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NT Idiomatic Translations
The New Testament: An Idiomatic Translation: The Early Letters
by George A. Blair (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity:
Edwin Mellen Press)
The New Testament: An Idiomatic Translation: The Master’s Life
by George A. Blair (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity:
Edwin Mellen Press)
The New Testament: An Idiomatic Translation: Later Revelation by
George A. Blair (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity: Edwin
Mellen Press)
I must confess that I began reading this text with certain
reservations. Firstly, I could not find any information about the
author. He did not seem to be a member of the scholarly biblical
guild to attempt such a momentous endeavor of providing a
translation of the New Testament. Today it is widely recognized that
such an enterprise is far too much for one person to attempt without
considerable preparation and linguistic studies. Secondly, no
footnotes were provided or bibliography supplied which would
indicate the translator's preparation and horizon. Thirdly, I would
like to know the actual procedure involved in producing such a
translation. He describes himself as a philosopher with a scholar's
background and refers to his own Mellen publication on The Synoptic
Gospels Compared (2003).
Nevertheless as I read the text I gradually grew in
admiration of the clear style of the writer as he faced such a
momentous task while admitting that new translations are a dime a
dozen. His approach is courageous and honest to produce "not a
literal, not really simply an idiomatic," but what he considers a
"faithful" translation. This means five senses:
1.) Faithful to the English as well as the Greek.
2.) Faithful to the personalities and writing style of the
authors.
3.) Faithful to when the documents were written.
4.) Faithful to the psychological context.
5.) Faithful to history and the intent of the authors.
This aim is for the texts to speak for themselves and all
in all one could not disagree with the proposals of the writer. I
could only admire. But most scholars would have questions and
problems on every page. I was taken aback by the translation of
Messiah by Prince, of John bathing instead of baptizing, of Judeans
not Jews, sacred people in place of saints, student for disciple and
community for church. Nevertheless the author at every point made me
stop and think how I would translate the expression. To be honest I
so often came up with the answer "I am not too sure."
Comments like Mark's report is obviously written in a
second language, Luke's is fluid and literary, Matthew is pedantic,
John is extremely poetic, the Rock's letters are somewhat pompous
and Hebrews is superb and elegant Greek writing, show a good mastery
of Greek as when he accuses the King James of sometimes transforming
the pedestrian into something lofty and elegant. However, to include
the second letter of Peter and other letters among the Early Letters
would not find much agreement among mainstream scholars.
I certainly admire the clear fluidity of Blair's writing
and the fact that he made me think and raised questions on every
page. I liked his comment (p.25) that it is "extremely implausible
psychologically" for Paul to have written Galatians around 48 "off
the top of his head" and then sent such "composed" letters as
Thessalonians and later reverted to his original style to Corinth
and only slightly modified it when writing to Rome and Philippi.
Certainly there is value in such fresh evaluations, whatever
scholars think of them. Why bother with a new translation of the New
Testament?
They seem to be a dime a dozen. But it turns out that in
many ways, they are all variations on the same theme, and, I think,
don't quite match in English what the Greek actually says—which is
what translation should be about. So I am going to try to produce,
not a literal, not a modern, not really simply an idiomatic, but
what I think of as a "faithful" translation.
There are several senses in which Blair attempts to be
faithful:
Faithful to the English as well as the Greek
First of all, this is a "faithful" translation in the sense
that Blair wants it to be faithful to both the Greek language he is
translating from and the English he is translating into. Most
translations that style themselves as "faithful" are really
faithful only to the Greek. They are "literal" translations, with
the English reflecting the Greek behind it—and the result is Greek
with English words, not English. To illustrate with a modern
language, it is in this sense "faithful" to translate, "Cuantos años
tienes, Chico?" as "How many years do you have, little one?" But
it's not English, however clearly it expresses the meaning. We say,
"How old are you, little boy?" Translations that are faithful to
both languages are sometimes called "idiomatic."
