Translation is literally using different words in an attempt to convey the same information. In most other contexts we would consider this a paraphrase.
But not the context where one is attempting to convey the same information in a different language. In most contexts we consider that to be a translation.
My point is that it this seems to be a distinction without a difference. In both cases different words are being substituted for the original words.
I’ve given an example of the difference here if it doesn’t seem different to you, I don’t think I have the ability to explain it more clearly.
But if I turn "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" into "So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s" that's paraphrasing and a form of fraud?
Again, if substituting a new set of words for a different set of words is fraudulent, does it really matter that much if the word substitution is from the same language or a different one? That only makes sense if human words all have one-to-one cognates in every other language, something we know is not the case. Heck, words often have multiple cognates within the same language.
Whence comes the idea that paraphrase is a form of fraud? It’s usually done as an aid to interpretation. It is also usually used to describe something that happens within a language, rather than between languages.
If you go from one English sentence to another that’s usually a paraphrase. In either case both sentences are a good translation of the Greek, but if your starting point had been the first English sentence then it seems distinctly odd, to me at least, to call the second sentence a translation of the first.
I mean, if you're happy to adopt a position that . . . there is no ambiguity in saying both that a speech is composed by Thucydides as what he thinks was demanded by the occasion and that it adheres as closely as possible to the sense of what was really said.
Given that Thucydides claimed both were true, there doesn't seem to necessarily be a contradiction, unless one is willing to completely dismiss any form of paraphrase as valid.
The question is what Thucydides means by making both claims.
You appear to be trying to get "some forms of paraphrase are valid" to imply "all forms of paraphrase are equally valid".
Which is where we came in.
Where we came in is you raised the question of how the gospel writers knew what Jesus said to Pilate when there were none of his disciples present.
You suggested that the gospel writers assumed what might have been said "a la Thucydides".
Are we to take it that when you said "a la Thucydides" you did so to maintain that the gospel accounts are a valid paraphrase of what was actually said?
To me, the most obvious sign that the Gospel authors didn't get Jesus' sayings very accurately is the huge difference in the style of how Jesus teaches from one Gospel to another.
I find it much easier to spend time with the Jesus of pithy remarks in Luke and Mark rather than the long, metaphysical sermons he gives in John.
To me, the most obvious sign that the Gospel authors didn't get Jesus' sayings very accurately is the huge difference in the style of how Jesus teaches from one Gospel to another.
I find it much easier to spend time with the Jesus of pithy remarks in Luke and Mark rather than the long, metaphysical sermons he gives in John.
Written, a generation after they were, by the Johannine school, written one and half generations after the setting of their subject making them.
Generation is rather a slippery term for length of time.
With the generally accepted dating of Mark, if I were he, publishing now, I’d be writing about events in my late teens and early twenties.
The dating of Luke is more variable, but if I were publishing now it could be as recent as my mid teens or as distant as the slightly earlier childhood of my parents.
For John it would be my early childhood or the slightly later childhood of my parents.
It’s easy, IMHO, to overestimate the gap between the events and the time when the accounts of them reached final form.
40 years at least for Mark. In Antioch? After the levelling of Jerusalem. Which it 'prophesied'. 60 at least for John. Easily 80. Nobody remembered those lectures of Jesus. Naturally.
One thing that LC hasn't mentioned but that was circled around upthread is Social Memory Theory. I've only done the tiniest bit of work on it and think some of it is a little silly, but that has been one of the dominant modes of inquiry gospel scholars have been using for the past, say, 15 years. Jan Assmann, who died recently, wrote a book called Religion and Cultural Memory which has been quite influential in this regard, and is quite good. Given that many theologians and scholars hold Mark to be the first gospel, some of the most work on this front has been done on Mark, and if people are interested I can give some titles.
The basic idea is that these texts are reflections of the group's memory of Jesus, rather than strict reportage or history or the like. Part of the reason for the rise of this movement is because the Gospels are such unusual texts qua texts; they don't fit into any ancient literary genre. This theory also helps account for the divergences between the Gospels as different groups had different memories of Jesus. It goes on for awhile. The book on Mark that I'm thinking of and can't remember the name of is like 600 pages.
It's a neat idea and thinking about it just now I'm more impressed by it than I was when I first found out about it. Funny how that works.
