Common misconception about Biblical translations

Excelsior

As moderator here I rarely start threads but I just read a post on another forum on Boards.ie about a topic that keeps re-occuring. They were talking about how with each new "translation" of the Bible there are new meanings added and then they cited an example:

A Board User wrote:

...the appearance of a New Testament prohibition of homosexuality in the 19th century

To deal with this specific example, the key text on homosexuality in the New Testament is in Romans 1. In the 1600's, the King James Version translated the relevant verses as:

Romans 1:26 & 27 wrote:

For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

The greek verb at use here in verse 27 in arsenekoi. Within the pagan temple worship of the Roman empire, which built on the traditions of the Greeks and which had its climax (not meaning to pun) in the city of Ephesus, arsenekoi had a specific meaning relating to temple prostitution and without being too graphic on a public forum, the penetration of a young man, an adolescent temple prostitute by an older man.

Although the author of Romans, Paul, certainly would mean these kinds of interactions when he mourned for the destructive way humans live when they lose sight of their divine aspect (Romans 1 is written so that the initial readers would automatically think of Genesis 1-3 where Creation culminates in humankind being made in the image of God) it isn't the only meaning.

I am sure that the Boards.ie user I quoted somehow believes that this was the case. But anyone who is even magazine-article familiar with the Classical world and its literature will know that long-term monogomous homosexual relationships were not uncommon in society, albeit if mostly in the upper middle classes onwards.

It would be much easier for me as a committed and passionate evangelical Christian to say that the New Testament is agnostic on the homosexual issue or that it is a modern corruption of the text. But this simply isn't the case. To claim any narrower interpretation of arsenekoi in the letter to the Romans is to do a great injustice to the text. Essentially, you would no longer be reading the letter Paul sent.

I love this stuff of Biblical Criticism and theology. I read everything I can on it. Literally, it fills my working day. And yet I can't seem to find the sources anywhere that feeds people the idea that the Scriptures have been tampered with willy-nilly. Or that major doctrines have been introduced under the radar since the 1800s. It simply isn't true.

So to get to my final point in this long and rambling rant, when a new translation of the Bible occurs it uses essentially the same raw material as all the other translations of the Bible- that is, the Greek and Hebrew texts. Those texts are widely available to the academic and ecclesiological communities. Translation is an art, not a science, but there is a massive consensus on what those ancient texts means. To test this, go to biblegateway.com, randomly pick a verse from any book and read it through the 15+ versions of the Bible they have on offer.

What you will quickly see is that some of the translations, like the Message, are properly understood to be paraphrases because they are very casual and use modern euphemisms and such things. Then there will be a massive middle ground where the NIV and the NLT and the NKJV and RSV and the NEB and the NRSV and the GN and all the rest of them sit. Some are older in style than others but they all say the same thing.

And that is just it- some are older. They are more difficult to understand. As our language evolves and our usage changes, we need to update our translations. But when we moved this year from the NIV to TNIV, the relatively small change of in some cases altering male-dominant terms, where appropriate, to non-gender specific terms caused a massive unrest. It was not done under the radar. The fundies were able to have their say and they shouted it loud.

But any reasonable outsider coming in will recognise that the only difference between the TNIV and the NIV is that the language fits our modern usage that little bit better while leaving the meaning completely intact.

Biblical translation is not like a cheat code for Christianity that allows us to change the terms of the game whenever it suits. The Bible is the most studied book in the world today. There are whole university departments staffed by non-Christian biblical scholars who act as the policemen to any flights of fancy on behalf of the faithful. It is all done out in the open, above board and with the transparency of any other rigourous academic discipline. Making blanket statements about the Bible's invalidity will just not stand up to the evidence.

Draupnir

Who wrote the original texts?

Im only now starting to become interested in the Bible, its writing and its basis in fact, from an academical perspective rather than a particularly religious one. I guess this might be the place to ask questions.

I'm wondering when and by whom, the original texts which constitute the bible were written?

MDTyKe

Draupnir; the Bible itself was wrote by many, many people - some, such as the Psalms, are written by many people, many of which haven't been credited. They were written over a long period, ie: about a thousand years in total, between Genesis and the Epistles/Apistols (sp?) (the letters of Paul)

However, they came together to form our Bible, when a group of bishops got together, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, to pick out the books which are believed to be the only true ones, and to burn the rest. The remaining books were burned, but many of them still remain around, ie: the Gospel of Mary. These books however, don't actually go with the rest of the Bible, as doctrinally they disagree, which is why they were never accepted, and are believed to have been faked. The other main set of books was the Apocrypha which is in the current day Catholic Bible, but not in any mainstream Protestant Bibles. This set of books was what was 'left' after they put together the other books, but was put out as being apostacy by Luther, after they were compared with the New Testament - they didn't doctrinally agree. Most of the Catholic Doctrine comes from one book of the Apocrypha; such as purgatory, praying to the saints, etc. Interesting stuff.


