The Ambiguity of Early Christianity: How we misread Paul

[Thomas]

"... but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect."

This past year, I burdened the English-speaking world with my very own translation of the New Testament – a project that I undertook at the behest of my editor at Yale University Press, but that I agreed to almost in the instant that it was proposed. I had long contemplated attempting a ‘subversively literal’ rendering of the text. Over the years, I had become disenchanted with almost all the standard translations available, and especially with modern versions produced by large committees of scholars, many of whom (it seems to me) have been predisposed by inherited theological habits to see things in the text that are not really there, and to fail to notice other things that most definitely are. Committees are bland affairs, and tend to reinforce our expectations; but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect.

Ask, for instance, the average American Christian – say, some genial Presbyterian who attends church regularly and owns a New International Version of the Bible – what gospel the Apostle Paul preached. The reply will fall along predictable lines: human beings, bearing the guilt of original sin and destined for eternal hell, cannot save themselves through good deeds, or make themselves acceptable to God; yet God, in his mercy, sent the eternal Son to offer himself up for our sins, and the righteousness of Christ has been graciously imputed or imparted to all who have faith.

Some details might vary, but not the basic story. And, admittedly, much of the tale’s language is reminiscent of terms used by Paul, at least as filtered through certain conventional translations; but it is a fantasy. It presumes elements of later Christian belief absent from Paul’s own writings. Some of these (like the idea that humans are born damnably guilty in God’s eyes, or that good deeds are not required for salvation) arise from a history of misleading translations. Others (like the concept of an eternal hell of conscious torment) are entirely imagined, attributed to Paul on the basis of some mistaken picture of what the New Testament as a whole teaches.

David Bentley Hart: "Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong" aeon.co/ideas/ 8 January 2018

 

[Thomas]

"Paul’s actual teachings, however, emphasise the overthrow of bad angels.

Paul’s actual teachings, however, as taken directly from the Greek of his letters, emphasise neither original guilt nor imputed righteousness (he believed in neither), but rather the overthrow of bad angels....

... The essence of Paul’s theology is something far stranger, and unfolds on a far vaster scale. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly or terrestrial, spiritual or physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God. But Christ has conquered them all.

In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ (hypetaxen) all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

 

[Thomas]

"For one thing, the ancient picture of reality might be in many significant respects more accurate than ours.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

Paul’s voice, I hasten to add, is hardly an eccentric one. John’s Gospel too, for instance, tells of the divine saviour who comes ‘from above’, descending from God’s realm into this cosmos, overthrowing its reigning Archon, bringing God’s light into the darkness of our captivity, and ‘dragging’ everyone to himself. And, in varying registers, so do most of the texts of the New Testament. As I say, it is a conceptual world very remote from our own.

And yet it would be foolish to try to judge the gospel’s spiritual claims by how plausible we find the cosmology that accompanies them. For one thing, the ancient picture of reality might be in many significant respects more accurate than ours. And it would surely be a category error to assume that the story of Christ’s overthrow of death and sin cannot express a truth that transcends the historical and cultural conditions in which it was first told. But, before we decide anything at all about that story, we must first recover it from the very different stories that we so frequently tell in its place.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

"... but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect."

This past year, I burdened the English-speaking world with my very own translation of the New Testament – a project that I undertook at the behest of my editor at Yale University Press, but that I agreed to almost in the instant that it was proposed. I had long contemplated attempting a ‘subversively literal’ rendering of the text. Over the years, I had become disenchanted with almost all the standard translations available, and especially with modern versions produced by large committees of scholars, many of whom (it seems to me) have been predisposed by inherited theological habits to see things in the text that are not really there, and to fail to notice other things that most definitely are. Committees are bland affairs, and tend to reinforce our expectations; but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect.

