The Queen James Version - Deliberate Mistranslation and a Big, Fabulous Bible

So big. So fabulous. Source

A few days ago, a Facebook friend tagged me in a link he'd posted about the Queen James Bible (hereafter, "the QJV," for Queen James Version), which, in the words of its editors, "seeks to resolve interpretive ambiguity in the Bible as it pertains to homosexuality." I'd never heard of it, so I clicked on the link and read about it. I ended up having more to say than would fit easily into a Facebook comment, so I decided to talk about the QJV in depth here instead.

Before I say anything else, let me state up front that I am an LGBTQ-affirming Christian. I believe that minority sexualities and gender identities are a blessed part of God's good and ordered creation, and they should be affirmed and celebrated in God's church. (I've talked about some of the reasons for this here.) At the same time, I am a thoroughly orthodox Christian: I profess the universal creeds of the church on a weekly basis with profound faith in the truth of what I am saying.* I believe that church teaching should be grounded in a faithful reading of scripture, guided also by reason, tradition, and experience.

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Now that you know my biases, dear reader, let's dig into the QJV.

The QJV is actually just a King James Bible with alterations made to the eight Bible verses that are most commonly used to condemn homosexuals. (The name "Queen James" is an allusion to the fact that King James, the person who commissioned the King James Bible, is thought by some historians to have been gay or bisexual.) It's not a new Bible translation, but an old one that's been altered to serve a particular purpose. In this, it's unlike just about any Bible I'm familiar with, although Bibliotheca, which takes the American Standard Version and updates some of the language for easier comprehension, seems like a distant cousin.

So the QJV is a weird Bible, more like a publicity stunt or a piece of post-modern art than a traditional Bible edition. It's not clear to me that there's much demand for a "big, fabulous," but very slightly modified KJV with a big rainbow cross on the cover. While the KJV is probably the most beautiful, and certainly most influential, English Bible translation, it's also among the least accurate in its renderings of the original texts.** This makes it an odd choice for making the point that an accurate understanding of the original texts shows that they make no direct reference to homosexuality as we think of it today.

As at least one reviewer has pointed out, if you really want a QJV, you can save money by modifying your own KJV: just scratch out the relevant verses and insert the edits proposed on the QJV website.

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What are the merits of the edits themselves? Some are simply rendering individual words differently than the KJV does, for what I see as legitimate reasons, but several of them are what I would call deliberate mistranslations. This is worth discussing in some depth.

When I say "deliberate mistranslation," what I mean is that the translators have intentionally rendered the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek original in English with words that do not accurately convey the strict sense of the original.† So this category includes, for example, the rendering of the Greek splagchnon as "heart" rather than "bowels" or "intestines," because the heart is the metaphorical seat of the emotions in English and the bowels are not; it includes the rendering of Hebrew zera' as "offspring" instead of "seed," because English speakers rarely refer to their children as their seed. It also includes instances where translators add words that are not in the text in order to clarify what they think the text is saying; for example, the NIV adds "the help of" to clarify that Eve is not claiming to have gotten pregnant by the Lord in Genesis 4:1.‡

Pictured: Eve and her kids.
Not pictured: Eve getting jiggy with the Lord.

Source

In this sense, nearly every English translation of the Bible is going to include some deliberate mistranslations. Looser translations that strive to achieve easy readability in English (the New Living Translation and especially The Message come to mind) are going to do this more than translations that strive to render the exact sense of the original language as strictly as possible (Young's Literal Translation or the New American Standard Bible, for example). The KJV is somewhere between; it tends to render individual words fairly literally, but often adds words for clarity. (It's worth mentioning that most printings of the KJV render added words in italics, which is a cool feature if you're trying to suss out what precisely the underlying text says, and annoying feature if you're trying to read the book out loud without sounding crazy).

Deliberate mistranslation is fine; what's important is that translators acknowledge that they are doing it and point it out when possible, so that readers can see it and investigate for themselves whether the text actually means something different. (An example of extreme deliberate mistranslation done well: The Inclusive Bible, which goes out of its way to interpret the Bible in non-sexist terms, including a refusal to use male pronouns for God. The translators lay out in detail what they're doing and make a good case for why it's worthwhile.) As far as I'm concerned, the QJV's editors are in the clear, since they're completely up front about what they're doing and include detailed explanations of each of their edits on the website. What I actually find more problematic is when translators make claims of high accuracy and then obscure their deliberate mistranslations and the ideology behind them. This is a particular problem with the NIV, for example; I've also discussed it with regard to the ESV. 

The deliberate mistranslations in the QJV are mostly added words; for example, the editors render Leviticus 20:13 with the addition "in the house of Molech" to indicate that they think the verse is about temple prostitution rather than consensual relationships. Romans 1:26-27 gets some more extensive additions and changes, but for essentially the same reason: this text is about paganism rather than homosexuality, the editors believe. The editors change "know" (in the sexual sense) in Genesis 19:5 to "rape and humiliate" to clarify that Sodom is condemned for the sin of not being hospitable to strangers, rather than for being a big ol' pile of gay (as tradition would have it).

