymology. A tupos is a pattern, imprint, outline, or some such, and hupo is the opposite of "Dionysius'" favorite prefix, hyper. God, he says, is hyper-existent, hyper-good, and so forth. What then are existence and goodness? They are hypo-types of God! That is, God is, strictly speaking, beyond existence and goodness, but existence and goodness don't misdescribe God as the "holy falsehoods of symbolic God-patterns" strictly speaking do; rather, they fall short of describing him, which is, after all, what hupo means.
The next category is that of the divine names. I'm not totally certain what the difference between the divine names and the hypotyposes is supposed to be, so let's simply assume that they are items that fall on the boundary of the hypotyposes and the symbolic theology. Goodness and existence are actually among the examples of this category, so "Dionysius" must not think that they are strictly hypotyposes, the way threeness, oneness, Fatherhood, Sonhood, Spirithood, the "lights of goodness" (whatever that means), and Christ's humanity are, but I chose them above because they are among the examples of hyper-attributes in chapter 1.
The final category is the symbolic theology, which contains the truly metaphorical. These are cases where we describe God in terms of sensible things (but apparently Fatherhood and Sonhood are not sensible?), and succeed in saying something true about him by this means.
This, at any rate, is what I got out of it. I encourage all you Bible translation bloggers to try your hand at interpreting/translating "Dionysius" to stretch your Greek muscles a little more and to tell me if you come to the same conclusions (and critique my translation!). I'd also appreciate any comments on this account as either (1) an interpretation of Dionysius, or (2) an actual assertion about our knowledge of God from anyone who has anything to say about such things.
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.
Peter Kirk has posted a discussion of the Latin text Augustine was familiar with and its effect on his doctrine of original sin. The claim is, effectively, this: Augustine believed in the doctrine of original guilt because of an ambiguity introduced by an excessively literal Latin Bible which persists in the Vulgate and later theologians have a propensity to read original guilt into the text of Scripture because Augustine did. The passage in question is the end of Romans 5:12. The English translations are pretty much all the same: "in this way death spread to all men, because all sinned." But Augustine's translation says "in whom all sinned." The English translations are certainly more accurate. It is true, however, that many theologians, following Augustine, have claimed that everyone sinned in Adam. For instance, Michael Rea's paper "The Metaphysics of Original Sin" (which I highly recommend, if for no other reason than because it's fun) discusses several Western accounts of original sin and finds it necessary to examine various accounts of personal identity, since some of these theories require that we actually each be identical with Adam at the time of his first sin, and not identical with him at his second sin, i.e. that in Adam's eating of the fruit we literally all sin in him.
Now, in the comments, Jeremy and others argue, and Peter concedes, that no contemporary Protestant theologian actually makes the argument Augustine makes and, in fact, have other arguments for this conclusion, but Peter nevertheless (plausibly) claims that we tend to be more inclined to accept this view because of Augustine's influence on the tradition.
Peter's claim is supported by the fact that in the Christian East, where Augustine's influence is considerably less (though he is still a canonized saint), theologians have generally accepted original sin while denying original guilt, which, if I read him correctly, is also Peter's view. I have been told that this view was also held by John Wesley who got it from the various Eastern Christian writers he read (he was particularly fond of the Macarian Homilies). The view is this: because of Adam's sin, human nature is corrupted so that none of us is able not to sin (Romans 3:23); however, contra Augustine, we are held guilty only for our own particular acts of sin (which we all necessarily commit due to the corruption of our natures) and not for Adam's sin.
Now, I see the doctrine of original sin as very strongly supported by Scripture, whereas I think the doctrine of original guilt is something that comes primarily out of systematic theology rather than the clear teaching of specific passages of Scripture. (Augustine, of course, had a specific passage teaching this view in his Bible, but that was due to a misleading translation.) In fact, Romans 5:12 seems rather supportive of the original-sin-without-original-guilt view under consideration as against the Augustinian view. For the record, I regard both views as plausible and orthodox, provided that those who deny original guilt make strong enough claims about depravity.
Throughout Romans 5, Paul sets up a parallel between Adam and Christ, the new Adam. "if by the one man's trespass the many died, how much more have the grace of God and the gift overflowed to the many by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ ... from one sin came the judgment, resulting in condemnation, but from the many trespasses came the gift, resulting in justification." (vv. 15 and 16) And the correspondance is real: indeed, there is a theological debate directly parallel to the debate about original guilt, and this is the debate about imputation of righteousness. "To impute" is a King James term for the Greek logizomai which can mean "to charge to one's account" (the word at Romans 5:13 is ellogeo, a cognate that means just exactly and only "to charge to one's account", whereas logizomai is a broader term and can also mean "to reckon," "to add up," "to consider," "to think," etc.). The doctrine of imputation of righteousness says that we are credited ("to credit" is a good translation of logizomai when used with a positive connotaton in some contexts) with Christ's righteousness; that is, in judging us, God considers Christ's righteous life as if it were ours and so acquits ("justifies" - Greek dikaioo) us, rather than condemning us for our sins.
(A brief note on this word: "justified" is often glossed as "declared righteous," and that's not so bad, except that "righteous" is also a technical theological term, and is also originally a legal term in the Greek, and we don't necessarily know what it means. To be righteous is to be on the right side of the law. To be justified means to have a judicial declaration state that you owe no (further) civil or criminal penalty. This can mean one of two things: either you have been found innocent or the penalty has been paid in full and you can now be released. I've used the translation "acquitted," which is footnoted in the HCSB, because it is easy to understand in this context, but I think Paul plays on the broader semantic range of the Greek word: on the one hand, we are acquitted because of Christ's innocence, but on the other hand, we were guilty and Christ paid our penalty for us. I think these are two different metaphors that Paul intentionally merges in his overally view of "justification.")
