Friday, December 6, 2024

Someone asks why I am using the Common English Bible - An Uncredentialed Lay Perspective

I WAS given a used copy of the Common English Study Bible and am going through it, reading the very interesting commentary.  I've been doing that with the Christian Community Bible which has a commentary that is from a decidedly liberation theological orientation, specifically a Catholic one so I wanted to get other opinions on what the text means.   I find that reading third-world, especially community specific liberation theology to be enormously persuasive in a way that abstract, academic commentary can't really compete with.   I read liberation theologies from a number of communities and orientations and have yet to find one that doesn't teach me something I didn't know.

I've checked several of the gotcha texts on several topics that interest me and the CEB doesn't feel quite as likely to have a strong a priori theological bent to it which some of the others, on occasion, definitely seems to.  And it's a translation done in language that isn't supposed to tax the reading ability of a 7th grader and I know some atheists read my blog to say "gotcha" and I don't want to tax them any more than I do, anyway.   It was a shock to me to find out how many college-credentialed among the English speaking People can't seem to even read at a 7th grade level. 

And I actually like the CEB.  I like several of the modern English translations quite a lot, though none of them have yet to reach the poetical levels of some of the old translations that are done in English that sounds nice but is a serious impediment to understanding it.   

My preferred translation of the New Testament right now is one which isn't poetical, the one by David Bentley Hart which benefits from his extensive knowledge of Greek, both the Christian and pagan literatures and his extensive reading of the earliest available understandings of it among the Christian writers who had the closest available knowledge of the world and milieu into which the writers of the texts had to say about its meaning.   I like how he made a jarring, startling translation one which Rowan Williams said reminds us of the dangerousness of the texts.  He reproduces into English the crudeness of the writing of some of the books.  One of those which I find most jarring and appealing is the use of the "historical present,"  using a present tense verb to talk about something that happened in the past, which is both more colloquial, something that we were taught wasn't quite proper, but which makes you feel the intensity and need of the author to say what they're saying to an an audience (many of whom would have heard instead of read the text) so as to make it relevant to their own experience.   

The meaning of Scripture is too important to let sounding pretty get in the way.  A lot of it should jar and force attention and thought and confront.  

I did use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer text of Psalm 51 the other day because that's what was being sung.  I generally think that most translations, for the most part, tried to stay faithful to the original used, whether that be the Hebrew of the Hebrew Scriptures OR the Greek translation of those texts (which were made by Jewish scholars, NOT Christians) or the Greek "original" of the New Testament, or the Aramaic for the few texts that were written in that language.  

It being the Christmas season in which such stuff comes up, I think the theological and doctrinal fudging of "original" texts probably occur in every edition of those that comes down to us.  We don't have "original" texts for the New Testament, we have manuscript copies of those.  Manuscripts, themselves, can often be better considered to be "editions."   Some of that is built right into the foundation of Scripture.  The Hebrew Scriptures contain, I believe very strongly, actual passages of "original" text, some of that very likely written down from oral transmission,  but every book among that is a product of long and extensive editing, commentary, theological and doctrinal insertion, etc.  I don't have any problem with that.  The idea that any of it can be said to be an "original" text in the way that that phrase is used for a modern author is nonsense, though by that I don't mean in any way that what comes down to us is unworthy of consideration.  

I see no reason to believe that the commentators, editors, etc. who produced the "original" of Isaiah or Jeremiah or the other books were not as inspired as the original authors whose texts form the seed from which the books as we have them grew.   I will say that as I have been studying the Bible, among the things I've come to understand is that most of those who comment on it and edit it and translate it fall into two categories, those who really and sincerely want to understand what it means and those who want to persuade other People that their a priori ideological and doctrinal claims are supported by what they produce.   I don't think there is any way to know when what we read is the product of one or the other.  I can say that a lot of the nonsense that is common received "wisdom" about the Septuagint as opposed to the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Scriptures is nonsense.  The Septuagint was a translation made by Jewish Scholars MUCH OF IT BEFORE THE BIRTH OF JESUS so it isn't a "Christian forgery."   I think that where it differs from the Masoretic text as defined by later Rabbis and scholars it is a sincere expression of their understanding of what the manuscripts they were working from meant.   I think if their motives can be questioned, those who produced the Masoretic Text in the period after Jesus and while there was active and often severe reason for a text that differed from what Christianity said could have had a motive to fudge that the original translators of the Septuagint didn't have because such an ideological struggle didn't exist then.  That's not to say that there is any one place where such a disputed text or interpretation can be safely attributed to such a dishonest motive,  I'm sure that in a lot of places, what comes down to us now is a product of differences in available manuscripts which can be counted on to have been different, back then.  So I'm not attributing such motives only fair-mindedness and even-handedness in making such accusations.   I have no problem for those who reject a Christian understanding of Scripture on the basis of sincere belief, I have no problem with even significant diversity so long as everyone treats everyone fairly and with respect.   

