Category Archives: Translation

A Mighty Deliverer of Mail?

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As my blogging moratorium for Burma has just ended, by British time, I will now post this snippet which I found in “The Month”, the newspaper of the Church of England Diocese of Chelmsford, October 2007, p.5:

‘DYNAMIC equivalence’ is a wonderful thing. It’s when Bible translators use a term which conveys the significance of a word rather than its literal meaning. For example, ‘blood’ may be rendered ‘life’. But it doesn’t always work. When children at the Cathedral School were invited to write their own psalm, in place of ‘Mighty Deliverer’ they unanimously proposed ‘Postman’.

Well, at least our heavenly Mighty Deliverer doesn’t go on strike!

Also this one on the same page:

ASSISTANT Organist at Llandaff Cathedral, David Geoffrey-Thomas, tells me their organ has been struck by lightning and all the electronics fused on ‘loud’. How frustrating to have been the organist when what they really needed was a conductor.

I will point this one out to the PA operators in our church who like to turn the music up really loud. They might find this a useful excuse when people complain about the volume.

Good news in the Bible for British drinkers

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I found the following interesting Bible verse:

No longer do they drink wine with a song;
the beer is bitter to its drinkers.

(Isaiah 24:9, TNIV = NIV, American and British editions)

Good news for British drinkers: when songs are sung, there is no longer wine on offer but beer, and better still none of that continental lager but best bitter!

Of course it isn’t actually supposed to mean this in the context, which is a very negative one. But I wonder if the translators realised that at least here in Britain “bitter” is a positive attribute when applied to beer. So this is an illustration of just how careful Bible translators have to be.

Prof Charlie Moule

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I just received news of the death of Prof C.F.D. Moule, “Known to all as ‘Charlie'”. He passed away yesterday, aged 98. I knew him when I was an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, and he was a famous professor near to retiring age. Nevertheless, he was an outstanding example of Christian humility and gentle wisdom, so much so that it was impossible for me to get him to walk through a narrow doorway ahead of me. He regularly served breakfast to us students in his rooms after services in the college chapel.

There is already a short obituary on the college website. I have pointed out to the college a couple of minor errors (which may be corrected later): he was still supporting the Dean in the time (also my time at the college) when Arthur Peacocke was his successor; and when he retired from his university post he moved initially to nearby Ridley Hall, Cambridge, where I remember visiting him, and presumably only later to Pevensey. The obituary notes his scholarship and particularly his important role in translating the New English Bible. It does not mention his 1959 book “An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek”, which remains influential – I still see it referred to from time to time, and it is still in print from Cambridge University Press.

Although I had had no personal contact with Prof Moule for nearly 30 years, I was sad to hear of the loss of a man who was in many little ways a role model to me of the Christian life.

The Translation of "My Name is Red"

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I am in the middle of reading My Name is Red by the Nobel Prize winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. This is a more highbrow type of novel than I usually read, but I admit to buying it because it was displayed at a bargain price at my local Tesco’s, which is more or less the UK equivalent of Walmart (although not to be confused with its rival Asda, which belongs to Walmart).

The display was presumably of books suggested for summer reading. But it was interesting in that The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was in what otherwise looked like a fiction section. And then a few days later I saw a very similar display in Heffers, the major academic bookshop in Cambridge. Are the staff trying to tell us something about The God Delusion?

Back to My Name is Red. I have now read about half of it. And I am enjoying it, although finding it harder going than the kinds of thriller that I usually read – even though it is technically a thriller, based on murder among miniaturist artists. In some ways I regret not reading this book in the original Turkish, which I could more or less manage with some help from a dictionary, but of course only the English translation was on special offer at Tesco’s. But reading the translation has brought up some interesting points for me as a Bible translator.

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Augustine's mistake about original sin

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Scot McKnight writes:

Behind the Reformation is Augustine; behind much of modern evangelicalism, especially in the Reformed circles today, is the Reformation. Therefore, at the bottom of the evangelical movement in the Reformed circles is Augustine and his anthropology.

And behind Augustine’s anthropology (understanding of humanity), which is outlined in Scot’s post, is a simple misunderstanding of one word in the Bible, a preposition consisting of just two letters. Scot is writing about the New Perspective on Paul, an interesting issue. But my point here is not about that, but about how a misleading Bible translation has led Christian theology seriously astray for 1600 years.

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Learning Greek and Hebrew: joy or torment?

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Different bloggers have been expressing very different opinions on the importance for pastors, priests and rabbis of learning biblical Greek and Hebrew. John Hobbins and Iyov, who both have a very scholarly perspective, seem to consider high levels of biblical language understanding essential for these callings, and regret that North American seminaries do not insist on this – and the situation is little different here in Britain. On the other hand, Suzanne McCarthy reminds us that book learning of this kind is not enough to make a good pastor:

I don’t really need a spiritual counselor who knows Greek or Hebrew. It can help, but empathy and knowledge of the human condition go further. If they can be combined with language knowledge – well that’s a different thing.

Lingamish, in his usual hyperbolic style, goes further. He writes:

Greek sucks. Hebrew hurts.

I don’t agree. But I understand what he is getting at when I read on:

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Tablet confirms Bible character

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The Times and the Telegraph have nicely complementary reports of the discovery of the name of a minor Bible character, from the book of Jeremiah, on a cuneiform tablet from ancient Babylon. I have written about this here and here. Details like this are a strong indication that the book of Jeremiah is a genuine eye witness account of events; they are extremely hard to explain on the currently popular “minimalist” models, according to which all of the Old Testament was written centuries later, in Hellenistic times. This may also indicate what happened to the gold from the temple in Jerusalem: dedicated to the great temple in Babylon.

Our Parent, who art in heaven?

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TheoBlogian Mike Swalm has started an interesting series In Our Image: The Language of Father and Divine Gender. This takes up among other things some of the issues which I raised here recently, about Driscoll’s God and Molly’s paradigm shift.

In a comment on Part One of TheoBlogian’s series Odysseus wrote:

I don’t know for certain, as I have not double and triple checked the reference, but I was told that in Aramaic, ‘Our Father’ can be translated in a variety of ways, including ‘Our Father/Mother’.

I’m not sure about the Aramaic either, but I know that the Greek word πατήρ pater translated “father” is not always explicitly male. Look for example at Hebrews 11:23, where the Greek literally refers to Moses’ “fathers” (the plural of πατήρ pater), but almost all English translations, even back to KJV and including the very literal Young and Darby versions, render “parents”.

If Moses’ “fathers” were not necessarily male, then Jesus’ Father was not necessarily male. Indeed, we more or less know that he was not, because he has no distinguishing body parts, and men and women are equally made in his image – as I argued in my post on Driscoll’s God.

So, do we need to translate πατήρ pater, the more or less new name which Jesus gave to God, as “Father”? Well, it is not a bad translation or a mistranslation. But I would suggest that “Parent”, while arguably not very elegant, would be just as accurate as a translation. For there is no justification for insisting on a specifically gendered word here.

Theology, language or world view?

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I have been rather quiet recently on this blog. But I have just uploaded to the Better Bibles Blog a post which may be of general interest, on The TNIV controversy: a matter of theology, of language, or of world view? This post takes as its starting point the ongoing controversy on that blog about the TNIV Bible translation, and relates it to the general conservative world view, and to the need for Christians to put God before their world views.