Why I Translate the Books of the New Testament from Scratch Again and Again and Again

 I've translated through every book of the New Testament at least twice. Most of them I've done at least four or five times. Some, like Romans, I've lost count of how many times I've translated through it completely fresh. 

     Why do I do this? 

     Because every time I put it away and start again fresh I see something I didn't see before. Every time I go back and check the lexical definitions of words I know I've checked a hundred times before, I'm looking to understand what exactly the semantic meaning really is here. My autistic brain wants to just plug in one of the lexical definitions that's already there, but it also knows that most of those lexical definitions are using English that's at least a hundred years old to describe idioms from a language and culture that's 2,000 years old. And so, I get hung up on a word or a sentence. 

     What is Paul actually saying? (Paul's letters are where this usually happens the most.) 

     I put it away. Read more about the history, language, culture, and philosophy of the first century Roman Near East. I read modern translations of other works from the same language and period, and then go back again and look at it again with those eyes. 

     I put it away again and focus on Modern Greek to see if it has anything to teach me about how certain word usage and constructions might have survived, and then I again go back and run through it again, looking at it with the eyes which that has given me. 

     And every time I do this, I strip away just a little bit more of the two thousand years of language, culture, and theological changes which have been imposed on the text and I come closer to being in the room with the author as he's writing. I come closer to having that conversation with him on his terms, not my 21st century, English speaking American terms. And I come closer to understanding what he was saying to those readers who already knew what he was talking about, because he was only reminding them of things he's already said to them while he was there. 

     I must come to this author without a Protestant theological background, without a Catholic or Orthodox background, without the background of someone from my century, and I must listen to him as he writes as though I was someone from his own time and place, someone who understands the people, the places, the idioms, the humor, the sarcasm. I go, and I come back as though I'm travelling through time; learning more each time I do until I get it. 

      I must approach it without bias, without judgment, without a preconceived opinion and just let Paul, or Matthew, or John speak as they are, no more and no less, and not put words in their mouths they didn't mean or say. In doing all this over the more than three decades since I started learning Biblical Greek, I peel back the noise generated by twenty centuries of change, both unintended and deliberate, layer by layer. 

     This is why I don't just do one translation and then go back and edit and revise it. I always go back and work from the Greek fresh. Every time. I go back and look up words I already know the meaning of just so I can find a new way to say it in English to see if that is more appropriate for a modern usage. I play with it a bit. Should this be word for word and grammar for grammar, or should it be rendered idiomatically or paraphrased? My ASD brain spends a half hour on a single sentence sometimes obsessively trying to make it make sense with the actual word meanings and grammar rather than giving it the standard theologically biased translation. And sometimes I go back and find that I was wrong, and I look at it again and wonder how I could have rendered it that way before. Sometimes it makes perfect sense at the time but looks like gibberish in English when I go back and look at it again. 

     But I go back. I sit in that room with the author as he's writing, and I do the hard work of trying to understand what he's actually saying without the noise. And sometimes, just sometimes, I get it. He speaks clearly as though it's my own native tongue. And that makes all of the above worth every single time.

No One Can Be a Slave of Two Owners

 Way back in 2014, my family and I moved back to Southern California from Arkansas. Among our hardships at the time was that we didn't have a car. We had ridden the bus back to California and could only bring what we could carry in our luggage. It was a rough time for a number of reasons, and in Southern California, not having a car put a serious hamper on our mobility. But one of the things I found myself feeling at the time was a kind of relief in a way. No car meant no insurance payment. It meant no needing to fill up the tank with expensive gasoline. It meant no car repairs. No yearly car registration either. We were using bus passes at the time, and the monthly pass was so much cheaper than actually owning a car. I was actually happy for a time about not having a car, and was somewhat stressed about being given one about four or five months later by the church we became members of.

     In 2016 or '17, I became the proud owner of a World of Warcraft account. I was paying $15 a month, give or take, for access to Azeroth. Honestly, paying to rent or "own" the thing felt like it obligated me to play it every day, otherwise I was wasting my money. 

     Owning anything means being responsible for that thing. Ownership's neither good nor bad, and it is a regular part of our society's collective psyche, but it does come with responsibilities if you want to continue to own that thing. Ownership of a thing, in a way, makes you the property or slave of the thing you own. Owning a thing obligates you to use it, or else why own it? Owning a thing obligates you to take care of it whether you want to or not. When you own a thing it takes and holds part of you for ransom until you let that thing go. Owning a thing, in a way, makes it your master because you, out of principle, develop an attachment to it just by virtue of your ownership.

