Undeception

While studying NT Greek in undergrad, I became interested in linguistics. I gradually became alarmed as I discovered that key insights into human language made by linguists were hardly ever taken into account among scholars intending to interpret the Bible from the original languages. Greek and Hebrew are treated by too many exegetes as special codes more than as living, changing, and internally diverse human languages.

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Over the last couple of days, Joseph Kelly and John Hobbins had a brief blogversation about what ḥesed means in the Hebrew Bible. These two guys are waaaaaaaay out of my league on this sort of discussion, and to my knowledge do not fall prey to the above mentioned shortcomings of biblical scholars, but reading Joseph’s last post prompted these thoughts.

Just as an outside observer, it appears that what we have here may be a result of treating semantics on a synchronic basis rather than reconstructing possible diachronic effects — not to mention the possible effect of synchronic language variation. That is, I think it’s clear that ḥesed means something very much like ‘loyalty’ in certain passages as Joseph suggests, ‘justice’ in others, and very much like ‘random acts of kindness’ in others (e.g. Ruth). As a linguist looking at this broad usage, I think we’re seeing the concept being used differently in different communities, probably living at different periods in history.

I admit that I’m no expert in OT chronology, and I have by no means done a study on every instance of this word. But I’ll offer one highly conjectural sketch of what the evolution of the word could have looked like:

It appears as though the word originally meant something akin to ‘obligated fairness’ and gradually evolved into more of a bland sense of ‘favor’. Psalms presents an early meaning, namely ‘justice, fairness’; at a later period (Exodus, 2 Samuel, etc.), Israel’s conviction of God’s favor for their community may have helped broaden and even dilute the concept to mean ‘loyalty, faithfulness’, perhaps further weakened toward ‘favor, goodness’ (essentially, “YHWH does right by us”); Ruth, typically dated in the Hellenistic period, might be a snapshot of the word at a late period in which the meaning of ‘goodness, favor’ has remained, the semantics of obligation possibly having dropped out over time (although I would also question ruling out a personal sense of obligation in Ruth’s faithfulness to Naomi).

I have focused here on possible diachronic reasons for this word’s varied usage rather than possible variation effects from different, synchronically coexisting theological or geographical communities. And as I said, this is nothing more than an armchair analysis. But this sort of variation in meaning between texts is absolutely the kind of thing that we must expect in our linguistic excavations in the Bible, and it’s also the kind of thing that biblical scholars don’t pay enough attention to. They often end up inflating words with all kinds of semantic baggage in ways akin to the Amplified Bible.

Lord knows I’m not accusing either the linguistically astute John Hobbins or Joseph Kelly of this, but I did think this particular discussion might benefit from those considerations in ways I hadn’t seen offered so far.

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?

Recently I ran across an old article¹ in the journal Language and had to smile at its similarity to a recent topic in the redaction criticism of the Gospels for which I previously noted a parallel in the translations I am studying in my dissertation.

In the Gothic translation of the Bible, at i Cor. xiii 2, we find swaswe fairgunja miþsatjau translating the Greek ὥστε ὄρη μεθιστάμεν (in the English version ‘so that I could remove mountains’). I wish to call attention to the word miþsatjau of the Gothic. One is struck by the inexactitude of the translation. Μεθ-ιστάμεν means ‘to move from one place to another’, or at least ‘to remove’, ‘to move away’. Μiþ-satjau should mean ‘to place with’ or ‘beside’, almost the reverse of the meaning of the Greek word.

Of course the difference is between two closely related semantic fields. Even in Old English, the word wið, which is the source modern English with, meant more commonly ‘against’ than ‘accompanying’. One at first wonders how “with” and “against” could be so closely related. It’s actually quite simple: it comes down to spatial considerations. Spatially speaking, friends who “see eye to eye” and competitors “standing nose to nose” are virtually indistinguishable. One who leans “against the wall” is very much “with the wall”. Many of us (at least in America) will talk of “fighting with” opponents rather than “fighting against” them. This is no isolated incident: it’s decidedly cross-linguistic because of the way the human brain most typically categorizes relationships in a fundamentally spatial sense. For instance, most prepositions in Indo-European seem to have started out as spatial adverbs, most of which have gotten metaphorically used to the effect that I can in a certain sense be with a friend who actually lives across the country in the sense that we figuratively “see eye to eye”. The Greek preposition/preverb μετα(-) sometimes denotes a transfer or change of location,² analagous to Latin trans- In the verb μεθιστάμεν³ here, we have at root something like ‘stand away from’ to the effect of ‘move away’, which the Gothic translator appears to have misconstrued to mean ‘stand with‘. But this is odd: while μετα can indeed mean ‘with’, it does so much more rarely in preverbs, and this is the only instance in the Gothic Bible in which miþ ‘with’ is prefixed to a verb in such a mistranslation of Greek μετα-. Here is Rice’s assessment:

As an explanation of the passage I offer the following: The translator was the victim of a momentary lapse, and, betrayed by the sound of the Greek prefix in the form μεθα- which stood in the original text, he erroneously supplied miþ- in his translation in place of the more or less accurate af- of Luke 16.4. The respective sounds represented by miþ- and μεθα- are closer than might at first seem, for the Greek e was close, the Gothic i was open, and by this time (4th century A.D.) θ was a spirant and equal to þ.

