Of course a lot of what we are talking about can apply to translation as a whole. There will always be things that don’t work in next language. Assumptions the original author made that cannot be assumed these days. Whether that is John’s Gospel or the film Amalie you need a certain amount of interpretation.
Indeed. I miss the perspective that @Eutychus can provide in discussions such as this.
The KJV has the advantage of a period when English was good at concrete expression. ISTM one can hardly better - ... the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. both for pithiness (and truth).
Modern English is now fonder of the abstract and polysyllabic, as in the parodic 'The Lord is my sheep maintenance operative'.
See, to me that passage in the KJV is pretty—mainly because it sounds “old”—but also harder to follow. Perhaps it can’t be improved upon if the main consideration is beauty. But if the main consideration is comprehension by the average reader/hearer today, it can definitely be improved upon.
Here's one of the things that modern translations get wrong: NRSV in this case
Daniel 7:13a As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
Mark 13:26 Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
I'm all in favour of inclusive language, but not where it obscures the connections between texts.
The NRSV is particularly egregious here. Their insistence on translating Paul's use of the Greek word for "son" into the generic "children" obscures a central teaching Paul is trying to make, I think.
What point do you think Paul is trying to make that is obscured?
And fwiw, my memory is that whenever the NRSV uses children where the original is sons, or brothers and sisters where the original is , it includes a note that the original is sons or brothers.
As many of you who have known me on these boards for a while will be aware, I'm a KJV girl. And (pace Baptist Trainfan), especially in the Nine Lessons; I've had several Christmases practically ruined by trendy vicars messing about with them!
As for the argument that it's not simple enough to understand, isn't it possible that the word of God is worth a few flexes of one's brain cells to figure it out?
Combine that with what David called "Cranmer's matchless prose" (a phrase which was referenced in the homily at his funeral), and you have something that imho approaches liturgical perfection.
It was precisely in that context that I think the familiar becomes safe and comfortable and loses its ability to shock and challenge.
I decided not to rise to @Piglet's "bait" as I respect her too much. But I'd agree with @Alan29's comment and in fact go a bit further: I don't think that failing to understand the AV is simply a matter of not being willing to flex a few brain cells.
Rather, I think that, for many secular and young people, its language can be so foreign and alien as to be incomprehensible - we who are familiar with it just don't see that. I'd also say that the Bible does not aim to be "matchless prose" (except, perhaps, in some of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature) - it aims to communicate God to people. Surely that must be paramount?
I decided not to rise to @Piglet's "bait" as I respect her too much. But I'd agree with @Alan29's comment and in fact go a bit further: I don't think that failing to understand the AV is simply a matter of not being willing to flex a few brain cells.
Rather, I think that, for many secular and young people, its language can be so foreign and alien as to be incomprehensible - we who are familiar with it just don't see that. I'd also say that the Bible does not aim to be "matchless prose" (except, perhaps, in some of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature) - it aims to communicate God to people. Surely that must be paramount?
At the risk of sounding like @Gamma Gamaliel isn't it both? One of the ways to communicate God to people is the "beauty of holiness", a sense of the numinous enabled by well-crafted words, poetry, music and art. You can communicate visually with stick figures, that doesn't mean the Sistine Chapel ceiling is superfluous.
I did actually wonder that myself - but to what extent should the Bible be expressing its "otherness" by its use of language? Not an easy question to answer.
I decided not to rise to @Piglet's "bait" as I respect her too much. But I'd agree with @Alan29's comment and in fact go a bit further: I don't think that failing to understand the AV is simply a matter of not being willing to flex a few brain cells.
Rather, I think that, for many secular and young people, its language can be so foreign and alien as to be incomprehensible - we who are familiar with it just don't see that. I'd also say that the Bible does not aim to be "matchless prose" (except, perhaps, in some of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature) - it aims to communicate God to people. Surely that must be paramount?
At the risk of sounding like @Gamma Gamaliel isn't it both? One of the ways to communicate God to people is the "beauty of holiness", a sense of the numinous enabled by well-crafted words, poetry, music and art. You can communicate visually with stick figures, that doesn't mean the Sistine Chapel ceiling is superfluous.
I think the arts can ornament the stories and can make even the most convinced atheist say "oh, that's lovely" and remain unchanged. But that isn't the same thing as delivering the message unadorned and unavoidable. I think scripture is a call for change.
Here's one of the things that modern translations get wrong: NRSV in this case
Daniel 7:13a As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
Mark 13:26 Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
I'm all in favour of inclusive language, but not where it obscures the connections between texts.
Hmmm. As best I can tell, the Aramaic in Daniel 7:13 translates to “one like a son of man” (emphasis mine), and that is how Jewish translations I’ve looked at have it. (The exception is Robert Alter, who translates it as “one like a human being.”) It is, as I understand it, a Hebrew/Aramaic idiom that means a human (as opposed to God or angels), or in some contexts Israel or an Israelite (as opposed to other nations); it’s not unlike C.S. Lewis’s “son of Adam” and “daughter of Eve.”
What it is not in Daniel, unlike in Matthew, is a title.
And I’ll note again, as I did above, that the NRSV, where it says “one like a human being” in Daniel, has a footnote that says “Aram one like a son of man.” While that footnote wouldn’t be read in a service, anyone using the NRSV for study would see that information and be able to make the connection.
The KJV has the advantage of a period when English was good at concrete expression. ISTM one can hardly better - ... the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. both for pithiness (and truth).
Modern English is now fonder of the abstract and polysyllabic, as in the parodic 'The Lord is my sheep maintenance operative'.
I don’t feel qualified to comment on your general point, but in relation to the passage you cite none of the main English translations move far from the AV. I agree that they don’t better it, but they are not (mostly) worse either, qua translations, and in relation to that passage they don’t head towards the abstract or polysyllabic.
