Introduction: The puzzles of language
During the Covid lockdown I read through the New Testament in Greek, and, because my Greek isn't very good, I had to have an English translation open beside me. I read through the Greek text painfully and slowly, one word at a time, which meant of course, that I also read the English text painfully and slowly, one word at a time, and was often surprised by the way the English translators had rendered the original text.
The fact that there are differences isn't surprising. Languages are a code, in which we take certain sounds and make them stand in as proxies for the various objects or concepts or perceptions which fill our consciousness and which we wish to communicate to others. A language has, broadly speaking, two constituent parts: vocabulary and syntax. That is, it is an agreed library of sounds which are aural metaphors for a whole bunch of stuff (vocabulary) and a set of rules for organising that library of sounds (syntax). The syntax of our own language, is largely unconscious to us. There's an old story of a native American who was a language prodigy, becoming fluent in English, Spanish, Italian and French in a very short space of time. His ability was so spectacular that he was taken to England as a sort of curio, and at dinner at one of the great old universities someone asked him "what is the grammar of your own language?" He replied, after deep thought, "my language has no grammar". We obey the rules of our own language but hardly know what they are until they are annoyingly pointed out by a grammar teacher or until we try to learn another language and have its puzzling rules confront us with the structures of our own native tongue.
But syntax does more than order our words. To the extent that our thought is verbal it also orders the way we think. For example, in English our sentences almost always contain an object, a subject and a verb. They are usually about one thing doing something to something else, and encourage a worldview in which the universe is full of subjects and objects; or in other words, full of things. This is not the case in all languages.
So I read the Greek New Testament and its English translation simultaneously: one vocabulary and its syntax being rendered into another. I noticed that the translation issues with the New Testament run a bit deeper than the conflicts between English and Koine (the rough, everyday Greek used to write the New Testament). The New Testament was written by Jews whose first language was (probably) Aramaic. They wrote in Koine, with which they were more (Paul, John) or less (Mark) familiar. So with this convoluted transition between languages, the subtle spiritual issues, which are the subject matter of the New Testament documents, sometimes have a rough passage in their journey from the original writers to their 21st Century Western European readers.
One of these translational problems seemed to me to be important and I've been thinking about it for the five years since. I'll talk about this more fully in future posts but briefly it is this:
There is in the New Testament a view of human existence that could be labelled "trinitarian". That is, people are envisaged as consisting of three parts: Body (σομα, soma); Soul (ψυχη, psyche) ; and Spirit (πνευμα, pneuma). This three fold division is exactly paralleled in the Hebrew Bible in the terms basar, nephesh and ruach. But this three fold distinction is foreign to the Greek culture which dominated the world in which the New Testament was written, and, also, in our own Western culture, which owes much to the Greeks. There is a tendency for translators into English to reduce this trinity to a binary between spirit/soul vs body; or to natural vs spiritual. This binary distinction is common in our culture and most people, including most Christians would be vague as to the differences between "spirit" and "soul" and would tend to use them as synonyms.
The New Testament's trinitarian (note the lack of capitalisation) view of human existence has become foundational for my own developing view of the universe in which I find myself existing. I think it is very important indeed. But I'll talk of that in future posts.
