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From The New Covenant
Commonly Called the New Testament
From the Preface and Introduction b y W i l l i s B a r n s t o n e View
the table of contents
of the entire New Covenant book |
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Yeshua and the Poor | |||
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In those days again there was a great crowd who had nothing to eat, and calling his students together he said to them,
Beyond the public event of the crucifixion, the doctrine and the metaphysic,
beyond the gathering of followers who will become legion and inform
the world-dominating religious movement of Christianity,3
the gospels speak to the human condition of peasants in an occupied
country in times of mean opportunity. At the heart of the gospels is the wandering and compassionate rabbi Yeshua. He teaches and feeds the poor. He cures the leper and demoniac, the bleeding woman and a paralyzed on the floor. He restores life to a dead boy and a dead man. He is with Jew and foreigner, children of the carpenter and rich man, official or soldier-all who come to him for medical miracles and spiritual food. There are terrified students,4 who fear for their lives on a boat in a windstorm on the Sea of Galilee5 until Yeshua tells the winds to fall; and there are the masses whom Yeshua feeds with a few loaves and fishes to satisfy them. The primal physical needs of people living close to the edge of life and death show on virtually every page. The book of the gospels is a brief epic of hunger and humility and sicknesses. As such it stands in black-and-white contrast to Homer's prosperous gods and soldiers and islanders, whose sensuality and adventure, rather than an impoverished human condition, excite us. The gospel figures, described in rudimentary Near Eastern Greek,6 incite the reader's deep compassion. That Yeshua comes as an earthly savior to the poor is poignant for us to observe. A woman falls to her knees begging the savior to touch her or her child and enact a cure; the man living in the tombs, possessed by demons, asks Yeshua whether he, too, has come to torment him, and then, cured by Yeshua, begs, unsuccessfully, to accompany him on his wanderings. The unclean are cleansed, the leper is washed, the hungry receive bread, the prostitute is not scorned, the woman (one of the Miryams,7 wandering in the garden) discovers a resurrected crucified who touches her with hope-all these are the figures of the human landscape which the New Covenant8 delivers without makeup or guise. No authority other than Yeshua appeals to us in these pages. But there is a price which the poor must pay for Yeshua's powers, which is a heart-rending fear and degradation. Some call it humility and modesty. There is the shepherd and the sheep, and the sheep, apart from allegory, are beasts of the field who bend their heads to graze. In that surrender and humiliation is the pathos, which makes this picaresque, episodic book perhaps the most evenly powerful work about the poor in body, soul, and hope. All politic, doctrine, even the beautiful poetry, parables, aphorisms, and ultimate drama of the agony of crucifixion pale before the constancy of the common person, who is the human everywhere and in all time. Therein lies the ordinary art and the plain great passion of the people in the gospels. The picture of primal nakedness covered by a colorless mean cloth, of hurting bodies that speak with need from a primal poverty, insures that the gospels, independent of faith, doctrine, commandment, fearful warnings, and metaphysic, will always reach those with eyes to hear and feel the human condition of the spirited body waiting on the earth.
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1Citations are from this new translation unless otherwise noted.
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Introduction
A Reformation of Openness | |||
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Reformations bring change, and historically have informed and have
been resisted with a sword. But to break the tradition of change that
dresses in compulsion and death, a reformation of openness means only
openness. No sword, no sin, no guilt, no infidel, no punishment. Truth
has a small t, and heart a big H, and so one truth does
not impose. A reformation of openness has silence mediate controversy,
understanding mediate sectarian wrath, and peace mediate the stranger.
The heart of openness is love (another sweet tautology), which is a
better key to the world than bitter closure. There is no end to openness.
Imperfection in this temporary life is a good to be open to, so that
the incorruptible Maximilien Robespierre does not arrest and execute
the suspected traitor who has strayed from truth. Better is an itinerant
who is open to the poor. A book need not end, nor a heart, nor a spirit
roaming in the blur inside. The day and night of life need not end but
stay open to vision, maybe the vision of the blind and crippled. So
reformation is openness, and carries in its intellectual passion a small
r.