Ask, for instance, the average American Christian – say, some genial Presbyterian who attends church regularly and owns a New International Version of the Bible – what gospel the Apostle Paul preached. The reply will fall along predictable lines: human beings, bearing the guilt of original sin and destined for eternal hell, cannot save themselves through good deeds, or make themselves acceptable to God; yet God, in his mercy, sent the eternal Son to offer himself up for our sins, and the righteousness of Christ has been graciously imputed or imparted to all who have faith.

Some details might vary, but not the basic story. And, admittedly, much of the tale’s language is reminiscent of terms used by Paul, at least as filtered through certain conventional translations; but it is a fantasy. It presumes elements of later Christian belief absent from Paul’s own writings. Some of these (like the idea that humans are born damnably guilty in God’s eyes, or that good deeds are not required for salvation) arise from a history of misleading translations. Others (like the concept of an eternal hell of conscious torment) are entirely imagined, attributed to Paul on the basis of some mistaken picture of what the New Testament as a whole teaches.

David Bentley Hart: "Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong" aeon.co/ideas/ 8 January 2018

Hello Thomas
At first glance I thought it was you who transalted the New Testament, until I read the link. But as it is you who posted this link, what point of interest do you want to focus on? In what does Hart's understanding of the texts differ from the established main stream translatins (NKJV, NASB, ...) or attempts to be as close as possible to the Greek (Young's Literal, Berean Literal, Literal Standard Version)?

 

[Thomas]

That's a good question, and a broad one.

Before I provide an answer, to supply context I'm posting extracts from an essay Hart wrote concerning his translation.

"... Because one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense.

I think it reasonable to ask not whether we are Christians (by that standard, all fall short), but whether in our wildest imaginings we could ever desire to be the kind of persons that the New Testament describes as fitting the pattern of life in Christ. And I think the fairly obvious answer is that we could not. I do not mean merely that most of us find the moral requirements laid out in Christian scripture a little onerous, though of course we do.

Rather, I mean that most of us would find Christians truly cast in the New Testament mold fairly obnoxious: civically reprobate, ideologically unsound, economically destructive, politically irresponsible, socially discreditable, and really just a bit indecent.

My basic argument was that a capitalist culture is, of necessity, a secularist culture, no matter how long the quaint customs and intuitions of folk piety may persist among some of its citizens; that secularism simply is capitalism in its full cultural manifestation; that late capitalist “consumerism”—with its attendant ethos of voluntarism, exuberant and interminable acquisitiveness, self-absorption, “lust of the eyes,” and moral relativism—is not an accidental accretion upon an essentially benign economic system, but the inevitable result of the most fundamental capitalist values.

I did indeed say that the New Testament, alarmingly enough, condemns great personal wealth not merely as a moral danger, but as an intrinsic evil.

Clement of Alexandria may have been the first—back when the faith had just begun to spread widely among the more comfortably situated classes in the empire—to apply a reassuring gloss to the raw rhetoric of scripture on wealth and poverty. He distinguished the poverty that matters (humility, renunciation, spiritual purity, generosity) from the poverty that does not (actual material indigence), and assured propertied Christians that, so long as they cultivated the former, they need never submit to the latter.

In the early modern period came the Reformation, and this—whatever else it may have been—was a movement toward a form of Christianity well suited to the needs of the emerging middle class, and to the spiritual complacency that a culture of increasing material security dearly required of its religion. Now all moral anxiety became a kind of spiritual pathology, the heresy of “works righteousness,” sheer Pelagianism. Grace set us free not only from works of the Law, but from the spiritual agony of seeking to become holy by our deeds. In a sense, the good news announced by Scripture was that Christ had come to save us from the burden of Christianity.