But Lot's wife looked back at the big ol' burning pile of gay, and lo, she became a pillar of salt. Source

An exception to the rule is Jude 1:7, which does not add words, but changes "they went after strange flesh" to "they went after nonhuman flesh" to clarify that the sin of Sodom involves trying to rape angels, rather than dudes having sex with dudes. While these are not literal renderings of the exact wording of the original texts, they render interpretations of the texts that are widely, though not universally, accepted in Bible scholarship. Again, since the editors are up front about doing this, I don't see a particular problem.

The rest of the edits simply re-translate the individual Greek words arsenokenotai and malakoi, which are often rendered as if they referred to consensual gay sex between adults, though it is far from clear that that is the case for either. (The former, which means something like "male beds" or "male bedders," appears to have been coined by Paul, and it's unknown what exactly it refers to; the latter means, literally, "soft," and Paul uses it in a way that his contemporaries don't, so again, we're in the dark about what exactly it means.) I think the changes the editors make in translating these word are adequate, though they're not what I would have chosen. These edits are not deliberate mistranslations at all, but simply different interpretations of the exact meaning of the underlying word.

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So, is the QJV worth buying? Certainly not, except to prove a point, or if your church has some really specific and slightly bizarre liturgical needs. Do I have a problem with what its editors are doing? Certainly not, though I wouldn't personally have made all the changes they did.

What's important when considering the QJV is acknowledging the continuity between the QJV and other Bible translations. "Every translation is a betrayal" is a cliche among translators, but it's true: no translator can faithfully, completely render a text in another language. There will always be wordplay, connotation, allusions, and other elements that get lost in the new language, and the text in the new language will tend to generate (however unintentionally) its own wordplay, connotations, and allusions. In addition to this, every translator has some kind of agenda: at the very least, they must have some answer to the question, Why do we need (another) translation? The fact is that the QJV's editors have found an answer to that question, one that no one else came up with, and however odd its actual implementation, their answer is worth pondering.

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*Note that in declaring myself an orthodox Christian, I make a distinction between affirming the dogmas of the church and the doctrines of the church(es). The dogmas of the church are the ideas that the whole church has, at some point, come together and agreed upon in a church council, such as the Council of Nicea. These ideas are affirmed in the creeds, like the Nicene Creed; they're things like the virgin birth of Jesus, his death and resurrection, God's creation of the world, and so forth. Human sexuality and gender identity are not topics that the whole church has ever come to an agreement on in a churchwide council, and given the fractured state of modern Christianity, it is unlikely that such a council will be convened any time soon. While many church denominations have different doctrines regarding human sexuality and gender identity, none of them has been affirmed by the whole church, and none can be a measure of Christian orthodoxy. I've written at length on the subject of who can and cannot be considered a Christian in an essay called The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be.
**Not primarily because of what I'm calling "deliberate mistranslation," but because the 17th-century translators did not have a completely firm grasp of Hebrew, and they didn't have access to the vast library of manuscripts of the texts that modern archaeology has provided us with.
†Deliberate mistranslation, then, is related closely to what Robert Alter calls the "heresy of translation by explanation," which I've discussed at some length here. Alter's category is essentially a subset of the larger category of deliberate mistranslation.
‡The NIV reads “With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.” Young’s Literal Translation more accurately renders this, “I have gotten a man by Jehovah.”

ESV Reader's Bible Review, with Notes on the Translation

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine alerted me to a Kickstarter she thought I would want to see, for a project called Bibliotheca. (See the video below—for real, see it, it's a great video).

The idea behind the project is that, because of the format in which it's usually published, the Bible is actually really hard to just sit down and read at length the way you would, say, a novel or a book of poetry (just two of the many genres which it contains).

I watched this video and was overcome by profound booklust, but at the end of the day I wasn't quite willing to part with $70 for this particular item—I wasn't sure I'd like the translation, and backing on Kickstarter is not quite the same as buying something outright. But the same friend who pointed me to Bibliotheca told me about the Bible Design Blog, a lovely site where I learned about the ESV Reader's Bible, a volume with a similar aim at a more affordable price. I tried to avoid buying the thing, but I eventually lost all resistance and shelled out $20 for a copy.

This was a problem, because my wife had already been pointing out, ever since we got married and moved in together, that we genuinely own too, too many Bibles as it is:

Above: the reasons I should probably not be buying more Bibles

Fortunately for me, when my ESV Reader's Bible arrived and I told Anna about it, rather than scold me, she merely lamented that she couldn't really be mad, since it was, after all, a Bible. I was relieved.