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A New Translation | |||
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Why a new translation of a biblical text? Why the King James Version in 1611, only eighty some years after the masterful Tyndale translation, which is as austerely plain and beautiful as a field of wheat? The most obvious answer is that language changes and so, too, do literary conventions for making speech contemporary and natural. There may also be the call for a new approach, since translation is not only style and period but approach and purpose. The earliest versions in English by John Wyclif in 1380 and William Tyndale in 1525 were created to bring Latin scripture into the English vernacular. Wyclif translated from Jerome's Vulgata, Tyndale worked directly from the Greek. For their daring acts of replacing the Jerome's fourth-century Latin (the authorized Christian Bible in the West) with their English vulgate, Wyclif's bones were dug up and burned and Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake. Wyclif's and Tyndale's purpose had been to bring scriptures to the people. Tyndale, citing the aims of his model the Dutch humanist Erasmus, wrote that the word of the gospels should reach the eyes of all women, Scots and Irishmen, even Turks and Saracens, and especially the farm worker at the plow and the weaver at the loom. Then in the early seventeenth century, the Tyndale and later versions were revised into the monumental King James Version, whose stated purpose by King James I's forty and seven translator scholars was to bring forth an authorized version for the Protestant peoples of the Church of England. The King James also had a literary and didactic aim, which appears in the first line of the prefatory "Translators to the Reader": "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light." I undertook a new translation of the New Covenant, commonly called
the New Testament,9 to give a chastely modern,
literary version of a major world text. In the introduction, annotation,
and text itself, I have followed some specific aims. First, I wish to
restore the probable Hebrew and Aramaic names and so frame the Jewish
identity of the main figures of the covenant, including that of Yeshua
(Jesus), his family, and followers. Second, I would like to clarify
the origin of Christianity as one of the Jewish messianic sects of the
day vying for dominion. And third, I wish to translate as verse what
is verse in the New Covenant as in Yeshua's speech and the epic poem
of Apocalypse, following a practice which, since the nineteenth-century
Revised, has prevailed in rendering Hebrew verse as in the Song of Songs,
the Psalms, and Job. With regard to ascertainable fact and religious belief, while respecting
all views, I have no pitch for any side. There is no more polemic or
proselytizing here than were this book a new version of the Odyssey
or of Sappho's fragments, yet I hope that my love for these extraordinary
world scriptures will show through. My wish is also that the covenant
will be read by all, and that the text and annotation will be a source
of pleasure and information, while giving some awareness of the background
from which Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus son of Joseph, came. Jesus was deeply Jewish. It is important to emphasize this obvious fact. Not only was he Jewish by birth and socialization, but he remained a Jew all of his life. His Scripture was the Jewish Bible. He did not intend to establish a new religion, but saw himself as having a mission within Judaism. He spoke as Jew to other Jews. His early followers were Jewish. All of the authors of the New Testament (with the possible exception of the author of Luke-Acts) were Jewish. I address this dire and central question of disenfranchising Yeshua
of his religious identity in two ways: by restoring the probable Hebrew
or Aramaic names to biblical figures and framing some fiercely anti-Semitic
passages in a historic context in the introduction and the textual annotation.
It should first be understood that although the extant gospels are only
in Greek, and Yeshua speaks Greek in the gospels, Yeshua did not use
Greek, if indeed he had any knowledge of it, as his everyday language;
and on the cross when he cried in agony to God, Yeshua spoke in Aramaic,
which had by and large become the spoken language of the Jews after
their return to Israel from the Babylonian defeat (586 B.C.E.),14
Hebrew remained the language of the temple and religion. Yet we have
Greek names for Yohanan (John-although the Germans retain the Hebrew
in Yohan, as in Johann Sebastian Bach), and somehow Yaakov or Jacob
in the Hebrew Bible becomes James in English, and Miryam becomes the
Greek Maria. By recovering what are the Hebrew and Aramaic names of
Covenant personages, I believe that the Semitic origin and climate at
last persuades in the gospels. In the same way that the Homeric names
Zeus, Athena, and Artemis are finally heard in twentieth-century translations
and no longer romanized as Jupiter, Minerva, and Diana, so, too, the
Jewish names of Yaakov, Yeshua, Yosef, and Yohanan are used here rather
than their irrelevant and misleading Greek or Anglicized forms. "Jesus Christ" is a Greek formulation and not recognizably a biblical Semitic name. If the name in English were chosen in keeping with other traditional English versions of biblical Hebrew names, he could also be "Joshua the Messiah," "Joshua the Anointed," "Yeshua ben Yosef," "Yesua bar Yosef,"15 or "Yeshua of Nazareth," and all these names have been given him by diverse commentators and scholars. This restoration does wonders to afford a truthful perception of the identity of New Covenant peoples. It will help us recall, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, among others, has observed, that the New Covenant was written by Jews about Jews for Jews. The New Covenant-though largely unread by Jews and when known may be perceived with deep fear-is the last major Jewish text of biblical Judaism, the parent religion of Christianity and Islam. The second way of handling traditional anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism
is through the introduction and annotations in the texts where I attempt
to place these remarks in a historical perspective. There was, of course,
the inevitable inflated rhetoric of interfamily rival sects within Judaism,
each seeking dominion during Yeshua's life. However, the texts were
not fashioned in Greek until late in the first and early in the second
centuries, with many unknown hands copying, redacting, and emending
the stories and recreating conversations, even of secret deliberations
that *allegedly* took place behind the walls of the Sanhedrin.16
By the time these texts were finally accepted by religious councils
in the fourth century, what had been a first-century controversy between
Jewish groups, allegedly between Pharisees and messianics, was now seen
ahistorically as a conflict between Jews and later Christians, "Christian"
being the word "messianic" or "messianist" in Greek
translation. By then, in name and thought, Christianity was politically
separated from Judaism, though it retained the Jewish Bible (Old Testament)
as its own Bible, to which it added the Jewish scripture of the New
Covenant.
