Green or Brown?

Innovative building design for appartment block design in Alès, southern France. 

Every time we drive past these appartments, my children (and me) are fascinated by the way in which the colour of the walls metamorphoses from brown through green and back to brown again. The other morning, while fetching birthday croissants from the baker's, I took the time to record the effect on camera.

The first photo gives a sweep of the vista in panoramic mode. But let's break it down.

The first two pictures give us an idea of how the colour appears when looking at the appartments from an angle.

 

The colour starts off a "pure" green and in the second photo the appartments appear to begin to metamorphose into brown.

The more we approach viewing angles that are perpendicular to the walls, the more the colour shifts to brown to such an extent that all trace of green is swallowed up in brown. 

Increasing the viewing angle still further slowly returns the apparent colour to green again.

Why am I telling you this? 

There are actually two applications, one is to a previous theme of the blog (development of a Triune God theology) and the other to the usage of "Lord" in modern Bible translations.

We didn't get to The Trinity overnight: more like a pregnancy

Let's take the Trinity one first. Readers of the blog may recall that I developed a historical model for the development of the Christian idea of a Triune God that I referred to as the Triune Hub. This is basically a cumulative summary of a number of well established "mutations" that Christianity brought to Judaism: see Jewish Roots Of The Trinity. In the same way that we cannot say that there is a snapping moment at which the appartment walls "switch" from green to brown, nor can we see early evidence for an instantaneous switching of God. It is false to say that in the first century and in light of Jesus and the Holy Spirit, that the Jewish Christians now understood God to be triune. It is also historically false to say that the way things had been reconfigured theologically for early Christians, was not significant enough to:

• speak of a rejectable Jewish sect
• centre Jesus and the Holy Spirit centrally in a theological conceptual hub previously populated or dominated by Yahweh alone
• baptise in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (as opposed to a Spirit-blank John-style baptism)

In addition to its subsequent enshrinement in Scripture, first-century Christian documents enter into a hermeneutic process that would be used to defend against a dissection or subordination order of the F, S & HS. Early and later "heresiarchs" would consistently provide negative threats to this recentering. This binding up together in worship, discussion and action of all three is reinforced for centuries to such an extent that eventually the notion of "substance" is introduced - and the walls are increasingly brown. Eventually, Godhood substance, equally shared, becomes simply God, thus the Triune God is "born" - after a looooong pregnancy.

From LORD to GOD

I sometimes wonder if I am even bordering on insanity for even thinking about the phasing out of "Lord" from Christian discourse and Scripture. But, I know it could happen. Not only could it happen, but it could happen without me even living to see it. Right now things remain very "green". Many Christian gatherings across the world today would make such a project seem about as likely as walking water. Every prayer is punctuated by "Lord", sometimes to a crazy degree, much higher than in any normal conversation we would use someone's name or title.

But then Peterson just went out there and splashed around a small splattering of very acceptable brown paint. He translated thousands of times over, in his early 2000s publication of The Message, the Hebrew Yahweh with ... GOD, not LORD.

Now, my research on the anarthrous nature of the Septuagint translation of Yahweh provides extra (dare I say more scholarly?) legitimacy to this translation choice. Maybe a tiny bit more brown. 

Where could extra brown-ness come from? My suspicion is that the church is going to have an ever-increasing battle with relevance to modern culture. Part of the drive for relevance concerns language. Old words, as invested with love and identity as they may still be today, are steadily disappearing and replaced with more meaningful equivalents. The greater the emotional investment, the slower that process is (and has to be).

Let's (at last) translate Yahweh and Kyrios into modern English!

So where does all this research into ancient Divine Name translation take us for modern-day translation?

Let's take Yahweh first. Reverting back to "Yahweh", simply transliterated into English, was a preference of mine for a couple of years. When reading or studying the Old Testament, I even began tricking my brain to replace LORD with  "Yahweh", which is kinda freaky!

So could Catholicism-endorsed "Yahweh" be a good solution?