Because one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism: commands to become as perfect as God in his heaven and to live as insouciantly as lilies in their field; condemnations of a roving eye as equivalent to adultery and of evil thoughts toward another as equivalent to murder; injunctions to sell all one’s possessions and to give the proceeds to the poor, and demands that one hate one’s parents for the Kingdom’s sake and leave the dead to bury the dead. This extremism is not merely an occasional hyperbolic presence in the texts; it is their entire cultural and spiritual atmosphere. The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities (conquered by Christ but powerful to the end) and torn between spirit and flesh (the one, according to Paul, longing for God, the other opposing him utterly). There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.

commonwealmagazine.org/christs-rabble

 

[Thomas]

Perhaps, to avoid trying to serve both God and Mammon, one need only have the right attitude toward riches. But if this were all the New Testament had to say on the matter, then one would expect those texts to be balanced out by others affirming the essential benignity of riches honestly procured and well-used. Yet this is precisely what we do not find. Instead, they are balanced out by still more uncompromising comminations of wealth in and of itself. Certainly Christ condemned not only an unhealthy preoccupation with riches, but the getting and keeping of riches as such. The most obvious citation from all three synoptic Gospels would be the story of the rich young ruler who could not bring himself to part with his fortune for the sake of the Kingdom, and of Christ’s astonishing remark about camels passing through needles’ eyes more easily than rich men through the Kingdom’s gate. As for the question the disciples then put to Christ, it should probably be translated not as “Who then can be saved?” or “Can anyone be saved?” but rather “Then can any [of them, the rich] be saved?” To which the sobering reply is that it is humanly impossible, but that by divine power even a rich man might be spared.

Christ clearly means what he says when quoting the prophet: he has been anointed by God’s Spirit to preach good tidings to the poor (Luke 4:18). To the prosperous, the tidings he bears are decidedly grim. “Woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full; woe to you who are full fed, for you shall hunger; woe to you who are now laughing, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:24–25). Again, perhaps many of the practices Christ condemns in the rulers of his time are merely misuses of power and property; but that does not begin to exhaust the rhetorical force of his teachings as a whole.

He not only demands that we give freely to all who ask from us (Matthew 5:42), and to do so with such prodigality that one hand is ignorant of the other’s largesse (Matthew 6:3); he explicitly forbids storing up earthly wealth—not merely storing it up too obsessively—and allows instead only the hoarding of the treasures of heaven (Matthew 6:19–20). It is truly amazing how rarely Christians seem to notice that these counsels are stated, quite decidedly, as commands. After all, as Mary says, part of the saving promise of the gospel is that the Lord “has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away starving” (Luke 1:53).

What is most important to recognize is that all these pronouncements on wealth and poverty belong to a moral sensibility that saturates the pages of the New Testament. It is there, for instance, in Paul’s condemnations of pleonektia (often translated as “greed,” but really meaning all acquisitive desire), or in the Pastoral Epistles’ condemnation of aischrokerdes (often translated as “greed for base gain,” but really referring to the sordidness of seeking financial profit for oneself). James perhaps states the matter most clearly:

Come now, you who are rich, weep, howling at the miseries coming upon you; your riches are corrupted and moths have consumed your clothes; your gold and silver have corroded, and their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire. You have stored up treasure in the Last Days! See, the wages you have given so late to the laborers who have harvested your fields cry aloud, and the cries of those who have harvested your fields have entered the ear of the Lord Sabaoth. You have lived in luxury, and lived upon the earth in self-indulgence. You have fattened your hearts on a day of slaughter. You have condemned—have murdered—the upright; he did not stand against you. (James 5:1–6)

 

[Thomas]

I imagine this is why the early Christians were communists

I imagine this is why the early Christians were communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days seem to be taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime. But at the dawn of the faith little thought was given to providing a decent life in this world for the long term. Thus the first converts in Jerusalem after the resurrection, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). To be a follower of the Way was to renounce every claim to private property and to consent to communal ownership of everything (Acts 4:32). Barnabas, on becoming a Christian, sold his field and handed over all the money to the Apostles (Acts 4:35)—though Ananias and Sapphira did not, with somewhat unfortunate consequences.