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9New Covenant is an exact translation of the Greek kaine diatheke (kainhv diaqh`kh) found in the Septuagint and in Paul's Corinthians 11.25 and Hebrews 8.8-13, meaning "new covenant." The title New Testament derives from Novum Testamentum, a mistranslation, appearing in the Vulgata (the Vulgate), the fourth-century Latin translation attributed to Jerome. In English and most languages of Western Europe, the term Novum Testamentum has been rendered "New Testament." In recent translations and also in the new editions of the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) and other standard modern versions, New Covenant is the preferred title and presented (as here on the title page), "The New Covenant, commonly called The New Testament." Please see p. 00 for further discussion. If one wished to preserve the fact that the New Covenant is a post-Torah scripture composed by, addressed to, and about, Jews of Yeshua's day (including Peter (Kefa), James (Yaakov) and Paul (Shaul)), one might speak of the New Torah or New Tanakh. Since both early Christian Jews and later Christians look to the Hebrew Bible (Torah) as their bible, it would seem logical to give the New Covenant a Hebrew name. 10Events recounted in the gospels are essentially theologically framed accounts confined to the gospels themselves. External references to Yeshua tell us little. Sutorius (Nero 16.2) mentions the existence of Christiani and of Jesus; Tacitus (Annales 15.44) mentions Christians and Jesus who was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate; Pliny the Younger has a brief reference to Jesus. The main external source is the Jewish historian Josephus, who wrote in Greek and lived later in Rome, and there are problems with what is authentic and what may be a later emendation. 11Anti-Judaism is a religious term based on
a theological contempt for Judaism and by extension for Jews. The actual
term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm
Marr to designate anti-Jewish campaigns then underway in central Europe.
Anti-Semitism had its beginnings during the first-century Roman Empire
when Jews were often segregated for their refusal to participate in
emperor worship and, by emerging Christians, for the Jews' failure to
accept Jesus as their messiah. Many scholars argue that Anti-Judaism
is a more accurate term, since Jews are only one among Semitic peoples,
and anti-Judaism means hostility only to religion, not to people. But
faith and people are inevitably synonymous. In Northern Ireland the
anti-Catholicism, while not against Irish ethnicity, is directed against
Irish people who hold Catholic beliefs. I have used both anti-Judaism
and anti-Semitism, depending on whether the hostility is toward the
religion or people or both.
13Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus for the First Time. (San Francisco: HarperSan, 1994), 22.
14From the seventh century B.C.E. till the rise
of Islam in the seventh century C.E., when Aramaic yielded to Arabic,
Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Fertile Crescent and the greater
Mesopotamian region and competed with Greek after the coming of Alexander
the Great, who conquered the region. The Syrian Christian Church used
their dialect of Aramaic, but as Aramaic became associated with pagans,
they spoke of it as Syriac and developed an altered alphabet.