Host hat on
Discussion about the trauma of losing faith (Martin54’s or anyone else’s) is way off topic for this thread. I have split those posts out, and, given the nature of the discussion, the new thread is in All Saints.
To some extent, people may be ignoring changes in technology. If you wanted to recreate exactly what someone said and did 80 years ago (1944), you would have a lot of resources available: sound recordings, photographs and text reproduced from speech by stenographers and typists (though this would be words without tones of voice or facial expressions, in most cases). (Surviving human witnesses with reliable memories would be few and rare.)
Now suppose you are living 200 years ago (1824) and you want to do the same, referring back to someone in 1744. You would have much less to work with. There might be contemporary written accounts, but you would probably end up with second-hand (or third-hand) accounts, as in "My father was there and he told me". The result might well be full of conflicting accounts. Does that mean the attempt should not be made?
Historians have to deal with these matters all the time. There may be some version of the Uncertainty Principle involved (with a large value of Planck's Constant).
<snip>
Now suppose you are living 200 years ago (1824) and you want to do the same, referring back to someone in 1744. You would have much less to work with. There might be contemporary written accounts, but you would probably end up with second-hand (or third-hand) accounts, as in "My father was there and he told me". The result might well be full of conflicting accounts. Does that mean the attempt should not be made?<snip>
Indeed. And the accuracy of recollection will depend on multiple factors, including the nature of the matters being recalled, and the practices of recall and transmission. And it will need, perhaps less obviously, an understanding of how superficially similar processes may have functioned quite differently, and with different effectiveness in that historical context. This is where work, like that of Kenneth Bailey, referred to in an earlier post of mine becomes important.
This isn’t a matter of saying people in the past were better at remembering than we are now, some generalised lament for allegedly declining standards, but rather a recognition that changing cultural circumstances lead to changing human behaviour. I could drive my car to the nearest town, almost without thought, in a way which would baffle and astound my forebears of 150 or 200 years ago. But they could routinely harness a pony and trap to the same task in a way which would be beyond me.
There is I think very little evidence that the early Christian communities made up stories about Jesus' sayings as an adult to prove Jesus's sanctity, and quite a lot of evidence that they cared about accurate transmission of the stories and sayings of his adult life.
(I would not care to defend the historicity of the infancy narratives on secular grounds.)
Later non-canonical gospels are later and differ in style.
I agree. Also, if they're trying to prove Jesus' sanctity, surely it's a very odd way of going about it? I mean, the man is shown hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors (one of whom he makes an apostle), he goes to parties and makes large amounts of wine, he insults the local religious leaders on a regular basis, he talks to women as equals and lets some of them cry over his feet, and he gets strung up on a cross naked in public shame. (Quite a few modern day Muslims find that event so repulsive they deny it entirely, because they believe God wouldn't allow that to happen to a holy man, let alone God incarnate.)
It doesn't look like hagiography to me--either of Jesus or of the dimwit disciples.
I’ll go through the first 10 or so posts to see if something is related to proving the supernatural. This first segment is unrelated.
(((((((In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing… You can see some of the frustration discreetly expressed in 2 Peter 15-16, where the author says, “15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” I believe it was Lewis who wondered ““I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition.” (Reflections on the Psalms)))))
Your job is to go and fetch copies of ALL of them. Yes, all, including the other languages, because sometimes translations preserve a very early text and how will you know if you don't look?
For the sake of pity, we'll allow you to establish an arbitrary cut-off date--nothing later than the sixth century, for example. But you're still going to have your life's work cut out for you. (and don't forget to find grant funding, these copies will cost you, not to mention the travel).
Let's assume that you've gathered everything, and now, a sadder and a wiser man, you sit down at a table stacked to the roof. Now it's time to read them all. Yes, ALL. Read them all, and then you pick a text that appears to you to be the closest to what the vanished author actually writ, based either on dating (consider the materials and the script used, and even where it finally came to light and any provenance it has) or historic testimony (I was lucky enough to have a handwritten autograph manuscript, although not as lucky as you might think, since the author continued to tinker with the text for years afterward, to the tune of adding 50% more to it--which forces you to try to discern authorial late changes from copyists' changes, intentional or otherwise. It sucks. Who'd be an editor?). You can also consider interior evidence, though if that's all you have, you may wind up changing your mind about manuscript priority halfway through, which kinda sucks too, as you've got to rewrite all your observations. The text that you choose to measure all the rest again may be called the key text, for the purposes of this explanation.