While Paul speaks of God "imputing" (or, rather, not imputing) sin in several places, the only talk of "imputing" righteousness in the New Testament centers around Genesis 15:6, which uses that wording in the Septuagint. The longest such discussion is Romans 4, immediately before our passage. This verse, as quoted by Paul at Romans 4:3, reads "But Abraham trusted God, and it was counted toward his [being] on the right side of the law" (my translation - traditionally, "Abraham believed God and it was credited to him for righteousness"). At 4:24-25, Paul connects this back to us and to Christ: "[Our trust] is about to be counted in our [favor], since we place our trust in the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. [Jesus] was betrayed on account of our violations [of God's law] and raised on account of the full payment of our penalty [or 'on account of our acquittal']." (With the traditional theological vocabulary: "[Our faith] is about to be imputed to us [as righteousness], since we have faith in the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. [Jesus] was betrayed on account of our transgressions and raised on account of our justification.")
This, as I said, leads directly into Romans 5, the first verse of which says, "Therefore, since our penalty has been declared 'paid in full' because we have trusted him [lit. 'from trust' or 'because of trust'], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ." (Side note: I'm beginning to understand why translators use the traditional theological vocabulary - translating into plain English is hard work, and I'm not sure I'm even succeeding!) The traditional Protestant view can be seen as a pretty straightforward inference from this passage: because we trust in Christ's rigtheousness rather than our own, God judges us on the basis of Christ's righteousness, rather than on the basis of our own. There is a lot of Biblical support for this kind of idea, especially in the prophetic books, often with the metaphor of clothing (e.g. Isaiah 61:10, 64:6, Zechariah 3) - I have no intention of tracking down every passage to this effect, because there are a lot of them. In fact, I think this is strongly enough supported that the parallel to imputation of righteousness can be used as an argument in favor of original guilt! Nevertheless, it remains an inference from the text, rather than the immediate teaching of the text. The immediate teaching of the text is something more vague and general, as original sin is more vague and general than original guilt. The text teaches that Adam's sin brought sin and death into the world for everyone, and Christ's righteousness brings life, peace, and justification into the world for everyone who believes.
As this is an inference, there is room for a view parallel to the original-sin-without-original-guilt view: the Christ's-righteousness-without-imputation view which, if I understand this article correctly, may be the view of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The author says "For a Christian, the beginning of eternal-life is the beginning of his belief in Jesus Christ. For him a promise has been given, a reward for eternity because, 'Who soever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die' (John 11:26)." Later he also says, "Repentance is the exercise of the free will of man, without which there is no salvation ... Repentance is ... the human reaction to the appeal of Jesus Christ." Christ, his righteous life and sacrificial death, his promise, and our trust in him are thus all seen as essential ingredients in salvation. Later, however, judgment is said to be according to "faith and deeds on earth" and reference is made to "the moral progress of the soul." Now, this is admittedly a little vague, and I'm going to interpret it charitably, keeping in mind that the Orthodox theologians who say these things intend them to be compatible with Scripture, including Romans. What could this possibly mean that would be compatible? Well, first we note that repentance and faith are seen as the beginning of this process - no good deed or "moral progress" occurring before this can please God in such a way as to acheive salvation - and that repentance is seen as a "reaction to the appeal of Jesus Christ." We further note that Pelagianism - the view that man is capable of initiating and/or accomplishing his own salvation - is regarded as a heresy in the East just as in the West. The story of salvation begins with "the appeal of Jesus Christ." Only after Christ makes his appeal to us can there be good deeds and "moral progress." We can then understand this Christ's-righteousness-without-imputation view by comparison with the original-sin-without-original-guilt view. Remember that because of Romans 5 we ought to say that we have Christ's righteousness in the same way we once had Adam's sin. As a result of Adam's sin, "death spread to all men because all sinned." We now claim that because of Christ's righteousness life can spread to all who believe, because all can live righteous lives. After repentance and the new birth, the believer can say "I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me." (Galatians 2:19-20) Christ in the believer now does what the believer could not do for himself - lives the life pleasing to God. On account of this life, the believer is judged to be righteous and acquitted of his sin. (Everyone who has begun the process - who has repented and believed - counts as "saved" in the Evangelical sense of that term. The Orthodox writer combines the "Great White Throne" judgment by which one enters heaven [Revelation 20:11-15] with the bema judgment for the heavenly reward [2 Corinthians 5:10].)
Now, what this theory needs, which is not mentioned in the article I linked, is an account of atonement. I don't necessarily mean penal substitution - I regard the doctrine of the atonement as an essential point of orthdoxy, but penal substitution as a probably correct but certainly incomplete account of the atonement. If this theory is to work, we cannot claim simply that the believer is "a new creation ... the new things have come;" we must also claim that "old things have passed away" (2 Corinthians 5:17), and the clear Biblical teaching is that, one way or another, it is the death of Christ that takes away our old sins (Romans 6:1-11, Ephesians 2:14-16, etc.).
By way of conclusion, let me say that I regard the traditional Protestant view as solidly Biblically and historically orthodox, whereas the view that I've been sketching here I say might be made to be both plausible and orthodox if sufficiently strong pictures of depravity and atonement can be annexed to it. This is far from an endorsement of this theory, but I present it for your consideration in the hope that it will cause you to reexamine your assumptions and think through the Biblical and rational grounds of your beliefs. Good luck!