15 Bar is Aramaic for ben, "son of."
16Sanhedrin from Greek (synedrion). Sanhedrin is a council or court of the Jews in Jerusalem. It is a Hebraized form of Greek synedrion, meaning a council or assembly. In the Mishnah, a collection of rabbinic oral traditions set down as writing (ca. 200 C.E.), the first use of Sanhedrin occurs. Therefore "Sanhedrin" in New Covenant translations to mean court is, as here, anachronistic. In the New Covenant Sanhedrin refers to judicial courts presided over by the high priest. Its usage is imprecise and the Sanhedrin may be connected to the council of elders in Israel. Sanhedrin may also mean just a "gathering" or "assembly." In Acts 22.5, Paul refers to the presbyterion (elders) as the authority that gave orders to arrest Yeshua. In Mark 15.1, it is called the symboulion (council). The use of a Greek word derived from a beginning of-the-third century C.E. Hebraized version of it indicates both an anachronism, and textually the presence of a late hand in the composition or amending of the gospels, which are said to have been set down in the late first century. |
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How old versions of the Bible shaped secular literature | |||
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Historically, the single book most deeply affecting the writers in the English language has been the Bible. Imagine John Donne, George Herbert, John Milton, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and Dylan Thomas it. But little of this flame-the fires of poetry-came from the New Covenant, as they knew it, nor from contemporary versions of the Hebrew Bible. Most of the biblical language and tale that entered English literature was found in early translations, those made in that short period between and including the Tyndale publications in the 1520s and 1530s and the King James Version in 1611. Not only was the language of the English Bible established during that period, but English itself, through word inventions in the Bible, became immensely expanded and enriched. In the nineteenth century, there were major scholarly and literary revisions, and in our time, especially in the last decades, there has been an opening and candor in religious studies as never before, permitting all to be said or speculated, doctrinaire and radical. But while theology and history have experienced liberation, in both studies and permissible translation, literary artistry has not done well. Perhaps because the need for intellectual freedom has been so imperative, art and the quality of the word have suffered by neglect. Early in the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot pitilessly attacked Gilbert Murray's old-fashioned, wooden, Swinburnean translations of the Greek tragedians and called for a renovation of Greek and Latin classics in English. Robert Fitzgerald, Dudley Fitts, and William Arrowsmith answered his plea with consummate renditions. In our time, ancient and modern texts, from the Chinese to the Italian, Spanish, and Russian, have enjoyed a renaissance of excellent translations and translators. Yet despite a renewed academic interest in using more reliable Greek sources to translate more accurately and in reading the scripture in "the Bible as literature" courses, no imperious Eliot has shown up to rebuke contemporary old-fashioned, wooden, Swinburnean translations of holy scripture. We have not the accomplishment of philosopher-theologian Martin Buber, who gave the modern German Bible a flowing, poetic, etymologically keyed alternative to Luther's famous sixteenth-century version. During the past century, we were given variations of the nineteenth-century English and American Revised Versions editions (1898-90), of which the best was the recent NRSV (New Revised Standard Version, 1990). The NRSV aims for accuracy and softening the male-oriented articulation, yet retains the essential archaizing, proper, and pious tone of biblical language. As is often the case with literature deemed sacred, the Bible has been held to criteria alien to the art of literary translation. Reform has often come under the emblem of objectivity where "information transfer," as in technical translation of history, business, and science, is the measure. There are also, for the sake of reader comprehension, interpretive translations and dumbing-down versions of the Bible, yet not in the manner of Mark's plain Greek, but as chatty or off-key street-talk renderings. The Bible in English deserves what our foremost writers can bring to
it. It is a richly complex document, with many levels of expressive
meaning, and translation that fails to bring over the maximum semantic
load, and that slights poetic language, abuses the hope of true equivalence.
The Bible is a volume charged with immense connotative meanings, as
are all our religious classics, including the Dao De Jing, Bhagavad-Gita,
and Odyssey. A version in our day that scarcely goes beyond the
heresy of explanation or a word-for-word transfer between tongues signifies
that again our age has failed to provide a classical work in English
as Tyndale did and the Authorized did. The latter became for many, right
or wrong, "an authorized original." Old versions are remote, and contemporary ones do not sing. In contrast
to the King James, whose scholars helped establish a great literary
tradition, in the new Bibles, after the corrections and recorrections,
the seminarian translators have kept repetition of seminal clichés
intact in pedestrian speech sullenly removed from literature. So great
literature is captive to neglect. It is imperative to remember that
these holy books from the coastal strip of Western Asia, of history,
religion, and philosophy, contain the most intense concentration of
the arts of narration, drama, and poetry the world has assembled. Apart from the gloom, there are areas of light. If there are not new
resplendent Bibles, there are writers infused with Bible light, with
a magnificence of language and spirit whose source remains the King
James Version. Consider T. S. Eliot's "Ash Wednesday," Murder
in the Cathedral, and The Four Quartets. For all his cranky
urbane anti-Semitism, Eliot is probably that last major poet in the
English language who has produced enduring pieces deriving directly
from the two covenants. Eliot's competitor might be James Baldwin of
Go Tell It on the Mountain, who uses the full rhetoric of biblical
speech preserved in the African-American church. Martin Luther King
spoke the language of the Bible in his dream speeches. Of course, these
examples mirror the mighty James and not the readable and more accurate
Revised and New Revised and New Revised Standard Version. |
17The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke. Edited by J. C. A. Rathmell. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963). First published in 1823 under the title: The Psalmes of David translated into divers and sundry kindes of verse. 18Even Richmond Lattimore follows the earlier
sacred tradition of blurring Yeshua's identity as a Jew through selectively
false translation. After Yeshua praises Nathanael for being "truly
a Jew," Nathanael says to Yeshua, "Rabbi, you are the son
of God. You are the king of Israel"(John 1:49). In Greek we have
Rabbi, but Lattimore, the most just literary scholar translator
of his day, here as elsewhere, still renders Rabbi in Greek as "Master"
in English. More recent translators, however, reflecting the present
mood, uniformly translate Rabbi as "Rabbi," including
the New King James Version (1979), which corrects the King James Version
(1611) "Master" to read "Rabbi."
