Let me offer here a translation of the first 11 verses of John 8, a reading, an Englishing with the verb tenses tense. This is how I hear it (in light of some of the recent blog commentary here and here).
1 Joshua goes to the Mount of Olives
2 At the crack of dawn again he comes to the Temple
The people all go with him
He sits he teaches them
3 To him the Midrash Writers, the Purists, bring
a “wife” wearing a Scarlet Letter
They sit her in the middle 4
“Teacher” they say to him
This “wife” for her adultery has cause to wear this Scarlet A
5 By law we are commanded, by the Torah of Moses, to execute her by stoning
What do you say to that, sir?
6 This speech of theirs is intended to test him
To give cause to categorically convict him
Joshua goes squatting in the dirt, like a woman, silent, his finger writes in it
7 Since they stay with their line of questioning at him,
He goes back up to their eye level and says to them
Fine, the “Error-Free” Men Go First: “Bash her with a stone”
Again, Joshua goes squatting in the dirt, like a woman, silent, writes in it
9 The men hear, they go away, the senior men first
He is left alone
This wife is in the middle
10 He goes back up to her eye level, says to her
“Wife”
Where are they?
Are none of your judges here?
11 She says
None, Master
Joshua says
None is your judge, not even me
Go on now
No more error for you
[[1 Ἰησοῦς δὲ ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸ Ὄρος τῶν Ἐλαιῶν.
2 Ὄρθρου δὲ πάλιν παρεγένετο εἰς τὸ ἱερόν,
καὶ πᾶς ὁ λαὸς ἠρχετο πρὸς αὐτόν,
καὶ καθίσας ἐδίδασκεν αὐτούς.
3 ἀγουσιν δὲ οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι
γυναῖκα ἐπὶ μοιχείᾳ κατειλημμένην,
καὶ στήσαντες αὐτὴν ἐν μέσῳ 4 λέγουσιν αὐτῷ,
Διδάσκαλε,
αὑτη ἡ γυνὴ κατείληπται ἐπ’ αὐτοφώρῳ μοιχευομένη·
5 ἐν δὲ τῷ νόμῳ ἡμῖν Μωϋσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν·
σὺ οὖν τί λέγεις;
6 τοῦτο δὲ ἐλεγον πειράζοντες αὐτόν,
ἵνα ἐχωσιν κατηγορεῖν αὐτοῦ.
ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς κάτω κύψας τῷ δακτύλῳ κατέγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν.
7 ὡς δὲ ἐπέμενον ἐρωτῶντες [αὐτόν],
ἀνέκυψεν καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς,
Ὁ ἀναμάρτητος ὑμῶν πρῶτος ἐπ’ αὐτὴν βαλέτω λίθον·
8 καὶ πάλιν κατακύψας ἐγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν.
9 οἱ δὲ ἀκούσαντες ἐξήρχοντο εἷς καθ’ εἷς ἀρξάμενοι ἀπὸ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων,
καὶ κατελείφθη μόνος,
καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἐν μέσῳ οὖσα.
10 ἀνακύψας δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῇ,
Γύναι,
ποῦ εἰσιν;
οὐδείς σε κατέκρινεν;
11 ἡ δὲ εἶπεν,
Οὐδείς, κύριε.
εἶπεν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς,
Οὐδὲ ἐγώ σε κατακρίνω·
πορεύου,
[καὶ] ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν μηκέτι ἀμάρτανε.]]
The Sexist Greek Jesus Addresses of Women
γυνη is Greek for “woman” or “wife.” It is in the vocative case [i.e., Γύναι] as Jesus addressing her directly. It is not nearly so abrupt in Greek as it sounds in English. It is the same form of the word Jesus uses when he tenderly comforts Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb (John 20:15). And yet it is not usual. Leon Morris (The Gospel According to John, Eerdmans, 180) comments that while the vocative can be used to express “respect or affection,” it is an unusual term for a son to use of his mother. It is not a Hebrew or a Greek expression.
– Bill Mounce, How Rude was Jesus?
There is no getting around that the fact that the use of “woman” sounds pejorative to our ears, and yet there is nothing pejorative at all in the Greek γύναι. After all, this is what Jesus calls his mother (John 2:4; 19:26). It is the term Jesus uses to address the weeping Mary at the tomb (John 20:15)…. “Lady” sounds pejorative to me, and “girl” is only a young “woman” and again sounds pejorative. So what are we left with [in English for the Greek Jesus’s addresses of women using γύναι]? Nothing.
– Bill Mounce, An Untranslatable Word: γύναι
After reading my post The Womanly Adultery of a Gospel, my BLT co-blogger Victoria responded this way: “Can you help us out a little here, Kurk? What is odd about this gospel Greek?”
I apologize for being unclear sometimes. And much much more than that I always appreciate intellectual curiosity, especially Victoria’s on this blog and at her other blog Gaudete Theology.
So here are a few things I’m thinking as I try to begin answers to the helpful questions:
- The fourth canonical gospel of the New Testament often uses odd Greek, and also since it’s the oddly non-synoptic gospel (i.e., it doesn’t always see things about Jesus and his message in the same way that the other three canonical gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, see things together), I’ve got this blog series going themed ambiguously: “Odd Gospel Greek” (or the gospel using odd Greek and also the oddest of the gospels in Greek).
- The first quotation of Bill Mounce (i.e., my epigraph) above correctly asserts that Γύναι /Gynai/ “is an unusual term for a son to use of his mother” and is “not usual” for a tender comfort coming from a man when addressing a grieving woman.
- That first quotation of Mounce could even be more general and still be correct: Γύναι /Gynai/ is odd Greek. The vocative address is used only a couple of times in the Homeric epics (in the Iliad twice); once only in one of the fragments of Bacchylides; once only in Thesmophoriazousai by Aristophanes, who has women celebrating the festival of the Thesmophoria; and only thrice by Sophocles (only twice in the Oedipus King, and only once in Ajax). Much later, after all this old Greek literature shows only these few uses of the vocative Γύναι /Gynai/, this odd Greek address to a woman/wife/lady/mother/girl is also rare in the Septuagint: only once in Judith and only twice in 4 Maccabees. Then comes the New Testament in Greek and its few odd uses of Γύναι /Gynai/ for direct speech to or at a woman: the first Pauline epistle to the Korinthian readers has it once; Mark’s gospel does not have it; Matthew’s gospel puts it in the mouth of Jesus once; Luke’s gospel has it once in the mouth of Jesus and once in the mouth of Peter and no more; and, except for the odd gospel of John (which uses Γύναι [Gynai] six times), this odd Greek does not appear anywhere else in the post-LXX Christian scriptures.
Here are a couple of other things to note as we begin to consider Englishings of this odd Greek:
- The gospel of John uses the Greek vocative address of a woman Γύναι [Gynai] twice as often as the Septuagint uses it and nearly twice as often as the rest of the writers of the New Testament use it. Invariably, the Greek writer of the gospel has Jesus saying this to women, different women in different contexts — his mother at a wedding; an unnamed Samaritan adulteress; an unnamed Jewish adulteress; his mother watching him hang naked and shamefully on a Roman cross; the crying grief-stricken Miriam of Magdala [addressed exactly the same way as angels had addressed this Miriam moments earlier]. This is high frequency usage of a rare Greek form in one short narrative mostly in the mouth of its male protagonist. Odd.
- That first quotation of Mounce is correct in quoting Morris in saying that, in Greek, for John to have Jesus addressing his mother as her son with Γύναι [Gynai] is rather odd. It’s also correct in noting that “γυνη is Greek for ‘woman’ or wife’.” In Greek literature, the only other writer to have a son address his mother, in Greek, this way is Sophocles. Sophocles has Oedipus address Jocasta, his mother, as follows:
Lady [Γύναι /Gynai/], do you know the one whom we summoned just now? [English translation by Sir Richard C. Jebb]
Wife [Γύναι /Gynai/], do you remember the man we were earlier asking to come here? [English translation by Dr. George Theodoridis]
Here are a few other things as we begin to consider whether this odd gospel Greek is really translatable or not (especially since we might not want to make the ambiguities of Oedipus and Jocasta our standards):
- That first quotation of Mounce correctly claims generally that “γυνη is Greek for ‘woman’ or ‘wife’.” And yet for a man to call the woman who is his mother by “the vocative case [i.e., Γύναι]” is “unusual” and odd and “not a Hebrew or a Greek expression.”
- However, that second quotation of Mounce incorrectly claims, in all too overgeneralized way, that “there is nothing pejorative at all in the Greek γύναι.” Mounce incorrectly claims by this second quotation also that this term John’s gospel puts five times in the mouth of Jesus is “untranslatable.”
- What Mounce has overlooked is how the sexist Aristotle quotes Sophocles, who has his character Ms. Tecmessa quoting a sexist Greek jingle or insult using Γύναι [Gynai] to justify her subjugating herself to Mr. Ajax in the play Ajax. Here’s the Greek in her mouth and a couple of good translations:
ὁ δ᾽ εἶπε πρός με βαί᾽, ἀεὶ δ᾽ ὑμνούμενα:
γύναι, γυναιξὶ κόσμον ἡ σιγὴ φέρει.