In Revelation 11:15, a loud voice from heaven says something which the HCSB translates as "The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Messiah, and He will reign forever and ever!" The other translations I had handy (NKJV, NIV, NASB, KJV, RSV) were all very similar. The agreement of the translations makes me wonder if I'm missing something, because it appears to me that there is another reading, which actually seems to me to deal with the grammar better. I would translate this reading as: "The Kingdom of the Universe, [the Kingdom] of our Lord and of His Christ, has begun, and he will reign throughout the ages of ages." (Note: I heard the translation "unto the ages of ages" for eis tous aionas ton aionon in the liturgy of an English-speaking Greek Orthodox Church and liked it; it's more literal than the standard translations.)
In terms of interpretation, there is one reason, I think, for favoring the standard translation over mine: namely, that the world (kosmos) is normally seen as opposed to the Kingdom of God in the New Testament. However, this usage is not constant throughout the NT, and in the Johannine literature I don't think it's even very common (though it is certainly used that way in 1 John 2:15-17, and I haven't done a comprehensive study). Furthermore, the style of the Revelation is supposed to be substantially differen than that of the undisputed Johannine literature (I haven't done a comprehensive study of this either), and in the Revelation the word is used only three times and the other two (13:8 and 17:8) both use it in the phrase apo tes kataboles tou kosmo - "from the foundation of the world" - so there is no usage of this word in the Revelation which clearly has a sense of a world system opposed to the Kingdom of God, the way the word is often used in other NT literature. So this interpretive consideration doesn't seem to be that strong.
Grammatically, I think my translation has a stronger basis than the standard translation, for two reasons: (1) egeneto is placed at the beginning of the sentence. This construction is parallel to the existential use of esti(n) ("there is an x" as opp. "x is y"). Again, it is similar to the idiomatic use of the word without a subject to mean "it came about" (see, e.g., Luke 1:5). To say what the translations interpret it as saying, we would expect egeneto to come in between "of the universe" and "of our Lord and Christ," rather than at the beginning. (2) There is no explicit nominative in the predicate (you'll note that translations that mark such things will have the second usage of "the kingdom" marked as not existing in the Greek). This is not problematic in and of itself, but it is needed to make my translation possible, and it also seems unlikely that this series of genitives with nothing separating them should belong one half in the subject and the other half in the predicate. Rather, "of our Lord and of his Christ" should be interpreted as an appositive.
While none of the translations say this, the Majority Text does have it punctuated as an appositive (that is, a comma is inserted after tou kosmou). NA27 does not. It is curious that the Hodges and Farstad should punctuate it this way, since Farstad worked on both the NKJV and the HCSB (both of which were done after the Majority Text), neither of which translate the phrase as an appositive.
Am I missing anything here? Are there any considerations in favor of the standard translation that I'm missing? Do others think my translation is plausible?
An important antidote to the ignorance of literal signs is the knowledge of languages. Users o the Latin language - and it is these that I have now undertaken to instruct - need two others, Hebrew and Greek, for an understanding of the divine scriptures, so that recourse may be had to the original versions if any uncertainty arises from the infinite variety of Latin translators ... There are certain words in particular languages which just cannot be translated into the idioms of another language. This is especially true of interjections, which signify emotion rather than an element of clearly conceived meaning: two such words, it is said, are raca, a word expressing anger, and hosanna, a word expressing joy. But it is not because of these few words, which it is easy enough to note down and ask other people about, but because of the aforementioned diversity of translators that a knowledge of languages is necessary. Translators of scripture from Hebrew into Greek can be easily counted, but not so translators into Latin, for in the early days of the faith any person who got hold of a Greek manuscript and fancied that he had some ability in the two langages went ahead and translated it.This fact actually proves more of a help to interpretation than a hindrance, provided that readers are not too casual. Obscure passages are often clarified by the inspection of several manuscripts ...
Because the exact meaning which the various translators are trying to express, each according to his own ability and judgement, is not clear without an examination of the language being translated, and because a translator, unless very expert, often strays away from the author's meaning, we should aim either to acquire a knowledge of the languages from which the Latin scripture derives or to use the versions of those who keep excessively close to the literal meaning. Not that such translatations adequate, but they may be used to control the freedom or error of others who in their translations have chosen to follow the ideas rather than the words. Translators often meet not only individual words, but also whole phrases, which simply cannot be expressed in the idioms of the Latin language, at least not if one wants to maintain the usage of ancient speakers of Latin. Sometimes these translations lose nothing in intelligibility but trouble those people who take more delight when correct usage is observed in expressing the corresponding signs ... What then is correctness of speech but the maintenance of the practice of others, as established by the authority of ancient speakers?
- Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 2.34-45 (tr. R.P.H. Green)
There's a lot more stuff here that mirrors some of the Bible translation discussions that have been had on this blog and elsewhere in recent times, but I got tired of typing. The whole section is a recommended read.
Jeremy Pierce's review of Leland Ryken's book Choosing a Bible, has me thinking about degrees of literalness in Bible translation, and I want to offer a few comments on that subject.
The first thing I want to say about degrees of literalness is that this is a spectrum. It is not a modal; that is, it is emphatically not the case the every Bible translation is either "essentially literal" or "dynamic equivalence" and all the translations within a category are the same. Let me illustrate. Let's pick a verse more or less at random - say Romans 12:1 - and I'll give some translations.