I decided not to rise to @Piglet's "bait" as I respect her too much. But I'd agree with @Alan29's comment and in fact go a bit further: I don't think that failing to understand the AV is simply a matter of not being willing to flex a few brain cells.
Rather, I think that, for many secular and young people, its language can be so foreign and alien as to be incomprehensible - we who are familiar with it just don't see that. I'd also say that the Bible does not aim to be "matchless prose" (except, perhaps, in some of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature) - it aims to communicate God to people. Surely that must be paramount?
I thought of my daughter as I read @Piglet 's post.
She would have the most impossible task making sense of a reading using the KJV. She is not unwilling to "flex a few brain cells" but her talents absolutely do not lie in making sense of Elizabethan English.
I do not think that being able to make any sense of the Readings should be reserved for those with particular intellectual aptitudes in that direction.
I feel the same about much of the BCP.
I pride myself that with a degree and a highly technical job I'm a long way from thick or unwilling to use my brain but I find the KJV and BCP often very obscure, especially in spoken form, and Shakespeare might as well be in Swahili for all I can follow it.
Whatever anyone may think of that, I don’t think it should disqualify us from understanding what is being said from the front of church.
Here's one of the things that modern translations get wrong: NRSV in this case
Daniel 7:13a As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
Mark 13:26 Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
I'm all in favour of inclusive language, but not where it obscures the connections between texts.
This is a particularly tricky one because in Daniel ‘son of man’ almost certainly just means human being. Jesus then appropriates the phrase to himself in a particular way (which almost certainly seemed odd to his hearers), and thereafter we tend to read Daniel looking backwards through that lens. (There is a similar problem in translating Psalm 8.)
But I think Jesus just means "I am the guy referred to as the Son Of Man in Daniel." Or was he adding another layer of meaning to it?
It seems to me that as time passes and English keeps changing, people are farther and farther fropm the language of the KJV. It is not only scholars and clerics who read Scripture, but laymen as well, at times. Do you think that in another 400 years, there will still be so many who insist on the KJV? By then, will there be the same kind of complaints about the RSV, that the language is so inaccessible? Shouldn't we expect that as time goes by, translations of Scripture should keep up?
I decided not to rise to @Piglet's "bait" as I respect her too much ...
Thank you, BT, and my apologies - it really wasn't meant to be "bait", but rather "may we agree to differ".
I can totally understand the desire to improve on translations to get closer to the original text or facilitate more erudite academic study, but for me the comfortable familiarity is something worth preserving.
The NRSV is particularly egregious here. Their insistence on translating Paul's use of the Greek word for "son" into the generic "children" obscures a central teaching Paul is trying to make, I think.
What point do you think Paul is trying to make that is obscured?
And fwiw, my memory is that whenever the NRSV uses children where the original is sons, or brothers and sisters where the original is , it includes a note that the original is sons or brothers.
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I think Paul is trying to make a point about us as sons of God, and that with Christ coming we who are in Christ are all now sons of God. That status as sons of God is important because of the unique status that sons had in the cultures then. Paul deliberately uses the word for son in these instances, I think because he's tying our sonship through Christ into a broader story of sonship he sees going on within the scriptures, through Isaac and the like. Paul is perfectly capable of using the word for children when he feels like it.
The NRSV doesn't always give a note. I just checked Galatians 3:26, which they translate as "children of God" taking υιοι to be "children" when that is really "son." Now, is this a major interpretive move? Maybe, maybe not. But if you go through and start putting together all of the various odd translation choices and other complaints one could make against the text, I think the general standing of the translation becomes a bit more suspect.
Here's one of the things that modern translations get wrong: NRSV in this case
Daniel 7:13a As I watched in the night visions,
I saw one like a human being
coming with the clouds of heaven.
Mark 13:26 Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.
I'm all in favour of inclusive language, but not where it obscures the connections between texts.
This is a particularly tricky one because in Daniel ‘son of man’ almost certainly just means human being. Jesus then appropriates the phrase to himself in a particular way (which almost certainly seemed odd to his hearers), and thereafter we tend to read Daniel looking backwards through that lens. (There is a similar problem in translating Psalm 8.)
But I think Jesus just means "I am the guy referred to as the Son Of Man in Daniel." Or was he adding another layer of meaning to it?
Almost certainly he’s also making a point of his own human nature, but latching in to such a title and using it in and out of season. It’s his favorite self reference.
But interpreting huios as ‘son’ is a translational decision (and incidentally the NIV makes the same decision about Galatians 3.26 as the NRSV.
It’s far from clear that Paul has a gender distinction in mind. There’s a natural rhetorical move from speaking about Isaac uios of Abraham to all his readers/hearers being uioi, but it’s not clear that it is because of semantic significance, and not merely making the connection clear by not changing the sound/form of the word.
As to decisions about translating son/child, here’s the entry from the NIV Greek dictionary
υἱός, huios, n. [root of: 5625]. son, child (of either gender), descendant (in any generation); by extension: a term of endearment; one of a class or kind, for example, a “son of the resurrection” is one who participates in the resurrection. “The Son of Man” is an OT phrase usually meaning “human being,” that in the NT is used almost exclusively as a messianic title (see Da 7:13), emphasizing Jesus’ humanity
and Strong’s
υἱός huios, hwee-os´; apparently a primary word; a “son” (sometimes of animals), used very widely of immediate, remote or figuratively, kinship: — child, foal, son.
But interpreting huios as ‘son’ is a translational decision (and incidentally the NIV makes the same decision about Galatians 3.26 as the NRSV.
