Both NT Wright, arguably the top New Testament scholar publishing today, and David Bentley Hart, the super-erudite Orthodox theologian who has taken even much of the Evangelical the world by storm, have released new translations of the New Testament in recent months. A friend of mine complained on Facebook that she had yet to hear any discussion about the need of a new bible translation.
That is rather unfortunate, because we seriously need one. Let me give a couple of examples, which will also give you a glimpse of some of the things you’ll get out of my Gospel of Mark Workshop:
Bread in Mark
The evangelist Mark uses the word “bread” (artos, ἄρτος) 21 (i.e., 7 x 3) times in his gospel. All but one of those occurrences are in the first half of his book; the only other is at the last supper (Mk 14.22).
Bread is a major theme in Mark, appearing some 3 times in each of the first eight chapters, and in fact (among other strategies) Mark builds the first half of his story around it. On the other hand, he uses the term “cup” (potērion, ποτήριον) 6 times, all but one of which (7.4) are found in the second half of his story— and again, he builds that half of his Gospel around the theme of the cup, among others.
Not entirely surprisingly, the two themes come together only in 14.22-23 (the last supper). So if you want to understand the Gospel of Mark, you have to recognize that he chooses his language very deliberately as he tells his story, and if you don’t get this, you’re missing a good deal of what he wants you to see.
Knowing this, you can understand why it’s not really helpful when translators decide to translate artos as bread one time, loaf another time, and leave it out altogether a third time. I’ve been studying Mark for more than ten years now, to the point where I’ve nearly memorized the entire book and even give workshops on it, and I can certainly assure you that despite his “rustic” style, Mark never ever uses a word carelessly— most especially when it’s one of his theme words!
So with this in mind, i invite you to compare Mark 2.26; 3.20; 6.8, 37-38, 41, 44, 52; 7.2, 5, 27; 8.4-6, 14, 16-17, 19; and 14.22 in the various translations that are available (you can readily compare quite a few of them at biblegateway.com).
You might argue that loaves means the same as bread, and that bread is ok in the singular but breads sounds odd in English— and you’d be right to argue that about English. But using loaves half the time and bread the other half suppresses a key auditory echo and obscures Mark’s thematic exposition.
And note in particular Mk 3.20, where NRSV and others just leave it out, presumably because “so that they could not even eat bread” seems odd— why single out bread, as opposed to other kinds of food? Could they eat carrots but just not bread? Surely this “must” be an example of Mark’s “rustic” usage!
Well, or so it might seem, if you’re not alert to the theme— and the fact is, no translators were very alert to “themes” like this, when any of our existing translations were published. For what is now called narrative criticism (the investigation of the writers’ various literary techniques and their impact on the story) has developed only in the past 30 years or so. (And by the way, it holds enormous and exciting promise for Orthodox theology!)
So it’s desirable to have a bracingly literal translation, as free as can be of theological or stylistic “decisions” by translators. It’s not good to think we know better than the writer what he “really wanted” to say, or to “smooth out” his style! And are we really surprised to discover in the Scriptures depths we never saw before?
Jesus’ faithfulness vs our faith
Another example is the famous and (needlessly) controversial expression, pistis Christou (πίστις χριστοῦ) found in Rm 3.22, Ga 2.16 (twice), 2.20, 3.22, and Ph 3.9; but contrast, e.g., Ga 3.26 and Col 1.4.
The Greek word pistis (πίστις) basically means trust or faithfulness, not belief in the sense we use it today— like, one “believes in reincarnation”, or “UFOs” or “penal substitutionary atonement” or some such.
And when Paul wants to specify the object of this trust or faithfulness, he uses the words in (en) or toward (eis). But when he wants to speak of the one whose trust or faithfulness it is, he uses a possessive such as my (mou, μου), or your (ὑμῶν, hymōn), or of Christ (christou, χριστοῦ). The KJV almost gets this correct, in that it has “the faith of Jesus” in the passages I mentioned; it would be better if they’d rendered it as “Jesus’ trust” or “Jesus’ faithfulness”, but the case is no different than saying something like pistis paulou— i.e., “Paul’s faithfulness”. You would never even think of translating this as “faith in Paul”! It just means Paul’s, or Christ’s, act of trust or faithfulness.
But just about all modern translators have decided that what St Paul “really means” by his expression “pistis christou” is not “Christ’s [own] faith(fulness)” in God, but “[our] faith in Christ”. You see the difference? St Paul says that Jesus’ faithfulness to God saved us, whereas almost every modern translator makes him say that our faith (or even “belief”) in Jesus saves us. This, of course, is because they need to find in Scripture support for Luther’s idea of sola fide— that we are saved by faith alone.
And here arises a very serious problem, which causes a lot of people to abandon their faith altogether: How can I come to have this faith— or worse: this “belief”? Can I make myself “believe” something? Is that even honest?
You’d never know from your modern Bible translation that St Paul never demands that you have something called “faith”. He says over and over that Jesus’ faithfulness to God— his trust in God— has saved us. That’s a huge difference, and if the church hierarchs had any serious concern for these matters, they’d declare practically every last bible on the market invalid and not to be used by the faithful at all— and if not at home, how much less in church!
Oh, and by the way, all the fathers I’m aware of agree with me and the KJV, but not with the modern translators. The Greek is very simple; it’s only ideology that led people to view it as I’ve described.
Messiah
One final example: In our Bible translations, we need to stop using the word “Christ”. Of course, “Christ” is a perfectly legitimate translation of the Greek christos (χριστός, anointed), but we have to take into account the histories of words when we use them formally. For the New Testament writers, the word christos was simply the Greek equivalent of messiah, or anointed (one). If when you read the NT— especially perhaps Acts and St Paul— and every time you come to “Christ” you back-translate it as Messiah, you’ll quickly come to realize what the whole argument was about, in the apostolic era: Who is the Messiah?
But our translations don’t make it easy for us to see this, because the word christos had a subsequent thousand-year dogmatic development in which it came to be defined not by Old Testament notions of the Messiah so much as by the great conciliar dogmas about the Three Persons, the Two Natures, and the Virgin Birth. Those are, of course, completely correct and unimpeachable and necessary dogmatic formulations, but they are not the ideas that Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and others had in mind when they were writing about the Messiah. Those great dogmas draw out the implications of what the biblical writers were talking about, but those implications aren’t what the biblical writers were talking about. When the biblical writers said christos, they meant the Messiah, the Anointed eschatological figure prophesied in Isaiah, Daniel 7, and so forth.
When we hear Messiah, we can’t help thinking of the Old Testament. But when we hear Christ, we really do tend to think instead of the Three Persons, the Two Natures, and the Virgin Birth. Just read any Orthodox commentary that might come to hand, you’ll see what I mean— not only is that the direction that the fathers take, but the editors of the commentary (the Orthodox Study Bible being one of them) don’t really even seem to be aware of this shift or treat it as being in any way significant.
So if our New Testament translations (and any new commentaries we write) are to accurately reflect what the New Testament writers were in fact occupied with, they will need to be explicit about it. David Bentley Hart uses “Anointed”, which is OK, but I don’t think it communicates the Old Testament context quite as instantly as it should. NT Wright uses Messiah, so I award him that point.
Still!— two new translations by two major scholars— exciting times for those who love the Scriptures!