So there you have it: translator’s fatigue. It appears Wulfila should have called it a day before beginning chapter 8! _____________________________________

¹ Rice, Allan Lake. 1933. A Note on the Gothic Bible, i Cor. xiii 2. Language, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 87-88.

² As an illustration of my earlier point about the spatial roots of prepositions, one of μετα‘s most common meanings, ‘after’, resulted when ‘a change of physical space’ got metaphorically applied to time. Thus μετα typically covered both the spatial ’change to a place hence’ and the temporal ‘change to a time hence’.

³ In this verb, underlying meta-(histami) ‘I stand’ underwent a phonologically conditioned change to meth-(istami) before the aspirated consonant h of histami.

The so-called Synoptic Problem in biblical studies results from the search for an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that even in a cursory analysis essentially necessitates that there was borrowing between them. In many cases there are entire sentences that are reproduced verbatim in two or even all three of the Synoptics. Although the first to formulate the problem, Johann Jakob Griesbach, posited that Matthew and Luke were the source of Mark, the reverse order is the dominant theory today: the “priority of Mark” is the leading theory that posits Mark as the first written Gospel, which Matthew and Luke then used as a source.

Lately I’ve been interested to learn of Mark Goodacre’s special contribution to the argument for Markan priority. In essence, Dr. Goodacre has demonstrated that in parallel pericopes, while the different Gospels may differ significantly near the beginning of the passage, by the end they tend to conform to much more similar wording. After Goodacre goes on to show that the wording that corresponds more closely toward the end of each passage is more consistent with the wording of Mark throughout the rest of the passage, this amounts to a strong argument for Markan priority. This suggests that Mark was being used as the source, and the redactors of the other two Gospels, after starting off strong in their objective to make the story their own, had a tendency to undergo the effects of what Goodacre calls ”editorial fatigue”, i.e. they lapse into less creative, more verbatim borrowing from Mark.

I’ve got an idea related to all this rattling around in my head. Please stay with me.

As the earliest attested Germanic language by close to two hundred years, and a remarkably archaic language besides, the language of the Goths is extremely valuable for reconstructing Proto-Germanic. Unfortunately, virtually the only texts we have in the Gothic language are manuscripts of Wulfila’s translation of the NT, only about half of which have survived. This is doubly unfortunate because, as the translator burdened with the sacred responsibility of translating a sacred text, Wulfila was extremely slavish to the source text, aping the Greek syntax wherever it was at all intelligible in Gothic. This means that we have very little that we can be confident is authentic Gothic syntax.

What this also means is that where we observe significant variation between the Greek text and Gothic, we may then rightly suspect that we are looking at an instance of native Gothic syntax overriding that of Greek. Studying the deviation of Gothic from the Vorlage (source text) is thus potentially instructive. Here again, an unfortunate limitation is that we only have a very small corpus, so it’s hard to tell how much stock to put into each treatment of Greek.

However, my long-standing interest in the Synoptics suggested to me that for each of the more verbatim parallel passages that survive in the Gothic texts, we actually have two or three shots at seeing how Wulfila might represent a single Greek text: one for each Gospel that translates the identical parallel texts. From what I’ve seen so far, there is indeed usually a difference in the Gothic translation from Gospel to Gospel, even when the underlying Vorlage is identical.

Now back to Dr. Goodacre: I think there may be an analogue of editorial fatigue in the “Gothic Problem” I just laid out. Whereas Matthew’s and Luke’s intents to add distinctiveness to their source material dwindled as the passages drew on, I suspect that Wulfila’s apparent intent to maintain as faithful a translation as possible regardless of how wooden it sounded would have resulted in progressively more latitude in his treatment of the Greek as he grew more confident and/or “fatigued”. This progressive latitude in translation would thus work in reverse of editorial fatigue in a way, since the latter resulted in less variation whilst Wulfila’s fatigue would ostensibly work in the opposite direction. I am unaware of what the literature says about translators’ habits, but anecdotally I have certainly noticed that when I am translating Greek, Old English, or whatever, my initial intent to translate as literally as possible certainly degrades as I progress through the piece I am translating, with gradually increasing inclusion of dynamic equivalents as I progress.

What can be learned from this? Well, because ancient biblical translators were unlikely to carefully sculpt each pericope separately as a redactor would, the points of laxity/fatigue would likely come in less systematic spurts. When comparing Synoptical parallels, we could at best hypothesize that the less slavish treatment of identical Greek passages would probably be a translation further down into that translation session. From where I sit, the most it could do for someone interested in recovering native Gothic syntax is to suggest a reason why one Gospel’s translation may more closely resemble the source: it was translated closer to the beginning of a session than the same passage in another Gospel. It’s an interesting idea nonetheless, and one I’ll be keeping one eye on as I continue my dissertation research in this area.

Any thoughts?

