The Gospels
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The voice of John’s Gospel is the most urgent one for reducing life’s necessities—and the necessity for eternal life in God’s presence—to the reliance on Jesus’ being who and what he says he is, God’s actual son, as finally certified by his resurrection and ascension to heaven. As I’ve indicated, all the Gospels have extensive and similar “Passions” (from a Latin word for “suffering”)—that is, narratives of how the crucifixion came about and took place—along with scenes of its aftermath. In John, those events almost devour the story. The long sermon is given not to crowds of all comers about how to live, how to worship, and what to expect at the end of the world; instead, it is given at the Last Supper, and it is about the ineffable oneness of God, Jesus, and those who love him and each other unquestioningly. In the final scene, Jesus is with a few of his followers, first unrecognizable, then performing a miracle that, at least in its results, looks rather prankish, then redoubling the teasing, which merges with momentous if not very clear commands, rebukes, and warnings. What does it all mean? Don’t ask the author, who merely avers that his testimony about “these things” is true.
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The words of the Gospels themselves are well suited to this strange textual enterprise. Normal authorship and subject matter are replaced with a singular yet complexly presented mystery, while the language and style—though superficially plain and not literary—manifest an almost impenetrable set of interweavings.
The Gospels are in fact something of a linguistic chimera. A lingua franca covering much of the ancient Near East was Aramaic, a relative of Hebrew; this is apparently the language Jesus spoke. Words attributed to him in his death agony on the cross (Mark 15:34, Matthew 27:46) are Aramaic versions of a Psalm verse (22:1). He would have known such verses from an Aramaic targum, or paraphrase and interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures (and a version of them that at this period would likely have been oral only).
Yet, except for the rare Aramaic interpolations in their texts, all four canonical Gospels are written in Koinē Greek, a lingua franca in use over thousands of miles of the Roman Empire. But it is an open question how much Greek of any kind Jesus’ own circle understood or used—perhaps not much. Nearly all the words attributed to them are thus in a language they may never have voluntarily uttered, belonging to a cosmopolitan civilization they may well have despised. Moreover, Jesus’ story is told almost entirely in this language. Further, some clunky in-text notes (indicating, for example, that the Passover is a Jewish festival) suggest that many of the Gospels’ original multiethnic readers needed a primer on the religion Jesus belonged to.
It is not that Koinē Greek itself didn’t have some Jewish background—and foreground. It was actually the language of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that was the late-antique Jewish Diaspora’s basis for worship and religious study possibly until well into the second century C.E.; the Septuagint is imitated, alluded to, and quoted throughout the Gospels. It is through the Septuagint that Semitic scriptural modes of expression keep breaking through in the basically Indo-European Gospels: “it happened that” (the King James’s “it came to pass”), repetitive and pleonastic verbal structures used for emphasis (I have tried to represent these instead of gliding over them, which is why I write, for example, “stunned almost beyond their capacity to be stunned” at Mark 5:42), and in general a refrain-like syntax seemingly more concerned with narrative formulae than with the representation of events.
But the Septuagint, the first major translation project in the West that is still extant, is hardly a precise or nuanced rendering of Classical Hebrew. The Gospels, themselves an awkward rendering of all their linguistic and cultural sources, cite and quote the awkward Septuagint translation with redoubled awkwardness, and the results can set the teeth on edge. The authors not only take verses far out of context but also sometimes seem to be merely guessing at the verses’ original content.
Yet—again—there is nothing daunting about the Gospels’ text in its basic components, on the surface. The text is even used in modern classrooms as an introduction to ancient Greek; as in a Dick and Jane reader, easy language and a set of simple stories are presented at the same time. The Gospels’ short sentences, limited vocabulary, and pared-down grammatical structures were well suited to the limited schooling of the first, less advantaged waves of converts to the Jesus movement around the Mediterranean. Exposed to a passage or two at a time—probably all that poor working people had a chance for—the Gospels’ first readers and hearers would likely have intuited no problem in the choices made by the new sect’s leadership of what to present and how to interpret the whole—as far as anyone perceived a whole, that is: for some time, the Gospels circulated separately. The stage was thus set in the first century C.E. for the fragmentary, liturgical, and heavy-handed treatment of the Gospels in the long term.
But as I have laid out, the Gospels are hardly simple below their surface. They are ruggedly composed, defensively hermetic, yet stumbling over themselves in their ambition. These challenges would have been daunting enough. When, quite early, the administrators of the texts (that is, the solidifying church hierarchy) began to put more space between themselves and the audiences of the texts, the texts began to veer out of control, like any authoritarian project.
Among the further unstable loads they acquired over the centuries were questionable translations (like “the Word,” whereas logos nowhere in past or contemporary ancient literature means a single vocable as such) and interpretations (like “Holy Trinity,” a theological construct based on a few enigmatic New Testament verses). And not only were large, fascinating portions of them ignored because they did not serve—or because they actually opposed—the needs and wants of powerful institutions; the text itself was also comprehensively scrambled when men at great cultural and linguistic distances from its origins copied by hand only one another’s handwritten copies. By far the most manuscripts to survive come from the late medieval period, when even the means to picture antiquity, except through other poorly understood texts, were gone, and doctrines and worship practices supporting an essentially feudal church urged anachronistic changes to scripture as it was being reproduced. In Western Europe, these changes were made on the basis of a Latin and not a Greek Bible—that is, at one long extra step from the original writings.
