While we were living in Berlin, many years ago, during the Cold War, I recall being confused by a rather common question:
How long are you in Berlin?
The phrasing of this query, at first, sounded to me as if the person wanted to know how long I would be staying in Berlin, not how long I had been living there. What does this odd concatenation of English words mean? It’s actually a word-for-word translation of the original German question, and it reveals a difference in German versus English when it comes to the expression of verbal tense and aspect.
In German, the following sentence is completely normal:
Ich bin seit einem Jahr in Berlin.
Literally, that says: “I am since a year in Berlin.” But that translation doesn’t just sound wrong; it is wrong. A native English speaker would express the durative (i.e., progressive) aspect with a different construction, namely:
I have been in Berlin for a year.
A brain thinking in German does not hear the strangeness of the present indicative in this situation. Similarly, a brain thinking in English has a great deal of difficulty hearing “ich bin” as correct in this context.
Tense and sensibilities
It turns out Greek has a similar sort of construction. In his Greek Grammar, Herbert Smyth explains it succinctly:
The present, when accompanied by a definite or indefinite expression of past time, is used to express an action begun in the past and continued in the present. The ‘progressive perfect’ is often used in translation. (Smyth 1956, p. 422)
Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? (NIV)
Jesus saith unto him, Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? (KJV)
Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? (NASB)
The Greek uses the present tense, but the English does not. A word-for-word translation in this case wouldn’t be merely stilted or awkward — it would be wrong.
We can find examples in the Septuagint as well. For example:
Before we get to Wrede, I’d like to quote from the Acts of the Apostles. First, from the Contemporary English Version, which proudly claims to be accurate and “faithful to the meaning of the original”:
Acts 5:30 (CEV) You killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. But the God our ancestors worshiped raised him to life.
The New International Version, which is the most popular English translation in the world, has a somewhat different take on the same verse. Their team claims to translate scrupulously from the original Greek using word-for-word along with thought-for-thought methods.
Acts 5:30 (NIV) The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead—whom you killed by hanging him on a cross.
Readers will no doubt remember this line from Peter’s speech before the Sanhedrin. Here’s another example from Acts 10:39. First, from the Good News Translation, which is still extremely popular. (The CEV and GNT both came from the American Bible Society.)
Acts 10:39 (GNT) We are witnesses of everything that he did in the land of Israel and in Jerusalem. Then they put him to death by nailing him to a cross.
And now the NIV:
Acts 10:39 (NIV) “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross . . .”
Peter is speaking here again. Curiously, the Jews disappear from the GNT and the CEV. We see minor differences, but one thing these verses have in common is the word “cross,” which does not exist in the original Greek. There are no nails or crosses here, only trees. These translations aren’t outliers, either. The New American Standard Bible (“Accuracy you can trust, in the English you speak!”) does it, too:
Peter Preaching in Jerusalem by Charles Poërson, 1642
Acts 10:39 (NASB) “We are witnesses of all the things He did both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They also put Him to death by hanging Him on a cross . . .”
What’s going on here? The translators have decided in these cases to substitute the word-for-word method with thought-for-thought. They presume to know what the author was really thinking, so they’re “fixing” (amplifying?) the text for modern English readers.
And we [are] witness of all [the] things he did in both the region of the Jews and [in] Jerusalem, whom also they put to death having hanged [him] on a tree.
I bring all this up, because a great deal of New Testament oddness remains hidden by our “accurate” English translations. The faithful translators will, of course, insist that tree is just a poetic synonym for cross. Do we really know that?
Diversity of Thought in the New Testament
They see themselves as faithful to the text, but they are faithful first to their conception of the Bible. That conception starts from the belief that the Bible is the inspired word of God. Here in the rural Midwest, we see billboards that ask “What does the Bible say about . . . ?” These questions reveal the foundational dogma that the Bible has a unified message at its core. The unspoken question for the faithful is “What is the Bible supposed to say?”