Ok, I’ll give this a try, although I didn’t get any bites with my last attempt at soliciting information from the learned…

I need to find the best references for textual variants in the Gospels. I’m not as much interested in the critically identified “best readings” of the text themselves, but good apparati that show the variants. Right now I’m finding that Aland’s invaluable Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum has a cracking good apparatus, but I need at least one more good source to try to fill in gaps. My goal is to identify variations between the Vorlage and each of the early translations I’ll be working with, so while I don’t have time to become a textual critic, I do have to avail myself of the best available critical work in order to get an idea of what each translation’s Vorlage might have looked like so that I’ll be able to distinguish a stylistic/synctactically significant divergent rendering from a calque of an obscure MS variant.

Since starting my research of the Gospels for my dissertation, I have repeatedly wondered (as I idly mused earlier) if there have been any attempts to identify where the Gospels may have originated/developed based upon dialectal considerations. As I run across patterns such as Matthew’s preference for plural nouns and lexical issues such as synonym substitution that by all appearances don’t significantly influence thematic or other conscious stylistic differences, I automatically think dialect, although of course idiolect variation occurs within a single dialect. This is contingent, of course, on being able to identify the place of origin for other texts with which they may be compared, so I recognize it’s a tall order. I assume there are plenty of guesses about where certain Gospels (John, for instance) originated based upon other considerations.

I imagine that narrowing down geographical areas in which the texts (or their authors) might have originated and developed has the potential to influence our understanding of the issues related to the transmission and composition of the traditions/texts of the Gospels.

I’d like to ask anyone who reads this blog and is informed about these issues: how have they been treated in the literature? And if you aren’t personally aware, do you think you could refer me to someone who might be? I’d certainly appreciate it!

Using an analogy especially interesting to me as an historical linguist, Sabio Lantz at Triangulations reminds us of the power of understanding that the Christian faith isn’t quite as unique as we all like to think:

We often see that naive mono-linguists think their language is unique in its ability to express deep thoughts. Well of course they do — they have never mastered another language. A good way to cure this parochial blindness is to do comparative studies. Using comparative linguistics researchers have learned more about the very nature of language than by studying any one language in depth.

He draws a correlation (the same one I drew a while back) between comparative linguistics, which shows that the Indo-European languages are related by a common source language, and comparative biology, which shows us that all life is related by a common ancestor. He goes on:

I feel that religious folks who have never thoroughly understood another religion are handicapped in a similar way to mono-linguists. And no matter how deep they dive into their religion, no matter how thoroughly they know their religious history, their scriptures original language(s) or the intricacies of their religion’s theologies, it will be the rare person who will see the deep patterns of all human religious thought.

Sabio suggests that just as “[i]t is by comparative religious studies that people can see how much their religion shares with other religions,” so also “[d]oing comparative studies helps people to see the nature of human hearts which generates their faiths.”

Despite the fears of many Christians, acknowledging such similiarities does not itself undermine the validity of Christianity. In fact, C.S. Lewis argued that certain universal similiarities such as shared mythological themes are to be expected. In his essay “Myth Became Fact”, he remarked that he would be more troubled if Christianity did not correspond to universal ideas in mythology, even in specific motifs such as “dying god” imagery:

We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block, if they weren’t.

To be clear, this is not Sabio’s point. As a former Christian, he does indeed believe that the universality of Christian themes that contradicts Christianity’s typical claims of exclusivity should lead one to the conclusion that Christianity is superfluous as a whole. I disagree. But such claims of exclusivity are indeed overwrought and largely based upon the belief in an inerrant source of all knowing. I don’t think Christianity is even fundamentally about holding onto various and sundry truth claims, but about surrendering my being to God in Christ.

Like Sabio, I am uncomfortable with the type of Christianity that maintains that all necessary truth lies exclusively within the pages of the Bible. The biggest problem is that this philosophy has a tendency to undervalue truth in a tragic way. This type of person has been caricatured in the character of Ned Flanders, who forgets to live life in a way that’s at all relevant to the world God made. Although most inerrantists would not maintain that literally all truth is in the Bible, they would say that all truth necessary for salvation is in there. This, then, is typically construed as a stamp of authenticity on the entirety of the claims of Scripture, resulting in the nonsensical demotion of other valid pursuits of truth when they conflict with something in the Bible. Clear example: the evolution/creation debate. Another difficulty resulting from this is responsible for an old habit of my own in which ethical insights from other systems are eyed distrustfully as possibly being somehow “worldly” if they are not presented in the Bible, without looking at their intrinsic merit.

I’m not saying that the Bible is all “derivative”; no one could seriously believe that it’s not got something unique to bring to the table. What I’m asking is that we Christians begin to see that “not in scripture” and “unscriptural” don’t necessarily equate to evil, wordly, or useless. I continue to affirm by my personal faith that Christ (not the Bible) is the fundamental expression of God to humanity. But God’s truth is reality, and so permeates the universe in ways not able to be contained in a single book. Defenders of the Bible through inerrancy who see themselves as the guardians of God’s truth are limiting God’s reign and authority over all extrabiblical reality by subjugating it all to their interpretations of Scripture.

Whatever is true is true whether or not the Bible says it — whether or not it even agrees with it. If believing the truth is so important, shouldn’t we concern ourselves first with seeking out truth rather than defending what we already believe?