The Book:

The ESV Reader's Bible comes in two formats, a hardcover version (cloth over board), which also comes with a lovely slipcase, and a softcover, leather-bound edition. I opted for the former, mostly because I associate the soft, leather-bound book feeling with Bible-y-ness, and I was trying to get as far as possible from that feeling in my reading experience with this volume.

Bible in its slipcase, a lovely feature in and of itself

This Bible doesn't really feel like a Bible. Held in the hand or the lap, it feels much more like a thick hardcover novel, the kind you take to the beach for a long afternoon: it fits comfortably in one hand, its cover pleasantly rough against the skin, like any really good hardcover without its dustjacket. The cover and binding are of high quality and lovely both to look at and touch.

The ESV Reader's Bible, fitting pleasantly into my hand(s) as I sit in my library/office at home

Like Bibliotheca, the Reader's Bible aims to improve the ease of reading through the Bible by stripping away the apparatus that normally clutters up the text when we we pick up a Bible from a pew or hotel drawer. Verse numbers, section headings, footnotes, cross-references, and double columns are nowhere to be found. Instead, each Biblical book looks like a long chapter in a novel, with the title at the beginning, words broken into paragraphs, and small section breaks between chapters:

The poetry sections are similarly uncluttered, though they don't reserve a single page for each poem the way most volumes of poetry do:

Just for comparison's sake, take a look at the Reader's Bible next to my mom's old Thompson Chain Reference Bible, which is designed for doing pretty much exactly the opposite of extended, pure reading. Here, both volumes are open to the first chapter of Mark. See how the Reader's Bible lets the text breathe without distraction for the eye, where the Chain Reference squeezes the text into tiny columns and loads up the margins with cross-references that pull the eye away from the story:

Top: ESV Reader's Bible; bottom: my mom's old NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible

The Bible it most resembles in my collection is probably Robert Alter's translation with commentary, which also uses a single-column format and no verse numbers, but which does include a great many footnotes that draw the eye:

Both open to 2 Samuel; note the majority of text in the Alter volume below the footnote line

So the Reader's Bible feels more like a novel than any Bible I've ever encountered. The feeling would be complete if not for the Bible-thin paper that's used in the book. If you look at Genesis and the Psalms above, you can see that there's a fair amount of text on other pages "ghosting" through to the page it's open to; this seems like a product of the thinness of the paper. The paper also warps and wrinkles easily under pressure from your fingers, like most Bible paper does.

Of course, the Reader's Bible is packing a ton of text into a regular hardcover novel-sized codex; to get a sense of how thin the paper needed to be to do this reasonably, I compared the thickest books in my library to the Reader's Bible:

Some of my thickest books, ordered by width

All of these were thicker than the Reader's Bible, and yet none of them had even half as many pages! Don Quixote comes close, but it's nearly half again as thick as the Reader's Bible.

So the book design is just a bit of a compromise. Bibliotheca deals with this problem by splitting the Bible into four volumes, but if you want to pack the whole Bible into a single volume, even stripped of everything but the bare text itself, thin paper is apparently the only way to make it happen without creating a monster brick.

We're looking at you, Neal Stephenson, with yer Cryptonomicons and yer Anathems. (Source)

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The Experience: 

The Bible study I'm a part of, a group of residents from Anna's hospital and their spouses, is currently studying Mark. In the absence of any reason to read anything else, I settled on that as my text to read as a test run with this volume. I also ended up reading Galatians, Colossians, and Ruth later on because of the pervasive joy I feel when I pick this thing up.

But let's start with Mark. Mark is the shortest gospel, and the gospels are easier to get through than a non-narrative text like a letter or a poem, but it's still usually a bit of a challenge for me to sit and read Mark all the way through without my mind wandering. This volume's presentation of the text without numbers, columns, headers, or section breaks, though, really drew me into the reading—it made the book actually hard to put down! I got wrapped up in the story and, maybe for the first time, really felt like I understood the flow of it, how each element of the story leads to the next: Jesus' incredible healings gather crowds; he teaches them about the kingdom of God that's just about to break through in an unexpected way; his explosive message angers varying groups in turn—the Pharisees, the scribes, the Herodians, the Sadducees, the priests—who, though they are each other's enemies, conspire to trap him; he angrily drives out the money changers at the Temple, which is enough for his opponents to arrest him; finally, he's executed and rises again.

That narrative sequence has never fully come through for me before. Normally it's easy to read Mark in little fragments and analyze what Jesus is teaching or doing here or there, because the textual apparatus is set up for that kind of thing, especially in Bibles with section headings announcing what's about to happen and breaking up the text. But absorbing the story as a whole is another task entirely, and this is the first Bible I've encountered that facilitates that task at all.