But in translating the New Testament, there is also a
second problem in being faithful to the English: the authors' words
generally appear in that specialized jargon that is "Biblical
English." Many have become technical terms, which it seems like
sacrilege to alter:
Christ, grace, disciple, justification, parable, Gospel,
baptism, apostle, church, and so on. These words have got so
encrusted with the Theological sense that they don't now have
anything like the meaning of the ordinary Greek words the authors
were using.
Do not misunderstand him. I have no quarrel with Theology
(except perhaps in some of its most recent deconstructive vagaries),
or even technical terminology. What Blair is saying is that the
original writers were using normal Greek words with ordinary Greek
meanings. The Theological implications may have been latent in
them, but these were only latent. In the beginning, they were just
simple words.
So if we use the "Biblical" term, a common word gets
transformed into something esoteric—which is unfaithful to the
English.
There are also other ways of being unfaithful to one or the
other language, which Blair attempts to avoid: to "modernize" the
text, fitting ancient ideas into a contemporary mold, or to make
alterations to cater to modern sensibilities or fads, or to make the
text "understandable" to us by putting it into "basic English," so
that the authors sound as if they were ten years old. Some of them,
after all, such as the author of Hebrews, clearly showed great
sophistication. No, he is simply trying to produce an English that
will create in a contemporary American mind what would have been in
the mind of someone in the first century who heard these documents
read (most people heard documents in those days, of course, since
few could read themselves). Perhaps you could say Blair is trying to
write what the authors would have written if they were writing their
(ancient) ideas in contemporary American English.
The result will doubtless come as a shock. Let me give some
examples.
First, instead of "translating" Christos by its
transliteration, "Christ," or by a transliteration of the Hebrew,
"Messiah," or by the literal meaning of the word, "Anointed One,"
Blair uses "Prince."
Why "Prince," of all things? Because the "Biblical" words
are seriously misleading. You see, because of Christianity's
development, the term "Christ" or "the Anointed" conveys the idea
of the divine Savior—and, of course, for us, the "Christ" in "Jesus
Christ" even sounds like his last name. For the Hebrew of the time,
however, the term was a title, and the Christos was thought of as
the descendant of David, the Pretender to the Throne of Israel, who
would reestablish a dynasty that would last forever. Kings were
anointed among the Hebrews, which means that even Ahab, hardly a
divine savior, was the "christ" or the "messiah" while he was King
of Israel. So "Jesus Christ" becomes "Prince Jesus."
True, there are other implications in the anointing; for
instance, as Hebrews points out, he was also a priest; but that
anointing wasn't in people's minds when they heard the term. And I
do not deny that the documents are trying to establish that Jesus
was in fact the divine Savior; but the point is that this isn't what
the word meant.
You will also find John "bathing" people instead of
"baptizing" them. The word means "to sink"; but the way people
bathed in those days without soap (though soap was actually known
back then) was to go down to the river and sink themselves in. Paul
alludes to a sinking when he says that we were sunk into the Prince
and died by this sinking. But the word would really have conveyed
the meaning of getting washed, not being drowned; and certainly it
did not have the purely religious significance our word "baptize"
has.
Blair translates Judaioi as "Judeans" and not "Jews,"
because that was what it originally meant. The term was something
like our "Yankee," which to a non-American means an American, but to
an American means a New Englander. Paul, for instance, was clearly
referring not only to Judeans but Galileans too, while John, who was
a (Jewish) Galilean, had a real problem with the Judeans, who
considered themselves the "real Hebrews" and looked down their
noses at the all-but-Gentile "northerners." His report isn't
anti-Semitic, it is anti-Judean. Blair owes this insight to a
conversation with Dr. Joseph Martos.
You will also find "sacred people" in place of "saints" or
"holy people." The reason is that we think of saints or holy people
as virtuous, and Paul, for instance, berates these "holy people"
for things like incest, backbiting, factionalism, and so on—hardly
actions of the kind of people we think of as saints. Furthermore, a
husband who is an unbeliever does not become a saint in our sense
just by being married to a Christian—even to a saint. But he does
become a sacred thing by association.
