Thursday 20 December 2018

The texts as holy and blinding success stories (historical factors): Lord's Resilience Part 1

The aim of this post is to identify three historical factors that may have influenced why such a central vocable as ‘Lord’ has shown such resilience in modern bible translation, ranging from the original biblical texts themselves, to the faithful art of sacred scripture copying and to the introduction of a specific status of ‘Kyrios’ via a special shorthand. These factors provide some explanatory power as to why ‘Lord’ may have slipped off the radar of many translation committees, before we tackle some more contemporary reasons in the next post.

It began with holiness

Thus far we have established that there seems to be a discrepancy between the NIV’s general translation policy, NIV heavy reliance on ‘Lord’ and ‘Lord’s current status in contemporary English. If my hypothesis is correct, that ‘Lord’ is outstaying its welcome, we then need to think about the factors and barriers affecting why some religiously significant words like ‘Lord’ might sometimes survive with such robustness in spite of the demands of dynamic translation. I believe it has something to do with sanctity. Think about it: if something is perceived by a person or a community as holy, then there is a responsibility to respect, to uphold, to commemorate and to preserve. Examples of this connection abound. Take the Islamic perception of the Koran for instance – every Arabic word is considered divine, literal God-utterances. Some of the complicated grammar in classical Arabic is even defined by it. You can’t touch it; you can’t change it. In Christianity, the idea of holy preservation is also very strong. In the wake of the reformation, the Catholic Church was under pressure to re-establish its continuity with (and preservation of) the past. Simon Ditchfield states it perfectly:

Roman Catholics were […] forced to take issue with the Reformers […] using the weapon of history that had been unsheathed by the Protestants […] The magisterial Catholic reply – the Annnales Ecclesiastici (1588-1607) of Cesare Baronio – [were organized into] 14,0000 columns of text in support of a two-word thesis: semper eadem – ever the same; that is to say, to demonstrate the continuity the Roman Church had always professed with its apostolic origins.”[1]

I believe, we can identify three significant historical factors that have contributed to this holy resilience to ‘Lord’s reassessment:
  • 1       the original texts themselves are self-sanctifying,
  • 2       for many centuries, copyists were at pains to copy the texts faithfully,
  • 3      introduction of powerful symbolic shorthand for extra sanctification of “Lord”,

I summarise these factors as “the texts as holy and blinding success stories” – they each contribute to our inability to see the painful and widening gap between contemporary mainstream and religious discourse. Let’s look briefly at how each one has functioned to see how that summary might be considered adequate (or not) in helping us understand why ‘Lord’ is outstaying its welcome.

1.      A deep regard for the texts’ sanctity is built in

Ever since the holy texts were first read and copied, their profound sanctity was explicitly anchored by the texts themselves and by the communities endorsing them, e.g. Deuteronomy 12:32, Revelation 22:18-19. The Revelation passage is packed full of terrible warning against manuscript meddling:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this scroll. And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll.   (NIV)

These texts are of course the Bible; the endorsing community became the Church who perceive it as the very inspired Word of God. Throughout history, the Christian community has been committed to the implementation, preservation and translation of these sacred Scriptures ever since. Each time, once established in any language, the community will likely not take any modification to any of the translated vocabulary lightly due to its association with being the sacred Word of God.

2.      Generally high standards of manual copying

Much has been made by some textual critics in recent times of potentially ‘wild’ copying practices in the first era of Christian copyist activity – how can we presume that this imputed holiness has always been true? The modern bible translator wants to be faithful to an original text – but did not all this profuse copying mean that speaking of “the original text” is meaningless if there were so many changes each time a manuscript was manually copied? Surely the sheer abundance of human errors would lead to an unacceptable level of trustworthiness of any critical text we want to call definitive.

Actually, despite the profusion of the burgeoning Christian demand for access to their holy texts throughout the Christian manuscript era (approx. 100-1500 A.D.) and the myriad of slight changes we see between each, we see in the thousands of extant manuscripts an extraordinary level of overall consistency. This is a witness to the steady motivation of Jewish and Christian scribes along with their commissioning authorities to remain faithful to God’s Holy Word despite natural tendencies to human error. Indeed, even for the staunchest critics acknowledge (e.g. Bart Ehrman), errors are 99% inconsequential and even traceable thanks to this mass of data the surviving manuscripts give us.

In the wake of a crumbling and decentralising Roman Empire, disagreements between the Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) Christianity, and the continuing expansion of the church cross-culturally, translations as well as copies were needed and used in liturgy. The point here is that once translated, further translations from the Greek were still possible but always with a view to preserving the original (sacred) meaning contained in the Greek – this could be the only conceivable reason for modifying the text in the target language.

