Now this difference of approach has a strong bearing upon the problem of how we set about translating the Hebrew of the Old Testament prophets. For the method which I adopted in translating the comparatively simple Greek of Letters to Young Churches , for example, was applicable enough to those human, non-literary documents. But it is wildly unsuitable for the transferring into English of the dignified utterance or the passionate pleading of these ancient men of God.
There is little hint in any of them of a conversational, let alone a colloquial, style. They were speaking in the name of the Lord and, like King James' translators 2, years later, both they and their editors thought that only the highest language could do justice to the oracles of the most high. We must, I think, attempt a style at once more lofty than our common speech and yet not so far removed from us that our minds cease to receive the message We must aim at a style which is both dignified and authoritative.
He did not however intend to translate literally as he tried to imitate the style of the Hebrew prophets. Just as in his New Testament he was "prepared to tone down all that was foreign and strange," so also in the Old Testament he sought to naturalize the text in English:.
We should be able to know what the prophet meant and, to some extent, feel what he felt without being continuously and embarrassingly aware of that gulf of 2, years. In other words, we must try to place the emphasis on what is of eternal value and tone down the 'accidents' of period and place. See now, here is the Lord, the Lord of hosts removing every staff and stay from Jerusalem and Judah—bread, the staff of life, and water its support; the strong man and the warrior; the judge and the prophet, the seer and the elder; the captain of fifty and the man of reputation; the skilled magician and the expert in charms.
And I will make mischievous boys their leaders And let them be led by the nose. The people will oppress each other, man exploiting man, Yes, every man his neighbour. The young shall behave rudely towards the old And the inferior towards those of high repute. Then a man shall take hold of his fellow, Whose family owns a robe of office , And say, You have a robe, you shall be our ruler, You shall be king of this pile of rubble!
In that day he will protest plainly, I cannot repair the ruin, My family has no bread And there is no robe of office; You cannot make me ruler of the people. For Jerusalem has stumbled And Judah has fallen; Their words and their deeds defy the Lord, Insulting his glorious presence.
Their besotted folly condemns them; They flaunt their sin like Sodom And make no attempt to hide it. Alas for them, for they brought evil upon themselves. Happy is the good man, it shall be well for him, For he shall eat the fruit of his deeds. But alas for the wicked, it shall go ill for him, For what he has done shall be his own undoing!
My people are cruelly oppressed—by children, And their ways are ruled by women. Your leaders are misleading you, my people, They are confusing the path in which you should go!
The Lord enters the court, The Lord stands to judge his people; And the Lord calls to account the elders and leaders of the people: It is you who have stripped my vineyard bare, Your houses hoard what you have plundered from the poor! What do you mean by crushing my people, By grinding the faces of the poor?
This is what the Lord of hosts says. The Lord also said: Because the daughters of Zion are high and mighty, Walking with their noses in the air, Flirting with their eyes, Mincing along with jingling anklets, The Lord shall strike their scalps with scabs And uncover what they keep hidden.
In that day the Lord will take away the luxury of anklets, headbands and moon-charms, ear-rings, bracelets and scarves, head-dresses, armlets and sashes, scent-bottles, magic charms, signet rings and nose-rings, party-dresses, cloaks, stoles and handbags, revealing clothes, linen garments, splendid turbans and outdoor veils.
Instead of perfume there will be the stench of disease, Instead of a girdle there will be a length of rope, Instead of well-groomed hair a bald head, Instead of a fine dress a bit of sackcloth, Branding instead of beauty-treatment! Your men shall die by the sword And your strong men in battle; The city-gates shall mourn and wail, And the city sit upon the ground, desolate and forlorn. Phillips wrote a number of other books, in which he dealt with questions of theology and biblical interpretation on a popular level.
In this book Phillips connects his theory of translation to a particular view of inspiration:. But before I begin my testimony as a translator I must make a few reservations. This theory is bound to break down sooner or later in the world of translation. There are over 1, known human languages, and it was during a brief spell of work for the British and Foreign Bible Society that I learned of the attempts to translate the Bible, or at least parts of it, into nearly all of these different tongues.
