give me that old time religion – a response to Rich Rhodes

    Richard Rhodes is a linguist who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley. He blogs at Better Bibles. His last BBB post touches on a number of great topics: representation of gender in Greek and English; differences in style across the components of the New Testament; “natural English” as the way to go if we are to have better Bibles in English. Though this post is just an excuse for me to link to Johnny Cash singing “give me that old time religion,” before I offer the link, I will take issue with some of Rich’s claims.

    I concur with the following comment by Rich in the thread pursuant to his post:

I just want to get to the point of being able to talk about how to make Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the writer of Hebrews sound as different in English as they do in Greek. And step one is to talk about subtle differences in usage. In this case, what linguists call markedness.

    Fine. Here is a feature of usage in the gospel of Matthew. The author likes to conform to Biblish diction and cite in Biblish for the sake of his LXX literate readership. He also likes to calque non-Biblish phraseology, like "the kingdom of heaven" and “our Father who is in heaven,” phraseology Jesus shared with the Pharisees. Hence the occurrence in Matthew of a relatively large number of Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic > Jewish Hellenistic Greek turns-of-phrase.

    In Matt 15:9, that's why we find the wording we do, per LXX Isa 29:13. For example: ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων “commandments of men” (not an exact calque of the Hebrew מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁי; the collective singular "command" is pluralized).

    It is true of course that “men” in this phrase, in Hebrew and Greek, is not gender-specific. Neither is “men” gender-specific in comparable English phraseology of a literary register, for example: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men/ gang aft agley,/ an' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain.” (a reading of the whole wonderful poem).

    I would argue that “a commandment of men” in Isa 29:13 is a fine literary translation of a component of a literary text. Isa 29:9-14 (with the exception perhaps of 29:11b-12) is a tautly composed diatribe blistering with a high density of patterned poetic language.

    To be sure, “a commandment of men” might not qualify as a politically correct translation. That, of course, might be considered a feature, not a bug. It *is* the translation of the Jewish Publication Society (NJPSV).  

    The salient contrast in Isa 29:13 depends on a “before God/before men” binary: heartfelt worship in response to God’s invitation versus lip service in response to a commandment of men drilled into a faux believer. A similar binary underlies Jer 31:34. Isa 29:13:

יַעַן כִּי נִגַּשׁ הָעָם הַזֶּה בְּפִיו

וּבִשְׂפָתָיו כִּבְּדוּנִי

וְלִבּוֹ רִחַק מִמֶּנִּי

וַתְּהִי יִרְאָתָם אֹתִי

מִצְוַת אֲנָשִׁים מְלֻמָּדָה

Because this people drew near with their mouth
and honored Me with their lips
while their heart was far from Me,
their worship of Me became
a commandment of men learned by rote.
[NJPSV somewhat modified]

    It makes sense to incorporate a parallel set of translation choices into a rendering of Matt 15:19 even if the latter’s distinctive features must also be respected:

Ὁ λαὸς οὗτος τοῖς χείλεσίν με τιμᾷ,
ἡ δὲ καρδία αὐτῶν πόρρω ἀπέχει ἀπʼ ἐμοῦ·
μάτην δὲ σέβονταί με,
διδάσκοντες διδασκαλίας ἐντάλματα ἀνθρώπων.

This people honors me with their lips
while their heart is far from me;
in vain do they worship Me,
teaching as doctrine the commandments of men.
[RSV=ESV slightly modified].

    I'm not sure there is a better way to capture the Biblishness and Rabbinicness of the style of Matthew than to preserve agreement in matters of detail across registers Matthew wished to conjoin: biblical Greek understood from within, and acting as an indictment of, Greek literate Pharisaic Judaism. I note in passing that the love-hate relationship with the Pharisees the gospel of Matthew reflects is unlikely to be an innovation of Matthew. It is best attributed to Jesus himself.

   One rephrases  "commandment(s) of men" at considerable peril - though Mark does, after the original is reproduced, in a similar context: “commandment of God” versus "the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8).

    NT authors demonstrate a strong commitment to the Biblish of their day. If you naturalize the NT’s Biblish too much – Biblish as in Hebrew Bible > Septuagint Biblish - you remove a component of its markedness.

    To calque or not to calque: that is the question. An exact calque is not necessary. An approximate calque seems preferable - across both passages. Viewed from this standpoint, RSV=ESV, as often, has a great deal in its favor.