The translators of the NIV and CEV feel free to add “missing” words. In the Gospel of John, both translations add “pray” and “prayer” where they don’t exist in the Greek. In the same Gospel, the CEV actually adds the missing name of Jesus’s mother (see 2:1). Did the author of John know her name was Mary? Perhaps. But he never wrote the name.
Today’s NT scholars do admit that some diversity of thought exists in the New Testament. However, the extremely conservative British and American scholars of the early twentieth century were far less tolerant of such notions. When Wrede pointed out passages in scripture that strongly suggest various authors had divergent ideas about when Jesus became the Messiah, they were not amused. But Wrede went further. He said such divergence indicated an evolution of ideas:
Jesus became the Messiah at his death (Paul)
Jesus became the Messiah at the baptism (Mark)
Jesus was the preexistent Son of God (John)
Moreover, Wrede pointed out that our earliest Gospel is a mixture of Mark’s dogmatic invention along with received tradition, and he showed that the author was neither an eyewitness nor a disinterested historian. Finally, his somewhat favorable references to F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss were certainly more than any self-respecting scholar could allow.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that pious Brits and Yanks savaged Das Messiasgeheimnis and its author, or that the book wasn’t translated into English until 1970. The tradition of reading and opining about Wrede, while diligently not reading Wrede has a long, proud history.
“The meaning of the item”
Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
If they had read Wrede, they would have discovered that he identified a number of core problems with critical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Many of these problems persist.
In the affirmative answer to this question if Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the Blessed” the high priest discerns blasphemy—and therefore a crime punishable by death. The blasphemy is usually thought to lie in arrogation to himself by a puny, weak and powerless man of the highest dignity known to Israelites, that of the Messiah sent by God. The tacit or explicit assumption behind this is that if the blasphemy lay in the pretension to divine glory and divine nature, Jesus like the high priest would have been taking the title “Son of God” to have a dogmatic, metaphysical sense and this is historically an impossibility. But to argue in this way is as dangerous as it is frequent. We must never say that if a particular item meant one thing it would not match up with the history of Jesus and that therefore it must mean something else. The meaning of the item is rather the prior question at all times. What history can make of it comes into consideration later. (Wrede 1901/1970, pp. 74-75, bold emphasis mine)
In a literary analysis especially, “the meaning of the item” must go back to the author, not to some imagined historical context. People still make this mistake. They gloss over the surface and look for what lies beneath. They leapfrog over the plain meaning of the text and evaluate matters as if they really happened, and they compare critically the terms Mark uses against the “normative” definitions found in other texts from roughly the same period.
As Wrede explains, calling oneself the Messiah would not constitute blasphemy. He writes:
[T]he mere assertion of messiahship does not, according to Jewish ideas, amount to blasphemy. But it is not any easier to see how a Christian author could find an instance of blasphemy here if he had only the Jewish idea of Messiah in mind. For when all is said the Messiah is not in Jewish eyes a divine being. On the other hand, if Mark understood “Son of God” in a supernatural and metaphysical sense, everything becomes quite clear. (Wrede 1901/1970, p. 75, bold emphasis added)
Many scholars have chastised Wrede for putting too many things under the umbrella of messiahship. Why keep healings and exorcisms a secret, they ask, when being acknowledged as some sort of wonder-worker doesn’t make a person the Messiah? Similarly, they note that nobody would have thought a Jewish Messiah would suffer, die, and be raised from the dead. Well, yes. That’s what Paul said: The claim that the Messiah had died was a “stumbling block” to the Jews. But Mark had an entirely different view of what it meant to be the Messiah.
While translating Dibelius’s book on John the Baptist (Die urchristliche Überlieferung von Johannes dem Täufer, 1911), I have been contemplating his discussions concerning methods of literary criticism. In particular, how do we identify bits of tradition from the later narrative framework in which they were placed?
Martin Dibelius (1883-1947)
The collectors’ additions are often clearly distinguishable from collected material: Information about changes in location and time,1 remarks of a pragmatic nature,2isolatedsayings of the Lord conveyed according to oral tradition, frequently added simply to insert a catchphrase, and finally, the so-called summary reports,3 with general information about healings.