Why bother with a key text? Because you've got to have something to compare the rest to. That's the plain and simple reason. You need something to put in the lemma (see below). In the best of all possible worlds, you choose a text that ends up being so central / early that it's clear that most of the other texts variants are later errors or emendations. In the worst of all possible worlds, you choose poorly, and after finding a zillion, zillion variants in which everybody agrees but your key text, you realize the error of your ways and start over with one more suited to the role. Ahem.
You sit there with your copies spread out before you. You take your key text and compare it word by word with a single other manuscript, designating that other manuscript by a name, letter, or symbol, so the textual apparatus you are producing doesn't get too clunky. This is why so many New Testament manuscripts have numbers or letters to designate them, and not some long-ass name. Be sure to keep a table of your manuscripts and their designations!
AS you compare, you note every single variant in wording, punctuation, noun/pronoun/verb form (such as a future where others have a simple past). There's a process by which you note all this stuff down--you take the original reading of the key text and write it so:
In the beginning]
That is the lemma. That is the reading in the key text you are using as a foundation. Now you note all the variants after it, using a letter or number for each manuscript, and followed by the variant reading you found there.
In the beginning] 2,3,5,7,22; In beginning 3, 6 21; In the start 8, 9, 10; in principio 11, 12, 13...
This entry I've faked up for you shows what you might get if you had a key text that read "In the beginning" and you discovered that manuscripts 2, 3, 5, 7, and 22 agreed with that wording, while 3, 6, and 21 dropped "the" ("In beginning"). Manuscripts 8, 9, and 10 read "In the start", and 11, 12, and 13 read "In principio" at that spot.
This is a good start. Go on and note ALL the variants for this phrase for all 25000 manuscripts. When you're done, have a beer. You'll deserve it.
Now move on to the next phrase and make a lemma of that.
was the word;]
Annotate the variants and agreements for all 25K manuscripts on that; and keep moving in this way through the whole New Testament. You will fall on your knees thanking God whenever you encounter a fragmentary manuscript--say, one that contains only a few verses, or one that has the four Gospels but leaves out the rest of the New Testament. Because, of course, there can be no variants for you to labor over if the text itself is missing.
Anyway, carry on. By the time you reach "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen." you will be white-haired and ready to retire. (That's why these things are done by committees. I was one woman dealing with roughly 38 sources, and it took me nigh on four years.)
This post is long enough, and I have had it for the night. I will just note in passing, though, that 25K manuscripts, more or less (because more are always being found) is an amazing amount of manuscript support for anything, including books like my own, which date to after Shakespeare's day. I believe we had THREE sources for Hamlet, one of which was obviously super corrupt, being the product of somebody trying to memorize the text so as to pirate it at the publisher's. Three. Just three, and the latest dating from 1628.
Think about that, the next time you want to bitch about the reliability of the New Testament text. There are Shakespeare scholars who would kill for a hundredth of the textual support, and they are 1500 years closer to us in time.[/quote]
You say that ancient manuscripts are fragmentary. If by that you mean that they sometimes come down to us incomplete (not always), of course I agree with you. What else is to be expected after 2000 years? This is true for all history, not merely Christian history.
The standard way of dealing with a fragmentary manuscript is to hunt up as many copies of the same text as you can, and compare them together to establish relative ages, levels of trustworthiness, and which came first in the "family tree" of manuscripts. We call that "filiation." I had to do it for my dissertation topic (a variorum edition of a Renaissance characterbook), which forced me to evaluate 26 handwritten manuscripts (about half of them fragmentary) and also 12 printed editions, behind which lay more yet-unrecovered manuscripts.
The process of comparing texts is a gruelling one. First you gather them all, as many copies as exist in the world, which is freaking gruelling process which in my minor case required visits to both the East and West Coast and also several microfiche sent from Cambridge and Edinburgh. And you hope and pray that no collector refuses to let you see his rare treasure, or forces you to fly over in person to consult it, because this gets expensive after a while. Keep in mind that the manuscripts of the New Testament books are well up in the thousands. I stole the text below from https://hc.edu/museums/dunham-bible-museum/tour-of-the-museum/past-exhibits/biblical-manuscripts/.
There are approximately 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. In addition, there are 10,000 Latin manuscripts, and 9,300 manuscripts in other languages.