But verse (1 Timothy 6) 18 goes further and tells them not only to make themselves rich in good works, but also to become—well, here the customary translations are along the lines of “generous” (eumetadotous) and “sharing” (koinōnikous), but the better renderings would be something like “persons readily distributing” their goods, in the former case, and something like “communalists” or “communists” or “persons having all their possessions in common,” in the latter. (A property that is koinōnikon is something held in common or corporately, and therefore a person who is koinōnikos is certainly not just someone who occasionally makes donations at his own discretion.) Only thus, says verse 19, can the wealthy now “store up” a good foundation for the age that is coming, and reach out to take hold of “the life that is real.” And this would seem to have been the social philosophy of the early church in general.

In the words of that very early manual of Christian life, the Didache, a Christian must never claim that anything is his own property, but must own all things communally with his brethren (4:9–12).

 

[Thomas]

I do know, however, that I have no good grounds for treating those prescriptions and judgments as mere hortatory hyperbole.

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have keenly desired to believe that the New Testament affirms the kind of people we are, rather than—as is actually the case—the kind of people we are not, and really would not want to be. The first, perhaps most crucial thing to understand about the earliest generations of Christians is that they were a company of extremists, radical in their rejection of the values and priorities of society not only at its most degenerate, but often at its most reasonable and decent. They were rabble. They lightly cast off all their prior loyalties and attachments: religion, empire, nation, tribe, even family. In fact, far from teaching “family values,” Christ was remarkably dismissive of the family. And decent civic order, like social respectability, was apparently of no importance to him. Not only did he not promise his followers worldly success (even success in making things better for others); he told them to hope for a Kingdom not of this world, and promised them that in this world they would win only rejection, persecution, tribulation, and failure. Yet he instructed them also to take no thought for the morrow.

This was the pattern of life the early Christians believed had been given them by Christ. As I say, I doubt we would think highly of their kind if we met them today. Fortunately for us, those who have tried to be like them have always been few. Clement of Alexandria may have been making an honest attempt to accommodate the gospel to the realities of a Christian empire, but it was those other Egyptians, the Desert Fathers, who took the Gospel at its word. But how many of us can live like that? Who can imitate that obstinacy and perversity? To live as the New Testament requires, we should have to become strangers and sojourners on the earth, to have here no enduring city, to belong to a Kingdom truly not of this world."

 

[Thomas]

So ... after these lengthy extracts, something by way of answer.

What I like about Hart is his idea, expressed elsewhere, that the authentic spiritual life, or walking the path, is an ongoing apocalypse.

The word derives from the Greek: from apokalyptein 'uncover, disclose, reveal,' hence the book is also called Revelations.

In Middle English it was read to mean 'insight, vision; hallucination.' The common meaning of 'a cataclysmic event' is modern, and a belief that it means 'an imminent end of the present world' belongs to the 19th century, its earliest reference being 1858.

But there is a very real sense that this ongoing revelation is also, to some degree, 'an end of the world' because it challenges us and undermines that in which we take for granted, even that which we choose to believe.

In short – as soon as Christianity becomes comfortable, it ceases to be Christianity in essence, and becomes something of an empty shell.

+++

 

[Thomas]

In an essay entitled "Getting to Larisa", Hart offers a laudatory critique of Stephen R. L. Clark's "Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice".

Hart notes that "Plotinus is a figure of epochal significance in the evolution of Western thought in the Christian era. Arguably no thinker of late antiquity was more consequential for the later development of both pagan and Christian metaphysics (and Muslim metaphysics as well)."

But goes on: "perhaps the most frequently caricatured thinker of the tradition that he inaugurated... a theorist of almost dualistic hostility to the life of the body and the senses ... interested only in the escape of some pure particle of spirit from the trammels of matter — the journey of the alone to the alone, the self’s final disappearance in the One 'like a drop of water in the sea'.” Hart treats all these as "cartoon(s) of a thinker of exquisite subtlety".