Our first two factors affect the strong preservation of Scripture generally. As we now transition to ‘Lord’ specifically, we can note an astonishing reality: to an even greater degree, ‘Lord’ is virtually never revised in the target language. Every time the Greek Kyrios appears in a new translation and is truly adopted in the target language, it sticks, as the faithful copying hands continued their much needed work.

This phenomenon of copyist faithfulness to both the text generally and to Kyrios specifically continues and even accelerates post-reformation as Biblical translation resumes in earnest in the wake of the Reformation.

3.     Introduction of powerful symbolic shorthand for extra sanctification of “Lord”

Rewinding the clock back to the first centuries of the Christian era, there must have been two clear demands for faithful copies of the same sacred texts: Jewish[2] and Christian, and they contain a key as to why ‘Lord’ is so fundamentally precious. Prior to the steady separation of these two faiths in and around the second century, Judaism handed on to Christianity the general sanctity of the texts and the name in Greek of the central divine character known as “Kyrios” – God himself – both in a full format and an ultra-sanctified abbreviated format. Why all this hard work to please God? The Jews were desperate to regain control of the land He had promised them.


At the very heart of this effort, saying and writing God’s name for Jews especially had become a seriously tricky business. We know at times specific vowel alterations were used, or contractions, or certain symbolic marks or just a blank[3]. Pavlov Vasileiadis, whom I have had the privilege of consulting for this paper, states: “The subsequent use of the contracted forms of the original nomina sacra κ[ύριο]ς and θ[εό]ς within Christian manuscripts probably reflects the Jewish practice of replacing the Tetragrammaton by י[הו]ה[4]. We can then infer the likelihood that the Jewish practice of ultra-sanctification of God’s name resulted in special repackaging in Greek via a similar process of contraction, into these “nomina sacra”, meaning ‘holy names’ in Latin.

Copying and developing this holy contraction practice would have also permitted Greek-speaking Jews and Christians to make the sharp the distinction they needed between their κ[ύριο]ς and all the other lords and gods vying for attention in the pagan context. Thus, this Judaeo-Christian practice of contraction permits both sanctification and differentiation.[5]

Christianity rapidly spread and reached numbers in the millions. Mainly located in the Roman empire, it drew imperial scrutiny, persecution and finally adoption during the third and fourth centuries. There was virtually no special language to adopt as the Hebrew Scriptures had long since been translated and circulated in Greek and the New Testament had even been written in every-day Greek originally! ‘Kyrios’ was not new either – a common term, in fact, designating a wide range of authority figures, such as a slave-owner or even an emperor. What was adopted within Christian faith and practice was its distinguishing literary feature of nomina sacra, and it stuck – even across early translations and for over a thousand years.

Subsequent translations of the Bible were thus preloaded with deep and reverent significance surrounding the contracted forms (also contracted in the new languages of Latin, Coptic and so on) that would add to the resilience of the translated counterparts. Once established, the translated terms would be slow or even impossible to evolve. Apparently, in linguistic terms, that is the effect of imputed holiness on a word.


[1] Ditchfield, S. (1995) Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy, Cambridge University Press. p. 6. Emphasis mine.
[2] Jewish communities, somewhat diverse but with a relatively stable population, would have continued to need fresh copies as old manuscripts wore out, as synagogue networks developed in the Roman empire and also as desert communities were established. By the time of the first century, the Jewish elite would have felt the oppressive presence of the Romans (yet another dominating power denying the Jewish people jurisdiction over the land God had promised them) and judged to be a direct consequence of the people’s inability to please God, or in other words, to be lacking in sanctity. This had various consequences on what was taught and practiced, and Jesus is well known to have opposed some of these in strong terms (e.g. see Matthew 23:1–36).
[3] We have very few surviving Jewish texts that predate the Christian era and they all appear to be of this “safer” variety that avoid the risk of the reader pronouncing the divine name of Yahweh or Kyrios. They achieve this via a selection of methods, including a simple space, four dots. Albert Pietersma, professor emeritus of Septuagint and Hellenistic Greek, is of the opinion that these surviving practices were actually later precautions, replacing within the Jewish scribal traditions the previous choice of Kyrios. The data in this paper will strongly support that part of Pietersma’s thesis, the claim that ‘Kyrios’ was in the original and earliest Greek translations.
[4] Vasileiadis, P. D. (2014) Aspects of rendering the sacred Tetragrammaton in Greek (2014), Open Theology 2014; Volume 1: 56–88, De Gruyter, Open. Note, however, despite the form of contraction Vasileiadis mentions using the first and last Greek letters of the sacred referent, alternative contractions were also possible, e.g. by using the first two Greek letters, officially dubbed “suspension”. It is this latter such as in the example given in Figure 1 above of Romans 10:13 from Codex Sinaiticus.
[5] A third advantage may have been the practicalities of speed and economy of space! Since the earliest Christian scribes would probably have been Jews themselves, they may, as Vasileiadas has shown, have borrowed from technical Jewish scribal practices to emphasise sanctity while even streamlining their copying process, saving time and paper. Not just a win-win, but a win-win-win! It is little wonder scribes later expanded the technique to other holy figures in the ensuing decades and centuries. The final list of ‘nomina sacra’ ended up considerably larger: God, Lord, Jesus, Christ/Messiah, Son, Spirit/Ghost, David, Cross/Stake, Mother, God Bearer i.e. Mother of God, Father, Israel, Saviour, Human being/Man, Jerusalem, Heaven/Heavens.

