Miles wrote:cnorman18 wrote:We are now moving from a discussion about whether the original texts have been properly translated into a discussion of whether or not Christian theological concepts are true.
What theological concepts? All we're talking about here is the contradictory rendering of a very key idea. Exactly whom did John have in mind when he has Jesus asking, "Do you believe in the Son of _
X_?" Man or god? It has nothing to do with any theology. All Christians make a distinction between the two. A very BIG distinction.
Between "man" and "God," surely. But "son of man" and "son of God" are terms used throughout the Gospels interchangeably. Both refer to Jesus; the meaning of the former, in particular, is uncertain. Jesus used it of himself, but never explained it.
How on Earth can you say that this isn't a theological problem? It surely isn't the
translator's job to figure out "what John had in mind" when he wrote "son of Man." It's his job to render the Greek text as accurately as possible into English.
The issues you mention here, all of them, are theological issues and not translation issues.
Not at all. Regardless of any theology one wants to construct, the fact remains that somewhere down the line in the nuts and bolts of the retelling/copying/translating business someone got it very wrong and the error has been passed on.
See, if you were approaching this with actual Biblical scholarship in mind, you'd see that that is a non-question.
You are asking translators to determine the content of the original autograph manuscript, and that can't be done. These are NOT eyewitness accounts; they are second- or third-hand at best, from multiple sources, and there are many more than one version of all the Gospel texts. THAT is the information we have to work with; there isn't any more. This is true of most ancient texts. You didn't think there was only one version of the
Iliad or
Gilgamesh around, did you?
There's no way to determine which of those two versions is "correct," and it's not either a translator's or a scholar's job to figure that out. See, scholars study the texts as they ARE, not as someone says they ought to be or should be. You can't invent information that isn't available. That isn't scholarship; it's speculation.
Nothing to do with any theology, unless that is, someone is trying to tell Christians that man and god are the same, which would certainly open a real can of worms.
The idea that Jesus was "the son of God" is a
theological concept. So is whatever meaning one assigns to the phrase "son of Man." The issue for a
translator is to determine, first, what the text
says, and in the case of Mark 9:35, one has to deal with the fact that even the most ancient manuscripts differ. The
conflict between these translations lies not in anything a translator can either determine or remedy, but between the ancient manuscripts themselves. There is no "error" here, from a translator's point of view; just an inconvenient fact that cannot be altered or fixed.
Now, if one begins to ask the
theological questions here - which was Jesus? Son of God or son of Man? What do those mean? ARE they in fact contradictory? - one has moved out of translation and into theology. Hard to think that the Gospel writers thought they were contradictory, since they used them both; for all we know, they thought that they were two sides of the same coin. All that is the theologian's job to work out,
not the translator's.
It is entirely possible that
both versions are correct, anyway; the Gospels were assembled from other documents, according to most scholars, and from multiple traditions and accounts. There were probably reports of both, which found their way into different manuscripts. For that matter, there's no reason to think that the original author, whoever he was, didn't make several slightly differing copies himself; if one wanted a document to be circulated in those days, it involved
copying it, over and over.
The fact is simply this:
No one knows how or how often these documents were copied and transmitted from church to church, or by whom, or even why; it's apparent that the gospel of Mark was in circulation before Luke and Matthew were written, and LONG before the composition of John. Why are there four, and not only one? No one knows, other than those who say it was "God's will." The conflicts among the Gospels themselves are of far more significance, theologically, than conflicts among ancient manuscripts; but that isn't the translators' problem, either.
Conflicts among theological ideas are the province of theologians; and conflicts among the manuscripts and their significance are the province of Bible scholars. The translator just deals with the manuscripts as we have them.
Before we go there, there are several places in the Bible where translations differ because the meaning of a Hebrew or Greek word is simply no longer known. We can often make a good guess from the surrounding context, but not always even that. There again, the translator isn't just making stuff up because he feels like it; he has to deal with nouns and verbs, the meaning of which is unknown and not determinable. In a good study Bible, those passages are footnoted with explanations. THAT is the mark of an accurate translation; it doesn't claim to be definitive. Other possibilities are noted in the margin.
Trying to find the one, absolutely original, pure and unaltered original text of ANY Biblical book is about as likely as finding the Lost Ark. In fact, I'd bet on the Ark turning up first - which would be convenient, because it supposedly contains the autograph manuscript of the first five books of the Bible, in Moses' own hand (I'm not holding my breath). In any case, finding or figuring out what the one true version said isn't the translator's job, nor the scholar's. It might be a concern for a fundamentalist theologian, but then it's impossible for him too.