It also made some more local narrative elements come through in a different way. Mark is an efficient, plain, effective storyteller, very much an inheritor of the Hebrew Bible's starkly economical and bare narrative style. His dramatic, fast-paced style really came through to me, and I was drawn into the text in a way I haven't been before. I've read a lot about the Bible, so I know some important literary devices in Mark from an intellectual level—things like the suspense involved in putting the hemorrhaging woman story in the middle of the story about Jairus's dying/dead/resurrected daughter, and the big turning point at the center of the book when the disciples finally get who Jesus is and then he's transfigured before their eyes—but reading the book this way helped me experience them viscerally, as not just as ideas but as feelings, connections, for the first time.

Galatians and Colossians, both letters of Paul (a biblical genre I have particular difficulty getting into) were both a breeze, and like Mark, I found myself grasping what they were each actually about, as a whole, much more than I usually do.

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The Translation:

The English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible is entirely new to me. I'd literally seen the name of the translation before, but until I purchased this volume, that was pretty much the extent of my exposure. By curious coincidence, at our most recent Bible study, which is a group that leans pretty heavily toward the evangelical wing of the Church, someone brought out an ESV and several others commented that it was their favorite, the best translation, the most accurate, etc.

So I did some digging, talked to my dad, searched Wikipedia, and so forth, to figure out what is the what of the ESV. Turns out it's a revision of the Revised Standard Version (RSV). We already have one of those, of course; it's called the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which is a great though by no means perfect translation. (The NRSV is what I typically cite and link to on this blog, and it's the translation I'm most used to.) The ESV, though, is a conservative revision of the RSV. In more ways than one, actually: all the sources I've seen say that a mere 6% of the text has been changed in any way. But what I really mean by "conservative" here is that the ESV was translated for and by conservative Christians.

I don't have a real problem with Christians of a certain ideological bent creating a translation that reflects their views; after all, I bought the Inclusive Bible for my wife, a translation that explicitly eschews gendered language for God, even though the original text frequently refers to God in male terms. She loves it. My issue with the ESV is more specific: there's a tension between the translators' biblicism and the actual features of the original texts themselves, and this causes them to do some slightly wacky things.

Biblicism is a subject that I've discussed before in detail, but it's basically a set of beliefs structured around on the idea that the Bible is the inerrant/infallible word of God. I think it's a silly and ultimately unworkable way of reading scripture, but the point here is that it seems to be the ESV translators' view of scripture. The problem with scripture is that it's messy—confusingly messy, if you think it's the "very words of God speaking to us," as the translators put it in their introduction. Why is the order of creation different in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? Why does Judges tell us Moses' father-in-law was Hobab, but Exodus calls him Jethro or Reuel? Why does 2 Samuel say Elhanan killed Goliath, when 1 Samuel tells us it was David? And so on.

This is a problem the translators of the NIV (the favorite translation for evangelicals while I was growing up) also ran into. Their solution, notoriously, was to alter the text to make it both internally consistent and consistent with their theology. Their insistence that the Bible was infallible, "God's Word in written form," was directly at odds with their translation practice, which is that the Bible needs to be altered so it does not contradict either itself or evangelical Christianity.

I checked to see if the ESV would do the same thing, and it does, though to a lesser extent. (The list I found of mistranslations in the NIV had 125 instances; 41 of those showed up in the ESV, too.) The ESV harmonizes some different versions of names in the texts and does some Christianizing (most egregiously in Isaiah 7:14, where it deliberately mistranslates "young woman" as "virgin" to match the citation in Matthew, where it's used to predict the virgin birth of Jesus). It's also been criticized for being clunkily literal, unidiomatic, and tone deaf,* and to my personal distaste it has an overtly conservative translation in some of the "clobber passages" for homosexuality.

I will say, however, that in reading the ESV Reader's Bible, my experience was never impinged upon by the translation. It's an "essentially literal" translation, but not so much so that it's unreadable as English or anything. (Young's Literal Translation this ain't, and I'm told it's easier to read than the also very literal New American Standard Bible.) There were many times where I quite liked what I was reading, so please take these criticisms with a large grain of salt.

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Wrapping Up:

If you watched the video at the top of the post and can't bear the thought of not owning a Bibliotheca, the bad news is that the Kickstarter is done and you can't back it anymore, but you can actually still preorder it at bibliotheca.co any time up until the creator, Adam Lewis Greene, actually places an order with the printer. So get on that!

I'm really hoping (1) that the popularity of the Bibliotheca project will not cause so much hassle for Greene—who originally envisioned making 500 volumes but is now going to need to figure out how to make thousands—that he gives up and doesn't deliver, (2) that its success will spur him or someone to make Bibliotheca more broadly commercially available, and (3) that it'll eventually appear in a translation I already trust. At all events, I'd love to see one in person sometime...

The good news is that, however great Bibliotheca is, I'm satisfied that the ESV Reader's Bible is a great substitute, or at least a very strong second place. It's also currently available at an astoundingly good price for a book of such high quality over at the Westminster Bookstore (you can also get the leather bound edition in brown and black there for good prices, though not the fabulous $14.99 the hardcover is going for).