Friday 14 December 2018

Lord dependency: the stakes are higher than we think

At our initial glance, it would seem that despite our strong Christian familiarity with the term, ‘Lord’ should be reassessed in light of these tensions (see previous post, Measuring 'Lord' Usage Today), potentially leading to a reduced dependency in our modern Bible translations. Granted: the translation ship still sails on the winds of truth, but the sails are shot with some historical relics, and “Lord” is perhaps the biggest hole of all. I may be a little extreme in my wording, but I would say it poses perhaps the deepest translational threat to a community struggling for relevance in a post-modern context. Despite its monumental religious and historic success, “Lord” runs the risk of redundancy – even bankruptcy. It is now an antiquated term that is essentially a religious gloss on an historic title from the Middle Ages, and as such actively contributes to alienating the church and its powerful message.

Monday 3 December 2018

Measuring 'Lord' Usage Today

In the last post we noted that modern translations like the NIV have maintained a strong reliance on the word "Lord", including those that claim that they have a fundamental commitment to dynamic translation and avoiding word-for-word translation traps. So, how does that double commitment work out? One way to check is to attempt to measure the dynamics of 'Lord' usage today, given my analysis that it should now be considered antiquated and 'old hat' in a way that its underlying Greek term was not.

Let us then look at some data. First, we can track is the trajectory of a word’s usage in English books[1], tracking ‘Lord’ usage from 1500 to 2008 alongside a selection of authority titles: ‘God’, ‘King’, ‘President’, ‘Chief’, ‘Leader’ and ‘Duke’:




Here we have the same terms again but focussed on the most recent 60 years:



Compared to its lofty heights in the 1600s where ‘Lord’ averaged around 0.08% of published words, it seems to have slumped to around 0.01% of words by the early 2000s. Indeed, the first graph also clearly shows some other relevant trends: all of the popular seventeenth-century keywords followed a similar pattern – ‘God’, ‘Lord’ and ‘King’ (and maybe ‘Duke’). However, it is interesting to note that the arrival of some other terms like ‘Leader’ and ‘Boss’ (not included above) have not outpaced these historic titles. You might think this implies that rather than painting a picture of a language that moves (like a painter painting over his old paint), evolving languages are simply diversifying and expanding (the painter is painting around his old paintings on an infinite canvas). Should we perhaps not question the validity of ‘Lord’ after all then? This first data pool, however, is derived primarily from published books and stops in 2008 and we have a couple more checks to do yet.

A second more up-to-date source provides a list of the top 5000 words from a large and balanced corpus of American English pool of 450 million words. The definite article, “the” occupies the top rank. “God” is 3,302nd, “King” is 2,359th, “Chief” is 1,781st, “Leader” is remarkably high at 464th and “Boss” is 2,344th (source: wordfrequency.info). “Duke” and “Lord” do not make the cut.






This is interesting – why the discrepancy between these two measures? Clearly language usage is not an easy thing to gauge. We need a third metric. Let us return to the most successful online search engine, Google, to focus on their News section, surely an accurate reflection on contemporary usage. Here are the number of hits per title as I write this in November 2018:

God
617,000,000
King
664,000,000
Boss
613,000,000
President
462,000,000
Chief
379,000,000
Leader
317,000,000
Lord
92,500,000
Duke
47,600,000







Two out of three of our metrics above seem to show a strong tension between:
  • CBT’s intended stance on Bible translation (dynamic),
  • CBT’s reinforcement of ‘Lord’ language (nearly 8000 instances, a few of which as insertions), 
  • The current linguistic situation of ‘Lord’ (low usage in mainstream discourse).