Most of the time Blair translated "flesh" by "matter," and
"fleshy" by "material." Our word "flesh" makes us think of "naked
skin" and has all kinds of sexual overtones; whereas what these
writers were driving at was (a) the opposite of "spirit" or
"spiritual" or (b) meat. In the second sense, John reports Jesus as
saying, "unless you eat the meat of my body" ["eat my flesh"], which
sounded just as disgusting to the Judeans as it does to us.
In place of "disciple," you will find "student," because a
mathetes (Lat. discipulus) is not some special follower, but just
the usual word for "student." The students of Jesus were not in a
classroom, of course; but then classrooms weren't how you learned in
those days.
The "apostle," becomes the "emissary." This is fairly close
to the original flavor of the word; the "apostle" is the one "sent
out" somewhere to speak for a king or government. "Ambassador"
won't quite do, since the ambassador was a representative of the
country, and the apostolos had a definite message the king wanted
delivered, or a task he wanted performed. The Twelve seem to have
understood themselves, once Jesus had died, as temporary spokesmen
for the Prince until he returned to take over the world's throne.
The "church" is the "community." The Greek word means "the
calling out" or "assembly." But we think of assemblies as things
that happen in auditoriums to listen to a speaker; and what the
authors of the various documents meant is a group of people with
something in common that unites them and sets them apart ("calls
them out") from others.
The "covenant" or "testament" is the "treaty." This is what
God entered into with Abraham and the people of Israel: a formal
agreement between two sovereigns. I toyed with calling it a,
"compact," which would do the job, but seems to me to lack
something; so I changed it back. And of course Jesus the Prince
ratified a New Treaty with his blood. Note, by the way, that the
term also means a "will," and sometimes will be translated that way,
when the context calls for it. Blair left "New Testament" as the
title of the book, however, so people would know what they were
reading.
Peter will be called by what his Greek name (actually
nickname) means: "Rock," which Blair admits makes him sound a bit
like a boxer; but Peter is now too common a name, and the name Jesus
gave him was not something that you would call a person in those
days; so if "Rock" sounds funny to us, it sounded funny to the
people then.
Speaking of what sounds funny, you will occasionally find a
strange conglomeration of consonants, YHWH, which is the Divine
Name, YaHWeH or JeHoVaH, as some used to spell it. The original was
written, as all Hebrew was, with nothing but consonants, with the
reader expected to put the right vowels in the right places. But
since no one ever pronounced this name (the Hebrews substituted
Adonai, "Master" or "Lord"—slave-owner--when they read it aloud), I
decided to leave it as it was, YHWH (although nowadays the "w" is
pronounced like a "v"). When quotations are given of the Old Treaty
and that word is there, Blair has substituted it back for Kyrios
(Master).
One other expression that looks funny. Jesus is constantly
saying, "Amen I tell you . . ." Contemporary translations have tried
to render this as something like "I solemnly assure you" (it is the
equivalent of "the fact is . ."); but the expression was a Hebraism
that was deliberately included in the Greek text, and would have
sounded odd to any of the hearers of the Report who was not a
Judean. So Blair left it as it was, because that seemed to be
consistent with the authors' intention.
One term Blair had a good deal of trouble with, oddly
enough, was the one usually translated "Gospel." "Good news" does
not really fits, because the euangelion is not exactly the contents,
but the message that was to be delivered to people; so, to get this
across, Blair finally hit upon "report of the good news" as coming
as close as he could think of to the sense.
In referring to the adelphoi of Jesus, Blair translated the
term "relative" instead of "brother," since "brother" to us means
only a blood brother, while the adelphoi included cousins and other
close relatives. For instance, John remarks that at Jesus' cross,
his mother and his mother's adelphe Mary of Clopas were standing
nearby. Clearly, his mother's parents didn't have two daughters
named "Mary," so the second Mary had to have been something like a
cousin, not a sister in our sense.