    The chief error of RSV=ESV is not getting the grammar of Isa 29:13 right: the narrative past tense of the Hebrew – “[their worship of me] became” - conveys an essential semantic feature: the apodosis of a condition.

    HCSB cannot be recommended across the passages, with its Matthew still speaking in Biblish even though its Isaiah speaks in more natural English.

Because these people approach Me with their mouths
to honor Me with lip-service—
yet their hearts are far from Me,
and their worship consists of man-made rules
learned by rote—

These people honor Me with their lips,
but their heart is far from Me.
They worship Me in vain,
teaching as doctrines the commands of men.

NIV 1984 is superior to NIV 2011 at Matt 15:9. NIV 2011 truncates the text; "the teachings they teach" would have been appropriate.

They worship me in vain;
   their teachings are but rules taught by men.

They worship me in vain;
   their teachings are merely human rules.

    If there is an alternative method of retaining the stylistic choices of Matt 15:9 to the one suggested here, a method which retains agreement across text and subtext, with Matthew quoting the KJV of his day with little modification - I would love to hear it. In the meantime, give me that old time religion.

Comments

[Mitchell Powell]

I went to a family reunion this weekend: approximately one hundred descendants of my great-grandfather gathered under an outdoor shelter, hiked about the woods, and sang old hymns in four-part harmony. If the goal is to quickly impart simple facts, the antiquated language was probably not the most efficient method. But if one important goal is to ferry people into community with a millenia-old community of faith, it does the job beautifully.

If you want to explain a single fact to a bigger, you talk the most natural current speech. If you want draw a listener into a strange world, they'll need to pick up some new vocabulary. And, as a matter of course, anyone immigrating into a strange world will suffer some misunderstandings, overconfidence that one "gets it" is also a form of misunderstanding.

[Mitchell Powell]

*to a beginner

[John Hobbins]

Hi Mitchell,

Agreed. Antiquated language is, in the right dosage, an appropriate vector of the vocabulary of faith, of cultural memories, and of habits of the heart, not to mention the archetypes to which Freud and Jung drew attention.

Maybe God knew what he was doing when he vouchsafed eternal truths in ancient tongues.

[Derrick Tate]

Hi John,

I wonder if there is a case to be made for the HCSB treatment.

I note that the NET Bible has something similar:

These people say they are loyal to me;
they say wonderful things about me,
but they are not really loyal to me.
Their worship consists of nothing but man-made ritual.

This people honors me with their lips,
but their heart is far from me,
and they worship me in vain,
teaching as doctrines the commandments of men

***

The argument might be similar to the saying about good, fast, and cheap--pick two.

Here the objectives could be to match the style of Matthew, the agreement across text, and the style of Isaiah.

Matthew's use of Isaiah may sound like Biblish. But how would Isaiah's use of similar words in a different context come across--Would it sound like Biblish in the same way?

[John Hobbins]

Hi Derrick,

My biggest problem with NET's solution is that it fails on two counts, not one.

NET Isa 29:13 does not respect the style of Isaiah. The language of Isaiah in the passage is less colloquial, far richer in metaphor, and more structured from the point of view of prosody and syntax than transpires from the NET version. NET Isa 29:13 dumbs down the text.

But I concede the point that if the text is not dumbed down in translation, it cannot be digested in real time as it would have been by its first readers, for whom the metaphor-rich, syntactically complex, and prosodically confined traits of the text would have been second nature.

The tradeoffs are clear. The hard-hitting immediacy of the prophet's diatribe is difficult to maintain if the metaphors and rich syntax it contains, however non-immediate to us, are retained.

I am also thinking that Jesus' diatribe with the Pharisees would have been grasped on the fly by his interlocuters, and by Matthew's target readership, because both Jesus and Matthew assumed a high degree of biblical literacy in their interlocuters. Of course, we must assume the contrary today. The hiatus on the level of pragmatics is virtually unavoidable.

[BkMitchell]

Has a form-analytical translation of the Bible ever been attempted? I am a bit fond of Jacob Neusner translation of the Mishnah that is rendered in that way. And, I think it would be fascinating to see that approach taken with the Bible.

[John Hobbins]

Not that I know of. It's mostly a question of visual formatting. There is no reason it couldn't be done.

[Cicero Ril]

Translation: not about converting words, but about translating the reader into the mind of the writer....