I learned of the extreme ingenuity which the translator must use to convey sense and truth where word-for-word transmission is out of the question. Such examples could, literally, be multiplied many thousands of times.
Yet I have found, when addressing meetings in this country and in America, that there still survives a minority who passionately believe in verbal inspiration. It appears that they have never seriously thought that there are millions for whom Christ died who would find a word-for-word translation of the New Testament, even if it were possible, frequently meaningless. Any man who has sense as well as faith is bound to conclude that it is the truths which are inspired and not the words, which are merely the vehicles of truth.
But like most theological writers who have protested against dogmatic views of "verbal inspiration," he goes on to suggest that not everything in the Bible is true. Concerning the Apostle Paul he says, "Sometimes you can see the conflict between the Pharisaic spirit of the former Saul who could say such grudging things about marriage and insist upon the perennial submission of women and the Spirit of God, who inspired Paul to write that in Christ there is neither 'Jew no Greek But whatever opinion one might hold concerning this, it seems that in his translation Phillips does not actually want the reader to see the "Pharisaic spirit of the former Saul" in all its glory.
In Colossians , Ephesians , and 1 Peter women are told, "adapt yourselves to your husbands," rather than "submit yourselves to your husbands. In weightier matters of theology too, it seems that Phillips was not entirely satisfied with the biblical teaching. His modernistic style of theology and his manner of interpreting the New Testament may been seen from the following passage in Ring of Truth:.
At some stage in my life as a Christian I must have heard the total depravity of man heavily emphasized. I do not think I ever personally accepted this, because ordinary observation showed a good deal of kindness and generosity produced by people whether they had religious faith or not. But I have found among gatherings of Christians of various denominations a minority who seemed to get a perverse delight in this emphasis on man's utter hopelessness.
And indeed we have not got to look far into devotional literature, whether Protestant or Catholic, to come across the idea that man is hopelessly sinful and incapable of good without the operation of the grace of God. I am not at all proud of Article 13 in the Book of Common Prayer, which says the same thing in a peculiarly unpleasant way. One comes from the first Epistle of John, where the writer reminds his hearers that no one should deceive them by any clever talk: "The man who lives a consistently good life is a good man as surely as God is good.
The literal translation is, of course, "Be men. But if it is true that the image of God is still present in man, however much it has been distorted or disfigured by evil, then it makes the most encouraging sense to be told to live like a man. At any rate, I must put it on record that this is the effect the inspired words had upon me.
We have only to read what he has to say about the condition of man in Phillips' own translation of Ephesians 2 under the rubric "We were all dead: God gave us life through Christ" to see how this old "detractor of humanity" delights in emphasizing the natural man's utter hopelessness.
But apparently Phillips does not understand that the doctrine of "total depravity," as expressed in the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican church, merely asserts that every part of man was corrupted in the fall, so that he is totally dependent upon God's grace, not that he was corrupted to such an extreme degree that the image of God was entirely lost, or to such a degree that no good thing remains by common grace.
He misunderstands this important doctrine, and his exegesis of Paul in 1 Corinthians 16 can only be described as sophomoric. If this is "the effect the inspired words had" upon the translator, he is plainly incompetent to interpret the Bible. Phillips' parphrase has many good points. But in general he fails to inspire confidence in his ability to paraphrase the New Testament without any deliberate or accidental modernization of the message itself, along with the words.
There seem to be three necessary tests which any work of transference from one language to another must pass before it can be classed as good translation. The first is simply that it must not sound like a translation at all. If it is skilfully done, and we are not previously informed, we should be quite unaware that it is a translation, even though the work we are reading is far distant from us in both time and place.
That is a first, and indeed fundamental test, but it is not by itself sufficient. For the translator himself may be a skilful writer, and although he may have conveyed the essential meaning, characterisation and plot of the original author, he may have so strong a style of his own that he completely changes that of the original author.
