Just as people (Peter Kirk on BBB, Doug Chaplin on Clayboy, Mark Goodacre on NT blog, Jason Staples, and more) are talking about sarx again, the New York Times wrote today: Il Giornale’s attack expanded on Thursday, with another editorial aimed at the Catholic Church itself, mocking not just the “hypocrisy” of sexually active priests…
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It turns out it’s hard to write poetry, at least good poetry. But even so, many efforts seem to focus more on the words than on the poem. Job 38:36 is an interesting example, because no one knows for sure what the words there mean, particularly tuchot and sechvi. Still, the poetic nature of the…
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John Hobbins has an interesting analysis of near-parallel passages in Mark 1:16-18 and Matthew 4:18-20. I’m struck by the fact that I can’t find a translation that makes it possible to follow along in English. (I have a table below.) The KJV, for reasons I can’t fathom, adds the word “Jesus” to Matthew, and it…
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Recents discussions (on Dr. Jim West’s blog, ScriptureZealot, etc.) have focused on what to do with Greek pronouns in English. But the discussion seem to gloss over the fact that subject pronouns are generally missing in Greek. So instead of “he said,” Greek offers us just eipen “said.” It can be “he said,” “she said,”…
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Grammatical and Real-World Gender It seems to me that a lot of the confusion about gender and translation stems from a misunderstanding of the two ways that gender works, as I’ll describe here. Two Kinds of Gender On one hand, men are different than women, and we can use the words “gender,” “masculine,” and “feminine”…
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Readers keeping up with the theoretical issues surrounding gender and translation may find this helpful or interesting or both. It’s reposted from my The Glamour of the Grammar column for the Jerusalem Post: Unlike in English, Hebrew nouns, verbs, and adjectives come in two varieties, commonly called masculine and feminine. The endings -a (singular) and…
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I’ll admit. I had an agenda when I composed my last post. And the agenda is this: The Greek pateres is one of the words that has more than one correct translation into English. Among the reasonable possibilities are “fathers,” “parents,” and “ancestors.” For example, in Ephesians 6:4 (and Colossians 3:21) it is clearly male…
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It’s hardly surprising that ancient words don’t match up perfectly with modern English ones. To pick one example out of thousands, the Hebrew kol is variously “sound” or “voice” (and the Greek translation fone is even broader, including “word” and somtimes “language”). In Genesis 27:22, Isaac hears Jacob’s kol; and in Psalm 47:5, we read…
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Comments like, “Even if you remove the male pronouns, is the Bible not still a patriarchal text?” (from a comment on Rumblings) and observations such as those from Mark Stevens that the T-NIV has been “unfarily criticized” for its gender neutrality make it clear to me that people are using “gender inclusivity” and “gender neutrality”…
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Jeff also has a post on his Scripture Zealot blog about Matthew 4:18-19 and 5:22-24. Take a look for another peek at the issue of gender and translation.
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