κἀγὼ μαθοῦσ᾽ ἔληξ᾽, ὁ δ᾽ ἐσσύθη μόνος.
But he answered me curtly with that trite jingle:
“Woman, silence graces woman.”
And I, taking his meaning, desisted, but he rushed out alone. [Jebb]
What I got as an answer from him was the usual short insult.
“Listen woman! Women are only beautiful when they are silent!”
At that I shut up and he ran out of the hut all alone. [Theodoridis]
For Mounce, it would seem, there is no English to address a woman, as a son must his mother, that is not pejorative. Of course, to address a woman who’s committed the capital offense of adultery (as much as Mounce would have translators put non-pejorative English in the mouth of John’s Jesus addressing individual women), I’m afraid it’s not so clear that the johannine Greek is not sexist.
Γύναι [Gynai] seems as marked, and as odd, as any other term of address at a “Wo-Man!” or a “Fe-Male!” has to be.
The Womanly Adultery of a Gospel
Females are botched males, claimed Aristotle.
Adulteresses botch marriages, as we all know.
And so it’s a perfect example of imperfection that there’s this odd gospel Greek botching an otherwise fine Greek gospel (and here’s the United Bible Societies text – Ed.26.):
[[1 Ἰησοῦς δὲ ἐπορεύθη εἰς τὸ Ὄρος τῶν Ἐλαιῶν. 2 Ὄρθρου δὲ πάλιν παρεγένετο εἰς τὸ ἱερόν, καὶ πᾶς ὁ λαὸς ἠρχετο πρὸς αὐτόν, καὶ καθίσας ἐδίδασκεν αὐτούς. 3 ἀγουσιν δὲ οἱ γραμματεῖς καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι γυναῖκα ἐπὶ μοιχείᾳ κατειλημμένην, καὶ στήσαντες αὐτὴν ἐν μέσῳ 4 λέγουσιν αὐτῷ, Διδάσκαλε, αὑτη ἡ γυνὴ κατείληπται ἐπ’ αὐτοφώρῳ μοιχευομένη· 5 ἐν δὲ τῷ νόμῳ ἡμῖν Μωϋσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν· σὺ οὖν τί λέγεις; 6 τοῦτο δὲ ἐλεγον πειράζοντες αὐτόν, ἵνα ἐχωσιν κατηγορεῖν αὐτοῦ. ὁ δὲ Ἰησοῦς κάτω κύψας τῷ δακτύλῳ κατέγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν. 7 ὡς δὲ ἐπέμενον ἐρωτῶντες [αὐτόν], ἀνέκυψεν καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Ὁ ἀναμάρτητος ὑμῶν πρῶτος ἐπ’ αὐτὴν βαλέτω λίθον· 8 καὶ πάλιν κατακύψας ἐγραφεν εἰς τὴν γῆν. 9 οἱ δὲ ἀκούσαντες ἐξήρχοντο εἷς καθ’ εἷς ἀρξάμενοι ἀπὸ τῶν πρεσβυτέρων, καὶ κατελείφθη μόνος, καὶ ἡ γυνὴ ἐν μέσῳ οὖσα. 10 ἀνακύψας δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς εἶπεν αὐτῇ, Γύναι, ποῦ εἰσιν; οὐδείς σε κατέκρινεν; 11 ἡ δὲ εἶπεν, Οὐδείς, κύριε. εἶπεν δὲ ὁ Ἰησοῦς, Οὐδὲ ἐγώ σε κατακρίνω· πορεύου, [καὶ] ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν μηκέτι ἀμάρτανε.]]
This bit is purified out of ΚΑΤΑ ΙΩΑΝΝΗΝ 8 of the SBL Greek New Testament, which is a little weird. It’s weird also because the Society of Biblical Literature has a website called Bible Odyssey, where some decent articles are posted by Bible scholars in somewhat of a pop format.
For example, there’s “The Woman Caught in Adultery (John 8:1-11)” by Jennifer Knust. When you read what she’s written, here, doesn’t it make you think “How appropriate this ‘inappropriate’ womanly adulteress story in this would-be unadulterated gospel”?
Crossposted from Gaudete Theology
Last Sunday afternoon, I spent a couple hours at the Oakland Mills Interfaith Center, one of the two interfaith centers in which my parish has a presence. The building has a central area resembling a courtyard, with plenty of natural light, opening out to various worship spaces and meeting rooms around the perimeter, and the walls of this courtyard-like space are used as an art gallery. Sunday was the final day of an exhibition called Picture Windows: The Painted Screens of Baltimore.
I’ve been intrigued by painted screens since I first learned about this Baltimore folk art form, but this was the first time I’d seen them. Like many domestic arts, it was intended to be both practical and pretty. In the days before air conditioning, the row houses of Baltimore would get pretty sweltering in the summer, and folks wanted all the windows and solid doors open to get as much ventilation as possible, with no curtains in the way to obstruct the air flow. But then what do you do about privacy, especially in an urban environment with folks walking right past your windows?
Well, it turns out, if you paint a picture on the front of the window or door screens, then that effectively blocks the viewers’ gaze through the screen. Your eyes focus on the picture, instead of looking through the screen; at least, if the area behind the screen is not illuminated. What a clever way to solve the problem! And what an opportunity it creates for beautifying a city street. Time was, most houses in some areas of Baltimore had painted screens on the windows and doors, so walking down the street was much like walking past a gallery of paintings.
The exhibit included screens that had been painted by traditional screen painters near the end of the era when the art was flourishing, and contemporary screens (for sale!) by currently practicing screen painters, some of whom had been trained by traditional painters. There was a little biography of each painter mounted among their works. The sizes ranged from small screens that might cover a ventilation window, to medium/large screens that would fill a normal sized window or the top of a screen door, to full door-sized screens (in some cases, mounted in the door frame, into which the painting extended).
What struck me at first inspection of these pieces is that they reminded me of cross-stitch. The screen, of course, is a fine rectangular grid to which the colors are applied; visually, this creates an impression similar to the fine rectangular grid used for cross-stitching.
The older, traditional pieces had some common themes; I don’t recall whether these were themes that were common to screen painting generally, or to one particular screen painter. They were landscape themes, mostly: a cottage, a stream, a flowering tree nearby. Quiet bucolic images, gentling the urban landscape in which they resided.
My favorites among the traditional pieces, though, were the ones that depicted a block or two of Baltimore rowhouses, each with its windows and doors covered by painted screens, as well as people scrubbing stoops, selling vegetables from a horse-drawn cart, or just ambling along. Delightfully self-referential, as well as showing how these screens looked in their native habitat.
Some of the contemporary pieces were painted in traditional styles; others took traditional themes but rendered them in a more contemporary style; still others ignored tradition entirely, and simply used the screen as canvas. It seemed to me that the modern pieces tended towards a more pastel palette and an airier feel. There were lots of Baltimore scenes, often harborscapes, or showing city landmarks like the Bromo-Seltzer Tower. My favorite, though, was much like this whimsical piece that portrayed a cat clinging to the screen door from the inside, obviously after the butterflies she could see outside. What fun!!
The same artist, Anna Pasqualucci, exhibited a few small (5×7, maybe? 8×10?) pieces in shadowbox frames, in which the screen had been shaped to create a 3D effect. A scene of the Baltimore harbor, with buildings standing out from their surroundings and waves rolling up onto shore, was my favorite of these.
After taking my time with all the painted screens, I decided to check out the Catholic chapel. While weekend Catholic masses are celebrated in one of the large worship spaces, both interfaith centers have a dedicated Catholic chapel for the reservation of the eucharist. I normally worship at the Wilde Lake interfaith center, and I’ve been in its tiny eucharistic chapel a number of times, but I’d never been to the one at Oakland Mills.
Well, it was lovely. It was larger than the one at Wilde Lake, and clearly intended for small masses and prayer services of 30-40 people. The chairs were arranged choir-style, in rows along the left and right walls, facing each other across a central aisle, as they are in the large worship space at Wilde Lake; the altar, centered in front of the far wall, was small and plain; there was an electric piano off to one side. But it was clearly designed for both communal and private prayer: there were a few prie-dieux here and there.
A characteristic artistic feature of most Catholic churches are the Stations of the Cross. These are fourteen artworks, each of which corresponds to a moment in Jesus’ passion, beginning with his condemnation to death and ending with his burial in the tomb. How the stations are depicted may vary, which is part of their charm as works of art. They may be lavish or simple; they may represent the entire scene, or just a symbolic element. They are typically placed along the outer wall of the worship space, so that as you pray the devotion, you move from station to station and thereby walk with Jesus on his via crucis.