And here is my point:

"If certain philosophers regarded their discourses not only as investigations of concepts, but as initiations into a more elevated order of vision (an apocalypse), then many of what modern readers are disposed to treat as incidental allegories or fetching analogies might better be understood as spiritual exercises, disciplines of the mind and will, which in being practiced — and only in being practiced — permit the reader to make tentative approaches to a central mystery, a reality veiled from all who have not yet achieved a certain state of soul." (my insertion and emphasis)

The same rule applies, of course, in fact moreso, to the reading of sacra doctrina. It's not enough to read sacred books, and being able to quote saints and sages counts for nothing if we do not practice what is being spoken about – without that, any commentary is the noise of an empty vessel, an echeo chalkos (1 Corinthians 13:2).

+++

So I think Hart's is not an attempt to be literally close to the Greek, but rather an attempt to be close to the mind of the sacred scribe, both in view of the world in which they live and the meeting with Christ therein.

In so doing he offers a text that is neither 'contemporary' nor 'comfortable', but which challenges us to think about and invest ourselves in what the text is saying.

+++

All sacred text works as koan – not superficially as a 'paradoxical anecdote' – but rather the paradox, the irrational or the unreasonable actually causes activity in the brain and mind that allow the person to think 'outside the box' – this is, apparently, a recognised and charted effect according to neuroscience... I'll dig out my reference to that.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

I imagine this is why the early Christians were communists

I imagine this is why the early Christians were communists, as the book of Acts quite explicitly states. If these are indeed the Last Days, as James says—if everything is now seen in the light of final judgment—then storing up possessions for ourselves is the height of imprudence. And I imagine this is also why subsequent generations of Christians have not, as a rule, been communists: the Last Days seem to be taking quite some time to elapse, and we have families to raise in the meantime. But at the dawn of the faith little thought was given to providing a decent life in this world for the long term. Thus the first converts in Jerusalem after the resurrection, as the price of becoming Christians, sold all their property and possessions and distributed the proceeds to those in need, and then fed themselves by sharing their resources in common meals (Acts 2:43–46). To be a follower of the Way was to renounce every claim to private property and to consent to communal ownership of everything (Acts 4:32). Barnabas, on becoming a Christian, sold his field and handed over all the money to the Apostles (Acts 4:35)—though Ananias and Sapphira did not, with somewhat unfortunate consequences.

But verse (1 Timothy 6) 18 goes further and tells them not only to make themselves rich in good works, but also to become—well, here the customary translations are along the lines of “generous” (eumetadotous) and “sharing” (koinōnikous), but the better renderings would be something like “persons readily distributing” their goods, in the former case, and something like “communalists” or “communists” or “persons having all their possessions in common,” in the latter. (A property that is koinōnikon is something held in common or corporately, and therefore a person who is koinōnikos is certainly not just someone who occasionally makes donations at his own discretion.) Only thus, says verse 19, can the wealthy now “store up” a good foundation for the age that is coming, and reach out to take hold of “the life that is real.” And this would seem to have been the social philosophy of the early church in general.

In the words of that very early manual of Christian life, the Didache, a Christian must never claim that anything is his own property, but must own all things communally with his brethren (4:9–12).

I have also observed that early Christianity was a voluntary "communist" society. The difference to later Marxist communism being that they were united in God, and all was voluntary, as th eKingdom of God as preached by Jesus is not based on obediance but on faith and love for God. This tradition was long time shared among collective monastic Christians and ascetic Muslim congregations.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

In an essay entitled "Getting to Larisa", Hart offers a laudatory critique of Stephen R. L. Clark's "Plotinus: Myth, Metaphor, and Philosophical Practice".

Hart notes that "Plotinus is a figure of epochal significance in the evolution of Western thought in the Christian era. Arguably no thinker of late antiquity was more consequential for the later development of both pagan and Christian metaphysics (and Muslim metaphysics as well)."