Part of my research has included an international survey of different translations*, which I think could be further analysed into families. Like French Catholics, for instance, Eglish-speaking Catholics use the Jerusalem Bible that states in Deuteronomy 6:4: 'Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one (or "Yahvé", in French). Like these Catholic translations, I noticed some Asian and new translation languages (maybe a Wycliffe policy) preferring transliteration too. Strangely, the mainline Italian translation, however, doesn't agree with this transliteration business practiced by Catholics elsewhere! The Vatican-endorsed Italian Conferenza Episcopale Italiana goes with the more (Protestant?)  il Signore (the Lord). So even the Catholics seem to be either lost or in a state of disunity on this question of how to translate Yahweh, as they actually endorse both possibilities!

LORD?

The entrenchment of LORD (Signore, Seigneur, etc.) is interesting and everywhere. It actually speaks to the underrated significance of the ancient Greek Septuagint, itself a fascinating but complex window on potentially earlier Hebrew texts than those we access via the Aleppo and Leningrad codexes and perhaps even earlier than (or geographically distinct from) the dead sea scrolls discovered mid 20th century in Israel. There are deep-seated and complex arguments both ways as to the Septuagint and Dead Sea Scrolls differences on the translation/transliteration choices. Why does it matter? Simply because no-one yet has a good argument to satisfactorily explain the LORD development with consistent dating. Dating matters because if translating the Old Testament's Yahweh, we want to know if there were even "Lord" undertones, overtones, or any tones at all. Well, a fascinating comparison between 1 Chronicles 17 and 2 Samuel 7 by Koog Hong suggests that there is indeed a link, even if he dots his "i"s and crosses his "t"s in an illogical way to my mind. The point is that it is possible that it may have entered Jewish practice to read one thing with your eyes but say another out loud in the context of religious gatherings.

I could go on for ages about this, sorry, but I'm trying to stick to the point: there are two problems with the English LORD that concern translation:

1. It is prefixed by the definite article, "the". So it is not quite true to say that "LORD" translates Yahweh in may translations, but rather "The LORD". That is obviously neither true of Yahweh, but nor is it true of the Septuagint.

2. Hardly anyone says "Lord" any more, although many Christians don't realise this.

GOD?!

ONE translation I hadn't looked at yet in my international survey of Yahweh and Kyrios translations (and weirdly this idea came to me in the early hours!) was to check Eugene Peterson's famous The Message - check it out! Peterson is super respected and not only have his books sold well but his Message translation has been very successful and seems to be standing the test of time. He went and translated, I'm guessing, all the 6867 Yahwehs that I counted "GOD"! I say, result! There's a score right there, BUT I would be surprised if he had explored like me how every single one of those Yahwehs were translated into koine Greek (not modern Greek). So I guess I'm excited, because, like with the Triune Hub, my proposal is going to sit predominantly on and tie together happily accepted practices.

So Peterson is a solid reference, but translating Yahweh by GOD does not solve everything, it's simply clearing the first of at least 7 hurdles. First, what does it solve? Both the above points, in fact. In English, we quite happily use this title as a name, which seems to be exactly what those early Greek Septuagint translators were aiming for. So GOD is faithful to that principle. Secondly, "God" is still as used and understood as ever, unlike "Lord".

Other problems

So we still have some other hurdles ahead of us that we will begin to navigate in the next post:

1. "GOD our God" (the Message)
2. "God of gods and Lord of lords"
3. Hebrew "divine combos", esp. Adonai Yahweh and Yahweh Elohim
4. New Testament references to God the Father (e.g. "The kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ", Revelation 11:15)
5. The Lord Jesus: Jesus was "made Lord" (Acts 2:36); the Lord Jesus Christ" (most translations of Jesus' full title in Greek, e.g. Acts 11:17)

Obviously, I have nothing definitive to offer, but I think I may have at least some potential connections for most of these extra hurdles now that Peterson has helped us over the first and most formidable! (I will add any further hurdles I have forgotten here as I proceed).

