WE ALMOST NEVER ADMIT that the act of reading texts written by other people is, inevitably, an act of interpretation. The plain facts of what the act of writing and reading written and hearing heard words is proves that. You hear a series of sounds and, if you know the language sufficiently, your mind resolves those into concepts which produce either coherent thoughts or incoherence. If you are learning a language, you can listen to a recording of something, something which, at first, totally goes over your head but which, with repeated hearings, gradually becomes clear. The text hasn't changed, your ability to interpret it has. And different people will come up with different understandings of it, usually not seriously different, sometimes very consequentially different. I doubt there's anything to be done about that, it's going to be the same no matter what, though I don't think all interpretations are the same, certainly not those which end up harming People and other living beings. Do unto others what you would have them do unto you and by their fruits you will know them are the safest rules to follow in judging the validity of all of this and those rules have the most impeccable provenance, no matter what the repute and provenance of the claims are. That Augustine or Calvin or "St." Pope JPII said so makes no more headway with me than if the good woman at the feed store down the road said it, frequently, less so. I can see who is more likely to do good.
The same is true for significant marks made on a surface, paper, clay, sand, etc. Only with written texts your mind will translate those into unheard sounds which are then resolved into ideas. I do not have the experience of language without having the experience of hearing, I would be extremely interested in how someone who learned language while entirely deaf would explain their experiences of that. Though I would only be able to imagine something like what that was like no matter how hard I tried to understand it.
When the language isn't one you know as thoroughly and familiarly as the mother tongue you learned as a child and have been gaining familiarity with it your entire life and exposure to its literary culture and daily use, the necessity of interpretation should be admitted up front. A translator who, ideally, is trying to make what those words say make sense to themselves and to those to who they want to pass that message - NOT THEIR OWN - to, owes it to their audience to admit that all of it goes through that filter which is even with the best of intent as capable of producing distortions as well as elucidation.
Even for versions and dialects of your mother tongue, older modes of expression you are not fully familiar with, things will be imperfectly understood if not maliciously and evilly used by intent. One infamous passage of English language translated scripture like that is when Jesus is made to say to his followers to let the kids in to see him, telling those kid-haters (I think they were all patriarchal type males) "Suffer the little children," sometimes even failing to finish the sentence " ...to come unto me for such is the Kingdom of Heaven. " He was telling them to put up with the kids not to hit them. Which is sometimes used by sadistic assholes to claim Jesus said beating kids was morally good for them. That one of the examples of that which I heard on TV was an Irish Catholic priest in charge of an elementary school shows how even someone who had to have read that enough to understand the passage twisted and distorted an unfortunate translation for his own hateful ends. Despite what is often said about the "literary value" of some translations, that shows how dangerous translating more for the sake of literary effect than meaning can be.* To tie that in with a recent post, that kind of thing is bound to happen when only unmarried men or other exclusive, small cliques, have ultimate power in an institution. Though there have been many married men and women who are as big assholes of that type.
For us when it comes to The Bible, for the entire modern audience, even those who have studied the languages of the Scriptures for many years, all of Scripture, even when read in the original languages, are, in effect, an interpretation, probably as much so as a translation is. I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to say that the only persons who had access to the full meaning of the original were those who wrote it AND IN MANY CASES THEY WERE INTERPRETING WHAT EYE-WITNESSES HAD TOLD THEM, PROBABLY THAT HAPPENING IN ARAMAIC, the author of Luke's Gospel and Acts explicitly says that's what his writings, a whole third of the New Testament canon was based on. For the bibliolatrous Fundamentalists who might be reading this, not even the writers of Scripture could have had access to that mythical pure, inerrant version of the KJV imagined into Hebrew, Aramaic and genuwine Koine Greek because they, too, relied on what other people had written down.
Even before that, when it's Scripture which is full of many different things but most importantly what is claimed to be divinely authoritative Statements and Commandments, that act of interpretation starts with those who authored the Scriptures, the Prophets, the Gospel Writers, the Epistle Writers, the story-tellers, those who authored other texts that were, then, collected by others and made part of the canon of Scripture, were interpreting their experience of encounters with God or divine inspiration or their commentary, ideas on, enhancements of and, in some cases rather clear ideological bending, of what previous authors produced. As I've said recently, I think some of what they put in it should have been left on the cutting room floor. Some of that Scripture has produced not only bitter and painful fruit but a full measure of evil.