That wouldn’t work in this small chapel, which has a large central aisle, but no outer perimeter through which one might walk. I was delighted by their solution: the stations of the cross in this chapel are presented as tall narrow paintings, each containing a single key word (“condemned”, “falls”, “meets”, “dies”, “buried”) painted vertically in black capital letters ending at the bottom of the painting against a purple background, with the remaining vertical space, above the word, filled with swirls and smears of purple paint. (The stations are a particularly Lenten devotion, and purple is the liturgical color for Lent.) They are hung close together, on the front wall behind the altar, so that while they take up relatively little linear wall space (maybe 12 feet?), it would still be possible to stand in front of each one to pray, then step to the next.
My initial reaction was to be pleased by the text-oriented nature of these paintings: I’m about the most text-oriented person I know, and it’s rare indeed that I find a visual presentation that feels like it was made for me. But the more I think about it, the more I’m appreciating the non-text aspects of this art and its presentation. Each word has a different length, so the black text reaches up to a different height in each panel. This gives the visual suggestion of a rising and falling path, subtly reinforcing the notion of walking. And it hangs on the wall behind and slightly above the altar: a space that, in Catholic churches, is normally occupied by a crucifix. This artwork expands the crucifix, so that we have before us an image of the crucifixion from condemnation to burial. I would never have thought of this, and it probably wouldn’t pass muster for a lot of liturgical purists, but I think very highly of it.
Centered on the right-hand wall (as you face the altar and this representation of the crucifixion) is hung a medium-sized square textile artwork in shades of yellow that abstractly suggests a sunrise. Because it’s off to the right from the left-to-right ordered stations, and because there is a gap of unadorned wall between the stations and the sunrise, it also suggests the continuation of the story: the time Jesus was in the tomb, and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.
I don’t recall that there was any art on the lefthand wall.
Immediately to your right as you enter the chapel, in the corner formed by the righthand wall and the wall containing the door, is a statue of Mary as our Lady of Guadalupe. It’s a medium-sized statue, perhaps three feet tall, on a low wooden stand; she is dressed in green, brown-skinned, holding a chaplet (a real one, not a painted one). A prie-dieu is placed in front of her. On another low stand, off to her left, is another small statue: Juan Diego, on one knee, looking up at the lady, with his cloak full of roses. I love this little tableau, and the fact that Juan Diego kneels alongside a person who kneels before our Lady.
Just a little further along that right hand wall, there hangs a wall-mounted tabernacle, centered slightly above eye-level for me, which meant I could get a really good look at it. It was quite beautiful: the sides of the case were silver, and the doors were clear glass covered with small square simple line drawings, rendered in silver or gold, arranged in a grid like patchwork. So you could see through the decoration to the simple gold ciborium, which thus contributed to the beauty of the tabernacle. Looking through the artwork to the ciborium reminded me that we look through the bread and wine with eyes of faith to see Jesus. The line drawings in some cases represented loaves or fishes, which are traditional tabernacle art, and in other cases seemed to be simply pleasing abstract shapes, often in groups of three. This was a lovely yet sparse use of the fine metals to give luster and beauty without a hint of opulence.
To the left and slightly above the tabernacle is mounted the usual red sanctuary lamp; before it is another prie-dieu, and beneath it is another wooden stand, in the center of which stands a medium-sized carved and painted wooden crucifix, so that a person kneeling there can look directly into the eyes of Christ. I noticed particularly that he seemed to be wearing a crown woven both of brown thorn and green laurel, and I very much liked that artistic representation of the resurrection victory over sin and death.
Overall I was very pleased and impressed by the sacred art in this chapel, both its quality and the care and thoughtfulness of its installation. It is a welcoming and peaceful space that I look forward to visiting again.
Ferguson, Missouri
Today, it’s finally made the mainstream media. But terrible things have been happening in Ferguson, Missouri — a small municipality in St. Louis County — since Saturday afternoon, when 18yo Mike Brown was shot and killed by police. According to multiple witnesses, he was shot multiple times despite being unarmed and having his hands in the air; and the interaction was police-initiated, who aggressively confronted Michael and his friend because they were walking down the middle of the street instead of walking on the sidewalk.
His body was left lying in the street for hours, while police kept everyone, including the youth’s mother, at a distance.
Trudy tweeted:
Please note that Brown’s family has requested that pictures of his body be taken down from the web and not further shared.
In response to the resulting peaceful protest that afternoon, and the peaceful prayer vigil that evening, police responded with a show of force: bringing out dogs (dogs!! police bringing dogs in response to black protesters!!), showing up in riot gear, huge numbers of police cars converging on the area, presenting an extremely aggressive posture that I could only read as deliberately provocative. Later that night, there was some property destruction against local businesses, including a fire at a local gas station. Police responded, and the next day there was some minimal coverage in the media focused on the “looting” (scare quotes because really, it only seems to be called looting when black people do it) rather than the original issue of police killing an unarmed black teen.
Sunday the police finally held a press conference, but still didn’t release the name of the officer involved in the shooting, which they had previously said they would do then. They did, however, describe a scenario that was at odds with witness accounts.
Sunday, Monday, Tuesday: …
Read the rest, including links to more information and actions you can take, over at Gaudete Theology.
The 9th of Av, 1914
ANTHEM FOR DOOMED YOUTH by WILFRED OWEN
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
—Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
Pagnini and the Brest Bible
I have argued for many years that the Pagnini Latin translation is the basis for Prostestant translations into the vernacular languages of Europe. The Brest Bible is an interesting example. But first let me provide a little timeline as background.
Erasmus Latin New Testament 1516
Luther German New Testament 1522
Tyndale English New Testament 1526
Le Févre French Bible (from Vulgate) Old Testament 1528, complete Bible 1530
Pagnini Latin Bible 1528
Brucioli Italian Bible 1531
Zurich Zwingli German Bible 1531
Luther German 1534
Coverdale English 1534
Olivetan French 1535
Each of these Bibles was translated with the benefit of the preceding Bibles. Luther worked from Erasmus Latin translation, Tyndale from Erasmus and Luther, Brucioli and Coverdale openly credit Pagnini, Olivetan worked from Pagnini and Le Fevre, Luther used Pagnini at least in part, although not predominantly, and so on. No complete vernacular Bible in Europe claimed to be from the original Greek and Hebrew, was actually done without the use of Erasmus’ Latin New Testament and Pagnini’s Latin Hebrew Bible.
Neither Erasmus nor Pagnini were Protestant. They were both Christian humanists, with a commitment to knowledge and scripture, but not Protestants. I am somewhat concerned that Protestants, on this continent, at least, do not often acknowledge the enormous debt owed to these two Latin translations by Catholics.
Back to the Brest Bible. For anyone interested in the debate regarding the debt owed to Latin translations,Hebraica veritas in the Brest Bible by Rajmund Pietkiewicz.
Here are paragraphs from the introduction and the conclusion.
Budny claimed that he could exemplifyit by means of many examples, some of which he presented inthe preface to his own translation of the Holy Scripture of 1572 (BSzB). This problem was also undertaken by Irena Kwilecka in her research, who came to the conclusion that the translators from Pińczów used, to a large extent, the new Latin translation of Santes Pagnini, which was made directly from the original. The basic auxiliary source in this respect was Latin edition of the Bible done by a well-known French editorRobert Stephanus (Estienne) of 1557, containing the Old Testament in faithful translation of Santes Pagnini,with added comments by an eminent Parisian Hebrew scholar François a Vatable and the translation of the New Testament based on the best Greek codes by Théodore de Bèze with his own comments.
On the grounds of to-date studies on the Bible we can be sure that the translation of Santes Pagnini played a crucial role in its creation (if not a paramount one). It seems tremendously intriguing because of the fact that the BB is evangelical-reformed in character, whereas Pagnini’s version is decidedly catholic. It came into existence on the basis of manuscripts collected since the times of Pope Nicholas V at the Vatican Library, and pope Leo X was the patron and sponsor of Pagnini’s works – the very one who on 3 January 1521 excommunicated Luther. The first edition of Pagnini’s Bible (Lyon 1527/1528) was equipped with a preface and approval of two popes: Adrian VI and Clement VII. On the third page we encounter the words:Datum Romae apud sanctum Petrum, sub annulo piscatoris twice. The author of the translation, Santes Pagnini, Dominican from Lukka, never joined reformation, and during his stay in Lyon (in the years of 1524-1536), where his greatest works came out, he vehemently combated the Lutherans and the Waldensians. It should be emphasized, that the catholic version of the monk, played a significant role not only in the emergence of the BB, but also in other translations made into national languages e.g. English and French, created in different factions of reformation.The same version constituted the basis of the translation of the reformed Bible, and at the same time found its way into the renowned Antwerp Polyglot (Antwerp 1569-1572) called „Counter-Reformation in folio” (figure 7). Hence, we can say that Pagnini’s work was of service for both Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Quality was the key element contributing to the significance of Pagnini’s translation, among the mentioned 16th century ones, new translation of the Hebrew Bible into Latin, which ideally met the requirements put forward before the translators of the Bible (especially those who felt inadequate as for their knowledge of Hebrew):Versio haec, quae verbum de verbo exprimit, propter sinceritatem maxime laudatur; Versio isthaec est grammaticalis, sed tamen fidelis.