The Literal Extreme (my translation from the Greek): "I call alongside therefore you, brothers, through the mercies of God, to stand beside the bodies of you a sacrifice living, holy, pleasing to God, the logical service of you."
NASB (very literal): "I urge you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service of worship."
HCSB (moderate-literal): "Therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your spiritual worship."
NIV (moderate-dynamic): "Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God - this is your spiritual act of worship."
NLT (very dynamic): "And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice, the kind he will accept. When you think of what he has done for you, is this too much to ask?"
The Message (the dynamic extreme): "So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him."
(Note: some people might object to where I have placed the NIV, but this is all just a matter of where you draw the "center" of your spectrum and, since there is only a partial ordering of Bible translations, without a definite metric, where you draw the center is a rather subjective matter. It may indeed be true that I regard the NIV as "moderate-dynamic" simply because I prefer translations more literal than it for most purposes, so this may just be my bias. The moral is: don't read too much into labels.)
The first thing to notice here is that the translation I have labeled "The Literal Extreme" is not English. Furthermore, if you were trying to decipher it without having a real translation handy and didn't know Greek, you would probably be misled. This is not an accurate rendering of the verse in English because it isn't English (there is, however, one way in which it is more accurate than some of the other translations: the word logikos means "rational" or "reasonable" or perhaps "meaningful," but I'm quite skeptical about the accuracy of the translation "spiritual," so my near-transliteration "logical" may actually be closer to correct than the translations in this respect). If you got much more literal than this, it would be Greek.
On the other end, if you compare the quote from The Message with the more literal translations, you will see what happens on the other end: if you get much more dynamic than The Message, you become a commentary.
So what we see on this spectrum is that the farther to the literal side you get, the less natural your English becomes and, at the extreme, this can cause the text to be virtually incomprehensible. As we move to the dynamic side, the translator's interpretation of the text begins to overtake the text itself, until we have an exposition rather than a translation. On the one hand, it should be noted that even my "Literal Extreme" translation involves some interpretation on the part of the translator: I had to determine which English words to substitute for the Greek words, and this is dependent on my belief about what those Greek words "literally" mean (although I tried to minimize this by using etymological definitions of compound words like parakalo, even though it doesn't actually mean "call alongside" in contexts like this). On the other hand, it is the case that, as you go further to the literal side, more of the task of interpretation is left to the reader and, as you go further to the dynamic side more of the interpretation is done by the translator. These are the extremes of the spectrum because if you go past them you no longer have an English Bible translation: if you get more literal, you no longer have English, and if you get more dynamic you no longer have a Bible.
It is my opinion that the vast majority of the space on this spectrum is good and useful, and I am very glad that there are a wide variety of Bible translations in English to be used by different people for different purposes. However, there is one region of the spectrum that I think is essentially useless, and another that I find problematic. The useless region is the area occupied by my "Literal Extreme" translation, and indeed anything that is much to the literal side of NASB (though I personally use the NASB for study fairly regularly, and I think it is a good and useful translation). The reason this piece of spectrum is useless is that the only way to properly interpret a "translation" of this kind is to reconstruct the original language, which involves knowing the original language.
The problematic piece of spectrum is on the far dynamic side, definitely including The Message and anything to the dynamic side of it (if, indeed, there is anything more dynamic than the Message - perhaps The Cotton Patch Bible?), and probably also including the NLT, at least in its most dynamic places. The problem with this region of spectrum is that it's difficult to determine how one should treat the book in question. Like a Bible? Like a commentary? Like a devotional? A sermon? It's pretty clear that by the time Eugene Peterson (author of The Message) has rendered the word soma, which literally means "body", as "your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life" we are no longer dealing with what Paul actually said in any meaningful sense, but only with what one particular person thinks Paul intended. (Note the implicit assumption, which some people might wish to challenge: I am assuming that there are some cases where we can read something in English and meaningfully assert that it is what Paul said, as opposed to merely an interpretation of what he said.)
This is not to say that The Message is bad. On the contrary, while I haven't used it too extensively, my overall impression of it is very positive. The important thing to remember about The Message is its purpose. Eugene Peterson, explaining what he was doing when he wrote The Message, said,
Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn't read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become 'old hat.'
This brings us to the next point. I've said already that I think almost the entire spectrum is good and useful, and I'm glad that Bible translations exist all along it. What parts of the spectrum are good for what people, and for what purposes? One consideration is that highly literal translations will often use an obsolete or technical term for a word that has no exact equivalent in everyday English in order not to lose the meaning, even though the original is nearly always a very common, easily understandable word. A literal translation will also generally preserve metaphors and idioms, and there are terms like "redeem" (which means something like "to purchase a slave in order to set him or her free") that have fallen out of normal English and/or taken on different meaning because we now lack the cultural context to give the word its original meaning (in this example, we no longer have slaves), and these will tend to be used. What this means is that a child or a person with little background in theology and ancient Roman/near Eastern culture will tend to be better with a more dynamic translation until he or she picks up the requisite background to study with a more literal translation. Also, for devotional reading, it is important to have a translation that "speaks your language" in a very meaningful way. Depending on how far your grammar differs from that of the original languages, it may not be possible to write a very literal translation that speaks to you this way. Certainly no translation can be as consistently literal as the NASB and use normal English phrasings as consistently as The Message at the same time. I personally have used the NKJV (which I would place between NASB and HCSB on the spectrum) for devotional reading, and now use HCSB. I find that both of these, despite being very literal, speak to me meaningfully most of the time, but that the HCSB does this better than NKJV. Note that these are pretty literal translations, and I don't think my dialect is any more more similar to the original languages in its grammar than most other dialects of English, so I do think that it is possible to have a literal translation that speaks naturally. On the other hand, both these translations (the NKJV much more so than the HCSB) have an unfortunate habit of writing in a much higher linguistic register (that is, they use fancier language) than the original of any New Testament book, with the possible exception of the Epistle to the Hebrews.