As it happened, in a project I've been working on for myself, as an exercise, of translating Luke and Acts into what I hope is very clear and simple Piron-style Esperanto. In addition to several modern "simple English" translations, I've been consulting the original texts in Greek** to the best of my inadequacy. I have also been consulting the translations made by the classicist, philosopher and, I guess, theologian David Bentley Hart whose knowledge of the Greek Language is unusually large for someone making such a translation. His long and essential preface material and post-script material are extremely enlightening on many issues upon which he exposes his own biases and reasons for doing what he did with rather stunning honesty as part of his critique of the efforts of others. Though what, I'd say, is more fairly called his orientation instead of "biases" are as someone familiar with the Greek language from the most ancient pagan texts and up through the relevant period of the early centuries of Christianity and as a quite independent member of the Orthodox branch of Christianity.
I can't claim to anything more than being a self-taught somewhat poor reader of the Koine Greek of the Bible who has become extremely skeptical of, especially, the influence of Augustine and his followers in Western Christianity and who has read, mostly, Gregory of Nyssa and a few of the other Greek theologians in English translations. Gregory, especially, led me to understand just how much of the most horrific part of Western theology, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, were based, not on what the texts closest to the witness of Jesus in person say, the Greek Gospels, Paul, James, . . . but on mistranslated and the late-in-life psychological fixations of Augustine and others who either disregarded what the Greek texts say or who could not even read them built on inferior Latin translations and, then built on that sand, instead.
In his Post Script, he goes into one of the most serious Western distortions of Scripture which has had little but terrible consequences for both the psychology and culture and theology of Western Christianity, things such as God eternally damning to the most horrific pain those who sin even mildly or, in the most pathologically developed aspect of that distortion, those who God merely chooses for eternal damnation before God creates them for that fate. Among the other things I can see that came from that was that kind of atheism which rejected that God and, even more so, the evil cartoon of Jesus that, for example, the minor British poet Stevie Smith slammed Christianity over it:
Is it not interesting to see
How the Christians continually
Try to separate themselves in vain
From the doctrine of eternal pain?
They cannot do it,
They are vowed to it,
The Lord said it,
They must believe it.
So the vulnerable body is stretched without pity
On flames forever. Is this not pretty?
The religion of Christianity
Is mixed of sweetness and cruelty.
Considering Smith's major theme was her pathological fixation with suicide, which she fulfilled, I have to wonder what place the decidedly grim view of Christianity she fashionably took played in that. I did like the radio play and the movie, which is probably about as much of a reason anyone remembers her apart from her slamming Christianity over those grim and unnecessary doctrines.
The American Fundamentalist fixation with the devil, fire and brimstone sermons, those Halloween Hell Houses which you have to conclude is a cover for them obsessively and sadistically enjoying the idea of the majority of humanity going to eternal punishment by their god of hell (I don't see how the idea of an eternal hell where Satan under whatever name they give him is in charge doesn't posit him as an all powerful god with different aims). Even when I was a child, I couldn't square that with the claims that such a God who would pointlessly torture souls eternally, without any hope of salvation, could possibly love such creatures he created. Either God is love or God makes creatures for eternal pain, in which case God is hate. If God does not make us to be able to understand how God could be both at once, that's certainly not our fault. That mainly Western God would be more of the ultimate dyspeptic Al Capp, a nasty son of a bitch.
And speaking of the devil, Augustine and his ilk are, as well, I think the inspiration of the myriads of modernist decadents and atheists who revel in so much of amorality and evil, while they share in a human weakness that Augustine, and Calvin had. Certainly a fondness for sadistic hatred, especially for those who are the least among us, was known before Western Christian patriarchs invented that, the precedents in many classical literatures and histories show that. I would go so far as to say that it is the psychological inspiration of every act of human and animal sacrifice, even that authorized by monotheistic religion.
I think it's reasonable to ask how much of Augustine's and others introduction of that into Christianity was a residuum of his previously held paganism.