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*Favorite example: Jesus' perhaps inadvertently sexual assertion in Luke 17:35 that "There will be two women grinding together."

The Danger and Beauty of Acculturation

Above left: Jaroslav Pelikan, the subject of the interview recording on the right. Source.

In a 2003 interview with Krista Tippett, Christian historian and Yale professor Jaroslav Pelikan discusses his project, ten years in the making, to collect and publish every Christian creedal statement he could get his hands on. At one point in the interview, excerpted in the audio clip above, he reads a portion of a creed created by a Masai church in east Nigeria, the Congregation of the Holy Ghost:

We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world...We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave.*

Pelikan points out that, "after a couple of generations" of reciting the Christian creeds given to your culture by others, "a Christian community gradually comes of age, achieves a level of maturation where you want to do it for yourself...speaking in your context, using the images of your culture. And the question is, can you do that without sacrificing the integrity of what you have received? It's easy just to repeat, but then it's not your own; it's easy to say what is your own, as though nobody had ever said it before, but then the question is whether it's authentically Christian."

Pelikan holds up the Masai creed as an example of the beauty and richness that is available to Christians when this process is done right. The Masai recast Jesus' life and death in their own cultural terms, and the result is both a Jesus who is wholly relatable to a new culture, and a fresh vision of Christ and creed for anyone to ponder, Masai or otherwise. However, "the dangers here are enormous!" Pelikan contrasts this creed with the "Nazi creed," that is, the creed of "Positive Christianity," a strain of Christianity in Nazi Germany which removed Jesus' Jewishness, refused to ordain ministers with Jewish heritage, and generally sought to conform Christianity to Aryanism.** Intuitively, we know that the Masai kind of acculturation or cultural blending of Christianity "has the ring of authenticity," and the Nazi kind does not, but Pelikan does not spell out exactly what makes them different.

Flag of the German Christians, group associated with "Positive Christianity" in Nazi Germany. Source.

(I feel like a good rule of thumb might be: if your church is putting a swastika on the cross, it's the wrong kind of acculturation. Maybe a bit too specific, though.) 

Listening to this interview brought immediately to my mind the most fascinating example of acculturation I'm aware of: a 9th-century poem called the Heliand. It's a linguistic and cultural adaptation of the Gospels, transferring them from their first-century, Mediterranean context and Greek language, to the language and context of the Saxons in Northern Europe. (The word heliand means "healing one" and is one of the Heliand's names for Jesus.) At the time the Heliand was written, the Saxons had recently been forcibly converted to Christianity by Charlemagne, the great conqueror and emperor of that time and place. It was written to them in order to help them transition to their new religion.

Needless to say, the Heliand is a fraught document. Unlike either the Masai creed or the creed of "Positive Christianity," the Heliand is not an instance of a culture adapting Christianity to itself, but rather part of an attempt to impose Christianity on Saxon culture from the outside. At the same time, it is quite beautiful. The Heliand manages to be quite consistent with both Christian tradition and the 9th-century Saxon view of the world, which is no mean feat. While it is whole-heartedly in favor of Christianity, it is (depending how you read it) at least ambivalent about and more likely wholly condemnatory of the conquest and forcible conversion of a people.

Page from a manuscript of the Heliand. Source

I had owned a copy of an English translation of the Heliand for years, but I'd never managed to read my way through the whole thing. After hearing the Pelikan interview, I set myself the task of finally finishing the book, so I could try to assess where it lies on the acculturation spectrum from Masai to "Positive" Christianity.

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My copy of the Heliand is a translation and commentary by G. Ronald Murphy. In reading it and thinking about the way it adapts Christianity to the culture of this northern Germanic tribe, I relied heavily on Murphy's notes. All this is to say that my assessment rests on the work of a single scholar and is, naturally, not in any way definitive. It'll be fun though!

Above: my copy of the Heliand, with my copious notes for this essay scribbled on a blank page at the front.

The anonymous author's task was to help convince the Saxon upper class that Christianity was for them, and he used a number of linguistic and rhetorical tools to carry it out.

The most basic tool, and one which I can only really see as fantastic, is to make simple changes to the concrete elements of the story, to make them conform to the hearer's understanding of the world. In the Heliand, Jesus is surrounded by things familiar to a northern European, Germanic audience. So when Jesus goes to the wilderness to be tempted, for example, he heads out into a forest rather than a desert. When John the Baptists' father, Zachary, writes what the name his newborn son will be, he inscribes it in runes on beech tree bark. Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Rome are Germanic hill-forts, surrounded by a wooden palisade wall and the huts of peasants. Jesus' disciples fish on a Sea of Galilee clouded in North Sea fog, and they watch Jesus walk on water from the deck of a viking-style longboat.