I can already share that I believe I can tie 1, 2 and 4 together happily with accepted practices. For 1, I will be referring to N.T. Wright and Michael Heiser. For 3, I will be consulting multiple mainstream translations and the Septuagint interpretive pattern itself. For 4, I will be leaning on the French Darby translation and some of my own work on 2 Corinthians 3:16-18.

My suggestions for hurdles 2 and 5 are fresh (i.e. mine and therefore probably valid for quicly shooting down in flames) but avoid simplistic or systematic translation. I feel confident they can lead to workable outcomes if in agreement with the general diagnosis of a "Lord" overhaul. I hope 5 will become clearer as this work gains momentum and interaction. This hardest of hurdles, how to translate today the "Lord" title attached to Jesus, is a challenge that will never see a fully satisfactory translation due to diversification and politicisation of authority positions in our modern society. Nonetheless, 5. can legitimately follow Peterson's suggestion in some instances.

So there're a few more posts needed right there! Thank you so much for your interest.

* the survey I reference here is a slowly advancing and incomplete study that I haven't yet published

When the Old Greek may indicate the oldest and lost Hebrew original: an example from Joshua

One of the perennial quests of scholars of the Bible is to establish what the original texts said. That sounds pretty easy, you just translate the old scroll, right? Wrong. All the old hand-written parchments and codexes we have found are at best copies, but much more likely copies of copies - and they all differ, usually in tiny ways.

I'm looking at how the Hebrew translates into Greek for key words: Adonai and Yahweh. One of the driving reasons behind this work is to better understand the "Bible" that the Greek-speaking first-century churches had to hand and cited, especially with reference to their new Lord, the risen and exalted Christ Jesus. So even if there are points where we feel that we need to look at our best Hebrew texts to establish our Old Testaments, our simultaneous desire to better understand the New Testament pushes us to contextualise first century understanding of God's Word. This Word is read avidly, in Greek, to establish and understand the perceived fulfilment of Christ's (first) Coming.

But there is another fundamental question that I remembered today as I was finishing up the Yahweh translations in Joshua - who is to say that the critical text of the LXX Greek translation does not, at points, refer to the oldest Hebrew tradition, to which we no longer have access? This point has been raised already by Septuagint scholars and provides further impetus to the NETS translation project.

But let me give you the example in Joshua I just came across that triggered this memory, from Joshua 8:27:

NASB: Israel took only the cattle and the spoil of that city as plunder for themselves, according to the word of the LORD which He had commanded Joshua.

NETS: Except for the livestock and the spoils that were in the city, all things that the sons of Israel took as spoil, according to the ordinance of the Lord, as the Lord had instructed Iesous.

Greek has no problem with using pronouns, so we should be asking ourselves the question here: why would a Greek translator opt to supplement the Hebrew in front of him with an additional "Lord"? We have already seen in our in-depth analysis of Adonai translation that there was a preference among the translators to remove redundant repetition where possible, so why do the opposite here? We can be more specific than this. In that Adonai study, which kept a close eye on redundancy avoidance, I showed that the translator of Joshua himself has expressed that preference for avoidance in Joshua 3:13 and 7:7, condensing "Adonai Yahweh" into a single κυρίου or κύριε.

It is more than possible that prior to a proven millennia-spanning vigilance for Jewish scripture copying, an earlier more natural practice was in force, as evidenced by Christian scribes. In my approximate understanding, this means copying as best as possible but minor tweaks/clarifications and a failure to independently proof for natural errors (a good summary of these is available here). In this instance of Joshua 8:27, what do you think? Did the Greek translator add a redundant "the Lord", or did he translate an earlier Hebrew exemplar that contained the repetition? If the latter, why didn't he remove the redundancy like in 3:13 and 7:7?

I wonder if the lost Old Hebrew did indeed contain the repetition and that in this instance the translator did simply stick to that repetition. The worry of consistency with 3:13 and 7:7 could be resolved by the fact that those redundancies are immediately adjacent, not so here in 8:27, and that the practice of Adonai-Yahweh redundancy avoidance may not be true of "Yahweh-Yahweh" avoidance, if indeed that even exists.