Your Male Privilege: “God” & other “Biblical characters”
10. God will be pictured as male and described in masculine terms 90% of the time.
8. Biblical characters of your own gender will be featured as primary subjects and as positive examples 90% of the time in the educational curriculum.
Male characters will be featured in the children’s curriculum, and in the youth group curriculum, and in the Sunday morning sermon, and in the small group studies…you get the idea.
—
The above are 2 of the 10 Ways Male Privilege Shows Up in the Church, in a recent post by Ms. Gail Vaughn Wallace at the Junia Project.
Fabiola, the 4th century divorcée
Probably lots of women were divorced in the 4th century. But Fabiola’s story is particularly interesting. I couldn’t find her written up in any history of previously ignored Christian women. She lived at the time that Jerome was teaching Roman matrons Greek and Hebrew and studied these languages herself but not from Jerome. HOwever, she did meet him later. She was married off as a teenager to an abusive and adulterous husband. She then initiated a divorce from him under Roman law. Jerome was later to say that this man was so abusive that not a prostitute nor a slave would put up with the treatment he gave her. So, all is good for the divorce.
Since under Roman law women had the right to remarry, Fabiola married the man she truly loved, but she was then excommunicated from the church for adultery. She was cut off from the life she aspired to. As a wealthy women she wanted to participate in the studious and reflective life, and in a life of pious activity. However, her second husband died young and Fabiola became a widow, although not considered so by the church. She was naturally thought of as an adulterous woman because the abusive first husband was still alive.
However, after the death of her second husband, she paraded in penitential clothing in front of the Lateran Basilica and was eventually reinstated in communion with the church. Considering her wealth, it probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Then Fabiola carried out the plan that was closest to her heart. She built the first real hospital in the western world, and a nursing home beside it for those whose stay would be permanent. She worked in the hospital, going out herself and sending out staff to bing in the sick, who had no idea what a hospital was.
Now, she thought, now she could seek the meditative life of study and reflection that she desired. So she packed up and went to Jerusalem to stay with Paula and Jerome and study Greek and Hebrew again. She stayed a year only. There are two theories of why she left. One is that is was unsafe as there were rumours of an attack from the east. But the other theory rings true, that she just couldn’t stand the ongoing controversy about whether Origen was a heretic or not.
On her return to Rome she built a hostel for Pilgrim’s and settled down to work in the hospital, taking the most difficult cases, acting as administrator, nurse and surgeon. She is recognized here and there in books on public health but does not get much press as a Christian woman and leader. She was not associated with any great Christian man, nor was she a martyr. She was an independent, strong-willed, intelligent and productive woman.
Disclosure: I have not read the 19th century novel about her.
Pagnini and the welfare state
I have tried drafting a few posts lately but none of them seemed interesting enough. So I gave up and retreated to reading French books in Google books on Santes Pagnini to see where he has been hiding out. This time I found out that he is not best known for having produced the most influential translation of the Bible in the western world. He did that. But he did something else for which he was more celebrated. He and a friend of his, Jean de Vauzelle, another of the preaching brothers, not monks, but Dominicans, who are not cloistered, the two of them were the inspiration and driving force behind the establishment of the first public welfare system in France. They wrested the feeding of the poor out of the hands of the church, which wasn’t doing such a great job, and founded a public system run by the city of Lyon and funded by local wealthy merchants and nobles, the church, and a tax rebate from Paris. He persuaded a relative, a fellow Florentine, to build a new hospital and make sure the poor were cared for. Someone went around house to house in Lyon and registered the poor, handed out bread once a week, set up homes and schools for poor children, and hired doctors for the hospitals, one of them being François Rabelais. Approximately 5% to 7% of Lyon was on welfare at the time due to recent crop failures and famine.
Pagnini went to Lyon because he knew there was a printing press with Hebrew fonts and a patron who would support his work. But ostensibly, he was sent to Lyon by the pope to suppress Lutheranism. Luther was calling for the abolition of the mendicant, (begging) orders, such as the Dominicans, since they were doing such a terrible job of caring for the poor. He supported the secularization of welfare.
So, Pagnini, against the wishes of his own prior, Nicolas Morin, an inquisitor no less, simply advocated for the secularization of care for the poor as well, preached compassion and education, mixed socially with the populace and made sure that Lutheran influence in the city was always low key and did not gain ground. No one could complain about the Dominicans of Lyon not caring for the poor. As well as secularizing welfare, he had wealthy citizens build and staff new hospitals. In this way he supported humanism and moderate Catholicism in Lyon during his lifetime and the city rewarded him by making him a citizen, giving him a living allowance and all he wine he could drink, so he was no longer a “begging” priest, but one who was well supported and could give his free time to teach Hebrew to his students, some of whom later became Hebrew professors themselves. Many of the same men were medical doctors, and wrote medical pamphlets on surgery, etc. mixing theology and medicine.
It happens that in these same years, 1520 to 1550, women poets were first published in France. The Lyon school of poets included many women, who participated with men in a salon of poetry readings, also producing poetry for publication. I fell into flights of fancy and wrote a poem which reflects Pagnini’s translation of the Psalms, in particular the first few lines of Ps. 42 and Ps. 22.
Here are the disputed lines,
כְּאַיָּל, תַּעֲרֹג עַל-אֲפִיקֵי-מָיִם–
כֵּן נַפְשִׁי תַעֲרֹג אֵלֶיךָ אֱלֹהִים
As the deer (masculine) desires (feminine) the springs of water
So my soul (fem.) desires (fem.) you, O God.
The problem is that the feminine of deer ends with the letter ת tau, and the verb “desires” in the feminine begins with the tau. Since there is only one tau in the first line, the reader has to chose, either the tau is mistakenly added out of nowhere and the deer is really masculine, or two tau’s are reduced to one tau, and the deer is feminine. This is called haplography, writing a letter once when it should be written twice. Most exegetes see the point, but in English the word “deer,” gender indefinite, is just too handy. However, in Hebrew the feminine “doe” has an echo in the feminine soul, so the feminine is more poetic. Here are some of the translations,
Vulgate
Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum,
ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.
Pagnini
Quemadmodum cerva desiderat ad torrrentes aquarum,
ita anima mea desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.
Luther Bible
Wie der Hirsch schreit nach frischem Wasser,
so schreit meine Seele, Gott, zu dir.
KJV
As the hart panteth after the water brooks,
so panteth my soul after thee, O God.
Geneva Bible
Comme une biche soupire après des courants d’eau,
Ainsi mon âme soupire après toi, ô Dieu!
Conferenza Episcopale Italiana
Come la cerva anela ai corsi d’acqua,
così l’anima mia anela a te, o Dio.
The French and Italian have translations which reflect the Hebrew, “doe,” but for English and German, I haven’t found any translations with “doe” or the equivalent. Perhaps I will later. Pagnini also introduced the expression, the “doe of dawn” in the heading of Ps.22. For this reason, I wrote a poem imagining what it would be like to be a woman during the Reformation. It was not uncommon for girls from wealthy families to have a Greek tutor, but never a Hebrew tutor. That was mostly taught in other venues, inaccessible to women. My friend was over for supper a few days ago, and we reminisced about how we had studied, one of us Greek, and the other Hebrew, for 7 years, along with several years of the other language as well. We were lucky. Here is my poem,
Dawn’s doe desires the rushing water
She is not filled by the stagnant pool
Ancient wisdom’s anxious daughter
Will not be this ages fool.Open those pages to her as well
And keep not the seal of unknown forms
The wandering mind will not dwell
In shelter from the word-waged stormsText is the tumbled torrent where
Three flow together in equal share.
We live at a time when people want to deny or erase the male-female distinction: to do so is to assault humanity itself and diminish God in the process.
– David Capes, 21st century
There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no “male and female”; you are all one in the Messiah Jesus.
– Paul, 1st century (translated by N.T. Wright in the 21st century)
At the blog for “The Voice” Bible, David Capes posted yesterday “They Come in Pairs (no, it’s not about Noah’s ark)” to correct, or perhaps to clarify, posts from Creig Marlowe. Capes also says he’s been inspired by the Marlowe posts and also by comments elsewhere made by N. T. Wright. The gist of Capes’s post is to acknowledge what Marlowe does with “binaries” in Genesis, but he wants to move away from what Marlowe does to make a greater acknowledgement of some sharp inherent distinction between male and female as part of God and as part of humanity. His post is written to assault the assault against “the male-female distinction.”