     Jesus taught that, "No one can be a slave of two owners. He will either hate the one and love the other, or he will love the one and despise the other." It is my thought this morning that this one of the reasons why the conditions of discipleship demanded a letting go of "the things you started off with", that is, your possessions, as much as they demanded letting go of any relationships where you were more attached to the other person than to Jesus Himself, and of course letting go of your own "psyche," your own self-identity, your "breath." You cannot serve two masters.

     If you are so attached to something that you cannot just let it go, then it is your master, it is your owner whether you want it to be or not. As I said, in this day and age, ownership of property is nearly unavoidable, but be aware of it, and what you possess that has ownership over you. These are the things which prevent you from really being His disciple. Not because He has strict rules, but because you have lent yourself over to serve other owners, and no one can be a slave of more than one owner or master.

Sometimes the Darkest Moments Can Produce The Brightest Lights

 I am going to say something here where my intention can be easily misunderstood. I hope it isn't. 

     Without the people and their descendants that slavery brought to America, history would have looked very different. There would have been no George Washington Carver to teach us about peanuts and their beneficial uses. There would have been no Frederick Douglas. There would have been no Martin Luther King Junior. No Nichelle Nichols from Star Trek. There would have been no Nat King Cole. The lady of color who was the human calculator behind the NASA efforts to get to the moon wouldn't have been there. The revolutionary army might all have died of small pox if not for the wisdom of an African slave who showed Cotton Mather how to inoculate against it half a century earlier in Boston. Or the Civil War might not have been won at all if not for the efforts of a freed slave posing as a housemaid in Jefferson Davis' house and gathering information for the Union.

     For all the horrors and atrocities that slavery brought, and it brought many, too many, it was also the soil which produced great minds, great people, people who inspired and taught us in so many ways. People without whom the United States could not have survived. I was contemplating at what point in history slavery could have best been stopped. Ideally, it would have been by waylaying the first Dutch slave traders so that it never took root to begin with. But then I remembered all of these great people and many more who contributed so much to who we all are as a nation. I remembered Les Mitchell who was a youth leader at the church I grew up in, and who was there for me at moments in my childhood when no one else was. Without slavery, he wouldn't have been there either.

      It is a general principle that more often than not, some of our greatest moments of growth, some of the most powerful lessons we learn, some of the moments which define who we are come from tragedy, from horrors, from things that happened which should never have happened. It is a truth that, without the Holocaust, it's likely that the State of Israel wouldn't exist today. Without the horrors of the Civil War, slavery itself wouldn't have been abolished in the United States. Without the Atomic Bomb dropping on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan would probably never have surrendered in WWII. How many people have experienced radical positive life changes from literally dying for a short time?

      There is a story from the Zen tradition:

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There once was an old Zen farmer. Every day, the farmer used his horse to help work his fields and keep his farm healthy.

But one day, the horse ran away. All the villagers came by and said, “We're so sorry to hear this. This is such bad luck.”

But the farmer responded, “Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?”

The villagers were confused, but decided to ignore him. A few weeks went by and then one afternoon, while the farmer was working outside, he looked up and saw his horse running toward him. But the horse was not alone. The horse was returning to him with a whole herd of horses. So now the farmer had 10 horses to help work his fields.

All the villagers came by to congratulate the farmer and said, “Wow! This is such good luck!”

But the farmer responded, “Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?

A few weeks later, the farmer's son came over to visit and help his father work on the farm. While trying to tame one of the horses, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg.

The villagers came by to commiserate and said, “How awful. This is such bad luck.”

Just as he did the first time, the farmer responded, “Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?”

A month later, the farmer’s son was still recovering. He wasn’t able to walk or do any manual labor to help his father around the farm.

A regiment of the army came marching through town conscripting every able-bodied young man to join them. When the regiment came to the farmer’s house and saw the young boy's broken leg, they marched past and left him where he lay.

Of course, all the villagers came by and said, “Amazing! This is such good luck. You're so fortunate.”

And you know the farmer’s response by now…

"Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?"

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No one wants tragedies or hurtful things to happen to them. No one wants atrocities to occur to anyone. The Holocaust was an atrocity. Slavery was an atrocity. But without the filth and dirt of those atrocities, we would not have had such beautiful things take root and grow as a result.