It’s far from clear that Paul has a gender distinction in mind. There’s a natural rhetorical move from speaking about Isaac uios of Abraham to all his readers/hearers being uioi, but it’s not clear that it is because of semantic significance, and not merely making the connection clear by not changing the sound/form of the word.
As to decisions about translating son/child, here’s the entry from the NIV Greek dictionary
υἱός, huios, n. [root of: 5625]. son, child (of either gender), descendant (in any generation); by extension: a term of endearment; one of a class or kind, for example, a “son of the resurrection” is one who participates in the resurrection. “The Son of Man” is an OT phrase usually meaning “human being,” that in the NT is used almost exclusively as a messianic title (see Da 7:13), emphasizing Jesus’ humanity
and Strong’s
υἱός huios, hwee-os´; apparently a primary word; a “son” (sometimes of animals), used very widely of immediate, remote or figuratively, kinship: — child, foal, son.
I'm not sure what you mean by "translational decision." The primary meaning of huios is 'son,' as given by the LSJ, BDAG, and the Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Sure, they also say that it can be used to identify children, but given that Paul goes from discussing the sonship of Isaac to addressing his audience, justifying a move away from the primary meaning of the word has to be done. And, it would seem to me, you ought to have a very good reason for choosing a secondary--or even tertiary!--meaning of the word. It's not that I think Paul is concerned with gender itself, but that he's drawing a line from Isaac as the beloved son of Abraham through to Jesus as the beloved son of God, through to us as the sons of God.
But it is sonship as descent that he is interested in, not sonship as maleness. In contemporary English the use of the word “son” implies presumes maleness, and this is not at all Paul’s intention.
That is what I mean by a translational decision. In rendering it into contemporary English do we want, in faithfully rendering Paul’s meaning, to emphasise the maleness or the descent?
I see what you're saying and I think it's a good question. But, again, Paul uses 'huios' when he could have used 'tekna' or the like. Paul didn't have to use 'huios'.
On the Nine Lessons and Carols thing, I think we have to look at the context. When the format was introduced it was at a time when people were generally more familiar with the texts.
Likewise, the Billy Graham Crusades in 1950s and '60s came at a time when there was a generally higher level of biblical literacy and knowledge of hymnody etc.
I'm.all for 'the beauty of holiness' and aesthetics but would insist on these things being 'in a language understanded of the people.'
In the Orthosphere there are stories of Russians and Greeks who only understood the Liturgy for the first time when they heard it in English rather than Church Slavonic or ecclesiastical Greek.
I'm told that the Romanian Orthodox review the language of their services every 10 years or so to make sure it's still comprehensible.
As for English translations of Orthodox liturgical texts they often tumble into cod Elizabethan or Jacobean.
The late Fr Ephrem Lash, a man who turned English eccentricity into a fine art, produced some decent translations although inevitably they have their detractors.
It's very difficult to strike the right balance. I'm sure there's a way to combine comprehensibility with a degree of gravitas and decorum.
There's a balance somewhere between 'Yo dudes!' and wilful obscurity.
As a child, I memorized large amounts of the KJB and so I still cling to those words. For study and general reading, I use the more modern translations. I think there is room for both. As someone posted earlier for most funerals of my age group the 23rd psalm from the KJB is the one often used. I have noted that most people say it without looking down at the printed words.
As someone posted earlier for most funerals of my age group the 23rd psalm from the KJB is the one often used. I have noted that most people say it without looking down at the printed words.
That was me. To be honest, what I’ve noticed is that it’s mostly people over the age of 60 or so who say it without looking at the words. Younger people tend to read it; or if they don’t read it, they tend to recite it a little tentatively, following the congregation’s leading. I think that’s in part less familiarity with the KJV and in part the fact that memorization fell out of vogue sometime in the 70s, at least in my corner of the world.
I'm another one who liked Robert Alter's translation of the OT.
And there are individual passages I like from translations as varied as the Douai-Rheims, the Jerusalem Bible and Ronald Knox's eccentric NT version. In fact I wish there were more translations around and when I look closely at study passages or even in meditative readings, I tend to go back and forth between translations.
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) but the strength of iambic pentameter, which isn't just an aesthetic quibble: iambic pentameter is very close to human speech patterns following the breath, building lines with a pulse. East to say aloud and easier to memorise, in the same way that Shakespeare's terminology may be archaic but the spoken lines come naturally to many of us.
I'm another one who liked Robert Alter's translation of the OT.
And there are individual passages I like from translations as varied as the Douai-Rheims, the Jerusalem Bible and Ronald Knox's eccentric NT version. In fact I wish there were more translations around and when I look closely at study passages or even in meditative readings, I tend to go back and forth between translations.
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) but the strength of iambic pentameter, which isn't just an aesthetic quibble: iambic pentameter is very close to human speech patterns following the breath, building lines with a pulse. East to say aloud and easier to memorise, in the same way that Shakespeare's terminology may be archaic but the spoken lines come naturally to many of us.
I find spoken Shakespeare nearly as hard to follow as Chaucer. If I have a written script I'm fine but I can't process it fast enough spoken; I only hear every third phrase or so because my brain is too occupied understanding one phrase to even hear the next two.
This is why I'm very strong on the language in church being very comprehensible.
I would strongly recommend John Barton’s “The Word” which addresses all these issues. Thorough and very readable.
I tend to use a Greek interlinear prior to preaching (which doesn’t, of course, help with the Old Testament) but it’s clunky to read. For reading out loud I’m torn between poetry and comprehension on better known passages.
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) but the strength of iambic pentameter, which isn't just an aesthetic quibble: iambic pentameter is very close to human speech patterns following the breath, building lines with a pulse.