Here’s the paragraph in which Capes gives Marlowe’s “binary” method the nod:
Dr. Marlowe is correct that some of these binaries form a hendiadys (literally, one through two). A hendiadys is an expression of a single idea by the use of two words often connected with “and” or some other conjunction. “His legal case is not black and white” uses a hendiadys. “Black and white” is not describing the color of the case but essentially that the facts of the case are not clear. If a case is “open and shut,” on the other hand, it is clear. In Genesis 1.1 “heavens and earth” describe not so much two things but one for which there is no Hebrew word,”the universe.” “Heaven” means everything above your head and “earth” means everything below your feet, in a sense then both words together mean “everything.” That is why we translated Gen 1.1 in The Voice: In the beginning God created everthing [sic], the heavens above, the earth below . . . “
Here’s the conclusion of Capes, his assault against this alleged assault on humanity itself:
The final binary “male and female” deserves special attention. Male and female make up one thing, humanity, and this humanity reflects the image of God. But it is in their differences, their complementarities that male and female reflect the imago dei. Male has no greater claim than female on imaging God. It is in their union together and distinctions from one another that God’s likeness is on full display. We live at a time when people want to deny or erase the male-female distinction: to do so is to assault humanity itself and diminish God in the process. Here is the commentary embedded at Genesis 1:27 in The Voice:
The crown of God’s creation is a new creature, a creature that can sound the heartbeat of its Creator. That creature, made male and female, reflects God’s own relational richness. The human family is to join God in the ongoing work of creation. The earth below and the sky above with all their inhabitants are too beautiful and too good to be left alone. They need the tender care and close attention that only God’s favored creature can give.
In Genesis 1:28ff. God blesses the humans and gives them the prime directive: be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth. In other words, humans are now directed to participate with God in the ongoing work of creation. God no longer creates ex nihilo. He uses preexisting elements and persons in order to fashion the next generation. Through the sexual union male and female become one flesh and life as we know it goes on.
What is interesting is how much more space and “special attention” Capes gives to this “final binary” of six total that he reviews. He need not apply his logic of distinction to any of the other five “binaries.” For the “the male-female” binary, Capes feels the need to assert “their differences, their complementarities.” For the “the male-female” binary, there needs to be “the sexual.”
N. T. Wright, who “inspires” Capes, has said that these special binaries are indeed the most special. They are the ones that must be complementary. The metaphors of difference, the constructs, therefore, whenever there is sexual difference, must be realities of difference, even if the Lamb (a male) and the Church (a female) are married.
Here are just a few problems:
- With the sexual in the binary of special attention to save all humanity, there is this idea, a hint of it anyway, that the Creator Being is sexual in the same way a human “male and female ” must be to keep the creation of “the next generation” going. Capes cannot go that far, of course. The best he’ll let himself do is to admit the following: “Good points, Emily. There are some wonderful images of God in the Scriptures that clearly describe the feminine side.” But he has to distinguish sharply the god-human binary (as a male-female binary) from all the other binaries, for the sake of the next generation.
- The logic of a “hendiadys” ostensibly must be abandoned when there is sex. The assertion of “both/and” categorical binaries, for Capes, becomes an assault, towards a denial or erasure of the male-female distinction.
- Genesis 5 and the story of Noah is still close by, despite what Capes wants for his funny blog title: “… Pairs (no, it’s not about Noah’s ark).” So when Paul uses “ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ” as a frozen phrase to his Greek readers in 1st century Galatia explicitly in order “to deny or erase the male-female distinction,” he’s likely not forgetting that old story of salvation that requires pairs on the ark, where in the LXX the same phrase is used. Paul is saying that his “Messiah,” who never was a male-one-flesh-with-a-female kind of savior, makes this very special sex binary a hendiadys.
Crossposted from Gaudete Theology, as I expect and hope that the commentariat and my cobloggers here may take up rather different points in their responses. :)
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil. Amen.
Those are the words I learned as a child, and still most frequently use when I pray. But sometimes I riff on it.
At some point in young adulthood, I encountered a translation that used “debts” and “debtors” instead of “trespasses”, and a commentary asserting that when Jesus talked about forgiveness, he was typically preaching to the people at the top of the wealth/power hierarchy. It was the people in positions of wealth and privilege who were called to forgive the debts of those who owed them money: not the other way around. This made sense to me in a “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable” kind of way.
The economic metaphor also helped me understand more concretely what forgiveness meant. I knew what it meant to forgive a monetary debt: it meant tearing up the IOU, wiping out the debt entirely, declaring “you don’t owe me that money anymore.” And, at least if you’re not an asshole, you also don’t bring up how generous you were in writing off that debt whenever there’s a conflict or negotiation between you and the person whose debt you forgave. A debt that’s forgiven is done, it’s over, it’s off the books.
In my first scripture course in grad school, I learned about the parallelism that permeates much Hebrew poetry, and I began to look for it everywhere.
Our Father in Heaven, / may your name be holy.
May your reign come / and your will be done
on earth / as in heaven.
Give us today / our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts / As we forgive our debtors.
Don’t lead us into temptation / But lead us out of evil.
I could even see some nested structure: “Our Father in heaven, holy is your name” has an ABBA structure (name/holy/holy/name).
Parallelism isn’t just aesthetic word games, though; like any other literary device, it accents the important concepts and brings out relationships between ideas. So I found this a fruitful reflection.
This form makes clear that “debts” beats “trespasses,” at least in English, by having a properly directional noun for the acting subject that makes sense with a possessive. “As we forgive our debtors” is perfectly clear. “As we forgive our trespassers”… not so much. Those might be our trespassers, that we sent out to trespass on other people’s lawns to go stir up trouble or hand out leaflets or sell Girl Scout cookies. And the connection with lawns (which is where I mostly saw “No Trespassing” signs as a kid) and the associated trivial level of infraction was also unhelpful.
Lately, though, I’ve been riffing on the Lord’s Prayer with a brain well soaked in mimetic theology.
Our Father in heaven / holy is your name.
May your reign emerge / and your will be enacted
On earth / as in heaven.
Give us today / what we need for today
And forgive us our trespasses / so we learn to forgive those who trespass against us
Do not put us to the test / but free us from evil
“Trespasses” is making sense again, in this theological framework in which defining my identity over against somebody else is sinful, and pacifically receiving my identity from God is holy; in which my righteous indignation is a surefire giveaway that I’ve been scandalized and hooked into mimetic rivalry with somebody who has done whatever it is they did to make me say “how dare they”: how dare they trespass against me or mine like that.
Forgive us our trespasses
So we can let go of that bristling defensive posture,
that tendency towards escalation, that mirror-imaging of sin.
Forgive us our trespasses
To remind us how it feels to be welcomed,
To remind us that we are no better no purer no holier
Than those who trespass against us.
Keep us out of that temptation
And free us from that evil
For yours, not ours, is the reign, and the power, and the glory:
Foreverandeveramen.
Paulo Freire in and on Translation
Abram K-J posted today his wonderful Spanish language “poem-prayer” inspired by his study of the works of Paulo Freire. Abram in comments below his post explains why he didn’t use Portuguese but used Spanish instead: La clase para que escribí un papel sobre Freire (la poema apareció al fin del papel) estaba una clase enseñaba en español. In other words, the professor and Abram and his classmates spoke and wrote in Spanish to study Freire in translation. And yet, he clarifies, in English, that when he read Freire’s most famous work it was in English translation.
Here’s a cover shot of the cover of one of the editions of this famous book:
This is one of the few covers of Pedagogy of the Oppressed that gives credit to the English language translator, Myra Bergman Ramos. What did Freire think about her and her translation?
Well, in Pedagogia da Esperança, co-written with Nita Freire (aka Ana Maria Araújo), he tells his thoughts about Ramos’s translating, and more.
Below we get some of that in the Freire’s Portuguese and in the English (translated by Robert R. Barr as Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed):
Additional detail of Freire’s work with Ramos is given by James D. Kirylo in his essay, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed: The Publication Process of Paulo Freire’s Seminal Work“:
I do not know, but I would imagine, that when in the United States teaching, Freire spoke with audiences and taught classes of students at Harvard in English (even if through an interpreter of his spoken Brazilian Portuguese). Given his play with and his practice of the power of language of the oppressed, it seems he had a great admiration for how young people — learners as pedagogues and pedagogues as students — would struggle with texts. He stays with this question, and I think he would appreciate what Abram has prayed in his poetry en español, as a translation of Freire’s language and ideas.
“I am overjoyed for the Church of England as it has finally consented [today, July 14, 2014] to the ordination and consecration of women as bishops. I believe that the inclusion of women in this order will bring new gifts and possibilities for its partnership in God’s mission in England. This represents one more step in the long transformation of church and society toward the Reign of God.”
– Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, the first female primate in the Anglican Communion
Full news:
“Falling into the Holes in Their Own Thought”
Fred Clark at Slacktivist this week has contributed more to the blogosphere conversation we also contributed to in the Noting Abusive Theologians post. Clark’s post is in response to Roger Olson’s question, “Should a theologian’s life affect how we regard his/her theology?” Leaving aside for now the issue of whether all sins should be viewed in the same light (that we should, as Clark thinks Olson does, put excessive beer-drinking in the same category as advocating the slaughter of peasants), I found Clark’s post very helpful in providing an alternative to either dismissing a person’s theology because of his personal life, or dismissing a person’s personal life because of her theology.