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Yeshua speaking verse | |||
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As for these wisdom poems attributed to Yeshua, they are of extreme
importance, indeed at the heart of the gospels, and are more likely
than the narrations to have claims to historicity. Yet these sayings,
too, though they may have been uttered by Yeshua, also have a source
in the preserved wisdom sayings of earlier figures, since it is natural
and expected that a charismatic sage will repeat the famous traditional
wisdom phrases of the past. With respect to their prosodic form, the
sayings, like Psalms, Song of Songs, and most of the words of Isaiah
and Jeremiah in the Hebrew Bible, may be read and lineated as poetry,
even though the monumentally poetic King James Version cast them in
prose. In the gnostic Gospel of Thomas,20 which
has no narration and is exclusively Yeshua's sayings, Yeshua's words
are also preserved in traditional aphorism that may be read as verse.
Here in this version Yeshua's words are lineated as poetry, just as
most of Yeshua's words, especially in John, are lineated in the French
and English editions of the New Covenant in the Catholic Jerusalem Bible
(1990). To most of us it is a secret that Yeshua's speech takes the
form of poems. Even more obscure is the notion that the authentic core
of the gospels stands in verse. This translation will introduce the
Jewish messiah of the Christians21 as the great
oral poet of the first century C.E., who heretofore has been our invisible
poet.
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20The Gospel of Thomas was discovered in 1945, in Coptic translation from the Greek, among the Nag Hammadi texts in Egypt. The dating is problematic. Some scholars suggest 50 or 55 C.E., while others suggest it may be the late second century or even the third. Its translation from Greek into Coptic was probably third century. There also exists fragments of Thomas in Syriac.
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Mark the vernacular story teller | |||
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When the writer or writers of Mark assembled the earliest of the canonized gospels, its story was of an itinerant rabbi who talked, healed miraculously, and walked the hills of Yehuda (Judea) and alleys of the holy city of Yerushalayim (Jerusalem); who mesmerized his followers with his word at once wise, evasive, lyrical, and surreal; and who suffered, if the story of the Roman crucifixion is accurate, the most dramatic and meaningful death in history. He was a wandering preacher in the Midrashic tradition. Recently, theologians compare him to a Greek Cynic philosopher, a late Diogenes looking with a lantern in bright daylight for an honest man. Not only were his followers about to have in letters a document describing a new, small sect of first-century Jews, a new Judaism – that would eventually take on its own identity and name, Christianity22 – but the book would, in plainest speech, detail Jewish and Greek thought concerning time and eternity, body and spirit, and the life of a skygod residing on earth who dies on a Roman cross and returns to the sky. These assumptions and events will in the next two thousand years spread around the globe as Christian theology. The narrative means employed in the gospels would also alter the use of language. The Greek resting point at which the New Covenant exists found its lexicon and style in both the Hebrew Bible and the diverse post-biblical scriptures that make up the noncanonical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the period. In Mark there was something else: the perfection of the ordinary, the pure, the rude,23 and the popular. It is spare and contains no spare words. A raconteur could say or dream it, but Aeschylus or even the great Shakespeare of Lear might not notice it as art. Or if they did, their version, as Shakespeare's borrowings from Plutarch, would be fleshed out beyond recognition. Yet in its lucid minimalism, Mark prefigured a formal revolution in style of two thousand years later when Hemingway, in biblical works like The Old Man and the Sea, came upon a speech that made the novelists of America and Europe go plain. In the opening picture in the wilderness are Mark's direct rhythmic word and bright plainness:
Yohanan the Dipper appeared in the desert and preaching an immersion of repentance for the remission of sins. The whole land of Yehuda24 and all the people of Yerushalayim25 came out to him and were being immersed by him in the Yarden River,26 and confessing their sins. Yohanan was clothed in camel hair, and wore a leather belt around his hips, and he ate locusts and wild honey. The author of Mark wrote in Koine, a form of demotic or spoken Greek,
and his voice is a spoken tale-not a learned written report in elegantly
difficult syntax. It is a teller's story, one largely repeated by Matthew
and Luke, each of whose version varies as a teller's account will. Here
the Hebrew Bible and the gospels share the medium of talk. Nothing is
plainer than the talk-narration of Genesis, which is to be heard as
speech or chanted as song. One must remember that God did not write
but "spoke" creation through the word; his feats on those
six days of labor were dictated into the Torah. Mark's gospel story
of the days of Yeshua turned out to be divine talk for later Christians.