Matt

rsynnott

Excelsior wrote:

The greek verb at use here in verse 27 in arsenekoi. Within the pagan temple worship of the Roman empire, which built on the traditions of the Greeks and which had its climax (not meaning to pun) in the city of Ephesus, arsenekoi had a specific meaning relating to temple prostitution and without being too graphic on a public forum, the penetration of a young man, an adolescent temple prostitute by an older man.

Although the author of Romans, Paul, certainly would mean these kinds of interactions when he mourned for the destructive way humans live when they lose sight of their divine aspect (Romans 1 is written so that the initial readers would automatically think of Genesis 1-3 where Creation culminates in humankind being made in the image of God) it isn't the only meaning.

I am sure that the Boards.ie user I quoted somehow believes that this was the case. But anyone who is even magazine-article familiar with the Classical world and its literature will know that long-term monogomous homosexual relationships were not uncommon in society, albeit if mostly in the upper middle classes onwards.

I'm interested as to why exactly you feel that that referred to all manifestations of homosexuality? Surely it could just refer to ritual sexual abuse?

Excelsior

It could of course. "Homosexuality" is an abstract noun. I can't claim that the interpretation offered by orthodoxy is binding in the same way as Newtonian physics is binding. But the argument that I am making is that if you want to read the texts as they were meant to be read then the strongest evidence sits with the orthodox readings.

The main thing to realize about Romans 1:26 and following is that it isn't just an ambush out of nowhere. Paul's argument stretches right back to the opening 3 chapters of Genesis. Reading today without an extensive familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures that reference to the Genesis narrative is oblique but it sits right under the text. He sees the point about being human as being to reflect God's image, which he says in a number of places in his writings. He clearly sees that in Genesis 1 it is male plus female who are made in the image of God. He chooses the practice of homosexuality, not as a random feature of "look, they do all sorts of wicked things." His point is that when people in a society are part of an idolatrous system -- not necessarily that they individually are specifically committing acts of idolatry, but when the society as a whole worships that which is not the true God -- then its image-bearingness begins to deconstruct. An obvious sign of that for Paul, granted Genesis 1, is the breakup of male-female relations and the turning off in other directions.

Romans 1 doesn't stand alone either. It is a masterpiece of argument and he has written it so that later on in Chapter 4 he argues almost word for word that that which was not done by the people in Chapter 1 was done by Abraham but that would be a total digression.

There is no straight line between what Paul means by homosexuality and by its usage today because there is no one understanding today of what constitutes homosexuality. There are many different analyses. Any classicist will tell you that when you read Plato's Symposium, or when you read the accounts from the early Roman empire of the practice of homosexuality, and they knew just as much about it as we do. In particular, a point which is often missed, they knew a great deal about what people today would regard as longer-term, reasonably stable relations between two people of the same gender. This is not a modern invention, it's already there in Plato. The idea that in Paul's day it was always a matter of exploitation of younger men by older men doesn't stand against the Hebrew tradition of which Saul as a Pharisee would have drawn on nor the Graeco-Roman world into which he travelled after Damascus. There was plenty of temple prostitution and manipulation, but it was by no means the only thing. They knew about the whole range of options there. Indeed, in the modern world that isn't an invention of the 20th century either. If you read the recent literature, for example Graham Robb's book Strangers, which is an account of homosexual love in the 19th century, it offers an interesting account of all kinds of different expressions and awarenesses and phenomena. NT Wright, the Biblical scholar everyone is trying to catch up with at the moment puts it this way:

Wright wrote:

I think we have been conned by Michel Foucault into thinking that this is all a new phenomena.

Contextualising Paul, a Jew, writing in Greek to a church in Rome leaves very little space for understanding homosexuality as meaning just one of the spectrum of lifestyles and behaviours lived around the Med at that time. Examining the references in the text to the image-bearingness of God bound up in the "male and female he created them" text of Genesis leaves very little space for a responsible reading of the text that limits its terms of reference to the great temple at Ephesus.

All that having been said, of course you can still say, and many people do, "Paul says x and I say y." That's an option that many in the church take on many issues. When we actually find out what Paul said, some say, "Fine, and I disagree with him." That raises all kinds of other issues about how the authority of scripture actually works in the church, and at what point the authority structure of scripture-tradition-reason actually kicks in.

Excelsior

Draupnir wrote:

Who wrote the original texts?

Many different people. There are 66 books in the Canon. We'd have to look at each book own its own merits since the evidence for some is strong and clear and for others its utterly up in the air.

Draupnir wrote:

I guess this might be the place to ask questions.