In other contexts, such as those addressing groups of
Christians, Blair translated adelphoi as "brothers and sisters" when
those addressed were not all men, since we don't use "brother" in
this inclusive sense.
This brings up what is called "sexually neutral" or
"inclusive" language. Blair has tried to translate anthropos as
"person" or "human being" instead of "man," because it is the
generic word for human being, and nowadays "man" is increasingly
only used to refer to male human beings (whose Greek is aver). Blair
has not, however, done this when it would make the phrase awkward or
call undue attention to itself.
And Blair could not bring himself to do anything with
"nonsexist" pronouns. "He/she" stands out like a feminist banner,
and to me the singular use of "they" has not yet got to the state
where the singular use of "you" now is in English (as witness the
trouble you get into in trying to decide whether to use a singular
or plural verb-form with it). Blair is sorry to antagonize
feminists, who bristle at the sight of the generic "he"; but it is
either that or call attention to pronouns at the expense of meaning
and flow—and meaning and flow are part of what this translation is
all about. Blair uses the generic "he" for God also, rather than try
to substitute a noun.
Because of what Blair just called "flow," he has not put in
the verse numbering (though he kept the numbering of the chapters,
which usually are reasonably rational divisions of the text). Verse
numbering encourages taking phrases out of context, and makes it
difficult either to see the document as a whole or to follow the
logic of it. Blair thought a sacrifice of ease of finding an exact
location is a small price to pay for ease in reading the whole text.
And, of course, the original hearers did not have what they were
listening to divided up into chapters and verses.
In cases where there are allusions that everyone in those
times would know, Blair occasionally put the allusion into the text
itself rather than into a footnote, on the grounds that the author
would undoubtedly have done so if he had supposed that his hearers
would have needed it. I also translated measurements into
rough-and-ready natural equivalents that mean something to us rather
than numeric equivalents in our metric system, which sound
anachronistic and convey a false sense of accuracy. Thus, the
students row several "bowshots" from land; the stone water jars hold
ten or fifteen "bucketfuls" rather than two or three "measures";
and so on.
Because of structural differences in language, Blair
occasionally introduced indirect discourse when direct discourse was
used in the Greek, and have been pretty free with connective terms,
substituting the English word that seemed to be called for by the
logic of what was being said. Connectives, more than anything else,
cannot be rendered one-for-one.
These are a few of the major changes. There are many
others, any of which can cause startled reactions. Suffice it to say
that Blair feels he can justify all of them, based on the current
meaning of the words and the general meaning of the Greek.
Faithful to the personalities and writing style of the
authors
A second thing Blair attempts in this translation is to
adjust the English style to what he perceives to be the style and
personality of the Greek writer, instead of trying to make the book
one coherent whole. The authors wrote very different Greek, some
extremely fluent and elegant, some literate but down-to-earth (some
even "earthy" at times), and some stylistically inelegant and even
quite poor.
Thus, Paul comes out sounding "talky," using contractions
and such, because it is perfectly clear that he was dictating as
fast as the words popped into his head, occasionally even losing his
grip on the sentence he was in. Mark's Report is actually quite
awkward and not seldom ungrammatical, obviously written by someone
for whom Greek was very much a second language. Luke's Greek, on the
other hand, is fluid and literary, though with a Hebraic cast to it,
Matthew's rather pedantic, and John's an extremely poetic use of
ordinary language. The Rock's letters are somewhat pompous,
especially the second, which is not in a style as good as the first
(on which he says he had help by Paul's friend Sylvanus), and
Hebrews is a superb example of elegant Greek writing.
Blair would be the first to admit that translations like
the King James Version are beautiful and even poetic, and they
sometimes do a fine job of rendering the peculiarities of the Greek
into something that sounds very much like English (e.g. "said unto
them" gets across Luke's peculiar "said toward them" very adroitly).