[1] Source: Google Books Ngram Viewer, http://books.google.com/ngram

Wednesday 28 November 2018

NIV reliance on "Lord"

WE NOTICED SOME wonderful words have evolved more slowly despite their place in an evolving language like English, like "love", "grace" and "true", perhaps because they transcend their rapidly shifting linguistic housing. In English Christendom, at least one central Christian word seems to have survived for other reasons: “Lord”, the primary focus of my current research. It continues to prevail in song, sermon and Scripture (although I would argue to a lessening degree in conversation and testimonial). 

In Scripture, ‘Lord’s bedrock, it comprises no occasional reference! While English translations will vary, the total number of occurrences of ‘Lord’ is usually situated in the mid-to-high 7000s[1] translating various Hebrew and Greek terms. The NIV appears even to consciously seek to reinforce the word. For instance, to translate the New Testament’s Greek word ‘hagiōn’, traditionally translated in English by ‘the saints’, the NIV writes, “the Lord’s people”[2]. As a result, it succeeds in bringing its own New Testament ‘Lord tally’ to nearly 700. Next to ‘God’, ‘Lord’ must be said to occupy one of the most important roles in the New International Version.

However, given the NIV's Committee on Bible Translation strong stance on respecting language dynamics, does this fit the usage of 'Lord' today? In my next post, we will attempt to answer that question according to three different metrics.




[1] God was usually known in Hebrew by his personal Name, ‘Yahweh’, which I count at 6,867 occurrences. These are systematically translated ‘Lord’ by NIV and other mainstream translations, following a centuries-old tradition that can be dated back to Tyndale and Luther’s publications in and around the 1530s, with Tyndale using “LORde” in (Genesis) and Luther “HERR(N)” (although we know that ‘Lord’ translations had already been around a long while even before that, e.g. Wycliffe, late 14th century). Add to 6,867 tally all the human ‘lords’ of the Old Testament mostly derived from Hebrew’s 'adown, the divine ‘Lord’ from,  ‘Adonai’, and the hundreds of occurrences of ‘Lord’ in the New Testament, largely as a title for Jesus, and reach the high 7000s pretty quickly.
[2] This particular choice is peculiar. Even if it were felt that the Jesus-Yahweh relationship were to be emphasised, it does not appear to have been done so via this route by the New Testament writers. Manifestly they were aware of the Septuagint translation into Greek of the Hebrew Bible and its specific wording, and cited it frequently. When the Hebrew says something very close to “Yahweh’s people/congregation” (NIV: “the Lord’s people”) ‘Kyriou’ is present and ‘hagiōn’ is not (e.g. LXX Num 11:29, 1 Sam 2:24, 2 Ki 9:6, 2 Chr 23:16, Ez 36:20). This is the opposite of the New Testament wording.

Monday 26 November 2018

When did this "Lord" business begin?

We live, think, reason and (for some) believe within the languages our personal histories have supplied us. Mine are very few: English by birth, and French a bit later on. English translations of the Bible have been around for so long that they can feel for many like the original language. If something sacred is understood about the Bible's nature, then it is naturally understood to be the translation that is also sacred, to such a point that its nature as a translated is hidden from our view.

Possibly the most central word to the English Bible apart from "God" is "Lord". Yet, as far as I can tell, Lord has only been around for a third of Christianity's history on this planet at best (I'm hoping that this proportion will not grow) and most English speaking Christian folk today might find that hard to believe.

Indeed, many modern translations of the Bible still keep going with "Lord" - I have a series of five reasons I will soon provide to help us understand why this title is showing such resilience. I also will provide some statistical research to suggest that in mainstream discourse, 'Lord' is indeed fundamentally religious and historical and not a contemporary term to designate authority.

Today, I just want to very briefly provide you how I understand the history of the word. Many people, myself included, presume that the English translation came about as a result of the King James Version, or maybe Tyndale might ring a bell of earliness. Of course, it all coincides with the printing press, so maybe that's when everything happened and Christianity moved itself out of Latin-only-mode.

That's not accurate.

Here's the complexity of it, in boiled-down form: translations of parts of Scripture had been going on well back in the middle ages. But back in the middle ages the language people in the island now known as the UK spoke a language so different to what is spoken today it should be understood as an entirely different language. From the Anglo-Saxon I have looked at, I literally only understand very occasional words, often simple conjunctions like "and" (we will see an example in a minute). Let's get back to Lord.