His tone also reflects the unknown sources of his specific tale which,
whether written, oral, or both, certainly carried the same character
of common speech. Each of the gospels has its own genius of style and preserves its authoritative way through discussion. Unlike the intimate tale of the gospels, the Apocalypse (Revelation),27 takes us elsewhere. Although also in koine, Apocalypse, like the many extant apocalypses of the era-Jewish and Christian-Jewish-is one long breath of Hebrew Bible prophecy of the end. Like the primeval tales of creation and destruction in Genesis and the grotesque sky beasts in Daniel, its immediate source, the primal grandeur of Apocalypse carries us in vision all over the heavens and under the earth.28 The gospels of healing, poetry, parabolic wisdom, and the culminating passion along with the angelic vision of Revelation make the New Covenant the ultimate Christian-Jewish book. The "ultimate Christian-Jewish book" refers to the fact that
although the gospels are books composed by Jews as is each book in the
Hebrew Bible, the gospels can also be seen as Christian-Jewish books.
The later Christians received the gospels as Christian scripture, where
Christian carries the meaning of messianic. Yeshua's followers saw him
as the messiah, the foretold Jewish messiah, there being not yet a separate
religion one could call Christianity. An increasingly prevalent understanding
holds that the gospels are Jewish books written by Christian Jews, which
were ultimately appropriated and shaped by later Christians who had
lost their Jewish centrality and who saw intra-Jewish rivalry in the
New Covenant as a struggle between gentile Christians and demonized
Jews. In John Shelby Spong's Liberating the Gospels: Reading the
Bible with Jewish Eyes (HarperCollins, 1996), the Episcopal bishop
asserts that "The Gospels are Jewish Books," (title of chapter
2). He notes that although Christians have been educated to deny that
the New Testament is a Jewish book, "the Gospels are Jewish attempts
to interpret the life of a Jewish man" (Spong 20) and "in
a deep and significant way, we are now able to see that all of the Gospels
are Jewish books, profoundly Jewish books" (36). He observes that
the gospels were written by four Jews (Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke,
a convert) about Jews. The bishop goes on to confess his own worldwide,
Christian-prejudiced education with regard to the gospels: "How
was it that one whose name was Yeshuah or Joshua of Nazareth, whose
mother's name was Miriam, could come to be thought of in history as
anything but a Jew? . . . Not only did I not understand that Jesus was
Jewish, but it never occurred to me to assume that his disciples were
Jewish either. I could not imagine Peter, James, John, and Andrew as
Jews, to say nothing of Mary Magdalene and Paul" (24-25). In his
extensive study of the New Covenant, he tells us, "We are beginning
to recognize the Gospels as Jewish books" (33), but as for their
historicity, he notes that the dark Judas, the dark "anti-hero
of the Christian tradition" (258), was a later Christian invention."
. . . "Judas never existed but was a fictional scapegoat created
to shift the blame for Jesus's death from the Romans to the Jews."
In a grand book-problematic, imperfect as grand books of all faiths must be since these are the writings of humans, not of God-there is a page behind the page. On the underpage lies the good news of the Jewish teacher, rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef. But on other uncertain pages in the New Covenant are words reflecting persuasions of later churchmen that have fashioned Yeshua as an alien Galilean denouncing his coreligionists and sending them to a punishment worse than found in Sodom and Gomorrah. These outbursts should be understood as perfectly implausible and unworthy of Yeshua's nature and mission. Then begins understanding and good feelings. Then Matthew of the lovely Sermon and the empathetic Beatitudes, "Blessed are the gentle / for they will inherit the earth" (5.5) reaches us and not Yeshua militant, "who comes not to bring peace on earth but a sword" (10.34). That battle-sword anger should not, with a positive twist, be explained away hermenutically but rejected outright as alien noises of sectarian rivalry penned by later anonymous hands. Then released from stains of anger, Yeshua's voice speaks an innocence of light in the heart, of "light filling the whole body." It is a covenant of the noblest and kindest love, enveloping us in a firmament of soul. And the Christian believer-or reader of any faith or joy-is released from negations to read the book of concordance.
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24Judea. 25Jerusalem. 26Jordan River.