Clark says:
It is, rather, a vitally important matter of identifying the way these men fell into the holes in their own thought so that we can avoid falling into those holes ourselves. We can’t shrug off Yoder’s sexual abuse or Jefferson’s slave-owning as, in Olson’s compartmentalizing phrase, “sides to their personal lives that we cannot be proud of”. . .
Did Luther’s anti-Semitism “affect” his theology, or did his theology foster his anti-Semitism? Yes, both. Did George Whitefield’s slave-owning shape his otherworldly revivalism or did his otherworldly revivalism rationalize his slave-owning? Yes, both.
The inability to recognize that cause and effect can flow both ways makes it unlikely that Olson will be able to “use it but highlight those areas” where the taint of this “scandalous action” can be identified as a discrete, separate compartment of thought. That’s not how humans work.
I think it is important to avoid the ad hominem fallacy when considering this question. After all, the truth or falsehood of a statement is not changed by the nature of the person who makes it. But (and this is an important “but”) individual statements of truth or falsehood don’t exist in a vacuum. They are each one bit of a whole system of thought subscribed to by the person making them. And often, human beings being what they are, inconsistencies and even outright contradictions can exist within a person’s system of thought. These inconsistencies and contradictions often come from unexamined assumptions and prejudices within the person who is writing or speaking. The cognitive dissonance thus created is often assuaged by some small cheat, such as an unacknowledged change in the definitions of the words being used. For instance, Thomas Jefferson’s idea that all people are equal is one tenet of his thought. The idea that certain kinds of humans aren’t really people is another tenet of the same man’s thought: the one that justified both slaveholding and the ongoing rape of certain of his female slaves. Both ideas have to be taken into account in order to make proper sense of Jefferson. The fact that equality depends on how “people” are defined is a weakness in his system of thought that needs to be recognized. In fact, it’s a weakness that he either introduced or allowed, in order to justify his personal behavior to himself.
We can’t ignore Jefferson’s weakness relating to who gets defined as fully human, if we want to avoid falling into similar traps in our own thinking.
Roger Olson’s reasoning on the subject is as follows:
If we were to discount the value of every theologian whose life was in some way scandalous our library shelves would be much less burdened down. And perhaps our theological thinking poorer. And I didn’t even mention all the German theologians and biblical scholars who supported National Socialism!
Having said all that, I have to add this. If those German theologians allowed their pro-Nazi sympathies to infect their writings we would all, I suspect, decline to use them in our courses. So, to the extent that a theologian allowed his infidelities, racial prejudices, wrong political views, to affect his scholarship, I believe we must inevitably either 1) discard his scholarship, or 2) use it but highlight those areas where the scandalous parts of his life affected it.
However, to the extent that the theologian’s scandalous actions did not affect his theology (or biblical scholarship) I see no reason to make much of them. They should probably be mentioned in a biography but there’s no need to reject his whole theology because of them.
Olson’s writing here, I think, reveals his tendency to think in just the sort of binaries I have been trying to avoid– that either a theologian’s theology has been affected by his personal life, or it hasn’t; and that it’s possible for it not to have been. And where it has been so affected, if it’s not too pervasive it’s possible to cut away those places like a bit of mold on a piece of cheese, leaving the rest good and usable. However, if the taint of the theologian’s personal life is too pervasive, the entire theology must be discarded.
But I’m afraid we humans really don’t work that way. We are all a mixture of bad and good acting and thinking. Our thinking does affect the way we act, and the way we act does affect our thinking– and this is particularly true of the kind of people whose words, spoken or written, are wise enough to have been remembered down through the years. Wise people don’t usually leave their actions unjustified by their thinking, because they are thinkers and they can’t function that way.
Therefore, it’s important to take a theologian’s private life into account when reading his or her writings, and note where cognitive dissonance may have been compensated for by changes in definitions and other such things. If Tillich abused young women at Union Theological Seminary, then his attitude towards women certainly affected what he wrote (or didn’t write) about Eve. The key is to keep that in mind when reading his Systematic Theology.
Guest Post by Dagesh Forte – “Rhythm And Poetry”
Dagesh Forte is the blogger pseudonym of a scholar in biblical Hebrew. You may recognize him as a regular contributor of posts to the blog unsettledchristianity, including a provocative piece noting how “biblioblogs creep into places that maybe they shouldn’t be.” (In the same post, he reveals his part in the “now defunct Hebrew and Greek Reader weblog,” a site that interacted with some of Suzanne’s posts, and mine also, at our other respective blogs.) We are delighted that he has contributed the following guest post here at BLT!
– J. K. Gayle
—-
RAP is a powerful tool. RAP comes from Hip-Hop, the cultural movement that birthed DJing as its own type of music (instead of just a record spinner who introduced songs), break dancing, graffiti art, and RAP music. RAP has come to be stereotyped as crass, sexually and violently explicit, misogynistic, and a host of other negative things that have caused America to label many RAP albums with the tag “EXPLICIT”. Even so, RAP dominates the music scene here in the USA and internationally. I think its high-time that Bible translators begin to explore RAP as a vehicle for translating biblical poetry.
So let me introduce you to four of my favorite rappers. I think they can provide a foundation for how to make good rap.
Gil Scott-Heron
Gil is not what we think of when we think of RAP. Gil was a blueman, a jazz musician, and a beat poet. But unlike other beat poets, Gil’s poetry was about race, specifically black Americans. Gil died in 2011. The latter part of his life was marked with multiple jail sentences for powder cocaine possession and possession of a crack pipe (Until recently, crack cocaine offenders were given lengthier sentences than were powder cocaine offenders). His greatest hit was The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
The music of Gil Scott-Heron is important to me because its beautiful and honest and painful. Anyone who has ever had to deal with the modern (and very American) constructs of “black” and “white” will identify with or feel convicted by some of Gil’s words. Gil showed me how I benefit from institutional racism. And he did it in a way that I could accept because his way was poetic. As Bible translators, I think the lesson we can learn from Gil is that poetry can offend and convict and bring what is in the dark into the light and it can do it in a way that is undeniable.
KRS One
KRS One is from the early days of Hip Hop and the RAP that came from it. His music is an excellent blend of rhyming techniques with powerful content. He challenges black Americans to reject labels put on them and he invites all people to think before they speak. He is a scholar of Hip Hop. Sometimes when I want to listen to KRS One, I have a hard time deciding if I want to listen to his music or one of his lectures. KRS One shows that sermons can be rapped. Here’s his early hit My Philosophy.
KRS One also give regular lectures. You can find them on YouTube. Here he is commenting on guilt and Genesis 3.
The Wu-Tang Clan
I love The Wu. Wu-Tang is the soundtrack to my undergraduate years. The Wu-Tang Clan is the longest surviving (minus O.D.B.) RAP group from New York. In my opinion, they are the best. The Wu-Tang Clan makes blues music in RAP. This is the voice that says, “If there is a God, he doesn’t love me.” The Wu is a look at the underbelly of American life. Their music makes me think of hard-to-hear psalms like #137. Here is “Heaven and Hell” from Raekwon’s solo album “Only Built For Cuban Linx N*****”. Though his solo album, the whole Wu-Tang Clan joins in the album and this song.
Mala Rodriguez
For decades, Spanish RAP was terrible (in my opinion). Spanish rappers mimicked the techniques that they heard from American gangster RAP. For the most part, that technique was rhyme with a very predictable cadence. In the last few years, I have been impressed with the RAP of Maria “Mala” Rodriguez. Her RAP does not sound like American RAP in Spanish. She plays with Spanish as a Spanish speaker would, not as an American would. Her lyrics are biting and raunchy. And sometimes she growls like a death metal singer.
Mala’s music reminds me that poetry is different from language to language. Rhyme is entertaining in English, but in Spanish it can be incredibly boring (and easy since nouns end in either -o or -a). Here is the single “33” from her 2013 album “Bruja”.
Could RAP translations of Psalms be a useful exercise? I think when we hear a translation of a psalm that causes the foot to tap and the head to nod to the beat, then we’ll know.
Book review as comic strip: Jenna Brager’s review of the graphic book “Mendoza the Jew”
Click over to the Los Angeles Review of Books for this interesting way to review graphic books. Jenna Brager reviews the recent graphic book Mendoza the Jew: Boxing, Manliness, and Nationalism – A Graphic History.
Here is how it starts:
Snowpiercer: Vagaries of commercial art
I saw the amazing film Snowpiercer this weekend, and was absolutely stunned by this striking interpretation of the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige. It is a rare bird: a cerebral action thriller. It has an impressive cast: Chris Evans, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Alison Pill, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton and the excellent Korean actor Song Kang-Ho. And, you probably have not seen it – it is only showing in a small number of theaters. It is only playing in eight US theaters at this time although it will open at approximately a hundred theaters by next weekend.