Source

The author's next strategy for drawing in his audience is to recast Jesus and his disciples themselves in Saxon cultural terms. The Heliand is addressed to the upper class of Saxon society: clan chieftains and the warrior vassals who served them. The warrior's loyally to his liege lord, and the lord's reciprocal kindness to and responsibility for his warriors, are among the highest values of this culture. So Jesus is depicted as a mighty chieftain who gathers loyal warrior-companions to himself before embarking on his quest to heal and save humanity. When Peter tries to walk on water with Jesus, but begins to sink because of his doubts, "he calls on Christ's feudal bond as Chieftain to a thane with its obligation on the lord to render help to his warrior-vassals":

The waves wound around [Peter], the high seas surrounded the man. Just at that moment he began to doubt in his mind. The water underneath him became soft and he sank inside a wave, he sank into the streaming sea! Very soon after that he called out quickly, asking earnestly that Christ rescue him, since he, His thane, was in distress and danger. (Murphy, pg. 96)

Upon hearing Jesus predict his death and proclaim his intention to go into harm's way, the disciple Thomas gives a rousing speech that recasts Christ's passion and death as the last stand of a chieftain surrounded by his warrior-companions: "[W]e should continue, on stay with Him, and suffer with our Commander. That is what a thane chooses: to stand fast together with his lord, to die with him at the moment of doom. Let us all do it therefore, follow His road and not let our life-spirits be of any worth to us compared to His—alongside His people, let us die with Him, our Chieftain!" (Murphy, pg, 130; compare Thomas's much shorter utterance in John 11:16).

A whole slew of Germanic cultural epithets pursue Jesus across the story, portraying him as the embodiment of the highest ideals in Germanic society; in Murphy's translation, he is "Chieftain," "Guardian," "Protector," "Champion." My personal favorite can be found in the crowd's reactiong to the feeding of the five thousand:

 All those people understood in their feelings that they had a mighty Lord. They praised the Heaven-King, they said that never would a wiser wizard ever come to this light who would have more power with God here in the middle world or a more sincere mind. (The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel, G. Ronald Murphy, pg. 93)

 That's right: Jesus is a wizard.

Source

Jesus is depicted as a wizard not because the author went off the deep end, nor because the translator didn't know what he was doing (Murphy makes a strong case for translating the Saxon uuarsago as "wizard"), but because magic was an important part of Germanic religion, and showing Jesus as a master of magic was a way of indicating his divinity. This brings us to the author's last tool for enticing his audience: the incorporation of Germanic religious imagery into the gospel story.

There are two main objections to this kind of thing. Christians sometimes worry about syncretism: the idea is that if you blend Christianity with another religion, the resulting religion will no longer be Christianity. A more universal qualm is that borrowing another religion's imagery to talk about your own is a kind of theft, a misappropriation, and that it can somehow lead to attempts to "trick" people into joining your religion (a claim that I've always thought was a bit insulting to the intelligence of converts and converters alike).

In any case, I don't think either objection applies in the Heliand. The uses of Germanic religion are typically quite subtle, usually respectful or at least neutral toward Germanic religious beliefs, and never seem like an attempt to trick the audience into thinking that this new religion is the same as their old one somehow. The primary purpose of incorporating these terms is comprehension, not trickery or theft: the author wants his audience to hear the message in terms that they will understand.

So, for example, when Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist, a dove descends from heaven, just as in the gospel accounts, but instead of hovering over Jesus, it alights on his shoulder. This produces a recognizable Germanic religious image: the god with a bird on his shoulder is Woden in Germanic religion. This subtly sets up the idea that throughout the Heliand, Jesus will be like Woden: a God associated with magical power and wisdom.

Odin, same as Woden but in Norse mythology. Easier to find pictures of.

Other religious images borrowed for the sake of comprehension include Satan being described like the snake that eats the roots of the world tree; the use of the cold Germanic underworld, Hel, to describe the bad side of the afterlife; Jesus' hanging on a tree in the manner of Woden; and Jesus' resurrection building a highway to heaven, very similar to the Bifröst.

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In the end, I think the Heliand succeeds in creating a gospel story acculturated to the Saxon way of life without losing the meat and bone of the gospel message. Along the way it creates some truly beautiful and striking images of its own, truly Germanic in nature but still wholly Christian:

Warriors were picked from the Jewish battle-group for the guard. They set off with their weapons and went to the grave where they were to guard the corpse of God's Son. The holy day of the Jews had now passed. The warriors sat on top of the grave on their watch during the dark starlit night. They waited under their sheilds until bright day came to mankind all over the middle world, bringing light to people.