Comments
So if I transform "Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῷ θεῷ" into "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's", that's translation and totally legit.
If I render "Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ θεοῦ τῷ θεῷ" as "So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s" that's also translation and also totally legit.
But if I turn "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's" into "So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s" that's paraphrasing and a form of fraud?
Again, if substituting a new set of words for a different set of words is fraudulent, does it really matter that much if the word substitution is from the same language or a different one? That only makes sense if human words all have one-to-one cognates in every other language, something we know is not the case. Heck, words often have multiple cognates within the same language.
If you go from one English sentence to another that’s usually a paraphrase. In either case both sentences are a good translation of the Greek, but if your starting point had been the first English sentence then it seems distinctly odd, to me at least, to call the second sentence a translation of the first.
You appear to be trying to get "some forms of paraphrase are valid" to imply "all forms of paraphrase are equally valid".
Where we came in is you raised the question of how the gospel writers knew what Jesus said to Pilate when there were none of his disciples present.
You suggested that the gospel writers assumed what might have been said "a la Thucydides".
Are we to take it that when you said "a la Thucydides" you did so to maintain that the gospel accounts are a valid paraphrase of what was actually said?
I find it much easier to spend time with the Jesus of pithy remarks in Luke and Mark rather than the long, metaphysical sermons he gives in John.
Written, a generation after they were, by the Johannine school, written one and half generations after the setting of their subject making them.
With the generally accepted dating of Mark, if I were he, publishing now, I’d be writing about events in my late teens and early twenties.
The dating of Luke is more variable, but if I were publishing now it could be as recent as my mid teens or as distant as the slightly earlier childhood of my parents.
For John it would be my early childhood or the slightly later childhood of my parents.
It’s easy, IMHO, to overestimate the gap between the events and the time when the accounts of them reached final form.
That reason for the dating takes for granted that prophecy doesn't happen. If it does, then that's a different matter.
The basic idea is that these texts are reflections of the group's memory of Jesus, rather than strict reportage or history or the like. Part of the reason for the rise of this movement is because the Gospels are such unusual texts qua texts; they don't fit into any ancient literary genre. This theory also helps account for the divergences between the Gospels as different groups had different memories of Jesus. It goes on for awhile. The book on Mark that I'm thinking of and can't remember the name of is like 600 pages.
It's a neat idea and thinking about it just now I'm more impressed by it than I was when I first found out about it. Funny how that works.
Discussion about the trauma of losing faith (Martin54’s or anyone else’s) is way off topic for this thread. I have split those posts out, and, given the nature of the discussion, the new thread is in All Saints.
BroJames, Purgatory Host
Host hat off
Now suppose you are living 200 years ago (1824) and you want to do the same, referring back to someone in 1744. You would have much less to work with. There might be contemporary written accounts, but you would probably end up with second-hand (or third-hand) accounts, as in "My father was there and he told me". The result might well be full of conflicting accounts. Does that mean the attempt should not be made?
Historians have to deal with these matters all the time. There may be some version of the Uncertainty Principle involved (with a large value of Planck's Constant).
This isn’t a matter of saying people in the past were better at remembering than we are now, some generalised lament for allegedly declining standards, but rather a recognition that changing cultural circumstances lead to changing human behaviour. I could drive my car to the nearest town, almost without thought, in a way which would baffle and astound my forebears of 150 or 200 years ago. But they could routinely harness a pony and trap to the same task in a way which would be beyond me.
I agree. Also, if they're trying to prove Jesus' sanctity, surely it's a very odd way of going about it? I mean, the man is shown hanging out with prostitutes and tax collectors (one of whom he makes an apostle), he goes to parties and makes large amounts of wine, he insults the local religious leaders on a regular basis, he talks to women as equals and lets some of them cry over his feet, and he gets strung up on a cross naked in public shame. (Quite a few modern day Muslims find that event so repulsive they deny it entirely, because they believe God wouldn't allow that to happen to a holy man, let alone God incarnate.)
It doesn't look like hagiography to me--either of Jesus or of the dimwit disciples.