For a study Bible, anyone with significant background should definitely use something pretty far to the literal end, but if the text becomes confusing, consulting a dynamic translation is often helpful. I use the NASB fairly regularly for studying the Old Testament (I study the New Testament almost entirely in Greek). The reason for this is that, while all translation involves some interpretation, in more literal translations more of the intepretation is left to the reader and you do, in that sense, get closer to the original text. On the other hand, it is very important to know when you have reached the end of your expertise. If you don't read the original languages (and even if you do!) the translators of (nearly?) every Bible translation will be more expert than you at interpretation. For this reason, if you come to an interpretation of a very literal translation (or the original language text) which you cannot find in any more dynamic translation or commentary, you should be suspicious of your conclusion (which is not to say that it is certain you are wrong, but only that it is highly likely).
To this, let me add one more point: I personally place a high value on the consistency of a translation. That is, I think translations that "stay put" on the spectrum (especially if they state their translation principles in an introduction in such a way as to make it clear where on the spectrum they are) are simply better than those that do not. Of course, perfection in this area is impossible, because the degree of similarity between the structure and vocabulary of the original language and the target language is not constant from one construction or word to another, but its an ideal to shoot for. In cases where a translation is forced to go more dynamic than its norm, footnotes are highly appreciated. It is my subjective impression (if someone has developed an objective metric for this, I would be very interested) that the NASB and HCSB do very well in this respect. The NASB introduction says "When it was felt that word-for-word literalness was unacceptable to the modern reader, a change was made in the direction of a more current English idiom. In the instances where this has been done, the more literal reading has been indicated in the notes." Note that the NASB departs from "word-for-word literalness" only when such a reading is "unacceptable." Based on my experience with the NASB, I would say that by "unacceptable" they mean something like "is complete nonsense," and they follow this rule pretty consistently. (It should be noted, however, that the first edition of the NASB, which is the one I have, makes, in my opinion, one of the worst translation policy decisions in the history of Bible translation - it renders prayers and divine quotations, and nothing else, in archaic language. This was changed in the NASB Update.) The HCSB introduction says "form cannot be neatly separated from meaning and should not be changed ... unless comprehension demands it. The primary goal of translation is to convey the sense of the original with as much clarity as the original text and the translation language permit ... When a literal translation meets these criteria, it is used. When clarity and readability demand an idiomatic translation, the reader can still access the form of the original text by means of a footnote ..." Note the lack of the phrase "word-for-word" included in the NASB. The HCSB practices, in general, a less rigorous literalism than the NASB. Also, whereas the NASB departs from its literalism only when the literal reading is "unacceptable," the HCSB is willing to depart whenever "clarity and readability demand" it. The HCSB does, unfortunately, move further to the literal side than its norm in its use of words like "propitiation," but this too is explained in the introduction ("Traditional theological vocabulary ... has been retained in the HCSB, since such terms have no translation equivalent that adequately communicates their exact meaning"). The NKJV has the same problem as the HCSB to a larger degree: it allows a certain amount of inconsistency in its degree of literalness for the sake of tradition. This, however, is a part of the goal of the NKJV and not an error. One of the selling points of the NKJV is that an NKJV user can easily read along with a pastor preaching from the original KJV. This is a useful thing, but it has reduced the overall quality of the NKJV as a translation. I suspect that most of the more dynamic translations (NLT, The Message, and those in between) are fairly consistent, but I don't have enough experience with them to judge.
It is, again, my subjective impression that the NIV is singularly bad on this point, and I therefore neither use nor recommend it for any purpose. (It is, however, rumored that the TNIV, which I have never used, is better about this.) What sort of relationship obtains between an NIV rendering and the original Greek text varies significantly from verse to verse and its footnotes are rarely useful in this respect. This is not to say that the NIV is useless or does not contain the Word of God, but simply that I think all of the other translations mentioned in this post are better than it (though I'm sure there are some translations I haven't mentioned which are worse).
In sum, what I am trying to say is the following:
I think that's all.
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?
ALCIPHRON: ... But what apology can be made for nonsense, crude nonsense? ... Look here, said he, opening a Bible, in the forty-ninth Psalm : ... "Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, when the wickedness of my heels shall compass me about?" The iniquity of my heels! What nonsense after such a solemn introduction!
EUPHRANOR: For my own part, I have naturally weak eyes, and know there are many things that I cannot see, which are nevertheless distinctly seen by others. I do not therefore conclude a thing to be absolutely invisible, because it is so to me. And since it is possible it may be with my understanding as it is with my eyes, I dare not pronounce a thing to nonsense because I do not understand it. Of this passage many interpretations are given. The word rendered heels may signify fraud or supplantation: by some it is translated "past wickedness," the heel being the hinder part of the foot; by others "iniquity in the end of my days," the heel being one extremity of the body; by some "the iniquity of my enemies that may supplant me;" by others "my own faults or iniquities which I have passed over as light matters, and trampled under my feet." Some render it "the iniquity of my ways;" others, "my transgressions, which are like slips and slidings of the heel." And after all, might not this expression, so harsh and odd to English ears, have been very natural and obvious in the Hebrew tongue, which, as every other language, had its idioms? the force and propriety whereof may as easily be conceived lost in a long tract of time, as the signification of divers Hebrew words which are not now intelligible, though nobody doubts they had once a meaning as well as the other words of that langauge. Granting, therefore, that certain passages in the Holy Scripture may not be understood, it will not thence follow that its penman wrote nonsense; for I conceive nonsense to be one thing, and unintelligible another.