It was not long then until: there was the spirit coming, by God's power, the holy breath, going under the hard stone to the corpse! Light was at that moment opened up, for the good of the sons of men; the many bolts on the doors of Hel were unlocked; the road from this world up to heaven was built! Brilliantly radiating, God's Peace-Child rose up! (Murphy, pg. 191)

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*The full text of that creed:
We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created Man and wanted Man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the Earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know Him in the light. God promised in the book of His word, the Bible, that He would save the world and all the nations and tribes. We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord. We believe that all our sins are forgiven through Him. All who have faith in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the Good News to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for Him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen 
**From the Wikipedia page on "Positive Christianity," the movement in mid-20th-century German Christianity to which I believe Pelikan was referring: 
In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained "Positive Christianity" as not "dependent upon the Apostle's Creed," nor in "faith in Christ as the son of God," upon which Christianity relied, but rather, as being represented by the Nazi Party: "The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation," he said. To accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to deny the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible. In such elements Positive Christianity separated itself from Christianity and is considered apostasy by Catholics and Protestants.

Reading the Bible in Translation

Above: Elihu just can't hold it in anymore.

Quick: which of these Job 32:18 translations is not like the others?

1. For I am full of words; the spirit within me constrains me.
2. For I am full of words, and the spirit within me compels me.
3. For I am full of pent-up words, and the spirit within me urges me on.
4. For I am full of words, the wind in my belly constrains me.
5. For I am full of matter, the spirit within me constraineth me.

If you answered #5 because it's clearly less contemporary than the others, you're right, but that's not what I was going for! The correct answer is #4. Take another look. 

The key thing that #4 has and the others are lacking is the word "wind." All the others translate the same term as "spirit."* Both are valid translations of the Hebrew word רוח (ruach), but the translation in #4 has a leg up on the others, and I'll tell you why: it's the best translation for helping the reader understand what this verse really is—a joke!

(Background info on Job if you need it: the book of Job is a theological debate, framed before and after by a folk story about the characters doing the debating. The main character is Job, a fundamentally good man who loses all he has, including his health. His friends come to visit and, in a series of poetic speeches, tell him that he is suffering because he sinned. Job, also in poetic speeches, insists he is guiltless and demands that God explain why he, Job, has been punished when he's done nothing wrong. Surprisingly, God shows up in the end and tells Job that he has no right to ask the master and creator of the universe such questions, and then God gives Job all his stuff back. It would be a way less satisfying ending if the speeches God gives weren't such dang fine poetry!)

Job chapters 32 through 38 are the last speeches by any of Job's friends. Up to this point, the author has stacked the deck subtly in Job's favor by giving Job all the best, most creative, insightful, and beautiful poetry, while his friends are mostly stuck with rather bland platitudes and hoary cliches. The speeches in 32-38 come from the young man Elihu, and they're probably the worst of the bunch.

Verse 18 of chapter 32 is a joke at Elihu's expense by the author of the story. Elihu is trying to say that he's gotten so tired of waiting to speak that he's filled to the breaking point with things to say, but he accidentally calls himself a windbag in the process! (Check out also the next verse, which has another comparison to a bag full to bursting. Note that this joke may also be about farting.) In having Elihu say this thing that ironically discredits him as a know-nothing blowhard, the author clues us in to the fact that we're not really supposed to take Elihu's ideas very seriously. And translation #4 is the only one among these that lets the English-speaking reader in on the joke!

Translation #4 is by a literary scholar and Bible translator named Robert Alter. For the last two decades, Alter has been working on a translation of the Hebrew Bible that's really, really worth checking out if you don't already know about it.

The translation (with commentary) so far: Pentateuch, Psalms, Wisdom Books, and Deuteronomistic History

In introducing his translation, Alter points out that we live in an age of many, many Bible translations, founded by and large on detailed scholarship and very advanced understanding of Hebrew based on current archaeology and other fields of study. When asked, "why add another?" he claims that, "[b]roadly speaking, one may say that in the case of the modern versions, the problem is a shaky sense of English and in the case of the King James Version, a shaky sense of Hebrew" (The Five Books of Moses, pg. xvi).

Alter accuses his fellow Bible translators of falling into what he calls the "heresy of explanation."** Bible translators, he claims, seem to feel afraid to translate much of the idiomatic, metaphorical language of the Hebrew into its most literal English equivalents, perhaps out of fear that readers will get confused. Instead, they tend to create translations that explain what the metaphors probably mean. Trouble is, many of the Hebrew Bible's important literary qualities—allusion, motifs, and as we've already seen, humor and irony—are bound quite tightly to these idioms and metaphors. Heck, Alter explains it better than I do—here's one of his examples:

