How Jesus's Meaning is Lost: 1 The Basics

(Personal Note: Last week, I had a couple of mini strokes, called TIAs. Had one about a decade ago, and it led to a bigger stroke. If you belong to a prayer circle, I would appreciate a few kind words thrown my way.
In other news, I also finished my novel on the Sermon on the Mount. I would appreciate any ideas on how to give out copies for feedback. A few pastors who could give reviews would be nice. I can only provide e-versions, kindle or pdf.)

Why are Jesus’s ideas lost in translation? The problem is that discovering the meaning of a sentence comes at the end of a delicate process. We do not always say what we mean. We do not always hear what people say. And, we interpret what we hear from our own unique perspective. This makes translation a task fraught with pitfalls.

The Work of Translation

Translation starts with knowing how words work in sentences. Sentences are created to communicate their underlying ideas or meaning. This underlying message is what biblical versions like The Living Bible claim to capture with their paraphrases of what is written in the Greek. This is not technically translation but interpretation. The problem is that reading one group’s or person’s interpretation isn’t necessarily what the speaker meant.

The meaning of a sentence emerges from three components:

• Words forms the “physical” structure of the sentence. Word meaning comes from how those words are used by speakers use their language. Jesus was a speaker, not a writer. His Greek words, like all words in all languages, have various meanings in different contexts. Word meaning also evolves. Influential books, like the Bible or Shakespeare, have a strong effect on their meaning over time.

• Word order is called a sentence’s "syntax." Syntax is the arrangement of words and phrases to create meaning. Syntax is the basis of rhetoric, how these words affect a listener or reader. Syntax is used to persuade, surprise, amuse, create suspense, and so on. When this arrangement is changed, both the meaning from context, and the effect of the meaning are lost. Humor, for example, can be easily destroyed simply by changing word order. To maintain humor, we must maintain surprise. The punchline comes at the end of the sentence in every language.

• Context is the larger order of sentences, what comes behind and what comes after each one. Some of this context comes from what the speaker responds to: what others say and the things that happen. Context, like syntax, creates an emotional response in listeners. For example, in humor, sentences can create a setup which is followed by a payoff.

We can make good translations with similar meaning. We try to use words that are used in the same ways in the different languages. We adopt syntaxes that have similar emotional effects. People still laugh and cry at Shakespeare’s plays when they are translated well. Some wordplay is lost, but the playful feel can be captured if the translator works to do so. Getting the vocabulary and sentence syntax right is the hard part. After that, context follows naturally, and the underlying meaning emerges.

Translation of Jesus

The wrong way to do translation is to start by assuming you already know the underlying meaning and expressing it in different way. Translators should work from words and syntax toward meaning not from any assumed meaning. As the phrase goes, “Assumption make an ass of you and me.” This is especially important in translating the words of the Divine. When approaching meaning of a higher order, we should proceed as carefully and humbly as possible. Help from the Spirit is needed, but we cannot think that the Spirit gives us the power to make broad assumptions.

If we ignore the vocabulary and syntax of what Jesus said, we cannot get to his original meaning. He chose the best words in the best order he could to communicate what he meant. He chose those specific words in that order to create a certain reaction in his listeners. Paraphrasing may or may not capture what Jesus meant, but paraphrasing does not allow a difference of opinion about what he meant based upon what he said. It only allows opinions about what someone thinks Jesus meant.

In Jesus's case, his meaning is called logos in Greek. Logos does not mean "word" as it is biblically translated but “meaning.” an "idea” or “concept." Many of his sentences express many different levels of meaning. They can even mean different things to different people at different times. We may discover new meaning as our experiences and situations change. We may reject paraphrases of Jesus’s words, but we are not rejecting Jesus in doing so. Only someone’s interpretation. Most who think they reject Christ are not rejecting Jesus at all but people’s ideas about him.

One reason people debated Jesus words for millennia is that much of what Jesus said is ambiguous. He used analogies because we do not have a good framework for understanding the Divine. If we cannot understand each other when we speak of earthly things, how can we understand when Jesus speaks of higher things? It is the height of hubris to claim we do.

Flawed Translation

The first important translation of the Bible was into Latin. The Latin Vulgate version became the standard for over a thousand years. It was initially flawed, as all human things are, with dogmatic interpretation and syntactical problems. For example, one syntactical problem is that Latin has no definite article (“the,” see the problem with this in this article) like Greek and Hebrew do. Dogma was already part of that initial “official translation” because the first “official dogmas” were decided at the Nicean Council, about a hundred years before the Latin Vulgate.

Over the centuries, there was more and more dogma, and people became more and more uncomfortable with the Church. The Reformation tried to undo this by focusing on “the word” not the church. And, we had a second generation of translations of the Bible into German, English, and so on. Faithful to “the word,” the KJV attempted to translate each word of the original Greek.

The Reformation led to more schisms. This led to more translations. In these new waves of translation, fidelity to the words has become less and less important. The assumed meaning has become more important. Paraphrasing is more common. By confusing the vocabulary that Jesus used and ignoring his syntax, it becomes harder and harder for us to get access to Jesus’s logos.

Conclusions

My own translations are far from perfect. I know because I have to fix them verse-by-verse every day. The Spirit is working slowly but perhaps steadily.

Future articles in this series will examine certain common problems with vocabulary and syntax. The problems with vocabulary are mostly self-inflicted. All languages are universal in that they express what we all share. Syntax is a bigger problem. Greek allows for a wider range of syntax than English. However, this is truer of the written languages. Spoken languages are more alike that written ones.