Modern papyrology, the study of surviving ancient paper documents (much rarer than later vellum, or animal-skin, manuscripts as testimonies to literary tradition), allows for fragmentary glimpses back toward the original Gospels texts. There are also early Gospels surviving in Coptic (late Egyptian), Syriac, and other languages of the Near East. Inscriptions and other archaeological finds can also be brought to bear. But a diversity of older evidence hardly unites to produce a buffed-up, clean, certain version of the text.
The critical apparatus of a properly edited ancient text in the original language is a listing, at the bottom of each page of the modern book, of what has been done to restore the text to something the authors at least could have written. But included in the apparatus are pleas of what philologists call loci desperati, “places without hope,” or indefensible content left in because no credible alternative could be either found in any manuscript or posited. In the Gospel of John, the apparatus often takes up a third of a page, sometimes half—and of course it omits all the obvious mistakes, the innumerable throwaway absurdities: the Gospels cannot, for example, refer to customs that did not exist before monasticism. The edition shows only the furthest refinement so far of all the excavated gold, but it still sometimes leaves the translator stuck with nothing coherent to render in the target language.
The problems that the Gospels pose in these circumstances can hardly be overstated. It would be one thing if the books were trivial, or generally regarded as fantastical or cranky. But their outsized importance and prestige did as much to confirm their original and added strangeness as to en
courage rational interpretation and correction.
In fact, in the phalanx of intellectual history, these books were from the start pushed hard toward ultimate, self-defining, all-encompassing meaning, and they became a basis for projects as big and wicked as the Crusades, and as startlingly decent as campaigns for humanitarian relief; meanwhile, and not coincidentally, they became almost unreadable as mere writing.
The Gospels were the first of the truly power-hungry Truth writings; epics of divinely directed national destiny like Vergil’s Aeneid and the Hebrew Bible were humbler, more specific, more confined in their audiences and their programs. A collection like the Gospels could arise only after the start of the essentially modern world, when the apparatus of material power had become so huge, so well organized, so distant, and so inexorable that nothing but a sweeping assault of words against it was acceptable to the rage, not of the poorest and weakest and most ignorant, but of those who at least had words at their command. Like Das Kapital and the works of Nietzsche, the Gospels are a poetry of Truth in which the assertions take over the poetry and the sense as well, making the text suitable as a basis for force, reform, or both. But even Nietzsche is friendlier to ordinary engagement and interpretation.
Here is just one example of what the Gospels (and their institutional proponents) ask us to take without any synthetic analysis or even synthetic awareness, because the passages are usually presented in isolation from one another, from the narratives in which they are embedded, and from basic historical data. All four Gospels tell of a slave’s having his ear sliced off—presumably not by someone in the high priest’s retinue to which the slave belongs, or by someone in the attendant mob—during Jesus’ arrest. In Mark (14:47), the mutilation is merely cited. In later Gospels, there are explanations—sometimes radiating far into the surrounding story—for how one of Jesus’ followers (who were all native civilians) came to be wearing a sword, impossible to conceal, in a land under foreign military occupation. Mitigations are also cited: in Luke the disciples are actually shown to ask permission to use their swords, and Jesus is shown not only to deplore the assault but also to heal the ear (22:49 and 51); in John, the victim has a name, Malchus (18:10), as if he were a willing witness to events and not an obscure and pathetic victim of them. During the Gospels’ very composition, a great deal of energy apparently went toward such repair work on the foundations of the platform for the metaphysical claims: for example, any fissures indicating that someone other than Jesus got hurt must be cemented up. The edifice as a whole seems designed to be unspeakably untouchable, a looming demonstration of how many people made it that way, and the determination with which they acted. In itself, in its own structures (to say nothing of the guardians around it), the text dares you to touch it.
Such writing binds itself not to describing either reality or what is imagined, but instead to insisting that reality has been reshaped entirely and that the words must somehow tag along, whether absurdities or sublime moral and spiritual formulations result. And the inconsistencies do not hide, but brazen it out, as if defying readers to challenge them. It is in a way an appealing defiance; whole classes of previously disregarded people, represented by generations of authors oral and literate, anonymous and pseudonymous, are taking the world into their hands through language. But it is a disturbing defiance nevertheless, as if the tract and the revolution are chaotically coming into being at the same time.
In the face of all this, I have done what I can to reconstitute the Gospels as books—to be read, understood, interrogated, enjoyed, and debated as they are. Fundamentally, I make for this translation the plea I have made for all my others: I love significant writing, and I try to love it for the best, which means calling every word as I see it, after the requisite research. How can anyone claim to love something—be it a book, a child, a country, a faith, or anything else important—that in its essence relies on her honesty, and yet try to keep that thing outside the reach of reality? This is particularly important for translating scripture. Reality is what God is, if there is a God.
