Saved in Translation

Yesterday's merry japes in the Spanish tongue have brought me back to Doug Chaplin's comments regarding the translation of the words of and stories about Jesus into Greek - or, to put it another way, the writing of the Gospels.

The scriptural basis of the Christian faith lives primarily in translation. We don't have Our Lord's words as he originally spoke them because the Gospels are not in his native tongue of Aramaic. Which makes any claim to be using the "originals" very nuanced when we go to our Greek New Testaments and try to drag the beauty of John's Gospel out of them.

But it's not even that simple. Because if we are reading Jesus quoting Old Testament scripture, we have to bear in mind that the Old Testament that the early Church tended to use was the Septuagint - a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Common Greek.

And so we have passages where Jesus - an Aramaic-speaking Jew, presumably - is quoted (in Greek) referring to passages in the Hebrew Bible, but the Bible he is quoted using is the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible - presumably (and this is presumably, I realise - I have no way of proving this) a version he didn't use. It's as if I wrote a life of Spurgeon, and wherever he quoted Scripture I subbed in the words from the Douai-Rheims Bible.

I'm assuming here that this is what happened -  and that this page is wrong when it argues, from Jesus' quoted words in the Bible, that he used the Septuagint.

If I were Drayton, and set store by Biblical inerrancy, I could despair at this point.

But the evidence, thankfully, is that I'm not Drayton. And I will rejoice that the Spirit takes all that linguistic mess and confusion and, through yet another translation, adds another layer of nuance. Or two, if you read the NIV where the Bible has been translated into Evangelical, or the Revised English, where passages appear to have been translated into Liberal. And I could go on.

And I will rejoice that God can get in on the act to the degree that he can take the Hebrew of Isa 7:14-16 and actually translate that into a genuine miracle.

A glory of our faith, it seems to me, is that through the competing narratives of the Bible stories and the scope for flexibility and imprecision that the story of the words entails, the work of Spirit and man or woman in interpretation goes on. We share a belief that can morph into a thousand expressions of life. And rather than regret that, I'm going to celebrate it.

Now I'm off to pour out some beakers. We're reckoning the wind's dropped off enough we can hold the ceremony outside again today - which is a great relief. Young Keith is busy installing the stations for the Spirituality of Robotics in the Moot House and I'm not convinced that one of those robots isn't a People-mincing machine. One of the Sirius Cybernetics Corps' less successful GPPs.