I'd hope so.

Draupnir wrote:

I'm wondering when and by whom, the original texts which constitute the bible were written?

I'd have to challenge MDTyke's understanding of how Canon was formed. Sorry MDT.

The Old Testament is a collection of Hebrew Scriptures used by Judaism that were compiled over almost 1000 years and were in some cases based on oral tradition that could be up to 3000 years older before that.

The New Testament is where this stuff gets controversial because the claims within those books are so concrete and offensive. Dating these books is done on 3 levels:

-they look externally for other texts that reference the book since if we know the date for Referring Book A, we know that Referred Book has to be younger.

-they date the physical manuscript

-they look internally for evidence within the text. For example, Luke and Acts are filled with accurate references to the outside world which help dating.

But it is an art, not an exact science and you can often tell someone's ideological position based on where they date the texts. For example, there are a famous group of biblical scholars on the US west coast called The Jesus Seminar who vote on what sections of the New Testament are authentic (!) and their very loose idea of who Jesus is undoubtedly affects their very late dating.

But if there is some kind of a consensus it would hold that the letters of Paul are the first Christian texts. The oldest scrap of New Testament that we have is from 1 Thessalonians and it interestingly reads, "and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead- Jesus". Paul started writing about 50AD, 15 years after the resurrection and maybe 10 or 12 years after his conversion.

The Gospels are Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. They are written by the guys they are named after- an disciple, an apostle, a disciple and possibly/probably an apostle. Nothing about John is plain- its the most controversial book ever written! Mark was first and it was probably written in the mid-late 60s. Matthew and Luke come soon after and are perhaps based in part on Mark but they are most likely after 72AD. John seems to have been written in the 90s and there is a strong point of view that would argue that John is the Beloved Apostle talked of in the Gospels and that he wrote it as a defence of Christianity from gnostic influences that sought to threaten it.

The first three Gospels are referred to as the Synoptics and they are very different in tone from the Johanine text, as they call John. John is a text laden with metaphysics- with imagery that points towards the deeper truth behind Jesus but Mark, Matthew and Luke are a bit more plain. There is a strong belief amonst scholars across the board that there is a root Gospel below Mark, Matthew and Luke and even closer to Jesus's resurrection from which they draw common themes. This hypothetical gospel is called Q, for the german word for source, Quelle.

The way to understand the canon formation is not in the dramatic Dan Brown style that MDTyke proposes but in a far more mundane and boring and realistic way. The church was persecuted across the Empire. Hated as splitters by many Jews and despised for pretty much all their beliefs by official Rome, the churches were underground. But communication still continued under the radar as can be seen from the detailed references to remote churches seen in the New Testament. Through this constant interaction, texts and records and testimonies of Jesus were passed from church to church. Judging from the writings of the earliest church leaders there was almost perfect unanimity within the church about the New Testament (and certainly about the Gospels) by 200AD and large agreement before that.

In the east, where the churches were made up largely of Gentiles (non Jewish people), the book of Hebrews was not such a favourite but in the west where Jewish culture was still strong within Christianity they loved Hebrews. Small differences like this aside, there is solid historical evidence that you could travel to any Christian church around the Empire and find the same books in use.

Then when Constantine became Emperor and there was at last freedom for church leaders to move around openly and to meet, they started having councils and conferences and at those conferences they declared what the Canon was. But the important historical point to remember is that the Canon was in existence across the networks of apostolic churches, which under persecution were like the segments of a submarine in trouble, closed off from each other. When persecution ended, when the submarine rose to the surface, the different compartments were opened to each other and they were pleasantly surprised to see that they largely agreed on what was important.

This is a very brief overview of the issue but feel free to ask more questions.

Draupnir

Thank you Excelsior, that really is a very interesting and thought provoking answer. I will have to do a bit more reading before I have anymore questions, but I am sure more will spring to mind and I will come back when they do. Thank you.

I think the best way to describe my personal interest in the development of the bible would be to say that I find it very difficult to believe it right now.

However, recently I have felt a great want to believe it, for a reason I cannot explain. I find myself wanting to read, to learn and to believe.

And in some ways, I think this want, this need to believe is what is starting to make me believe, as strange as that may sound.

Thanks again.

Dades

Draupnir wrote:

And in some ways, I think this want, this need to believe is what is starting to make me believe, as strange as that may sound.

The only strange thing to me is that you freely admit it, and yet continue to "believe".

Cronus333

My Greek teacher told me this and I don't know if it's true or not but it's interesting anyway. He said that when they were translating a book of the bible from Greek that there was a mark in one sentance that looked like an iota. If it was a mark the sentance said Jesus is God but if it was an iota it meant Jesus was like God!! Hope they picked the right translation then....