27Apocalypses may be found in James H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City: New York, 1983-1095), and in Barnstone, The Other Bible (San Francisco: HarperSan Francisco, 1984. All the other apocalypses are called "apocalypses," but the apocalypse in the New Covenant in most translations into English is "Revelation." In other languages, especially in those where Greek Orthodoxy is followed, the Greek word "apocalypse" is transliterated as apocalypse rather than translated as revelation. 28In Omens of Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), Harold Bloom reminds us that apocalyptic tradition, so widespread in intertestimental time and especially in the diverse noncanonical books of Enoch, has a long tradition from Zoroaster to Islam: "From Zoroaster on, apocalyptic expectations flourished and made their way into Judaism and its heretical child, early Christianity, and then into Islam, which sprang forth from Jewish Christianity"
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Principles of Persuasion | |||
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Having known the scarlet T of translation much of my life, along with some other letters of sin, academic and creative, and having written a book about translation's history, which centered in part on Bible conversion, I'd rather say nothing about the way taken here. Rather than defend, repeat or assert notions of translation which many, including myself, have made thin by repetition, I'd prefer to guard silence and let the reader read with no excuses from me. It would be better. But for reasons I think clear, it is not fair (and not the practice) to be silent about lingistic methods of converting a book of holy scripture. So after speaking with some passion about the New Covenant, and of the equally deep need for windows to see them through, I offer some principles of presentation that have helped me to attempt this translation. 1) The English text should read with the plain grace of the Greek page. 2) The invisible Hebrew Bible and Aramaic sources are in part refreshed by giving in many instances the Hebrew Bible and Aramaic names of person and place rather than the misleading Hellenizing Greek versions of the names, where the apparent intention of Greek mediation is to remove the book from its Semitic sources. The book should read not as a Greek book in English but as a Semitic book about Semites, which has passed through Greek in reaching us. 3) The names of prophets or titles of books of the Hebrew Bible cited in the text are identified and mentioned by name. Where in the Greek it says "and it is written" or "and the prophet says," it is normal practice in annotated translations to identify these names solely in minuscule reference name initials, along with chapter and verse numbers, in the margin or at the bottom of the page.29 Matthew might have expected his informed readers to know which Jewish prophet spoke a specific passage and where that passage occurred, as in the famous first reference to the foretold messiah in Matthew 2.5-6. In the New Revised Standard Version, in answer to the question "where the messiah was to be born" it reads: In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is has been written by the prophet. In this translation it reads,
Here the name of the prophet Micah is spelled out. In the excellent The New Annotated Oxford Bible of the NRSV (1997) the prophet's name may be guessed from a note "Mic 5.2," embedded in an eight-line note on "the wise men" (Magi). However, it is unlikely that a reader will seek out this reference. It should be said that the prophet's names are normally omitted from the Greek scripture, but not always, as seen in Mark, which chronologically opens the New Covenant. Mark reads,
Here Isaiah is in the text and it is not necessary to search elsewhere for the name. Unless the specific information of the prophet's name or source book is made known in the English text, the translation is incomplete, since the present audience in English, including scholars, will not identify the intended reference that has been cited to give ancient authority to the text. If one must look to the margin or bottom of page to find this specific name that is implied, but not stated, in the gospel, then the text becomes unreadable. In summary, most readers do not search out name references that an ancient reader might have understood, and unless such information informs the English translation, the translation fails to inform the English reader. 4) With respect to certain offensive gender-biased language, solutions are at best tentative. In the same way that anti-Semitism cannot be glossed over by euphemism or alteration of the text, so, too, the intentional male language, reflecting habits of bigotry toward women, cannot also be eliminated without falsifying these unfriendly intentions in the text. We are far from removing stylistic infelicities caused by playing with these awkwardnesses, but I have diminished the preponderance of male-gender speech where the Greek does not demand a male interpretation. An excellent example of unnecessary and misleading male-biased translation is rendering anthropos "human being" or "person," which is not to be confused with aner, andros, the normal word for "man" as gune, gunaikos is the normal word for woman. Anthropos means human being in Greek without reference to gender (though in Greek, too, some people assume that all human beings are men). Yet anthropos is normally translated into English as "mankind," which is not acceptable, since it is gender preferential. Gender-free "people" or "person" is preferred to the more abstract or sociological "humanity" or the hybrid "humankind." Yet Robert Alter in his Genesis (1996) uses "human" and "humankind" naturally and with easy authority-which has helped to establish them in some moments as the right and apparently only right words. In the past, men and women alike accepted "man" synecdochically to mean "man and woman," but that meaning of man and woman never fully worked. The word anthropos also brings us to one of the key theological
and literary word problems of the New Covenant. What do we do with
the phrase Son of Man? In Greek the phrase ho huios tou anthropou
(Matt 12.8) was not a negation of women, since it actually means son
of a human being, probably as opposed to a divine being. Ho huios
tou anthropou definitely does not and cannot mean "Son of Man,"
its prevalent translation, for that mistranslates the word anthropou,
which, as said, means a human being, a person, humanity, and not restrictively
a man. If one insists on one gender, "son of woman" would
be a more logical translation in order to indicate, as apparently
intended, that Yeshua is a human being born of a mother as opposed
to a god or God. What "man," or more reverently "Man,"
means is a favorite theological discourse. The capitalization in English
(not in Greek) adds another mystery to the English translation. I
have a few solutions, none satisfactory, since as in all translation
of multivalent words, one choice of meaning excludes another.