Such translations are not "faithful" in the second sense of the
term, even when they are in good English, because they transform
what is sometimes quite pedestrian into something lofty and elegant.
That is not what Blairis after.
Faithful to when the documents were written
Blair also wanted to be "faithful" to the documents in the
sense that to put them into the order they were actually written in.
As we have them from the traditional compilation, you find the
Reports and Acts first, and then the letters—basically, in
descending order of length— when the fact is that almost all of the
letters belong before any of the Reports.
Of course, in many cases it is by no means obvious when the
documents were written, and it is even open to dispute as to by
whom—though this is not to be taken as meaning that everything is up
for grabs. There is a good deal of evidence for some of them, both
from references from other ancient writers (the "Fathers of the
Church") and internally; but for others, early Christians are silent
or not in agreement, and the internal evidence says either nothing
or things that can be interpreted several ways, depending on what a
given commentator thinks was the state of Christianity at the time.
For example, does the reference in First Peter to being persecuted
as "Christians" refer to the fact that people were persecuted for
their belief—which had occurred from the beginning—or to the formal
crime of being a "Christian," which would put the letter late?
Anyhow, Blair tries his best, and when he perpetrates
something controversial, he feels he can justify the position. But
so can anyone; the only real evidence we have is the documents
themselves, and we have to make educated guesses based on what is in
them.
But be aware that this is only translation, not a treatise
that goes into the various controversies (and they are as legion as
the Gadarene demons) and discusses the relative merits of various
positions and gives detailed evidence for my view. To do all this
would take many volumes (in fact, Blair’s justification simply for
putting Matthew's Report after Mark's and Luke's does take a whole
book:
The Synoptic Gospels Compared, published (The Edwin Mellen
Press).
But what he does here is let the documents speak for
themselves as much as possible, once we have them in an English
that says what they originally said. But, of course, since they are
not completely self-explanatory, Blair incluses little introductions
to each, giving a hint as to when he think the document was written
and why he think so, a bit of the context that would make sense out
of some of the allusions, reasons why he translates certain words in
a certain way, and a bit of what he thinks it was about, as well as
what it implies about Jesus and the Christian enterprise.
Blair needs to give a more detailed commentary on
Revelation, however, since, while it may have been revelatory to the
original audience, it is to us an enigma, unfamiliar as we are with
the historical context, with what is called "apocalyptic"
literature, and with number symbolism and its function.
Faithful to the psychological context
We have not run out of ways of being faithful yet.
Presumably, each of the authors had a reason for why he was writing.
In many of the introductions, Blair tries to discover this by a
"psychological contextualism," giving what he thinks the situation
was at the time, and what psychological demands this made on the
author, explaining why he wrote at all, and why he said what he
said.
For instance, for Blair it makes no psychological sense to
say that James would write a letter, using Abraham as an example of
actions rather than faith, after Paul had written Romans, where Paul
brings up James's exact position and then thoroughly refutes it. It
does make sense, however, as a rebuttal to the less sophisticated
argument of Galatians, in which Paul used Abraham as an example of
faith rather than actions, but in the process seemed to imply that
actions were completely irrelevant.
Further, if James, a man of great prestige, had written
this letter right after First Corinthians, then it makes
psychological sense for someone in Corinth who got hold of it to
have denounced Paul as a fraud and a heretic, and to have him driven
out of town in disgrace—thus prompting Second Corinthians.
Reading the Bible in the traditional order, you miss all of
this, because the documents have no relation to each other. Seeing
them chronologically opens up new vistas into how Christianity
developed in its early years.
Faithful to history and the intent of the authors
It is no secret that the authors of these documents were
not just writing history or biography; quite clearly, from the very
beginning, they were trying very hard to get across the religious
significance of what they were saying. The question is, is this
religious significance something they added to the events that
happened, or did the events themselves actually have it?
