Undeception

Recently I read Samuel Butler’s prose translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. At one point I was struck by his rendition of line 351 in Book 8 of the Odyssey: “A bad man’s pledge is bad security.”

Good line! I wondered if Butler had simply translated it, or if he constructed this particular expression himself to approximate the sense of the meaning of the Greek expression, or if the aphorism in Butler had a prior but post-Homeric history. So I set off a-Googling.

Long story short, it’s his own translation. But what I found was that there is a history of disagreement as to the actual sense of the original statement.

First I came across this translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, which has apparently also been published:

Johnston: It’s a nasty thing to accept a pledge made for a nasty rogue.

This was quite a different spin. You see, the context is that Poseidon is vouching for Ares, promising that Ares would pay the damages caused by his affair with Hephaistos’ wife Aphrodite. Hephaistos is incredulous; as Butler understood it, he responds to the effect of, “It would be stupid for me to trust him to pay me back.” If you read the next few lines, you’ll see why Butler’s translation makes some sense. Hephaistos asks Poseidon, “What if Ares runs away — how am I going to force mighty Poseidon to pay me in his stead?”

In Johnston’s version on the other hand, Hephaistos is not trying to communicate that it is simply foolhardy to rely on someone who is untrustworthy; rather, his point seems to be that getting involved with rogues in any capacity is somehow “nasty”, which I took to mean immoral, unethical, or otherwise repugnant. “Poseidon, why would you lower yourself like that?” That was such an interesting take that I knew I’d have to look further. His well received translation notwithstanding, Butler was not known as a Homeric scholar, so I began to wonder on that basis if his memorable phrase might actually be an inaccurate translation of this line.

So I looked elsewhere. Another somewhat esteemed translation is that of the poet Alexander Pope:

Pope: Will Neptune (Vulcan then) the faithless trust?
He suffers who gives surety for the unjust:

The idea is that there are negative consequences for anyone vouching for scoundrels, a somewhat ambiguous rendition that still implies the same understanding as Butler.

Finally I found the Homeric text itself and, being more of a Koine man, had to put a little effort into making sense of it. Here’s the text:

δειλαί τοι δειλῶν γε καὶ  ἐγγύαι ἐγγυάασθαι.

Worthless indeed are even the pledges pledged by the worthless.

If my translation is any good, it seems to indicate that Butler and Pope give a better sense for sense translation than does Johnston.

So I ask my learned readers: do you know of any linguistic/cultural reasons why Johnston, the only proper classical scholar among the bunch, might turn out to be right?

One of the things you have to get used to when studying another language academically is the sometimes bewildering number of modifiers placed on nominal cases, which themselves may be overwhelming in their own right. Not only must you learn to distinguish the accusative from the dative, and the dative from the genitive (etc.), but then you have to grapple with things like a dative of means as opposed to a dative of manner. I think my all-time favorite is genitive of time within which.

Initially I questioned if some of these categories weren’t just being made up for the novelty of it or, since I was studying NT Greek at a conservative Christian college, because some exegetes with a mystical bibliology were going overboard trying to milk every last drop of meaning from a God-breathed text.

I was wrong, and moreover regarding the latter conjecture, I would that every person trying to milk every last drop of meaning from the Bible were so properly thorough in their linguistic analysis, rather than utilizing the type of “exegesis” that consists of throwing a verse against the wall and seeing what sticks.  By no means am I saying that overwrought dissection isn’t possible, but as I learned more about how language works, I began to appreciate its complexity and have consequently concluded that we do indeed usually need such categories to properly describe what’s being said.

But anyway, I was reminded of the usefulness of these categories recently as I came across this statement by Jesus in Mat 5.12:

χαίρετε καὶ ἀγαλλιᾶσθε, ὅτι ὁ μισθὸς ὑμῶν πολὺς ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·

Rejoice and be glad, because your compensation will be ample among the heavens.

Now, it is true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and there is a chance that one could make the argument that the following observation is an illustration of just that!

The thing I wanted to point out was that “compensation” is singular but “your” is plural. So it appears he’s talking about a single compensation for multiple people. Most translators would note the possibility that the possessive pronoun is distributive (there’s one of those fancy categories). In other words, is Jesus saying, “You guys are going to share in something great” (the literal reading) or ”You will each find your (individual) compensation to be ample” (a distributive relationship between the possessive pronoun and the object)? Without the very real category of distributive, someone taking a mechanically literalistic reading might conclude that there is one collective reward. But if the possessive is distributive, things make more sense according to our own way of understanding how wages are supposed to work. The distributive reading is indeed the conventional reading, and it makes sense; there do seem to be cases in which the object is clearly not shared as a collective heap but must rather be conceived of as parceled out among the possessors.

This might be one of those cases; surely each persecuted individual deserves his own share. Right? But wait: are we justified in choosing the reading that makes the most sense to us without verifying that we’re not reading our own cultural views back into the text? Scholars commonly remind us that the people of Palestine, as those in the East reportedly do even now, thought much more corporately than individualistically, the latter outlook being commonly claimed as an heirloom of Greek thought that only later influenced Christianity. When we blindly assume that, for instance, the OT prophets were making individualized promises to each of us (Jer 29.11 comes to mind), we run the great risk of personalizing more than we were ever intended to. Matthew was certainly the Gospel the least influenced by Hellenism and the most reflective of Hebraic modes of thought and expression. (And if Goodacre et al. are correct, Luke’s version in chapter 6 that has this exact phrase is borrowed directly from Matthew, not Q…)

Honestly, on this one, I’m not sure. For one thing, wages (a possible translation for μισθὸς) were, then as now, typically given to individuals. And there’s something to be said for the distributive sense when considering the adjective πολὺς ‘much, many, great, plentiful’ with the singular noun. But is it at least possible that Jesus wasn’t promising everyone “wages”, or that they would have their own personal pan pizza, but that he’d deliver a large sheet pizza for us to share? The Sheep and the Goats judgment later in Matthew 25 is certainly pictured as an en masse affair.

Oh, there’s certainly a sense in which this is an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question (what’s it matter so long as we get what’s coming to us?), but I’d still like to know what you think. Would a “collective reward” picture have any interesting implications or advantages over the more typical “individual reward/wage” view?

As a fairly new owner of a smart phone running the Android OS, I was happy to find a Greek NT resource for only $0.99. This app, called simply “Westcott-Hort Greek New Testament” (don’t groan – see below), is based off that outdated but public domain edition, but is enhanced with morphological tagging, lexical data (from Strong’s, but please don’t hold that against it), and notes on significant variant readings from NA27 to mitigate deficiencies in the outdated Westcott-Hort text uncovered since 1881. The text of the AV is available by clicking on the verse numbers.

Use Barcode Scanner or click the image from your phone to download this app.

There are a couple interface issues, such as (currently) not giving the option to go to a particular verse; one must simply navigate to it from within its chapter. But hey, it beats paying more for other apps to give you access to the Greek NT, usually with fewer features than this app offers. If you’d like to try it out, remember that Android Market lets you refund your purchase within 24 hours with only the click of  a button. Highly recommended.