I'm not sure what you mean here. On the whole, the KJV is not written in iambic pentameter. (Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth: starts out in a trochaic rhythm if you pronounce blessed as two syllables and count 'are' as stressed, and ends with a dactylic rhythm.)
I agree with you that most of the KJV is written in rhythms that approximate closely to speech.
To my ear, if you leave out the various ums and ers and other phatic markers, prose that sounds like speech tends to average about one stress every two to three syllables. Verse with one stress every two syllables like iambics sounds stately; verse with one stress every three syllables sounds excited; verse with one stress every four or more syllables sounds like bureaucratese.
(Most good writers of iambic pentameter play the iambic rhythm off against the spoken rhythm, so you hear the spoken rhythm as a variation on the iambic rhythm that it is officially supposed to be, like syncopation in music.)
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) but the strength of iambic pentameter, which isn't just an aesthetic quibble: iambic pentameter is very close to human speech patterns following the breath, building lines with a pulse.
I'm not sure what you mean here. On the whole, the KJV is not written in iambic pentameter. (Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth: starts out in a trochaic rhythm if you pronounce blessed as two syllables and count 'are' as stressed, and ends with a dactylic rhythm.)
I agree with you that most of the KJV is written in rhythms that approximate closely to speech.
To my ear, if you leave out the various ums and ers and other phatic markers, prose that sounds like speech tends to average about one stress every two to three syllables. Verse with one stress every two syllables like iambics sounds stately; verse with one stress every three syllables sounds excited; verse with one stress every four or more syllables sounds like bureaucratese.
(Most good writers of iambic pentameter play the iambic rhythm off against the spoken rhythm, so you hear the spoken rhythm as a variation on the iambic rhythm that it is officially supposed to be, like syncopation in music.)
No, I didn't mean it was all written in iambic pentameter (anymore than Shakespeare) just that iambic petameter tends to be memorable and close to everyday speech then and now. Though I know some dispute the accessibility.
I find spoken Shakespeare nearly as hard to follow as Chaucer. If I have a written script I'm fine but I can't process it fast enough spoken; I only hear every third phrase or so because my brain is too occupied understanding one phrase to even hear the next two.
This is why I'm very strong on the language in church being very comprehensible.
This. And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
I think the "Comforting and familiar" nature of the KJV expressions may be critical here. It is far too easy to hear them and not HEAR the words or the meanings.
At uni, we had a lad from Northern Ireland. When he read in services, it was beautiful, his lilting voice, always a pleasure. I coudn't understand a word he said of course.
I need to hear things in new ways to get more out of them. I know that is not true for everyone, but I think it has some truth for many. Reading the Bible should be done for understanding, not just for the music.
My church still has a BCP Evensong, though actually we use the more modern version of the opening section ( Beloved, we are come together…., rather than Dearly beloved brethren ). Nevertheless, the Bible readings are not from KJV. The church Bible is NIV. The sermon and intercessions are in current English. Inconsistent? Yes. Comprehensible? Yes.
I grew up on KJV and if I quote randomly from the Bible, it will almost certainly be in KJV, but I would not be advocating its use in church or for study or personal devotions. The KJV was meant to enable readers or listeners to understand and that ought to be the main criterion today. Having said that, there are versions which don’t come across well when read aloud from the lectern.
I think a benefit of the KJV over modern translations is that its very strangeness and difficulty encourage one to approach it as a text. We tend to be very bad at reading the Bible for its literary qualities and in a literary fashion. Rather, we read it as if it is some kind of pit that we have to mine bits of truth out of. Learning to read the Bible as a collection of texts in the way one would read the complete works of Shakespeare or the novels of the Bronte sisters or what have you is an important view to bring to it, I think.
In my experience, the NRSV and other modern translations don't really encourage that kind of reading.
This is a bit of a sideline - but the division of the texts into verses, useful of course for finding things, tends to make us examine verses individually rather than seeing broader sweeps and arguments. (Yes, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I am looking at you and your ilk!)
Another point: different languages pass on information at different speeds. For instance, in Daniel 3 we get the list of "horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music" no less than four times. It gets very repetitive - I don't think modern English would put it like that.
I find spoken Shakespeare nearly as hard to follow as Chaucer. If I have a written script I'm fine but I can't process it fast enough spoken; I only hear every third phrase or so because my brain is too occupied understanding one phrase to even hear the next two.
This is why I'm very strong on the language in church being very comprehensible.
This. And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
When I was based in Kenya I found it really interesting listening to clergy colleagues preaching and also to anyone undertaking a public speaking role. In Kiswahili there are different words for you singular and you plural so when they addressed a group in English they always said "You" (singular) and "You People" plural. Initially it sounded rude to me but I came to love it and it certainly aided understanding.
This is a bit of a sideline - but the division of the texts into verses, useful of course for finding things, tends to make us examine verses individually rather than seeing broader sweeps and arguments. (Yes, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, I am looking at you and your ilk!)
Another point: different languages pass on information at different speeds. For instance, in Daniel 3 we get the list of "horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music" no less than four times. It gets very repetitive - I don't think modern English would put it like that.
I agree with the division of the text into verses, and especially when the text is presented as chunks of verses in multiple columns on the page. I think that greatly hinders reading, and I'm always in favor of giving the text in a continuous format, as one would find in almost all books of non-scriptural literature.
As for your point about the repetition, this is where I think approaching the Bible as a literary text is useful. If you came across repetition in a modern literary text then you would ask why is there so much repetition, what is trying to be conveyed, etc etc. We don't do that with the Bible for some reason, but I think we should!
Nothing really to do with the topic. But once, when preaching in Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau, I assured my congregation that all people were "pecadores" (= sinners). Unfortunately local popular usage takes the word simply to mean "people". So I was basically saying that "all people are people"!