The film is an extended allegory on religion, North Korean absolute control, and revolutionary movements set within an action thriller genre. The basic premise is that in an effort to end global warning, science accidentally unleashes a brutal ice age that has killed all of humanity except for a tiny remnant living aboard a massive train that circumnavigates rail lines that circle the globe (with extended bridges connecting, for example, Alaska to Siberia). The train is strictly segregated with the wealthy in the front, with every luxury imaginable – from sushi bars to hot tub pools – and the masses piled into cattle cars at the back. A team led by Curtis and Gilliam (a clear nod to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil) attempts to launch a revolution to take charge of the engine car – facing a long series of obstacles and challenges.
“Snowpiercer” is a CGI feast – one that normally would play best on the big screen. And yet, as a result of a controversial deal with Harvey Weinstein’s video-on-demand unit, the film seems destined to be seen by most on the small screen. Is this the future of cinema in America?
The Boston Globe gives the fascinating backstory behind the release – a story that has a great deal to say about how movies are distributed. Here are some excerpts:
“Snowpiercer” is a mesmerizing science fiction/action film that moves like the bullet train on which it takes place.[…] “Snowpiercer” isn’t a perfect movie but it is an astonishing one. Bong takes the dystopian fantasies of such movies as “Blade Runner” and “Brazil” and compresses them into an elongated space that rushes forward on speed and story. The film’s visual imagination is baroque, insane, inspired, with each railway car a newly revealed universe of beauty and peril. […] “Snowpiercer” demands to be seen.
It almost wasn’t. Back in 2012, Harvey Weinstein of The Weinstein Co. bought US rights to the film based on its script and a few sample scenes, but when [director] Bong [Joon-Ho] turned in the finished film the distributor balked. The 126-minute runtime wasn’t as much an issue as the film’s dark tone, often brutal violence, and general creative weirdness. The wide release Weinstein envisioned now seemed risky; secondhand reports had company executives claiming the film wouldn’t be understood by audiences in Iowa and Oklahoma. Bong was told he had to cut 20 minutes or the film wouldn’t be released. In effect, he was being penalized for being too visionary.[…]
Bong refused to make the edits, especially after a Weinstein cut reportedly tested more poorly than the director’s original. Meanwhile, “Snowpiercer” was released in Korea, France, and other countries to rave reviews and massive box-office returns. Finally Weinstein relented: Bong’s version could go out to US theaters — but only in limited release. Instead of playing 600 to 1,000 screens, “Snowpiercer” would be seen in 100 or so art houses and out-of-the-way multiplexes.[…]
A crucial decision seems to have been Weinstein’s relegating “Snowpiercer” to the company’s Radius/TWC subsidiary, which specializes in releasing movies in innovative multiplatform arrays that include theatrical, video on demand (VOD), and other outlets. This practice severely restricts which theater chains will agree to show a film, since most exhibitors believe that digital distribution cannibalizes their customers.[…] [O]nce “Snowpiercer” went to Radius/TWC — with an as yet unspecified VOD release scheduled for a number of weeks from now — its shunning by theater chains was assured.[…]
What the “Snowpiercer” saga inadvertently reveals is an entrenched industry in the midst of a sea change while paddling against the current as fast as it can. VOD revenues aren’t reported by distributors — meaning there’s no way to compare those numbers with box office grosses — but the anecdotal evidence is clear. More people than ever are dialing up movies on their TVs, laptops, and phones via cable services, Roku and AppleTV boxes, NetFlix, iTunes, and Amazon. The only movies that still draw mass audiences to theaters are heavily promoted studio blockbusters — and even they last only a few weeks — and the occasional art-house hit like “Grand Budapest Hotel.”[…]
What that means for you, the moviegoer, is as yet unclear. At the very least, films that don’t strictly conform to the big-budget studio entertainment model — that are labors of love, or are challenging, or just different — will find it harder than ever to find a big-screen toehold in this paranoid new world. “Snowpiercer” may have been relegated to the exhibition boondocks because it falls between the audience cracks: It’s too violent for genteel art-house audiences, too weird for the mainstream. And yet it’s impossible to believe that an action-packed science fiction movie starring [Chris Evans who previously played] Captain America (with an 86 percent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, no less [note, as of 6/29, the Rotten Tomatoes rating has risen to 93%]) couldn’t do a decent chunk of business for a few weeks in 600 theaters[…].
N.T. Wright’s Complementarianism
There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere, and here at BLT, about the Interview with N. T. Wright on First Things on the subject of sexuality. I have read several of N. T. Wright’s books and lectures and have found him to be in general an articulate scholar and a convincing writer on Christianity and the Bible. The interview linked above is a portion of a longer interview, and it focuses on Wright’s (negative) views on gay marriage. The puzzling thing about the interview, as others have pointed out, is how it departs from Wright’s usual reasoned discourse to compare those who believe marriage can and should be extended to same-sex couples, to Nazis and Stalinists. This is not the kind of approach I’m used to reading from a man I highly respect. Several other blogs, such as Sarah Over the Moon and Slacktivist, have taken issue with this approach.* Several posts here at BLT, such as this one by Suzanne McCarthy and this one by J. K. Gayle, have focused on some of the implications of Wright’s thinking, focusing in particular on this quote from the interview:
With Christian or Jewish presuppositions, or indeed Muslim, then if you believe in what it says in Genesis 1 about God making heaven and earth—and the binaries in Genesis are so important—that heaven and earth, and sea and dry land, and so on and so on, and you end up with male and female. It’s all about God making complementary pairs which are meant to work together. The last scene in the Bible is the new heaven and the new earth, and the symbol for that is the marriage of Christ and his church. It’s not just one or two verses here and there which say this or that. It’s an entire narrative which works with this complementarity so that a male-plus-female marriage is a signpost or a signal about the goodness of the original creation and God’s intention for the eventual new heavens and new earth.
This paragraph from Wright’s book Surprised by Hope is also appropos:
Heaven and earth, it seems, are not after all poles apart, needing to be separated for ever when all the children of heaven have been rescued from this wicked earth. Nor are they simply different ways of looking at the same thing, as would be implied by some kinds of pantheism. No: they are different, radically different; but they are made for each other in the same way (Revelation is suggesting) as male and female. And, when they finally come together, that will be cause for rejoicing in the same way that a wedding is: a creational sign that God’s project is going forwards; that opposite poles within creation are made for union, not competition; that love and not hate have the last word in the universe; that fruitfulness and not sterility is God’s will for creation.
Wright’s views against same-sex marriage, then, are rooted in his insistence that the very meaning of marriage is about male and female– and that men and women, males and females, themselves are representative of something larger, some overarching pattern of complementary binaries in God’s plan for creation and re-creation, and there can be no deviations from that pattern:
If you say that marriage now means something which would allow other such configurations, what you’re saying is actually that when we marry a man and a woman we’re not actually doing any of that stuff. This is just a convenient social arrangement and sexual arrangement and there it is . . . get on with it. . . If that’s what you thought marriage meant, then clearly we haven’t done a very good job in society as a whole and in the church in particular in teaching about just what a wonderful mystery marriage is supposed to be.** Simply at that level, I think it’s a nonsense. It’s like a government voting that black should be white.
It’s not my purpose here to give a complete Scriptural and philosophical defense of gay marriage. Though I am no longer at all convinced that the passages of Scripture that are used to deny gay marriage address committed, faithful same-sex unions at all, I think I’ve got a lot more still to study and learn about that topic.*** But I do want to talk about the subject of binary thinking and exclusionary definitions such as Wright displays in the quotes above, and how they relate to the concept of “complementarity” in male-female relations, particularly in marriage.
Before he started blogging here, J. K. Gayle blogged at Aristotle’s Feminist Subject, where he said this in 2009::
We are suspicious of binaries. And we are suspicious not because binaries cannot or do not exist in nature. But we are suspicious of binaries because the binary is the fundamental structure of patriarchy. The would-be pure and precise division of the binary helps and has helped and will continue to help males to be dominant over females. In contrast, there’s feminine discourse, which tends not to be reduced to the “either / or” but, rather, tends to be “both and” and “more.”
[A]lthough we in the west tend to speak in terms of categories, that are binary, as if they are natural, our practices are ancient, going back to the man Aristotle, who profoundly believed that females naturally were inferior to males.
The idea of binaries as exclusionary, either A or Not A, shows more the influence of Aristotelian categories on Western thought than it reflects the mindsets of either the ancient Hebrew or New Testament Greek writers. This Aristotelian way of thinking is certainly not the only way to approach the texts. Even if not consciously intended by Wright, the Bible’s concept of binaries brought into union definitely implies a “both-and” kind of relationship in many instances, rather than the exlusionary either-or. As Rabbi Rachel Barenblat says on her blog Velveteen Rabbi:
This is what it means to say that the Jews accepted the Torah for real at Purim: we accepted the deepest Torah, the highest Torah, the Torah in which there is no longer a distinction between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” because to God on high it’s all one. At this level of spiritual elevation, there’s nothing which the sitra achra, the “other side” — in a word, evil — can grasp. Once you get to this high place, evil has fallen away. This is the point at which we’re connecting not with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (which presumes binaries) but rather the Tree of Life.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was what kept Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life. God did order the world in Genesis 1 through binaries, but that doesn’t mean there’s only “either/or” and never “both/and” or “more.” The presence of a pattern does not exclude combinations or exceptions. Also, the binaries of Scripture are generally principles or patterns, not laws or rules. There are very real, very human humans who have an extra X chromosome, or who present as one sex but have the hormones of the other. And God created them.