So the Wessex Gospels, variously dated but probably early 1000s, used drihten, a proto-germanic word that meant governor, Lord, etc., and was also used to translate Yahweh (or Latin's Dominus), i.e. God. From the few passages I have looked at, the article is missing. That is relevant for my research into the implications of using Lord today, since nearly 7000 occurrences of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible were written and subsequently translated deliberately without the article. This ensured that God's Name carried over into new cultures and languages as a proper name. Drihten appears to have maintained that tradition:

Drihtnes ys eorðe, and eall þæt heo mid gefyld is; and eall mancynn þe þæron eardað is Drihtnes. ("The earth is the Lord's, and all that she is filled with; and all mankind that dwell thereon is the Lord's") --Psalm 23 (24 in King James Version), King Alfred Translation (Paris Psalter)

Source: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/drihten

The Hatton gospels use the same anglo-saxon term.

Where we notice a switch occurring is with the Wycliffe translations in the 14th century. "Lord" makes its appearance at last! But it hasn't yet stabilised. In 1522, Martin Luther's German Bible gave HERRN for Yahweh, all caps. 1529 was the year that Tyndale published the Pentateuch translation, in which we see a curious "the LORde" for Genesis, and "the Lord" from Exodus onward. 1539 gave rise to the "Great Bible", commissioned by King Henry VIII, which appears to be the last translation to spell Lord with an "e", Lorde, except that it consistently applied the full caps throughout (the LORDE). The last major milestone before the KJV is the Bishop's Bible in 1568, where Lord reverts back to its current spelling (and maintained capitalisation, the LORD, for translation of Yahweh). The KJV simply continued in the Bishop's Bible standardised format in 1611.

I hope that helps!

Sunday 25 November 2018

What To Do When We Score A Blank

WHAT SHOULD WE do when we feel devoid of purpose? Empty not just of belief but also of disbelief? We should certainly not despair. Here's why (if my experience is anything to go by):

We need to be here. Christian origins, theology, the church... anything that isn't directly about the here and now can be an escape, and I'm glad to report there is a wonderful feature about all life. Well, it's got good and bad bits - I'm trying to focus on the good bits! It's called "homeostasis". It's about a universal force that draws everything back to a state of equilibrium, and I have encountered it at work in my own life time and time and time again.

At some point, equilibrium pulls me back to here. The escapism - even if it is true that it is an escape of purpose and meaning - cannot prevail, and even a crisis of belief becomes empty. This is an interesting and stabilising point for someone who perceives life as chaotic. As Tim Keller points out in his great little book, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, what I believe ceases to seem to be of such drastic importance. If my own belief or disbelief are at the centre, then I am at the centre, precisely what the wounded and inflated ego demands. But too much of that too often and homeostasis exerts its own demands. Our souls were not built to withstand that kind of imbalance indefinitely.

Right now, I feel like my own belief about metaphysical reality to draw me toward superficiality, something to which I have been consistently allergic (partly because I am). My new "ground zero" is not "Help, Father God" - invoking simultaneously a whole host of uncertain definitions and investigations.

Instead, it is simply to breathe. In. And out. And I'm here and I'm OK and I'm back quicker to a place of social availability.

Sunday 18 November 2018

Four perspectives on Bible translation



What might this constant change mean for Bible translation? We can suggest four logical basic Bible translation perspectives:

1.       Static source to static targets
2.       Static source to dynamic targets
3.       Dynamic sources to static targets
4.       Dynamic sources to dynamic targets

assorted-color clothes lotThe first perspective would imply that not only a given Greek term like ‘Kyrios’, usually translated into English as “Lord”, always held the same usage and meaning (static source) but also that ‘the Lord’ has always held the same usage and meaning (static target). Even though we haven’t yet considered how we should imagine the source Bible languages functioned, we already should realise that this first approach to Bible translation is ill-fated since we know that our target languages are constantly on the move. For example, a couple of hundred years ago we might have described our clothes as “gay” even though today we might not.

The second perspective marks a significant improvement: the source language is still perceived as fundamentally static (after all, no-one speaks that Greek anymore, right?), but it is conceded that the target language is a shifting target. Thus, “ye have respect to him that weareth the gay clothing” (James 2:3, King James Version) has now become “you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes” (New King James Version).

