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.

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[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.