I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven. and in The New Revised Standard Version: I saw one like a human being As for where the meaning belongs in every appearance-between a simple synecdoche for "son of man and woman," where the one represents the whole, or whether it has its more mysterious meaning of the forecast messiah as found in Daniel, Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and elsewhere-that is the provenance of secondary writing. The problem is to find a solution for the text here, that is not stylistically crude and that rejects the unacceptable "son of man." "Son of a human" is awkward. and "son of the people" may evoke a political coloring of Red Square. While translation of connotative material is and should be as imperfect as it is rich, here the imperfection of the translation is especially troubling, since the phrase in question is key. "The Son of Man," though sacred in tradition, remains a theological minefield. I have settled on changing the adjectival genitive tou anthropou, "son of people," to a simple preceding adjective."Earthly son" seems a good way of indicating that Yeshua is a human being (which is the literal meaning of anthropou) as opposed to a "heavenly son" or "divine son." 5) This is an unbiased version. It does not proselytize by inflation, sectarian piety in the lexicon, or use any strategy to promote or demote one religious position or denomination over another, or to affirm or deny religious faith and rightness. 6) With respect to speech, I wish the English to come alive in
a version close in meaning to the original, without tampering with the
extraordinary metaphors by redoing them through equivalent metaphors
or paraphrasing them abstractly. Similarly, images are as far as possible
not changed or replaced by dubiously "equivalent" images.
In this sense, the translation attempts to convey art and magic by remaining
as close as possible to the Greek, discovering great freedom, essential
information, and every mystery in the literal. The authors should speak,
not the translator or what the translator may represent. The version
should be simple and modern, without dropping into basic English. While
it avoids churchy and pompous speech, it is happy, as the King James
Version was, to exploit the range of the English language. 7) With respect to etymology and the Greek language in its koine form, I interpret words not only in their traditionally New Testament dictionary interpretation, which are often puffed up with a religious rhetoric, but in their classical Greek usage, which was the base of the koine-writing authors. Hence, while respecting the tradition and scholarship of earlier versions, this translation is done directly from the Greek, rather than from other English versions with a mere nod to the Greek and the Latin Vulgata. Consequently, it tries to ignore erroneous "habits," to use Jorge Luis Borges's preferred polite word for traditional practices of pious speech that have become frozen by custom. This means the translation seeks the better word, not the sanctified one. Many words and phrases have been sanctified in the course of centuries of translation from scripture. These clichés are often infelicitous and inaccurate and help enforce traditional misunderstandings of the Greek. Although I have followed the principle of looking at each word freshly and meticulously, the effort, I wish to think, is not pedantic. My joy of discovery has been constant. An example of a minor, but perhaps representative, translation opportunity occurs in Matthew 28.8. After the crucifixion, the two Miryams are rushing off, full of fear and happiness from the place of internment of the body of the messiah, to spread the good news of the resurrection. Up to this moment in Matthew, each reference to the burial site is to Yeshua's taphos, his tomb or grave. Now taphos is replaced in Greek by mnemeion, which like mnemia means commonly a tomb or grave, but it is literally "a token of remembrance" and so carries the meaning of a memorial, and is given in Liddell and Scott the meaning in Latin of monimentum, which stresses the aspect of a "memory tomb." Following the etymology as well as a pertinent ordinary meaning of the word, I have translated mnemeion as "memorial place," retaining the implication that the messiah's burial place has already become a memorial, that is, a place to remember the dead, which fits this moment in the drama. 8) As for the sound of the Greek and the English, I have found a way that helps me hear, which I hope is transferred to the reader. Before seeking an English equivalent of the text, I read each few lines aloud to myself, and when the koine resonates smoothly I look for English words. I approach the koine as both written text and as speech and chant heard in Greek Orthodox chapels and monasteries. The gospels would be very poor if they did not live in the ear in Greek. 9) Yeshua's voice, which expresses itself in the tradition of the chanted Jewish Bible and which he alludes to and cites, should come through in English with overheard poetic rhythm.
By these means-modest yet significantly new, which neither alter,
interpret, paraphrase, or clarify scripture-I hope that these concluding
books of the whole Bible (the Hebrew Bible and New Covenant) will be
seen as narratives about Jews specifically, by Jews, to convince coreligionists,
and eventually also gentiles, that the arrival of the messiah foreseen
in the Jewish Bible had come in the person of Yeshua. The Jewish Bible has bequeathed us Christianity and Islam. By restoration of Aramaic and Hebrew biblical names in the New Covenant, these books will at last also look like Jewish, not Greek, scripture, and be read as such. Then perhaps the New Covenant, which has for millennia been the main source of the demonization of the Jews, will no longer serve that terrible end, and both Jews and Christians can read the uplifting, tragic and mysterious voyage of the New Covenant for its spiritual firmaments and literary marvels.
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about poet/translator Willis Barnstone including other translations,
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