But goes on: "perhaps the most frequently caricatured thinker of the tradition that he inaugurated... a theorist of almost dualistic hostility to the life of the body and the senses ... interested only in the escape of some pure particle of spirit from the trammels of matter — the journey of the alone to the alone, the self’s final disappearance in the One 'like a drop of water in the sea'.” Hart treats all these as "cartoon(s) of a thinker of exquisite subtlety".

And here is my point:

"If certain philosophers regarded their discourses not only as investigations of concepts, but as initiations into a more elevated order of vision (an apocalypse), then many of what modern readers are disposed to treat as incidental allegories or fetching analogies might better be understood as spiritual exercises, disciplines of the mind and will, which in being practiced — and only in being practiced — permit the reader to make tentative approaches to a central mystery, a reality veiled from all who have not yet achieved a certain state of soul." (my insertion and emphasis)

The same rule applies, of course, in fact moreso, to the reading of sacra doctrina. It's not enough to read sacred books, and being able to quote saints and sages counts for nothing if we do not practice what is being spoken about – without that, any commentary is the noise of an empty vessel, an echeo chalkos (1 Corinthians 13:2).

+++

So I think Hart's is not an attempt to be literally close to the Greek, but rather an attempt to be close to the mind of the sacred scribe, both in view of the world in which they live and the meeting with Christ therein.

In so doing he offers a text that is neither 'contemporary' nor 'comfortable', but which challenges us to think about and invest ourselves in what the text is saying.

+++

All sacred text works as koan – not superficially as a 'paradoxical anecdote' – but rather the paradox, the irrational or the unreasonable actually causes activity in the brain and mind that allow the person to think 'outside the box' – this is, apparently, a recognised and charted effect according to neuroscience... I'll dig out my reference to that.

I have focused on the Gospel accounts rather than on Paul. Yet according to the canonical Gospel accounts, Jesus is quite radical in disrespecting luxury and worldly power, although he doesn't see ascetism as a merit, rather as a consequence to live with if it is due. The Gospel "of Thomas" inclines even more inclined to ascetism. Later traditions, in particular those who have entered the Islamic hadith (collections of Ibn Hanbal, Ibn a-Dunya, al-Ghazzali) seem even to go beyond the ancient traditions, quoting sayings attributed to Jesus as seeing a benefit from the absence of any "luxory" that exceeds the minimum requirements of survival.

But - coming back to my question: Is it the translation of the text that is different, or is it the selection of what we want to listen to or where we close our ears?

 

[cherish]

"... but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect."

This past year, I burdened the English-speaking world with my very own translation of the New Testament – a project that I undertook at the behest of my editor at Yale University Press, but that I agreed to almost in the instant that it was proposed. I had long contemplated attempting a ‘subversively literal’ rendering of the text. Over the years, I had become disenchanted with almost all the standard translations available, and especially with modern versions produced by large committees of scholars, many of whom (it seems to me) have been predisposed by inherited theological habits to see things in the text that are not really there, and to fail to notice other things that most definitely are. Committees are bland affairs, and tend to reinforce our expectations; but the world of late antiquity is so remote from our own that it is almost never what we expect.

Ask, for instance, the average American Christian – say, some genial Presbyterian who attends church regularly and owns a New International Version of the Bible – what gospel the Apostle Paul preached. The reply will fall along predictable lines: human beings, bearing the guilt of original sin and destined for eternal hell, cannot save themselves through good deeds, or make themselves acceptable to God; yet God, in his mercy, sent the eternal Son to offer himself up for our sins, and the righteousness of Christ has been graciously imputed or imparted to all who have faith.

Some details might vary, but not the basic story. And, admittedly, much of the tale’s language is reminiscent of terms used by Paul, at least as filtered through certain conventional translations; but it is a fantasy. It presumes elements of later Christian belief absent from Paul’s own writings. Some of these (like the idea that humans are born damnably guilty in God’s eyes, or that good deeds are not required for salvation) arise from a history of misleading translations. Others (like the concept of an eternal hell of conscious torment) are entirely imagined, attributed to Paul on the basis of some mistaken picture of what the New Testament as a whole teaches.