Strangely enough the word for sinner in Welsh is "pecadur" - clearly it has come into both languages from Latin.
And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
I think that’s a challenge of modern English generally, not just of the KJV—standard English now uses the same pronoun and verb conjugation for singular and plural second person, which can make it hard to tell which is meant. (I love how Tim Mackie at the Bible Project podcast uses “y’all” when the “you” is plural. And he’s not even from the American South.)
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) . . . .
We’ve mentioned upthread that cultural expectations and preferences come into play, and I’ve wondered if this is part of it. Living in the US, Bible readings at school assemblies wasn’t something I experienced. (As far as that goes, school assemblies were rare, and they definitely didn’t include Bible readings.). You heard the Bible read at church and, in some families, at home, and you read it yourself. And my experience was that the KJV was never used at church or at home.
As a child, I received three Bibles from our church—when I was baptized, when I was confirmed and when I recited the catechism. They were all RSV. I remember questioning at the time why they were all the same translation. Surely, I thought, I didn’t need 3 RSVs.
And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
I think that’s a challenge of modern English generally, not just of the KJV—standard English now uses the same pronoun and verb conjugation for singular and plural second person, which can make it hard to tell which is meant. (I love how Tim Mackie at the Bible Project podcast uses “y’all” when the “you” is plural. And he’s not even from the American South.)
Yeah, some folk manage fine with that ambiguity but throw an utter shitfit over singular "they".
And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
I think that’s a challenge of modern English generally, not just of the KJV—standard English now uses the same pronoun and verb conjugation for singular and plural second person, which can make it hard to tell which is meant. (I love how Tim Mackie at the Bible Project podcast uses “y’all” when the “you” is plural. And he’s not even from the American South.)
Yeah, some folk manage fine with that ambiguity but throw an utter shitfit over singular "they".
Quite true!
I think we generally do manage okay with that ambiguity, as context usually makes it (more or less) clear. But in something like the Paul’s letters or the Sermon on the Mount, the context clues can be harder to pick up on.
I'm sure I've heard that the formal "Kjv only" argument isn't so much Jesus spoke c16th English but a 'papal infallibility' style argument. God wouldn't let the medieval church be condemned by having the wrong bible so it must have been the right version preserved while maybe we should consider that sinaiticus was lost for a reason before being so reckless as to use it.
That's not a position I hold, though isnt so far from positions I might.
To be fair to the kjv, whenever I've tried to look something up in the original languages, the KJV has been the best for helping to word match. If the KJV has "love is X, love is Y, it Z". Then you know that where the sentence structure changed, that's where to start looking, whereas newer versions (and obviously things like the message) might do "love is X and Y. Love Z", and confuse the search (though not the meaning).
<snip>To be fair to the kjv, whenever I've tried to look something up in the original languages, the KJV has been the best for helping to word match.<snip>
The RV or ASV are even better for this as they have the same translational approach, but are based on better original language texts.
@Gamma Gamaliel that's always felt very important for me in reading biblical texts, that they were meant to be read aloud or performed and for most of history they have been spoken aloud or sung as part of the liturgy.
I was looking at individual sole-author translations I've read in recent years and two jumped out at me because of the issues around 'voice' and colloquial sense as much as literary or aesthetic value. In his translation of the NT, David Bentley Hart was concerned to keep the rough slangy textures of the Koine Greek idiom, not smooth it out artificially. This is a deliberate non-literary translation that tries to restore the earthy or careless everyday language, tones and registers of many different speakers. On the other hand, there is NT Wright's translation, The Kingdom New Testament that wants to alter our contemporary understandings of certain concepts and terms by making them unfamiliar and strange to us, to bring alive the Jewish culture and context so often overlooked.
Earlier I said that we need new translations, in part because the global language we speak, contemporary English, is in flux and changing as our societies change. But for a new translation to be worthwhile, it must do something new and be aware of how we speak to one another in different places and from various social positions, and what we resist or welcome when we read texts made transparent or new. The translator or translation committee (another complicated distinction) needs to be aligned with earlier or existing translations, know about the history of scholarship and commentary traditions on the original text, and then move towards expressing new insights about elements in the text that have been under-served or under-played in older interpretations. If the original Hebrew text is in a rhyming metrical pattern, how is that to be shown? The subtext has to come across loud and clear and the text has to be readable when spoken to a congregation or Bible study group.
I agree in principle but in pedantic mode point out that Hebrew poetry doesn't use rhyme or formal metre anymore than the KJV is written in iambic pentameter.
Hebrew poetry relies on contrasts and 'parallelism', the repetition or layering of similar or opposing ideas.
That isn't to say there isn't a 'music' to it, but it's not formally metrical.
On the 'performance' thing, one of the reasons the Orthodox go in for intoned readings is to avoid a kind of 'amateur dramatics' approach or the opportunity for readers to show off. We've all heard readings where the speaker seems to be angling for an Oscar or BAFTA award.
We could argue that this can be taken too far, just as the Byzantine avoidance of polyphony misses out on the more harmonious and layered effects found in the Russian music tradition.
But yes, any translation must somehow reflect the underlying form of the original - whether it be fast-paced narrative as in Mark's Gospel, pithy aphorisms as in the Proverbs or poetry as in The Song of Songs and Psalms.
I agree in principle but in pedantic mode point out that Hebrew poetry doesn't use rhyme or formal metre anymore than the KJV is written in iambic pentameter.
Hebrew poetry relies on contrasts and 'parallelism', the repetition or layering of similar or opposing ideas.
That isn't to say there isn't a 'music' to it, but it's not formally metrical.