Modern atheists would object to me pointing out that their predilections are a cultural result of the most twisted aspects of Western church orthodoxy and, in English speaking countries, probably France, too, one of the most developed aspects of that in the predestinarian parts of Calvinism. I read the meditations on God eternally roasting even unsinning babies who died without benefit of baptism made by those august fathers of Western Christianity and it is impossible to not conclude that they very much like and enjoy that idea. They seem to positively groove on it. In the process it is impossible to not conclude that they have issued the most outrageous slanders against Jesus, against God that it is possible to make, one which Stevie Smith rightly rejected though, a good but decidedly minor member of the 20th century Brit smart set, she never seems to have been introduced to the idea that maybe the large majority of Western Christians simply didn't understand what the often complex and often obscure texts say. David Bentley Hart concludes is discussion of it with this:
But the texts do not actually say any of that, and again, the absence of any hint of such a notion in the Pauline corpus (or, for that matter, in the fourth Gospel, or the “Catholic Epistles,” or those very early doctrinal and confessional texts the Didache and Apostles’ Creed, or the writings of the Apostolic Fathers . . .) makes the very concept nearly as historically suspect as it is morally unintelligible. Moreover, to read back into these texts either the traditional view of dual and in some sense synchronously eternal postmortem destinies or the developed high mediaeval Roman Catholic view of an absolute distinction between “Hell” and “Purgatory” would be either (in the former case) a dogmatic reflex rather than an exegetical necessity or (in the latter) an act of simple historical illiteracy. But I leave it to readers to reconcile the various eschatological passages of the New Testament with one another, or not, as they choose; the most I can do is offer an observation about two of the greatest and most brilliant Church Fathers of the later fourth and early fifth centuries. The Greek-speaking Gregory of Nyssa, who was a universalist and who simply assumed the purgatorial view of the gehenna, was able to unite all the various biblical images and claims in a fairly seamless synthesis in his writings, omitting nothing known to him as Christian canon. Conversely, the Latin-speaking Augustine, who took very much the contrary view, was far more selective in his use of scripture, was dependent on often grossly misleading translations, and had to expend enormous energy on qualifying, rephrasing, and explaining away a host of passages that did not really conform well to the theological system he imagined he had found in Paul’s writings. This is, if nothing else, instructive.
This rather rambling answer to a horrified reader who doesn't like where I'm going could certainly be better but I'm dealing with some ongoing issues. I hope to get back to commenting on the insanity of U.S. politics this week, maybe saving this topic for weekends.
* In going through my language exercise, I've come to the conclusion that the currently raging war between the "dynamic equivalence" and "formal equivalence" theories of biblical translations is rather pointless. Even the most "formally equivalent" translations is saturated by the same actions as are defined by "dynamic equivalence". I can compare that with my evolving ideas about singing opera in the languages those are written in as compared to using a good translation into the language the majority of the audience can understand. If it's a bad translation then it may as well not be understood, if it's a good translation that tells you what's going on, what's being said, while not doing too much violence to the music, that's certainly preferable to not understanding what's being said, what's going on and the whole story behind the thing. Which reminds me of, when he started setting the decadent poetry of Stefan George in The Book of the Hanging Gardens, Schoenberg remarked that he realized that, though German was his first language, he had never really thought of the meaning of some of the Schubert songs he'd known since his childhood.
Luckily, for us, we don't have to try to make it fit in with a preexisting melody. I wouldn't think of touching the Psalms to try to make singable texts, though the Magnificat and other Canticles are hard to get into a form that I really like.
Which could get me back to some of the preface material of DBH in which he proclaims his shock at the radicalism of the New Testament which, though he'd long been able to read the Greek texts, he didn't really appreciate till he had to try to figure out how to say it in modern English. I will say that though he confesses his doctrinal predispositions in what he concluded, I'd trust his to be fairly free of conscious or unconscious twisting of meaning to conform to any church or theological ideology. I can't claim that I think about these Scriptures in the language of DBH's translation but it has become one that I look at more and more when trying to figure out what the Koine text means. At least he's up front about where he's coming from.
** We don't have 'THE ORIGINAL' Greek texts of either of those, or, in fact, of any part of the New Testament, we have editions which choose words and sentences and passages of the oldest and some later manuscripts which don't always agree in many details and, at times, more serious parts of Scripture.
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