I must disagree with Wright that presence of an exception or combination somehow denigrates or damages the pattern or principle. Just as the existence of the platypus is not bad just because it doesn’t fit the pattern of either a land creature or a water creature, the existence of humans and human relationships that don’t fit the male-female pattern do not destroy the pattern. The Genesis binary patterns are beautiful, but they are not set forth as law, and not fitting into them is not disobedience.
If those in Christ are the true family of Abraham, which is the point of the whole [Galatians 3] story, then the manner of this identity and unity takes a quantum leap beyond the way in which first-century Judaism construed them, bringing male and female together as surely and as equally as Jew and Gentile. What Paul seems to be doing in this passage, then, is ruling out any attempt to back up the continuing male privilege in the structuring and demarcating of Abraham’s family by an appeal to Genesis 1, as though someone were to say, ‘But of course the male line is what matters, and of course male circumcision is what counts, because God made male and female.’ No, says Paul, none of that counts when it comes to membership in the renewed people of Abraham.
But sometimes we don’t notice what Wright is not saying in that essay. He’s not saying he’s an egalitarian. He’s only saying he doesn’t think women should be restricted in church ministry. He makes it clear, though, that he is not saying anything about his views on marriage, and that “ticking the box” of women in church ministry does not necessarily meaning “ticking a dozen other boxes down the same side of the page.” In fact, when it comes to marriage, this piece written by Andrew Wilson on the Confluence Blog defines Wright’s view as follows:
Wives and husbands, along with everyone in the church, are called to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ, but not in identical ways. The church submits to Christ by recognizing him as head, and following his leadership. Christ submits to the church by loving her, taking on the form of a slave, giving himself up for her, and presenting her holy and blameless. So when Paul compares the wife to the church and the husband to Christ, he is saying that the ways in which their ‘mutual submission’ is expressed will be different: the woman will follow her husband’s lead, and the man will exercise his leadership by serving his wife, as Christ-like leaders always do. (This view is very simply expressed by Tom Wright in Paul For Everyone: The Prison Letters).
Wilson then directly quotes Wright:
Paul assumes, as do most cultures, that there are significant differences between men and women, differences that go far beyond mere biological and reproductive function. Their relations and roles must therefore be mutually complementary, rather than identical. Equality in voting rights, and in employment opportunities and remuneration (which is still not a reality in many places), should not be taken to imply such identity. And, within marriage, the guideline is clear. The husband is to take the lead – though he is to do so fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided. As soon as ‘taking the lead’ becomes bullying or arrogant, the whole thing collapses.
This is a very “soft” complementarianism to be sure, but it is complementarianism all the same. And Wright does insist in his “Women’s Service in the Church” teaching that there must be no blurring of the male-female binary:
But once we have grasped this point we must take a step back and reflect on what Paul has not done as well as what he has done. In regard to the Jew/Gentile distinction, Paul’s fierce and uncompromising insistence on equality in Christ does not at all mean that we need pay no attention to the distinctives between those of different cultural backgrounds when it comes to living together in the church. . . the differences between them are not obliterated, and pastoral practice needs to take note of this; they are merely irrelevant when it comes to belonging to Abraham’s family. And this applies, I suggest, mutatis mutandis, to Paul’s treatment of men and women within the Christian family. The difference is irrelevant for membership status and membership badges. But it is still to be taken note of when it comes to pastoral practice. We do not become hermaphrodites or for that matter genderless, sexless beings when we are baptised.
And yet in the very same essay, Wright says this:
I notice that on one of your leaflets you adopt what is actually a mistranslation of this verse: neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. That is precisely what Paul does not say; and as it’s what we expect he’s going to say, we should note quite carefully what he has said instead, since he presumably means to make a point by doing so, a point which is missed when the translation is flattened out as in that version. What he says is that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no ‘male and female’. I think the reason he says ‘no male and female’ rather than ‘neither male nor female’ is that he is actually quoting Genesis 1, and that we should understand the phrase ‘male and female’ in scare-quotes.
So does Paul mean that in Christ the created order itself is undone? Is he saying, as some have suggested, that we go back to a kind of chaos in which no orders of creation apply any longer? Or is he saying that we go on, like the gnostics, from the first rather shabby creation in which silly things like gender-differentiation apply to a new world in which we can all live as hermaphrodites – which, again, some have suggested, and which has interesting possible ethical spin-offs? No. Paul is a theologian of new creation, and it is always the renewal and reaffirmation of the existing creation, never its denial, as not only Galatians 6.16 but also of course Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15 make so very clear. Indeed, Genesis 1—3 remains enormously important for Paul throughout his writings.
What then is he saying? Remember that he is controverting in particular those who wanted to enforce Jewish regulations, and indeed Jewish ethnicity, upon Gentile converts. Remember the synagogue prayer in which the man who prays thanks God that he has not made him a Gentile, a slave or a woman – at which point the women in the congregation that God ‘that you have made me according to your will’. I think Paul is deliberately marking out the family of Abraham reformed in the Messiah as a people who cannot pray that prayer, since within this family these distinctions are now irrelevant. . .
Remember that the presenting issue in Galatians is circumcision, male circumcision of course. We sometimes think of circumcision as a painful obstacle for converts, as indeed in some ways it was; but of course for those who embraced it it was a matter of pride and privilege. It not only marked out Jews from Gentiles; it marked them out in a way which automatically privileged males. By contrast, imagine the thrill of equality brought about by baptism, the identical rite for Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female.
Wright is saying that men are still men and women are still women in Christianity, and that they should be fully who they are; that women should not try to be just like men in the way they minister. But he is also saying that the whole “there is not male and female” is a reversal of the text of Genesis 1, “male and female He created them.” He uses this as justification for Paul’s support of women in all areas of ministry. The distinctions that would make a man say, “I thank God I was not born a Gentile, a slave or a woman” are all distinctions of privilege, whether of race, economics or gender. These privileges must now be laid down, for they are irrelevant. Equality has been brought about by the substitution of baptism for circumcision.
And yet it is that very privilege, that very distinction, which Wright upholds in male headship in marriage. If the husband, despite being “fully mindful of the self-sacrificial model which the Messiah has provided,” still assumes that leadership belongs to him by right, he is acting according to a distinction of privilege which man assumed over woman as a consequence of the Fall in Genesis 3:16. We read in Philippians 2 that privilege (as the equal of God) was the very thing that Christ laid down, in order to take the form of a slave– which constituted, at the Crucifixion, a complete emptying of privilege. Galatians 3, as I have insisted elsewhere, cannot mean something different for women than it means for Gentiles and slaves. If a free Jewish man could not say to a Gentile or slave, “Be happy with the level ground at the foot of the cross, but being free and Jewish means the privilege of leadership belongs to me alone,” then a free Jewish man could not say it to a woman either. Not even if she were his wife.
Like Wright, I see a pattern of binaries in Genesis 1, and I also see a pattern throughout the New Testament of things that have been separated brought back together. What I don’t see is exclusive binaries that deny the right to exist of anything outside them. Nor do I see God endorsing the upholding of patterns of privilege and marginalization– which must die if the promised union is ever to be complete.
I know I don’t have Wright’s credentials or education, but Paul did say God had chosen the foolish and the weak things of the world to confound those who are strong and wise. Sometimes not having privileges also means we are free from being blinded by them.
I very much appreciate the opportunities I’ve had to learn good things from Dr. Wright. There have been logs in my own eye that he has definitely helped me to remove. So I feel emboldened to point out this speck in his. May God be gracious to us both.
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*Sarah Over the Moon wrote a very good follow-up piece yesterday. Suffice it to say that I agree with her whole-heartedly that no matter how much many of us may like and respect N. T. Wright, Christianity has no superstars other than Christ, and no Christian leader should ever be considered exempt from examination and critique of his or her views.
** Here, I think, Wright misquotes the passage, for Paul never says marriage is a mystery. He says the union of Christ and the church is a mystery. Human marriage is supposed to look towards that union, but it is not that union.
***My basic approach to the gay marriage question is to rely on the litmus test once set forth by Augustine. “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” Love of my LGBT neighbors means listening to them and trying my best to understand their perspective. The question in my mind in regards to any practice must be, “Does it harm the self, the other, or the creation?” And if not, is it not love of my neighbors to allow them to enjoy the same kind of committed union that gives me such comfort and support?
blogs egalitarians read
Gail Wallace of the blog The Junia Project lists her favorites here. Commenters are adding theirs there, and there does seem to be a fair number of blogs egalitarians write and read.