Pentateuch Translations of Yahweh

HERE IS HOW the translators of the Septuagint went about their initial task of translating the divine name, Yahweh (and the shortened version, "Yah") into the Greek word, KYRIOS, which of course means "Lord" in English.

In the table below, we can see how often the translators applied the article when they did this. Because I have already done some work elsewhere in Ezekiel and in the Psalms, I have also populated the table with the data I obtained there also. Please see below for some comments, but do also note this post, because as I continue to work on the rest of the Hebrew Bible translation, this table should continue to automatically update.

As stated previously, we are looking here specifically at the cases known as "nominative" and "genitive". The reason for this is that the other three main Greek cases affect whether or not an article is required. This tighter selection provides a tighter and more meaningful methodology than has been previously reported by Septuagint scholars. It shows us that the "anarthrous" rule implemented by the Pentateuch translators was even closer to systematic for the Septuagint than has thus far been reported: the one we like to call "The LORD" was initially and perhaps almost as bizarrely as in English, translated just "LORD" in 99.3% of the 1340 instances where the translators used nominative or genitive forms (kyrios and kyriou). By so conspicuously removing the "the", the name quality of Yahweh seems to have been carefully integrated, perhaps in a similar vein to other important name-titles like "Pharoah".

At the time of writing this post, I have developed a process that has significantly accelerated how I can generate this data, with now nearly 3000 of the Yahweh occurrences in the Hebrew Bible processed. This may seem like nearly half-way, but actually, things should move much quicker now (Psalms has been accessible on this blog as early as October 2016!).

What will take longer to provide is the control data - from a control group of proper names and a control title group of "king".

When the Yahweh translations are complete we will also be able to show diagrammatically any shifts or outliers in the translation practice outside of the Pentateuch.

Remember, a fairly extensive and relevant analysis has recently been completed on how Adonai was translated throughout the canon, integrating the response of lead NETS translator, Dr. Albert Pietersma, here.

Memory and oral traditions

Bart Ehrman is going through a series of posts at the moment on his blog ehrmanblog.org concerning his latest book project. He seems to have decided that he has spent many years - decades even - in the field of textual criticism and it is time to move on, and the field that has gripped him is memory.

That might sound a bit strange, moving from studying manuscripts to a field in psychology - why not just move into surfboard design? Of course, it is much more closely related than that! The reason why memory is such a fascinating topic is because some of our fellow human-beings of the first century, who became "followers of the Way" BEFORE anyone wrote anything down but AFTER Jesus was exalted back to the Father's side, relied on word of mouth for what Jesus said and did. So it is like Ehrman senses the need to push the boundaries of time back even further by looking into the way oral stories are transmitted and circulated from a more sociological perspective.

I am sorry to not hyperlink the exact post, you can only read it fully if you are a paid up member, like I am.

There was something that he said today that struck a chord of truth deep within me, so I decided to leave the following comment on his post today:

One of the most enlightening posts, and I didn’t even agree with it all! The line I think that seems so simple and yet speaks to me most profoundly is this: “you necessarily mould it to the audience you are addressing”.
Man alive, I think that is so obvious now, and yes I did believe the oral tradition myth. I even feel a bit convicted by it, because I even hear MYSELF tweak stories as I tell them according to my own audience!

With regard to the gospel narratives, I think it also goes without saying that a believer who cherishes their view of God’s sovereignty when it comes to communicating good news about his Messiah, could be fully in charge on the macro level of what essentially was to be retained. Right?

When I said "oral tradition myth", I was referring to one part of the post that articulates a point of view that many of us have heard (it is true) and believed because it seems to make sense (it is true) and so we have taught others (not sure I have, but I could have done): BECAUSE they did not have the means to document and record, oral cultures have always been especially careful and accurate in the way the recount significant stories - in our literate cultures we can simply compare two different texts to look for discrepancies, so do not have to be so careful when telling stories orally.