(Dibelius 1911, p. 4, my translation, italics his)
Don’t imagine that Dibelius thought that separating out earlier tradition, layer by layer would be an easy task. Not at all, but at times the evangelists do reveal some obvious seams, and the “precious stones” stand out from the settings.
Hence, the religious nature of the gospel writings precludes an “objective” historical account in the modern sense. However, the non-literary character of the Gospels assures the likelihood that some elements of the ancient and original tradition could be preserved within the accounts. After all, the authors do not want to create literary works, but rather to preserve and reproduce the tradition that was handed down to them. The fact that they polish the stones, fit them together, and place them in a framework does not necessarily rule out their understanding of the innate properties of these stones. (Dibelius 1911, p. 2, my translation, bold emphasis mine)
Here we see Dibelius giving credit to the compilers of the Gospels. According to his way of thinking, they didn’t write non-literary books because they lacked ability or ambition. Instead, he believed they valued the preservation of tradition above all else.
The image of polished stones set within a frame reminded me of the largely misunderstood metaphor of pearls on a necklace, usually attributed to K. L. Schmidt. In actuality, he said the opposite of what most people think he said:
We could illustrate it with this metaphor: the Markan account is not a necklace made of loosely strung-together pearls between which we can squeeze one sometimes here, sometimes there, but rather a pile of unstrung pearls, even if some pearls will match up from time to time. (Schmidt, 1919, p. 281, emphasis mine)*
At the same time, I became interested in a term Dibelius used, “Sammelberichte,” usually rendered as “summary reports” in English. Obviously, the presence of a summary paragraph at the end of a set of stories indicates a joint or a seam in the narrative. And while searching for cases in which scholars talked about such literary breaks, I came across a truly wonderful analogy for bits of tradition within a later framework.
Soup with Large Croutons (Wikimedia)
Julius Wellhausen’s croûtons-in-the-soup simile aptly describes the evidence and data paradigm needed to re-examine the single authorship of Luke and Acts. While “joints and seams” form the literary intersections that unite segments of written material, they simultaneously define the boundaries where those segments have been linked. That is to say, functionally they both unite and divide. (Walters 2009, p. 43)
I nice little book, And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible’s Orginal Meaning, by Dr Joel M. Hoffman, gives us some valuable and interesting insights into the complexities involved with translating from Hebrew to English. He entertainingly discusses some culturally entrenched mistranslations that we have inherited in most of our Bibles, too.
I am sure I am not the only one with an interest in Bible study who has been known to struggle to find original meanings of Hebrew words by piecing together data from a number of lexicons and dictionaries. Hoffman has a discussion highlighting three common methods of understanding Hebrew that don’t work very well. I can understand his advice being fit for amateurs but he seems to be saying that even professional translators have also at times fallen into these traps:
Unfortunately, three common methods of understanding Hebrew are rampant among translators, and none of them works very well. The three methods are internal word structure, etymology, and cognate languages. (p.21)
The news is not all bad, though. Hoffman does discuss a fourth method that really does work. But first he addresses the three bad wolves.
Wrong: Internal word structure
Hoffman illustrates the problem here with English language analogies.
The word “patent” by definition means a “non-obvious art”, with “art” being use in its technical sense to embrace science as well what we think of as art. But the key part of the definition is “nonobvious”.
In fact, Section 103 of Title 35 of the U.S. Code, the part of U.S. law that deals with patents, specifically notes that “non-obvious subject matter” is a “condition for patentability.”
He incidentally refers to one wag who managed to patent the simple stick though describing it in a way to hide its obviousness, and I have seen a patent go through for “a circular transportation facilitation device” (the wheel!) — again clever scientific jargon can be used to make something obvious seem quite novel.
Now since the suffix “-ly” usually turns a word into an adverb, one might expect that patently would mean doing something in a non-obvious way. But of course we know the word means the exact opposite!
Again, the word “host” means someone who welcome guests at parties. But “hostile”, once again, has an opposite meaning. If we tried to use the word “host” to understand “hostile”, or vice versa, we would get a completely wrong answer.