- George Berkeley, Alciphron 6.7
[Note: the verse in question is Psalm 49:5. Alciphron's quotation is one word different from the KJV in print today (which has "wickedness" instead of "iniquity"), but the KJV was edited a few times after the writing of this dialog in 1732. Of modern translations, NKJV has "the iniquity at my heels," and NASB and HCSB both read "the iniquity of my foes." LXX uses the Greek pterna meaning heel.]
I'm studying Plato's Parmenides in a graduate seminar this semester. It is rather a baffling text, and there is a wealth of secondary literature which contains little consensus on anything. Today, as I was reading Constance Meinwald's guidebook to the dialog, I came across an issue in the translation of the text which I think is relevant to a number of discussion about Bible translation that I've had on-blog, and thought I would share. The issue is one of preserving a (probably intentional) ambiguity in the original in translation, and thus with the degree of interpretation done by translators, and the degree left up to readers of the translation.
What is usually referred to as "part 2" of the Parmenides consists of a series of deductions from contradictory hypotheses. The hypotheses in question are stated in the Greek as hen estin (137c4, etc.) and hen me estin (160c1-2, etc.). The 'standard' translation (that is, the one included in the Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper) by Mary Louise Gill gives two very literal translations. For the first hypothesis, in the main text Gill has "it is one" and in a footnote gives the alternate translation "one is." For the second hypothesis, Gill has "one is not" and doesn't give an alternate translation. This ambiguity applies to a huge number of statements throughout the dialog and seems to be intentional (more on that in a moment). Meinwald, citing Jowett, suggests (p. 30) that we can preserve that ambiguity if, instead of translations of the form "if the one is" we give translations of the form "on the hypothesis of the being of the one."
Now, if we did the latter in a Bible translation, many people who, like me, favor highly literal translations, would be up in arms about all the words we're adding. However, what I want to point out is that the more litaral translations are more interpretive than the looser ones. That is, because there are multiple possible literal translations of this particular phrase which have substantial differences in meaning, a literal translation requires the translator to pick one of those as the correct interpretation for inclusion in the main text, and thereby leaves fewer readings open in the English than are available in the Greek. That translator is here doing the interpreting and not leaving it to the reader.
To make matters worse, this probably isn't a case where we're simply not sure what Plato means, but a place where he is being ambiguous on purpose. The reason seems to be that the actual thesis of the historical Parmenides was simply "it is." He denied that "it" (that which is) was divided (DK28B8 line 22), and therefore, by implication, that it was plural. So the real hypothesis of Parmenides is that "that which is, is one," or, to put it in better English, "only one thing exists." But Plato's dialog is concerned with the theory of forms, and therefore he seems to use the phrase to mean "Oneness Itself exists." Thus the ambiguity seems to be necessary in order for the phrase to meet both the dramatic needs of the dialog (i.e. to be spoken by Parmenides) and the needs of Plato's philosophical purpose. This seems to be precisely the reason Meinwald embraces Jowett's translation.
To return to the question of the literalness and degree of interpretation of translations, it seems here that the less literal translation turns out to be more accurate. This result will be unsurprising to regular readers of the Better Bibles Blog, where such cases are on display regularly. What I really want to call attention to, though, is that the less literal translation actually involves less interpretation on the part of the translator and leaves more to the reader. This, as I understand it, is the main reason for those (again including myself) who favor more literal Bible translations. You will hear us say "I want a translator to tell me what it says, not what it means." While a certain degree of interpretation on the part of a translator is absolutely necessary, I do agree with that statement. However, as it turns out, there are some cases, such as this one, where that principle ought to cause us to lean toward a less literal translation. How about that?
I'm quite busy right now and haven't had much time for blogging, but I wanted to give a quick note about an issue I found that troubled me today.
The first line of the book of Titus reads Paulos, doulos theou, apostolos de Iesou Christou kata pistin kai epignosin aletheias tes kat' eusebeian ep' elpidi zoes aioniou. The particle de is a bit troubling, as it ordinarily has at least a slight adversative meaning. That is, it sets up at least some slight opposition between what comes before and what comes after. It is true that Matthew and many other writers, particularly those whose Greek is not so good, begin almost every sentence with de, even if there is no apparent connection with the previous sentence, and so we often translate it "and," and Smyth's Greek Grammar says that it is "the ordinary particle used in connecting successive clauses or sentences which add something new or different, but not opposed, to what proceeds" (sect. 2836). However, here we have it apparently in the middle of a sentence, and it wasn't clear to me at first why. If one wanted to say in Greek what the HCSB says - "Paul, a slave of God, and an apostles of Jesus Christ..." - I, at least, would expect to see kai for "and," not de.