David Bentley Hart: "Everything you know about the Gospel of Paul is likely wrong" aeon.co/ideas/ 8 January 2018

Sorry. That is to long. I am sick. Think of my mother who just died. A dog or two I just lost. I just hope in Pauls name have a good message.

 

[cherish]

Do you know Jeroen van der boom ? Mag ik dan bij joi?

 

[cherish]

Do you know Graziano? Rot sind die Rosen?

 

[cherish]

I have focused on the Gospel accounts rather than on Paul. Yet according to the canonical Gospel accounts, Jesus is quite radical in disrespecting luxury and worldly power, although he doesn't see ascetism as a merit, rather as a consequence to live with if it is due. The Gospel "of Thomas" inclines even more inclined to ascetism. Later traditions, in particular those who have entered the Islamic hadith (collections of Ibn Hanbal, Ibn a-Dunya, al-Ghazzali) seem even to go beyond the ancient traditions, quoting sayings attributed to Jesus as seeing a benefit from the absence of any "luxory" that exceeds the minimum requirements of survival.

But - coming back to my question: Is it the translation of the text that is different, or is it the selection of what we want to listen to or where we close our ears?

Excuse me. Was sagen sie?

 

[Thomas]

But - coming back to my question: Is it the translation of the text that is different, or is it the selection of what we want to listen to or where we close our ears?

I'd say the translation can snap us out of well-worn assumptions.

 

[talib-al-kalim]

Sorry. That is to long. I am sick. Think of my mother who just died. A dog or two I just lost. I just hope in Pauls name have a good message.

I'm sorry for you.

Excuse me. Was sagen sie?

Ik heb me gericht op de evangelieverhalen in plaats van op Paulus. Toch is Jezus volgens de canonieke evangelieverhalen nogal radicaal in het niet respecteren van luxe en wereldlijke macht, hoewel hij ascetisme niet als een verdienste ziet, maar eerder als een consequentie om mee te leven als het nodig is. Het evangelie "van Thomas" neigt nog meer naar ascetisme. Latere tradities, met name die welke de islamitische hadith hebben betreden (verzamelingen van Ibn Hanbal, Ibn a-Dunya, al-Ghazzali) lijken zelfs verder te gaan dan de oude tradities, door uitspraken te citeren die aan Jezus worden toegeschreven als een voordeel van de afwezigheid van enige "luxe" die de minimale vereisten voor overleving overstijgt.

Maar - terugkomend op mijn vraag: is het de vertaling van de tekst die anders is, of is het de selectie van wat we willen horen of waar we onze oren sluiten?

 

[talib-al-kalim]

I'd say the translation can snap us out of well-worn assumptions.

Can you post and example?

 

[Thomas]

I'd say one clear indication is the translations of aionios as an age, rather than an eternity, as is common in other translations – much about this topic between myself and @Faithfulservant here

As many commentators have noted, Hart says:
“It was a world in which the heavens above were occupied by celestial spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places ... "

As for specific translations, there are many offered in the discussion here – Bob Short and his audience are Catholic, and Hart is Orthodox, and division shows up even here – but then again the Hart v N.T. Wright debate is also referred to, and Wright is Anglican.

(The whole article spreads over 6 pages, but thats a discussion of the whole project.)

The last word from Bob Short:
I don’t think I will read this again, but I’m glad I read it. I would suggest those of you who find themselves intellectually battling with Calvinists might find some interesting material here. My favorite thing about the translation is the urgency I feel in books like Mark, with all the sloppy changes in verb tense. I also like that it is quite different and so it feels like encountering the New Testament anew. Still, while one may interpret things Hart writes in his introduction as saying that he wishes to create a translation free of theological bias, this is just as flavored by his own theology as the NIV. Treat it as the most argumentative interlinear of all time.