The example of this kind of translation which springs most readily to my mind is Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I would therefore make this the second test: that a translator does his work with the least possible obtrusion of his own personality. The third and final test which a good translator should be able to pass is that of being able to produce in the hearts and minds of his readers an effect equivalent to that produced by the author upon his original readers.
Of course no translator living would claim that his work successfully achieved these three ideals. But he must bear them in mind constantly as principles for his guidance.
This seems to me to be the right place to set down a justification for my own methods. As I have frequently said, a translator is not a commentator. He is usually well aware of the different connotations which a certain passage may bear, but unless his work is to be cluttered with footnotes he is bound, after careful consideration, to set down what is the most likely meaning.
Occasionally one is driven into what appears to be a paraphrase, simply because a literal translation of the original Greek would prove unintelligible. But where this has proved necessary I have always been careful to avoid giving any slant or flavour which is purely of my own making. That is why I have been rather reluctant to accept the suggestion that my translation is "interpretation"! If the word interpretation is used in a bad sense, that is, if it is meant that a work is tendentious, or that there has been a manipulation of the words of New Testament Scripture to fit some private point of view, then I would still strongly repudiate the charge!
But "interpretation" can also mean transmitting meaning from one language to another, and skilled interpreters in world affairs do not intentionally inject any meaning of their own. In this sense I gladly accept the word interpretation to describe my work. For, as I see it, the translator's function is to understand as fully and deeply as possible what the New Testament writers had to say and then, after a process of what might be called reflective digestion, to write it down in the language of the people today.
And here I must say that it is essential for the interpreter to know the language of both parties. He may be a first-class scholar in New Testament Greek and know the significance of every traditional crux, and yet be abysmally ignorant of how his contemporaries outside his scholastic world are thinking and feeling.
After reading a large number of commentaries I have a feeling that some scholars, at least, have lived so close to the Greek Text that they have forgotten their sense of proportion. I doubt very much whether the New Testament writers were as subtle or as self-conscious as some commentators would make them appear. For the most part I am convinced that they had no idea that they were writing Holy Scripture.
They would be, or indeed perhaps are, amazed to learn what meanings are sometimes read back into their simple utterances! Paul, for instance, writing in haste and urgency to some of his wayward and difficult Christians, was not tremendously concerned about dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's" of his message. I doubt very much whether he was even concerned about being completely consistent with what he had already written.
Consequently, it seems to me quite beside the point to study his writings microscopically, as it were, and deduce hidden meanings of which almost certainly he was unaware. His letters are alive, and they are moving—in both senses of that word—and their meaning can no more be appreciated by cold minute examination than can the beauty of a bird's flight be appreciated by dissection after its death. We have to take these living New Testament documents in their context, a context of supreme urgency and often of acute danger.
But a word is modified very considerably by the context in which it appears, and where a translator fails to realise this, we are not far away from the result of an electronic word transmuter!
The translators of the Authorised Version were certainly not unaware of this modification, even though they had an extreme reverence for the actual words of Holy Writ. Three hundred years ago they did not hesitate to translate the Greek word EKBALLO by such varying expressions as put out, drive out, bring forth, send out, tear out, take out, leave out, cast out , etc. And as a striking example of their translational freedom, in Matthew we read that the thieves who were crucified with Jesus "cast the same in his teeth," where the Greek words mean simply, "abused him.
I feel strongly that a translator, although he must make himself as familiar as possible with New Testament Greek usage, must steadfastly refuse to be driven by the bogey of consistency. He must be guided both by the context in which a word appears, and by the sensibilities of modern English readers.
In the story of the raising of Lazarus, for example, Martha's objection to opening the grave would be natural enough to an Eastern mind. But to put into her lips the words, "by this time he's stinking," would sound to Western cars unpleasantly out of key with the rest of that moving story. Similarly, we know that the early Christians greeted one another with "an holy kiss. Again, it is perfectly true, if we are to translate literally, that Jesus said, "Blessed are the beggars in spirit.
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