No-one really holds the third perspective, at least to my knowledge. It would imply a deep understanding of the living dynamics of interconnected languages of Hebrew and Greek, while presuming the opposite to be true of languages spoken today.

The fourth perspective is where I think all Bible translation should land, regardless of readership (readership should of course be integrated, but that is a subsequent stage of reasoning). Here, the source languages and the target languages are both perceived as dynamic, alive and interconnected. If this fourth perspective is to be truly embraced, then we must bid farewell to simplistic word-for-word translation, just as the Chair of the Committee on Bible Translation, Dr. Douglas Moo, has recognised:

Do we continue to require our second-year language students to translate “word for word,” perpetuating a simplistic and ultimately false view of language?[1]

With other CBT members also echoing this perspective, it is encouraging that the NIV appears fully resonant with this reality. That is why I have chosen this particular committee as my primary intended readership and the NIV as my primary base translation for reviewing modern ‘Kyrios’ treatment.
Clearly, however, this process of linguistic change is a complex one. In many of our modern target languages, especially those that are among the richest, most developed and innovative languages, some words have evolved with slower dignity and perhaps more flair than others, both inside and outside the confines of religious discourse, like “love”, “joy”, “peace”, “God”, “hope”, “grace”, “divine” and “true”. At least one central Christian word seems to have survived for other reasons: “Lord”, the primary focus of my paper/book. So why might some historical religious language still function so prominently in some of the most successful Bible translations of our day and should that exempt it from the demands of Perspective 4?
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Saturday 10 November 2018

Tech is powering the diversity and change embedded in our language

With the evolution of the relatively few surviving languages, we bear witness to a very familiar pattern to that established by biological evolution: consensus that it happens and wide diversity on how it happens.

One factor seems to be if the language spoken is by a people indigenous to an area. These folk might be more likely to innovate than a diaspora group.

Another huge factor for accelerated language evolution is technology. Like other major players in the news media, The Guardian has recognised the power the Internet has had on accelerating linguistic change. They recently featured the following column, stating: “The usual evolution of English has been accelerated online, leading to a less formal – but arguably more expressive – language than the one we use IRL”*, writes Emmy Favilla, editor and author, somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
If the purpose of Bible translation is to effectively communicate to readerships existing within evolving linguistic frameworks (and all readerships do), then Bible translation cannot just be about checking off the languages as yet “unreached by the gospel”.

In summary, languages seem to be in a deep state of constant flux, especially under certain accelerating technological factors, which should have a profound effect on the perceived task of Bible translation.


*  Favilla, E. (2017) How the internet changed the way we write – and what to do about it, The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/booksblog/2017/dec/07/internet-online-news-social-media-changes-language  

Friday 2 November 2018

Second book project

Well, Mutated Faith never took off, but I don't mind. It played an important role in getting me to where I am now. Folk sometimes download or consult the sample chapter I put online at Academia here.

But the point is that for some time I have been thinking the creative drive to rethinking how we translate Kyrios in our Bibles has created such a body of research and momentum even on this blog, that it is time to review it all and place it in some form greater order, which is now looking quite a lot like a book.

This book, however, is very different from Mutated Faith. Mutated Faith I had hoped would appeal to genuine seekers who were also interested in ancient Christianity and questioning their faith, but I never managed to convince publishers - not yet at any rate. In its initial edition of the current book, I want to appeal to a much smaller readership: the Committee on Bible Translation responsible for the New International Version of the Bible.

What is its working title? I'm currently using:

Kyrios 2.0: Why and how to gently relieve the Lord from 500 years of service




Some words of explanation about this title are in order.

Kyrios 2.0”: Kyrios has been translated as “Lord” or “the LORD” for centuries and is now so deeply rooted into Christian parlance that it can be difficult to rethink these as suitable holders for the crucial underlying term in Greek. The “2.0” is to suggest that it is indeed time for an update.

Why”: 2 reasons will be given as to why the Lord should be prepared for retirement - modern usage and grammatical inaccuracy.

How”: the book will propose a bespoke, context-driven methodology for translating ‘Kyrios’ and finally offer a “test-drive” of this methodology throughout the New Testament.

Gently retire”: as I started to realise in the build-up to penning Blind Lover Tina Discovers Name Change, it is impossible to overstate how deeply rooted and central the Lord is to Christianity - it is a question that goes significantly further than an ivory-tower decision on a Greek translation.

500 years”: a reference to the earliest widespread translations into English that included “Lord”, most notably the publication of the Tyndale Bible.


Service”: a clear recognition that Lord has had a hugely successful and helpful role for the church.