One would expect to see de if there was some contrast between the two, and would therefore translate it "Paul, a slave of God, but an apostle of Jesus Christ according to the faith of the elect of God and [according to] the hope of eternal life," thus setting up a conrast between being the slave of God, but being the apostle of Christ, as if perhaps contrasting the low position of slave, but the high position of apostle. This doesn't seem to me to make very good theological sense, compared to Paul's other writings. What's going on? Smyth may just have the answer: he says that de is sometimes used "where a second relationship is added" (loc. cit.) and cites Aeschylus (Persians 151) and Thucydides (4.7) in support. Both cases describe a single object's relationships to other objects, and the de separates the two relations without contrasting. Thus here, "a slave of God, and an apostle of Jesus Christ" may not be contrasting points, it may merely be an also. Still, it is troubling to be crediting Paul with a usage Smyth can cite only from Aeschylus and Thucydides. Does anyone know a reference closer to the New Testament that does this? Or do we really think that Paul would just use de in place of kai here? Or does a slight contrast make sense in this context in a way I don't see?
One of the great difficulties in translating ancient and Medieval works is dealing with quotations. The rules and conventions of quotation we have today were developed relatively recently, so it is sometimes difficult to say what is and isn't a quote, and it is even more difficult to figure out how to mark these in a modern translation with modern punctuation.
In New Testament translation, the issue gets even more complicated, because New Testament translations are generally bound together with Old Testament translations, and one must decide whether to harmonize them (that is, whether to translate quoted passages identically, even if they are not quite the same). Furthermore, people sometimes hang theological arguments on how often the NT directly quotes the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made about 200 years before the NT was written. Finally, the handling of Scripture by the New Testament authors is relevant to us today, if we really believe, as most Evangelicals say they do, that the best way to interpret the Bible is to let it interpret itself. The only place we can see the Bible doing this in direct and obvious ways is when the New Testament quotes the Old.
This summer I have been leading a Bible study on the Epistle to the Hebrews. One of the things I have been trying to address is the use of the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX) by the author of Hebrews. The handling of Scripture in this particular book - and, in fact, the whole style of argument - is far more familiar to us than most of the rest of the NT. It is written in a very western/Greek dialectic (pattern of discussion/conversation/reasoning), whereas most of the Bible is written in a Semitic dialectic which is unnatural to westerners, and even the primarily (culturally) Greek Pauline epistles and Johannine literature still contain confusing Hebrew-isms from time to time. Ironically, the Epistle to the Hebrews is probably the least Hebrew (and most western/Greek) in style of any NT book, although it is the most Hebrew in content, audience, and, of course, title.
The author of Hebrews quotes the LXX quite consistently, and virtually always quotes it verbatim, especially when he explicitly identifies what he is saying as a quote, or draws an argument from it. For this reason, it is especially interesting to compare his usage of Scripture to ours.
There is, however, a problem: most translations do not clearly distinguish between direct quotations and mere references. Generally, they lump them all together. Furthermore, they don't distinguish between quotations from the LXX and places where the author appears to have translated from the Hebrew himself. In the study, I came to Hebrews 10:35-39, a passage which makes very interesting use of a section of Habbakuk. However, it is rather difficult to get across just exactly what it going on with the quotations to people looking at an English translation, since most are set up for simply noting the OT references, and aren't necessarily translated with this kind of quotation-marking in mind. This got me thinking about how to convey in a translation what was going on with the quotes here in a way that would be natural to native speakers.
I began by thinking through what the closest modern English equivalent to the LXX was. That wasn't very hard: the KJV wins hands-down. It is more archaic to us than the LXX was to the author of Hebrews (the KJV is nearly 400 years old, the LXX was only 200), but, like the LXX, the KJV is the 'old standard' of English Bible translation. So I proceeded to splice together the Hebrews passage and the Habakkuk passage in the KJV, filling in the blanks with some translation of my own from the LXX (feel free to correct my Elizabethan grammar and style), to create this KJV-LXX translation of Habakkuk 2:2-5:
And the Lord answered me, and said, “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, that he may run that knoweth it. For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall rise, and not be in vain; though it cometh late, wait for it; because he that shall come will come – see that ye tarry not! If any man draw back my soul shall have no pleasure in him: but the just shall live by faith in me. He that thinketh contempt and despiseth is a proud man, he completeth nothing, who enlargeth his soul as hell, and is as death, and cannot be satisfied, but gathereth unto him all nations and heapeth unto him all peoples.”
Therefore, don't throw away your boldness – it has a great reward! You [will also] need patience so that when you have done the will of God you may receive the promise. There is still such a very short[1] [time until] “he that shall come will come” (and he will not tarry), “but the just[2] shall live by faith,” and “if any man draw back my soul shall have no pleasure in him.” But we are not among those who draw back[3] toward destruction, but those who trust[4] [God] for the safe-keeping of our souls.[5][1]Lit. “so so short”
[2]Synaiticus, Alexandrinus, and at least one early papyrus read “my just one” (source: The Greek New Testament According to the Majority Text, second edition, ed. Zane C. Hodges and Arthur L Farstad)
[3]Lit. “the drawing back”
[4]Lit. “of the trust” (or “belief,” or “faith”)
[5]Lit. “soul”
I believe that the author is expecting his audience to be familiar with Habakkuk (which is of course, is quite a lofty expectation), and to understand what he is doing with it. My hope was that by putting things this way, the people in my Bible study would also see what was going on here. What I find interesting, is that this does, indeed, look a lot like the way the Bible is used by many modern preachers, especially if they expect the congregation to have the text in front of them and follow along. It strikes me as a Baptist style of Biblical preaching. Of the juxtaposition between the original text's "see that ye tarry not" and the NT's "and he will not tarry" (I used the archaism 'tarry' in the NT to emphasis the word-play with the original).