On the 'performance' thing, one of the reasons the Orthodox go in for intoned readings is to avoid a kind of 'amateur dramatics' approach or the opportunity for readers to show off. We've all heard readings where the speaker seems to be angling for an Oscar or BAFTA award.
We could argue that this can be taken too far, just as the Byzantine avoidance of polyphony misses out on the more harmonious and layered effects found in the Russian music tradition.
But yes, any translation must somehow reflect the underlying form of the original - whether it be fast-paced narrative as in Mark's Gospel, pithy aphorisms as in the Proverbs or poetry as in The Song of Songs and Psalms.
That 'no metrical system of Hebrew poetry' is an older understanding and you might want to read Robert Alter who argues for a better appreciation of the non-uniform metrical arrangements of Hebrew poetry.
Ok. I didn't express myself very well. Not formally metrical rather than 'non-metrical' might be a better way of putting it.
I don't know Hebrew so may be wide of the mark.
I do know that Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme.
But I was making a somewhat pedantic aside and was broadly in agreement with your main point.
Sorry if I sounded tetchy, @Gamma Gamaliel, I didn't mean it in a sharp way. When I began learning Greek and Hebrew and reading commentaries, there was this shared academic understanding and 'taken-for-granted' ways of doing the historical-critical method or quest for the historical Jesus or form criticism, and then it was being challenged from all directions and we woke up and started to look at what was going on in philology and queer theology and socio-historical research. A post-grad student who had studied Sanscrit came in and demolished most of the lecturers' arguments because she pointed out that in Sanscrit prosody (notably the Vedas) there is a class of irregular meters analogous to what you find in Hebrew poetry. There is a syllabic count and then there is the mora, a timing unit shorter than a spoken syllable and that can be heavily or lightly stressed. There's free arrangement in the mora but not the fixed syllabic count so a great deal depends on the spoken recital of the poetry. It's more complicated than that and I'm not going to push this further, but a great deal has to do with the breath and sung forms or dialogues. None of us understood her descriptions until she sang and recited or chanted the text aloud to us and suddenly we heard not a Western rhyming scheme but echoes and assonance and lilting variations in speed.
Comments
See, to me that passage in the KJV is pretty—mainly because it sounds “old”—but also harder to follow. Perhaps it can’t be improved upon if the main consideration is beauty. But if the main consideration is comprehension by the average reader/hearer today, it can definitely be improved upon.
What point do you think Paul is trying to make that is obscured?
And fwiw, my memory is that whenever the NRSV uses children where the original is sons, or brothers and sisters where the original is , it includes a note that the original is sons or brothers.
It was precisely in that context that I think the familiar becomes safe and comfortable and loses its ability to shock and challenge.
Rather, I think that, for many secular and young people, its language can be so foreign and alien as to be incomprehensible - we who are familiar with it just don't see that. I'd also say that the Bible does not aim to be "matchless prose" (except, perhaps, in some of the Psalms, Prophets and Wisdom literature) - it aims to communicate God to people. Surely that must be paramount?
At the risk of sounding like @Gamma Gamaliel isn't it both? One of the ways to communicate God to people is the "beauty of holiness", a sense of the numinous enabled by well-crafted words, poetry, music and art. You can communicate visually with stick figures, that doesn't mean the Sistine Chapel ceiling is superfluous.
I think the arts can ornament the stories and can make even the most convinced atheist say "oh, that's lovely" and remain unchanged. But that isn't the same thing as delivering the message unadorned and unavoidable. I think scripture is a call for change.
What it is not in Daniel, unlike in Matthew, is a title.
And I’ll note again, as I did above, that the NRSV, where it says “one like a human being” in Daniel, has a footnote that says “Aram one like a son of man.” While that footnote wouldn’t be read in a service, anyone using the NRSV for study would see that information and be able to make the connection.
I thought of my daughter as I read @Piglet 's post.
She would have the most impossible task making sense of a reading using the KJV. She is not unwilling to "flex a few brain cells" but her talents absolutely do not lie in making sense of Elizabethan English.
I do not think that being able to make any sense of the Readings should be reserved for those with particular intellectual aptitudes in that direction.
I feel the same about much of the BCP.
I pride myself that with a degree and a highly technical job I'm a long way from thick or unwilling to use my brain but I find the KJV and BCP often very obscure, especially in spoken form, and Shakespeare might as well be in Swahili for all I can follow it.
Whatever anyone may think of that, I don’t think it should disqualify us from understanding what is being said from the front of church.
But I think Jesus just means "I am the guy referred to as the Son Of Man in Daniel." Or was he adding another layer of meaning to it?
Thank you, BT, and my apologies - it really wasn't meant to be "bait", but rather "may we agree to differ".
I can totally understand the desire to improve on translations to get closer to the original text or facilitate more erudite academic study, but for me the comfortable familiarity is something worth preserving.
And fwiw, my memory is that whenever the NRSV uses children where the original is sons, or brothers and sisters where the original is , it includes a note that the original is sons or brothers.
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I think Paul is trying to make a point about us as sons of God, and that with Christ coming we who are in Christ are all now sons of God. That status as sons of God is important because of the unique status that sons had in the cultures then. Paul deliberately uses the word for son in these instances, I think because he's tying our sonship through Christ into a broader story of sonship he sees going on within the scriptures, through Isaac and the like. Paul is perfectly capable of using the word for children when he feels like it.
The NRSV doesn't always give a note. I just checked Galatians 3:26, which they translate as "children of God" taking υιοι to be "children" when that is really "son." Now, is this a major interpretive move? Maybe, maybe not. But if you go through and start putting together all of the various odd translation choices and other complaints one could make against the text, I think the general standing of the translation becomes a bit more suspect.
