The Greek New Testament
This week I continued physical therapy after last week's knee operation. After some jokes about bones and joints, the therapist and I got into a discussion about Ancient Greek, Hebrew and the Bible.
He asked if Greek was like Hebrew because a fundamentalist family member of his often talked about those languages, though the family member does not know those languages. I said they were not much alike at all, but they were two of the languages, along with Aramaic, that the Bible was written in.
Of course, the fundamentalist in his life bragged about taking the Bible literally. Which led us to a conversation about what literal really means.
For Christians, the most important passages of the Bible are the words of Jesus. Jesus is quoted throughout the four Gospel accounts. Each of those Gospels are written in Greek. They are eyewitness accounts by four men who knew and followed Jesus during His brief, three-year ministry in Israel. Jesus traveled, but only in Israel, then as now a very small country. Jesus spoke to Jews and to people who lived in Israel, including Roman officials and soldiers.
All of the words Jesus spoke were in Aramaic and Hebrew. Aramaic is very like Hebrew and was, at that time, the commonly spoken language of Israel and what is now the Middle East.
Fundamentalists believe there is a perfect autograph copy somewhere of every word of the Bible. Therefore, they can take the Bible literally because every word is perfect.
If there is anything repellent to a fundamentalist, it is actual faith. They want certainty. The idea of perfect manuscripts fits with their need for certainty. But as with all of life, the reality is complicated, way too complicated for a fundamentalist.
Most of the words of Jesus recorded by the Gospel writers were spoken in Aramaic. Jesus spoke Aramaic as He gave what is known as the Sermon on the Mount, also known as the Beatitudes. This brief speech is recorded in the beginning of Chapter 5 of the Gospel of Matthew. But Matthew did not write the speech in Aramaic, he wrote it in Greek. Matthew translated the words he heard from Aramaic to Greek.
Most Americans speak just one language, so they don't deal with the problems of translation in their daily life. Someone who speaks only English can think of translation as some kind of word-for-word swap from one language to another. But anyone who deals with multiple languages knows better.
In this case, Matthew's Greek version of what Jesus said is 87 words. The closest I could get to Aramaic is a Hebrew version of the New Testament. The Hebrew version has only 64 words. A standard English translation has 121 words.
The fundamentalist version of Bible inspiration says Matthew was doing something akin to automatic writing. That he wrote 87 words of Greek that became the perfect original. Inspiration in this view is something akin to automatic or magic writing.
For this to be true, we have to imagine Matthew, a real human person, remembered the words of Jesus and wrote down the 87 Greek words that exactly corresponded to those 64 (or so) Aramaic words. A real person translating those words would wonder "What about this word, what about this phrase?"
All language is culture which is why there can be a new translation of the Bible every year, in any language. Matthew, the man, wanted to express what Jesus said, the best he could. In the process of writing the Gospel, he was not in a trance. He wrote, he thought about what he wrote, he changed what he wrote. As with anyone who has ever translated a sentence, or a paragraph, or a book, we must choose words, phrases and syntax to best express what we believe was said.
Matthew was also writing about a man he did not understand. Matthew knew Jesus, lived with Jesus, and like all the disciples, misunderstood Jesus. How could it be otherwise? We never fully understand each other. Matthew heard the words of God in the form of man. Part of translation is trying to express not just the word, but the thought being expressed. No translator has ever faced a greater challenge than a Gospel writer.
So Matthew was translating the words of Jesus from Aramaic to Greek and striving to pick the right words to represent the Words of God. Matthew wrote by faith, not by dictation. Matthew had a different task when he was writing what Jesus did rather than what He said. Then Matthew was turning his memories into words. But, again, his task was not as straightforward as the same task would be for a native speaker of Greek. Matthew, like every New Testament writer except Luke, was a native speaker of Aramaic. So he was writing in Greek even though Aramaic was the language of his early life and thought. Matthew wrote good Greek, but not native-speaker Greek as Luke did.
Before the Bible was translated into English, the spoken words of Jesus were already translated from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. The idea of a perfect original copy fills many imaginations but simply does not exist. No one has the exact words spoken by Jesus. No one wrote down the exact Aramaic and Hebrew words Jesus spoke, so no one has what would be the true original copy. What we have is the memory of four different men translated into Greek words. Those who can read Greek know that the four accounts differ greatly in tone. Luke wrote very good Greek. Mark wrote with a limited vocabulary using grammar and syntax strongly influenced by Aramaic and Hebrew.
Everything about real life makes a mockery of certainty. We can only live by faith or make up a false certainty to hide behind.
The entire universe, from photons to galaxies, is at once too small and too vast to fully comprehend. The result is that those who reject all religion, such as Richard Dawkins, and those who reject all science, such as Ken Ham, are equally, extremely wrong. Science of every kind opens new frontiers constantly because every aspect of life has new facets to discover. Faith flourishes in every culture despite all the skeptics.
The Bible itself can never be pinned down like a butterfly on wax by fundamentalists. Jesus left no writings. Every word of Jesus in Scripture recorded by the Gospel writers is a translation from Aramaic or Hebrew to Greek. In English those words are two translations away from the original words. And those words have ambiguities and connotations and shades of meaning even in the original language--which we don't have.