(((((((In any case, God—this God—seems to like things messy, or at least not to mind it. And so the coming of the New Testament into the world bears some resemblance to childbirth—a messy, bloody process, with pain and joy mixed. And probably a lot of swearing… You can see some of the frustration discreetly expressed in 2 Peter 15-16, where the author says, “15 And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, 16 as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.” I believe it was Lewis who wondered ““I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition.” (Reflections on the Psalms)))))
For the sake of pity, we'll allow you to establish an arbitrary cut-off date--nothing later than the sixth century, for example. But you're still going to have your life's work cut out for you. (and don't forget to find grant funding, these copies will cost you, not to mention the travel).
Let's assume that you've gathered everything, and now, a sadder and a wiser man, you sit down at a table stacked to the roof. Now it's time to read them all. Yes, ALL. Read them all, and then you pick a text that appears to you to be the closest to what the vanished author actually writ, based either on dating (consider the materials and the script used, and even where it finally came to light and any provenance it has) or historic testimony (I was lucky enough to have a handwritten autograph manuscript, although not as lucky as you might think, since the author continued to tinker with the text for years afterward, to the tune of adding 50% more to it--which forces you to try to discern authorial late changes from copyists' changes, intentional or otherwise. It sucks. Who'd be an editor?). You can also consider interior evidence, though if that's all you have, you may wind up changing your mind about manuscript priority halfway through, which kinda sucks too, as you've got to rewrite all your observations. The text that you choose to measure all the rest again may be called the key text, for the purposes of this explanation.
Why bother with a key text? Because you've got to have something to compare the rest to. That's the plain and simple reason. You need something to put in the lemma (see below). In the best of all possible worlds, you choose a text that ends up being so central / early that it's clear that most of the other texts variants are later errors or emendations. In the worst of all possible worlds, you choose poorly, and after finding a zillion, zillion variants in which everybody agrees but your key text, you realize the error of your ways and start over with one more suited to the role. Ahem.
You sit there with your copies spread out before you. You take your key text and compare it word by word with a single other manuscript, designating that other manuscript by a name, letter, or symbol, so the textual apparatus you are producing doesn't get too clunky. This is why so many New Testament manuscripts have numbers or letters to designate them, and not some long-ass name. Be sure to keep a table of your manuscripts and their designations!
AS you compare, you note every single variant in wording, punctuation, noun/pronoun/verb form (such as a future where others have a simple past). There's a process by which you note all this stuff down--you take the original reading of the key text and write it so:
In the beginning]
That is the lemma. That is the reading in the key text you are using as a foundation. Now you note all the variants after it, using a letter or number for each manuscript, and followed by the variant reading you found there.
In the beginning] 2,3,5,7,22; In beginning 3, 6 21; In the start 8, 9, 10; in principio 11, 12, 13...
This entry I've faked up for you shows what you might get if you had a key text that read "In the beginning" and you discovered that manuscripts 2, 3, 5, 7, and 22 agreed with that wording, while 3, 6, and 21 dropped "the" ("In beginning"). Manuscripts 8, 9, and 10 read "In the start", and 11, 12, and 13 read "In principio" at that spot.
This is a good start. Go on and note ALL the variants for this phrase for all 25000 manuscripts. When you're done, have a beer. You'll deserve it.
Now move on to the next phrase and make a lemma of that.
was the word;]
Annotate the variants and agreements for all 25K manuscripts on that; and keep moving in this way through the whole New Testament. You will fall on your knees thanking God whenever you encounter a fragmentary manuscript--say, one that contains only a few verses, or one that has the four Gospels but leaves out the rest of the New Testament. Because, of course, there can be no variants for you to labor over if the text itself is missing.
Anyway, carry on. By the time you reach "The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen." you will be white-haired and ready to retire. (That's why these things are done by committees. I was one woman dealing with roughly 38 sources, and it took me nigh on four years.)
This post is long enough, and I have had it for the night. I will just note in passing, though, that 25K manuscripts, more or less (because more are always being found) is an amazing amount of manuscript support for anything, including books like my own, which date to after Shakespeare's day. I believe we had THREE sources for Hamlet, one of which was obviously super corrupt, being the product of somebody trying to memorize the text so as to pirate it at the publisher's. Three. Just three, and the latest dating from 1628.
Think about that, the next time you want to bitch about the reliability of the New Testament text. There are Shakespeare scholars who would kill for a hundredth of the textual support, and they are 1500 years closer to us in time.[/quote]
I read the first 2-3 pages of the discussion. None of it is relative to proving the supernatural.
Ditto. I’m lost.