Let me be entirely clear,  I THINK THAT EVERY READING, EVERY HEARING OF SCRIPTURE OR ANY OTHER TEXT IN ANY SUBJECT MATTER PRODUCES AN INTERPRETATION OF WHAT WAS SAID.   That is intrinsic to how thinking as a human, and I assume other organisms, happens.   Every hearing of the "original" every reading of the "original" would have produced variant understandings of it.  Every transmission of even an attempted verbatim "text" or the original would have been open to changes made from the minds of even those whose determination was to transmit exactly what they'd heard or read.  That is just how it is to be a human being doing such things.   It is remarkable to me that the Christians most wedded to "the text" the evangelicals and fundamentalists are those denominations most prone to radical division on the basis of different understandings of exactly the same words.  Those who make an idol of the King James Version as the "literal truth" from God don't ever seem to agree on what those texts mean.  The same is true of Rabbis whose Masoretic texts of Scripture are as exactly uniform as it is probably possible for humans to produce, one of the glories of that tradition is the practice of intense and precise dispute over texts.   I think that's extremely healthy and honest.   Far better than the Catholic assertions of the authoritative magisterium. 

I should say that I am also far more likely to believe some of the earliest commentators on these things.  I have come to really believe that Papias was probably telling the truth from his direct knowledge that there was a Hebrew (or, I'd guess more probably Aramaic) text of the sayings of Jesus which may well have come directly from Matthew, the Apostle of Jesus for reasons I stated before.  I think it's entirely probable that a tax collector for Rome was literate and in the habit of writing so if one of them had become a member of the inner circle of Jesus, it's entirely natural that such a person would have put his memory of what he said into writing and that that document would have been widely copied and distributed, within the limits of the early Christian world of the time.  I think that whoever complied the first edition of the Gospel of Matthew very likely was someone who was familiar with a Greek translation (such as Papius said were made) of that text and who was clearly familiar with an early copy of Mark's Gospel and so combined them.  I think it's very likely that the author of Luke had access to Matthew's Gospel as well as a manuscript of Mark and not improbably a Greek or  translation or the original Aramaic sayings by Matthew among those sources he claimed he consulted to come up with his Luke-Acts.  It's clear he would have compiled a lot of information about the earliest Churches as well as the life of Jesus to write those books.  

The "historical-critical" practices of the late 20th and early 21st centuries have reached a point well past diminishing returns.  The practice of condescending rejection of what those we have who were closest in time and place to the beginning of Christianity, the writing of the Scriptures is entirely out of hand.  As I've said that is done to the extent it is in regard to no other genre of ancient literature.  It is done to debunk, not to produce honest scholarship.   When John says that Jesus was writing in the dirt, when Mark says that Jesus read from the Scroll of Isaiah, they were in a lot better position to have known or heard Jesus or those who knew him than any late 20th or early 21st century "Jesus" recreator."  Their "Jesus" as an illiterate, based on what they take to have been your "typical" Jewish peasant of the time is as phony as anything found in some fundamentalist theme-park or Hollywood would-be presentation of him.   I say that as someone who has said that if Jesus and Paul were illiterate, their intellectual accomplishments would be far more and in no way less impressive.    I'm willing to read some of the conclusions of modern scholarship - the commentary of the CEB Study Bible and virtually all other modern commentaries are the product of that - but I reserve the right to practice rigorous criticism of that scholarship, too.

P.S. I was also asked why I start my posts with bold capital letters.  I started doing that after reading Ogilvy On Advertising in which he said it made reading text easier to start paragraphs with a bold letter. I liked the way it looked when I started the post that way.  After I changed to a san-serif font, because I found it easier to read than a serif-font,  I dropped the practice for every paragraph because that looked better to me and I started using a larger font for those initial bold capitals.   

And, years ago, Simps made it clear he didn't like it so I didn't want to drop it, entirely.   To be entirely honest.


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