This principle is in fact related to the ancient, basic image and analogy of the Greek philosophical term logos (again, badly translated as “the Word”): the lexicons point me toward the idea of a mathematical accounting that can be checked against real objects and events and must come right in the end. The Hebrew prophets are eloquent and touching in showing God as the enforcer of reality, sometimes with a vengeance. It seems to me that the best role for scripture is to induce us to think more clearly about what language actually represents—with descriptions (or mere assertions) of “truth,” “service,” “repentance,” “sacrifice,” “evil”—so that we can think more clearly about what we do in the world and avoid that vengeance. I hope that American Christians in particular find my fresh cast of the Gospels’ language helpful for this purpose.
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As for methodology, at least I knew from the start that, for a more objective translation, the Gospels’ original first-century C.E. Greek texts—or the best restoration of these texts, in the Nestle-Aland edition of the New Testament—needed to be extricated to the degree possible from everything that would have bewildered the authors and the early audiences. But I immediately ran into a difficulty: the shortage of vital beliefs and experiences I could be confident those people would have affirmed.
It’s clear that they didn’t even think of “the way things are” (let alone have a name for it, “Christianity”), but the reverse: they thought that all conventional assumptions should be adjusted or replaced. Great jolts were thus given to the meanings of words, so that a translator has constantly to aim at moving targets. The following is just a summary of the inherent but fluid contradictions that dominated the Gospels before the texts were even finalized. And here I’ve come to the core of the unachievable for a Gospels translator: people were, on the evidence, questioning, positing, and affirming wildly at almost the same moments. How can that contribute to a readable modern English version, in the mood of the original but at least comprehensible to our (officially) rationalist culture?
Here, in any case, is my impression of the convulsions in popular didacticism and belief that did the most to shape the Gospels. Because Jesus’ known provincial origin, unremarkable family, and humiliating trial and death did not at all accord with his ultimate significance as it was insistently reported, it became more plausible that certain predictions of the world’s end, with known powers turned upside down, were true—though the heavenly warfare, the salutary natural disasters, and the other divine interventions pictured in apocalyptic literature had almost nothing in common with events like the crucifixion and the resurrection. It appeared, then, that a brand-new and yet somehow authoritative sense had to be made of these events, even if it meant turning language upside down as well.
In Judea, the main fountainhead of authority was the Hebrew Bible (though it was not yet even in the final stage of canonization). Certain passages in it could, at a stretch, be made to explain how God’s providence played out in this impressive new instance. The providence of the single, all-powerful God was supposed to play out with perfect if not perfectly comprehensible justice; traditional Jewish piety could not imagine anything else—but traditional Jewish piety was now going to be stressed to the breaking point and beyond.
The biblical book of the prophet Isaiah—actually the work of at least three authors responding to major Judean military and political crises—was already a beloved resource for those grappling more than half a millennium later with what Greek and then Roman hegemony had meant for Judaism. By turns a great poem of the natural as opposed to the built-up and institutional world, a cry for equality and fairness, an indictment of the establishment’s folly and selfishness, and a fervent testimony to God’s justice and mercy, Isaiah suggested why an oppressed man should become the saving leader. “We need the opposite of the powerful operators who got us into this” is in fact a
n intuitive sentiment at a time of national catastrophe. Isaiah even contains passages about a “suffering servant” (42:1–4, 49:1–6, 50:4–7, and 52:13–53:12)—which seems to have meant Israel itself, victimized by more powerful nations around it but chosen by God for a special role in the world. In Isaiah and other Hebrew prophets, however, validation of the underclass and the middling classes, as people, tends to be noblesse oblige, and generalizing. In the Gospels, which quote Isaiah often but usually askance, the exaltation of the lowly individual becomes quite literal, and has a special application to Jesus: this downtrodden nobody is the one we’ve been waiting for—it’s him, exactly because he’s nobody. The Gospels quote other prophets in the same vein.
Also helpful for making sense of Jesus were, paradoxically, certain linguistic barriers. A Hebrew and Aramaic idiom, “son of mankind” (basically “human being,” though it was eventually to yield that portentous English phrase “Son of Man”), was replicated in Greek in connection to Jesus as his story spread. The phrase probably sounded rather peculiar to anyone—that is, to practically the whole Roman Empire—unfamiliar with the languages of Jews in their homeland. The Diaspora itself had been using the Greek Septuagint Bible translation for worship and study for many generations, but “son of mankind,” rendered (more or less) literally in that work, is hardly natural Greek phrasing and so may have remained one of those wordings in sacred literature that sit waiting for an explanation in a new direction.
Through any version of scripture the phrase “son of mankind” could be linked to the biblical Book of Daniel, which contains the only substantial concentration of apocalyptic writing in what Christians call the Old Testament. In Daniel 7:13–14, the prophet has a vision of someone “like the son of mankind” coming on clouds to reign everlastingly over all peoples, not just the Jews. Here was fundamental and authoritative testimony for how Jesus could, through being a person, be much more than a person.