Is this KJV thing a good idea? Well it has some downsides: first, the KJV is not always the most accurate to the original (I corrected it in one or two places in the above). Second, the KJV is not the most readable translation either. Third, most NT translations are packaged with OT translations, but if we do this then the OT we're quoting is not the same as the OT we're packaging. Finally, although it might be fun, it doesn't make sense in a real translation to just arbitrarily pick some date as 'now' and adjust the level of archaism in the rest of the language around that. Every passage needs to be natural and intelligible. However, we need to mark quotations better somehow, and if one is just translating the NT I think this kind of approach might work. At any rate, I believe it worked well in this particular instance, as we were trying to understand how the author of Hebrews is treating and interpreting Scripture in this passage.
Not long ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the New Testament may have consciously made use of the language of Athenian democracy, especially in its usage of the words ekklesia and kerux. JollyBlogger has now posted on the etymological fallacy in our understanding of the ekklesia (HT: Parableman). The etymological fallacy occurs when an interpreter uses a piece of information about the history of a word which was unknown to the author or, at least, which the author was not thinking about in his usage of the word. For instance, although I am aware that the word 'gay' originally meant happy, if you use that piece of information to interpret me as somehow asserting that all homosexuals are happy, you commit the etymological fallacy.
In my post on ekklesia, I pointed out that ekklesia is derived from ek plus klesis and thus has the etymological definition of "those who are called out." What JollyBlogger wants to draw our attention to (and what I hope was apparent in my original post) is that when the authors of the NT used the word ekklesia, the definitions going through their minds was not "those who are called out," but something else. What I suggested in my post is not that we should translate the word as "those who are called out," but that at least some of the NT writers (and the other early Christians who used the term) may have (and, in my view, probably did) self-consciously adopt the term from the socio-political arrangements of pre-Roman Greece.
The lexicon entry JollyBlogger cites does point to this usage, which would have been well-known at least to Greeks (would it have been well-known to Jews?) in NT times. However, the lexicon goes on to point out that "it is important to understand the meaning of ekklesia as 'an assembly of God's people.'" I agree that this is the correct interpretation, but I don't think it is right to treat this as a separate definition and translate the "of God's people" part. The intended audience of the New Testament books would probably have seen ekklesia and thought "assembly" or "meeting" or "gathering," and known only from context that we were talking about the Church. Sometimes the context is such that in order for English speakers to understand, we must add information that isn't part of lexicography strictly speaking, but additional contextual information. However, I don't think this is such a case. I don't think that if Paul writes "to the Assembly of God at Corinth" there will be any confusion with the Athenian Assembly (though there may be some confusion with the Assemblies of God denomination, which presumably got its name from this verse or a similar one). Even if it doesn't say "of God" in the text, I think Assembly with a capital A is enough for most readers to figure it out from context. The lexicon rightly points out that "a translator must beware of using a term which refers primarily to a building rather than to a congregation of believers" - in other words, the traditional translation "church" is a little questionable (linguistic research would be needed to determine if people interpret its use to refer to the building or the people - to assume that it refers only to the building in modern English based on its germanic root would be, again, the etymological fallacy).
Some people have suggested that the word already had some religious overtones due to its usage in the Septuagint (I don't know a lot about that). If this is so, then "congregation" might actually be a good translation.
At any rate, the important point JollyBlogger is making is that in all likelihood, the connection between ekklesia ('church') and eklektos ('elect') is nothing more than a pun, despite all the theological emphasis some Christians place on it. (Note that eklektos has only one kappa where ekklesia has two: LSJ says eklektos isn't even from the same root as ekklesia; it's from eklego.) I like to think it is an intentional pun, but I do not have strong evidence for this. A quick glance at my concordance shows that the two words never appear in the same verse. We ought not, on the basis of this etymology alone to connect the Church with the Elect. The etymology doesn't prove that, and the etymology of ekklesia is not necessarily the best place to start in building an ecclesiology. Of course, the Church is connected with the Elect, but we need to look at the text, and not just the etymology to show that.
Moral of the story: beware the etymological fallacy! Words today don't always mean what they meant in Shakespeare's day, and words in the NT don't always mean what they meant in Plato's day. Just because we can take a word apart and show what words it is derived from, doesn't mean we know what it means: the fact that conscience comes (I imagine) from the Latin 'con' meaning with and 'scientia' meaning knowledge has nothing to do with the meaning of the word. This, of course, is a fallacy that we classicists (especially those who do not yet own a copy of BDAG and work from LSJ when reading the NT) are particularly prone to. On the other hand, there is a great benefit in having the classical background as the original authors may have also had that background and it may have influenced their word usage (a favorite example of mine is that there is good reason to believe that Paul was familiar with Plato, directly or indirectly, and especially his Republic). However, it requires a lot of argument to show that, and it can't just be assumed that because the word came into usage in such-and-such a way (hundreds of years before the time of writing) it has a certain meaning.
The Wall Street Journal recently published an editorial on the cultural and linguistic influence of the King James Version. It's a very interesting read and a topic I've been writing about for some time now. In addition to the transliterated words that I've looked at on this blog, the author points out some more commonplace words and phrases which have entered the English language through the Tyndale-KJV tradition of Bible translation. His examples include 'clear as crystal,' 'powers that be,' 'root of the matter,' 'arguments,' 'city,' 'conflict,' 'humanity,' 'legacy,' and 'network.' (Yes, I did just say that the word 'network' originates from the KJV - I had to look that one up. It occurs no less than seven times in the KJV Old Testament, and seems to be used to mean something like a lattice.) The article is brief, well-written, and highly recommended.
(HT: Reformation 21)
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?