Almost certainly he’s also making a point of his own human nature, but latching in to such a title and using it in and out of season. It’s his favorite self reference.
It’s far from clear that Paul has a gender distinction in mind. There’s a natural rhetorical move from speaking about Isaac uios of Abraham to all his readers/hearers being uioi, but it’s not clear that it is because of semantic significance, and not merely making the connection clear by not changing the sound/form of the word.
As to decisions about translating son/child, here’s the entry from the NIV Greek dictionary and Strong’s
I'm not sure what you mean by "translational decision." The primary meaning of huios is 'son,' as given by the LSJ, BDAG, and the Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Sure, they also say that it can be used to identify children, but given that Paul goes from discussing the sonship of Isaac to addressing his audience, justifying a move away from the primary meaning of the word has to be done. And, it would seem to me, you ought to have a very good reason for choosing a secondary--or even tertiary!--meaning of the word. It's not that I think Paul is concerned with gender itself, but that he's drawing a line from Isaac as the beloved son of Abraham through to Jesus as the beloved son of God, through to us as the sons of God.
That is what I mean by a translational decision. In rendering it into contemporary English do we want, in faithfully rendering Paul’s meaning, to emphasise the maleness or the descent?
On the Nine Lessons and Carols thing, I think we have to look at the context. When the format was introduced it was at a time when people were generally more familiar with the texts.
Likewise, the Billy Graham Crusades in 1950s and '60s came at a time when there was a generally higher level of biblical literacy and knowledge of hymnody etc.
I'm.all for 'the beauty of holiness' and aesthetics but would insist on these things being 'in a language understanded of the people.'
In the Orthosphere there are stories of Russians and Greeks who only understood the Liturgy for the first time when they heard it in English rather than Church Slavonic or ecclesiastical Greek.
I'm told that the Romanian Orthodox review the language of their services every 10 years or so to make sure it's still comprehensible.
As for English translations of Orthodox liturgical texts they often tumble into cod Elizabethan or Jacobean.
The late Fr Ephrem Lash, a man who turned English eccentricity into a fine art, produced some decent translations although inevitably they have their detractors.
It's very difficult to strike the right balance. I'm sure there's a way to combine comprehensibility with a degree of gravitas and decorum.
There's a balance somewhere between 'Yo dudes!' and wilful obscurity.
And there are individual passages I like from translations as varied as the Douai-Rheims, the Jerusalem Bible and Ronald Knox's eccentric NT version. In fact I wish there were more translations around and when I look closely at study passages or even in meditative readings, I tend to go back and forth between translations.
One reason I find the KJV version so compelling isn't just cultural familiarity (the version most often used at school assemblies) but the strength of iambic pentameter, which isn't just an aesthetic quibble: iambic pentameter is very close to human speech patterns following the breath, building lines with a pulse. East to say aloud and easier to memorise, in the same way that Shakespeare's terminology may be archaic but the spoken lines come naturally to many of us.
I find spoken Shakespeare nearly as hard to follow as Chaucer. If I have a written script I'm fine but I can't process it fast enough spoken; I only hear every third phrase or so because my brain is too occupied understanding one phrase to even hear the next two.
This is why I'm very strong on the language in church being very comprehensible.
I tend to use a Greek interlinear prior to preaching (which doesn’t, of course, help with the Old Testament) but it’s clunky to read. For reading out loud I’m torn between poetry and comprehension on better known passages.
I agree with you that most of the KJV is written in rhythms that approximate closely to speech.
To my ear, if you leave out the various ums and ers and other phatic markers, prose that sounds like speech tends to average about one stress every two to three syllables. Verse with one stress every two syllables like iambics sounds stately; verse with one stress every three syllables sounds excited; verse with one stress every four or more syllables sounds like bureaucratese.
(Most good writers of iambic pentameter play the iambic rhythm off against the spoken rhythm, so you hear the spoken rhythm as a variation on the iambic rhythm that it is officially supposed to be, like syncopation in music.)
No, I didn't mean it was all written in iambic pentameter (anymore than Shakespeare) just that iambic petameter tends to be memorable and close to everyday speech then and now. Though I know some dispute the accessibility.
This. And using the KJV can unintentionally trip people up. For instance, Paul writes many injunctions in his letters to "you". Because we've come to think of "thou" as the way to address God and "you" to address people, we fail to realise that these "you" injunctions are not personal but collective, they're written to groups of people rather than individuals: "you all". Has this led to people thinking of our faith in too individualistic a way? I think that it may have.
At uni, we had a lad from Northern Ireland. When he read in services, it was beautiful, his lilting voice, always a pleasure. I coudn't understand a word he said of course.
I need to hear things in new ways to get more out of them. I know that is not true for everyone, but I think it has some truth for many. Reading the Bible should be done for understanding, not just for the music.
IMHO.
(And it must be well read in church, not mumbled from a phone held up close to the reader's face!)
I grew up on KJV and if I quote randomly from the Bible, it will almost certainly be in KJV, but I would not be advocating its use in church or for study or personal devotions. The KJV was meant to enable readers or listeners to understand and that ought to be the main criterion today. Having said that, there are versions which don’t come across well when read aloud from the lectern.
In my experience, the NRSV and other modern translations don't really encourage that kind of reading.
Another point: different languages pass on information at different speeds. For instance, in Daniel 3 we get the list of "horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe and all kinds of music" no less than four times. It gets very repetitive - I don't think modern English would put it like that.
When I was based in Kenya I found it really interesting listening to clergy colleagues preaching and also to anyone undertaking a public speaking role. In Kiswahili there are different words for you singular and you plural so when they addressed a group in English they always said "You" (singular) and "You People" plural. Initially it sounded rude to me but I came to love it and it certainly aided understanding.