The Hebrew noun [זרע] zera‘ has the general meaning of “seed,” which can be applied either in the agricultural sense or to human beings, as the term for semen. By metaphorical extension, semen becomes the established designation for what it produces, progeny. Modern translators, evidently unwilling to trust the ability of adult readers to understand that “seed”—as regularly in the King James Version—may mean progeny, repeatedly render it as offspring, descendants, heirs, progeny, posterity. But I think there is convincing evidence in the texts themselves that the biblical writers never entirely forgot that their term for offspring also meant semen and had a precise equivalent in the vegetable world. To cite a distinctly physical example, when Onan “knew that the seed would not be his,” that is, the progeny of his brother’s widow should he impregnate her, “he would waste his seed on the ground, so to give no seed to his brother” (Genesis 38:9). Modern translators, despite their discomfort with body terms, can scarcely avoid the wasted “seed” here because without it the representation of spilling semen on the ground in coitus interrupts becomes unintelligible. E. A. Speiser substitutes “offspring” for “seed” at the end of the verse, however, and the Revised English Bible goes him one better by putting “offspring” at the beginning as well (“Onan knew that the offspring would not count as his”) and introducing “seed” in the middle as object of the verb “to spill” and scuttling back to the decorousness of “offspring” at the end—a prime instance of explanation under the guise of translation. But the biblical writer is referring to “seed” as much at the end of the verse as at the beginning. Onan adopts the stratagem of coitus interruptus in order not to “give seed”—that is, semen—to Tamar, and, as a necessary consequence of this contraceptive act, he avoids providing her with offspring. The thematic point of this moment, anchored in sexual practice, law, and human interaction, is blunted by not preserving “seed” throughout.

Even in contexts not directly related to sexuality the concreteness of this term often amplifies the meaning of the utterance. When, for example, at the end of the story of the binding of Isaac, God reiterates His promise to Abraham, the multiplication of seed is strongly linked with cosmic imagery—harking back to the Creation story—of heaven and earth: “I will greatly bless you and will greatly multiply your seed, as the stars in the heavens and as the sand on the shore of the sea” (Genesis 22:17). If “seed” here is rendered as “offspring” or “descendants,” what we get are two essentially mathematical similes of numerical increase. That is, in fact, the primary burden of the language God addresses to Abraham, but as figurative language it also imposes itself visually on the retina of the imagination, and so underlying the idea of a single late-born son whose progeny will be countless millions is an image of human seed (perhaps reinforced by the shared white color of semen and stars) scattered across the vast expanses of the starry skies and through the innumerable particles of sand on the shore of the sea. To substitute “offspring” for “seed” here may not fundamentally alter the meaning but it diminishes the vividness of the statement, making it just a little harder for readers to sense why these ancient texts have been so compelling down through the ages. (The Five Books of Moses, pgs. xx-xxi, emphasis added)

If you skipped all that quoted text, know this: Alter's main point is that current translations of the Bible are ugly and clunky. I think he's pretty much right, but I actually want to take the argument a step further, and suggest that English translations of the Bible are, by themselves, completely inadequate when it comes to the needs of Christian interpreters.†

Think about it: if our usual translations of the Bible are missing something as cool, interesting, yet simple as a joke about Elihu being a windbag (golly, even his name sounds kind of like someone talking about nothing), how much other more important stuff isn't coming through in translation? How much important stuff is just impossible to effectively translate into English?

Christians read the Bible, by itself, in translation all the time, and while that's fine on occasion, it's not a really effective way to discover the meanings in the text, and it can lead to misinterpretation and simple misunderstanding far too easily. I wrote about this in a little more detail last week, but reading the Bible without someone or something to inform you about the historical and literary context seems foolish to me, and frankly, expecting to be able to interpret it without help amounts to magical thinking.

Put it another way: if we read the Bible in translation with no outside help, and expect to understand it, we are like the man in that old story: he's up on his roof, trying to get away from the rising water during a flood. He prays to God, "Save me!" Another man in a boat passes by and invites him in, but the man on the roof says, "No thanks, God will save me!" The man on the roof drowns; in heaven he confronts God, "Why didn't you save me?" God says, "I sent the boat, what more did you want?" If we read the Bible without all the help God has sent us—in the form of commentators, knowledgeable pastors, Biblical archaeology, and so forth—are we not the same as the drowned man who refused the help that he prayed for?

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*The other translations are: 1. NRSV, 2. NIV, 3. NLT, and 5. KJV. Note that The Message has an interesting, if slightly bonkers, take on this material that includes neither "wind" nor "spirit" but that does include "volcano," if that's what you're into.
**"Heresy" is of course a loaded term in Christian circles. Given that the technical definition of heresy, at least in Western Christianity, is "contradicting something declared in one of the ecumenical councils of the early church," I don't think this can be considered actual Christian heresy. Someone with extensive knowledge of the ecumenical councils: feel free to correct me!
†Which is not to say that you shouldn't buy Alter's translations. In fact, in no way did I mean to imply that; I'm clearly a huge fan of dude's work, and if you're interested in dipping a toe in to see how you like it, I recommend starting with his translation of Genesis, or better yet, 1 & 2 Samuel.

Photo sources:
1. http://www.gci.org/files/images/b6/index
2. Me! Them is my books. The second from the bottom was my birthday present from my parents this year. Thanks, guys!