This is the "Jesus of history/Christ of faith" controversy;
and it is actually what prompted the investigation that gave rise to
this book. Since Blair is a philosopher with a scientific
background, he is not really interested in basing his life and
conduct on legends that are not factual, however meaningful and
beautiful they might be. Blair does not, however, subscribe to that
silly view of science that something isn't "scientific" if it's not
materialistic. Science is the enterprise that tries to find out what
the facts really are, not what fits some preconceived view of what
they ought to be. True, "this worldly" explanations are, for good
reasons, preferable to "supernatural" ones; but one shouldn't cling
to inconsistent and self-contradictory positions just because the
alternative might involve something spiritual.
So, while on the face of it, the "Jesus of history" theory
is attractive scientifically, the alternative is therefore not
immediately ruled out of court. We have to test the theories to see
what holds up under scrutiny. Remember, our only evidence available
is the documents in this book. Any theory must make sense of them.
You see, almost any assertion of fact is subject to
verification or falsification by an application of a generalization
of scientific method, because it inevitably implies (predicts) that
if it is a fact, some other things have to be facts also. These
other things may be testable; and if they aren't facts, then the
view that predicts them is false.
In the case in question, the alleged fact is that Jesus was
simply a very wise and holy man. But in the New Testament, he is
portrayed as the Son of God and a miracle-worker who rose from the
dead. Now if the alleged fact is true, then the documents are
factually false; and so either the authors were lying, or they
honestly thought they were relating what happened and were
innocently deluded.
It is easy enough to falsify the theory that the authors
were lying. People only lie if they have something to gain by it.
But the authors of the documents here received no money, no
prestige, no comfort, nothing but poverty, hatred, suffering,
horrible torture, and death. They had absolutely nothing to gain by
telling these stories, and everything to lose (see Second
Corinthians). Why would they lie?
The other prediction gets spelled out in this way:
Originally, Jesus was such a powerful personality that his followers
were fascinated by him and his teaching. But this teaching was in
some ways subversive, and so he was killed. After his death, his
followers related what he had said and how holy he was; and as time
went on, more and more glowing characteristics and events were added
to the original narrative, symbolically enhancing his prestige. As
still more time passed, these were accepted as facts, with the
result that eventually, the authors of the documents thought that
the miraculous events had actually occurred. The "Jesus of history"
had been transformed into the "Christ of faith," whose life now had
a new, profound significance for the salvation of souls, and
Christianity was born as a religion.
But what this theory now predicts is that the earliest view
of Jesus would be that of the human Galilean sage, full of holiness
and enigmatic statements. Only after quite a few decades had passed
(especially after people who had seen and known Jesus had died)
would the fantastic embellishments be accepted as actual events. And
it was then that the documents reporting them were written.
The obvious way to test this, of course, is to arrange the
documents in order of writing and see (a) how far away the earliest
ones are from Jesus' death, and (b) whether the early documents deal
with the Galilean sage as opposed to the divine wonder-worker. If
they do, then the probability is high that the theory is valid, and
one can abandon Christianity as a religion, and simply keep it as an
interesting historical phenomenon, perhaps gleaning something from
the wise pronouncements reported.
If, on the other hand, the beginning is relatively close to
the actual events of Jesus' life, and if the "Christ of faith" is
there from the get-go, the theory has a severe problem. This
difficulty becomes more acute if the statements of the "Jesus of
history" do not appear until considerably later. A further blow
would happen if some of the documents explicitly seem to refute
this theory (e.g. by saying, "If you don't believe that what I am
saying actually happened, go ask these other people who were there
and saw it for themselves.")
So as you read these documents from beginning to end, you
will be able to follow The translator in his journey through the
texts, and judge for yourselves why, when all was said and done, he
found he had to remain a Christian. To Blair, it was all quite
exciting; to his own surprise at how clear it became that the "Jesus
of history" and the "Christ of faith" were in fact one and the same.