I agree with the division of the text into verses, and especially when the text is presented as chunks of verses in multiple columns on the page. I think that greatly hinders reading, and I'm always in favor of giving the text in a continuous format, as one would find in almost all books of non-scriptural literature.
As for your point about the repetition, this is where I think approaching the Bible as a literary text is useful. If you came across repetition in a modern literary text then you would ask why is there so much repetition, what is trying to be conveyed, etc etc. We don't do that with the Bible for some reason, but I think we should!
Strangely enough the word for sinner in Welsh is "pecadur" - clearly it has come into both languages from Latin.
Doublethink, Admin
We’ve mentioned upthread that cultural expectations and preferences come into play, and I’ve wondered if this is part of it. Living in the US, Bible readings at school assemblies wasn’t something I experienced. (As far as that goes, school assemblies were rare, and they definitely didn’t include Bible readings.). You heard the Bible read at church and, in some families, at home, and you read it yourself. And my experience was that the KJV was never used at church or at home.
As a child, I received three Bibles from our church—when I was baptized, when I was confirmed and when I recited the catechism. They were all RSV. I remember questioning at the time why they were all the same translation. Surely, I thought, I didn’t need 3 RSVs.
Yeah, some folk manage fine with that ambiguity but throw an utter shitfit over singular "they".
I think we generally do manage okay with that ambiguity, as context usually makes it (more or less) clear. But in something like the Paul’s letters or the Sermon on the Mount, the context clues can be harder to pick up on.
That's not a position I hold, though isnt so far from positions I might.
To be fair to the kjv, whenever I've tried to look something up in the original languages, the KJV has been the best for helping to word match. If the KJV has "love is X, love is Y, it Z". Then you know that where the sentence structure changed, that's where to start looking, whereas newer versions (and obviously things like the message) might do "love is X and Y. Love Z", and confuse the search (though not the meaning).
The RV or ASV are even better for this as they have the same translational approach, but are based on better original language texts.
At best, this can give a sense of gravity and 'distance' - "Wisdom! Let us attend!" - there's something important going on here folks ...
At worst it can sound like Daleks are running the service.
As with others here, I'm for both poetic musicality and conprehensibility but it isn't always easy to achieve.
I was looking at individual sole-author translations I've read in recent years and two jumped out at me because of the issues around 'voice' and colloquial sense as much as literary or aesthetic value. In his translation of the NT, David Bentley Hart was concerned to keep the rough slangy textures of the Koine Greek idiom, not smooth it out artificially. This is a deliberate non-literary translation that tries to restore the earthy or careless everyday language, tones and registers of many different speakers. On the other hand, there is NT Wright's translation, The Kingdom New Testament that wants to alter our contemporary understandings of certain concepts and terms by making them unfamiliar and strange to us, to bring alive the Jewish culture and context so often overlooked.
Earlier I said that we need new translations, in part because the global language we speak, contemporary English, is in flux and changing as our societies change. But for a new translation to be worthwhile, it must do something new and be aware of how we speak to one another in different places and from various social positions, and what we resist or welcome when we read texts made transparent or new. The translator or translation committee (another complicated distinction) needs to be aligned with earlier or existing translations, know about the history of scholarship and commentary traditions on the original text, and then move towards expressing new insights about elements in the text that have been under-served or under-played in older interpretations. If the original Hebrew text is in a rhyming metrical pattern, how is that to be shown? The subtext has to come across loud and clear and the text has to be readable when spoken to a congregation or Bible study group.
Hebrew poetry relies on contrasts and 'parallelism', the repetition or layering of similar or opposing ideas.
That isn't to say there isn't a 'music' to it, but it's not formally metrical.
On the 'performance' thing, one of the reasons the Orthodox go in for intoned readings is to avoid a kind of 'amateur dramatics' approach or the opportunity for readers to show off. We've all heard readings where the speaker seems to be angling for an Oscar or BAFTA award.
We could argue that this can be taken too far, just as the Byzantine avoidance of polyphony misses out on the more harmonious and layered effects found in the Russian music tradition.
But yes, any translation must somehow reflect the underlying form of the original - whether it be fast-paced narrative as in Mark's Gospel, pithy aphorisms as in the Proverbs or poetry as in The Song of Songs and Psalms.
That 'no metrical system of Hebrew poetry' is an older understanding and you might want to read Robert Alter who argues for a better appreciation of the non-uniform metrical arrangements of Hebrew poetry.
I don't know Hebrew so may be wide of the mark.
I do know that Hebrew poetry doesn't rhyme.
But I was making a somewhat pedantic aside and was broadly in agreement with your main point.
Sorry if I sounded tetchy, @Gamma Gamaliel, I didn't mean it in a sharp way. When I began learning Greek and Hebrew and reading commentaries, there was this shared academic understanding and 'taken-for-granted' ways of doing the historical-critical method or quest for the historical Jesus or form criticism, and then it was being challenged from all directions and we woke up and started to look at what was going on in philology and queer theology and socio-historical research. A post-grad student who had studied Sanscrit came in and demolished most of the lecturers' arguments because she pointed out that in Sanscrit prosody (notably the Vedas) there is a class of irregular meters analogous to what you find in Hebrew poetry. There is a syllabic count and then there is the mora, a timing unit shorter than a spoken syllable and that can be heavily or lightly stressed. There's free arrangement in the mora but not the fixed syllabic count so a great deal depends on the spoken recital of the poetry. It's more complicated than that and I'm not going to push this further, but a great deal has to do with the breath and sung forms or dialogues. None of us understood her descriptions until she sang and recited or chanted the text aloud to us and suddenly we heard not a Western rhyming scheme but echoes and assonance and lilting variations in speed.