The Gospels

by Sarah Ruden

  Daniel does not indicate here whom he is writing about, but the man is widely identified elsewhere as the Messiah or “Anointed One.” (The Greek translation is Christos, the origin of the English word “Christ.”) The Messiah was to be the successor of God’s chosen ruler, King David, who had presided over a powerful and united kingdom and passed it intact to his son Solomon, the builder of the First Temple.

  This was stinging history to Jews enduring Roman occupation in their homeland, whose only taste of anything approaching both unity and independence within the past eight or nine centuries had been under the recent, self-destructive Maccabean dynasty. The Dead Sea Scrolls, a cache of Jewish literature discovered in the mid-twentieth century, contains messianic passages indicating that the Jewish nation’s glory will be restored through a preeminent kingly or priestly figure. But particularly interesting in the Dead Sea Scrolls, as far as the Gospels are concerned, is the so-called Messianic Apocalypse, which pictures a healer, liberator, bringer of good news to the poor, and raiser of the dead; these elements are not original, but the combination of them makes for a striking similarity to Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels: someone remarkable not so much for the position he inherits and holds, but for the comprehensively benevolent and powerful things he does; he might be seen as a sort of apotheosis of the common man.

  By such routes, Jesus’ identification in the Gospel accounts as “the son of mankind” could be the ultimate dual coding. It could mean the obvious, that this was a person—he wouldn’t even necessarily stand out; it could also mean that this was the sovereign leader of the Jews and, in that role, the savior of the world. The phrase, in the context of the Gospels, has so much sonority, so much special weight, that I write “son of mankind” instead of “son of a human being,” which was my initial choice. (In addition, the change helped me navigate the nightmare range of anthrōpos, “human being” in Greek: it can—and in the Gospels does—mean anyone from Jesus, a human being in an indescribably elevated sense, to a “person,” a “guy,” or a “you there.” Pilate uses it with pitying contempt of Jesus: “Look at this guy,” not “Behold the man!”)

  The extreme flexibility, and frequent vagueness, of the Hebrew and Aramaic words for “son” (sometimes “son of” looks like a mere expansion or intensification of “of”) allowed another important interpretive journey. “Son of God” had long meant a special servant of God; it was probably never meant literally, at least never during the historical period:* even the greatest kings and prophets and miracle workers in the Hebrew Bible are shown as strictly human. But with the help of the translated Greek phrase used among followers of Jesus with Diaspora or pagan backgrounds, “son of God” came to mean a single human offspring of the omnipotent and omnipresent deity. Children of divinities were staples of pagan mythology and hero cult, and the Roman emperor himself was styled “son of god” and worshipped accordingly, so commonsensical and religious outrage must have been lulled in many minds when it came to similar claims about Jesus—but the Jewish establishment, especially in and around Jerusalem, plainly thought that all such claims were blasphemy.

  The clash between Jewish and early Christian thought on this score was therefore a sort of cosmological drama, the intellectual version of the apocalyptic contest between incompatible worlds. In the Gospels, again, the conflict saw the stretching of traditional language past the breaking point. What was the result really like?

  To keep my balance in the face of this question, I had to resist evaluating the later historical, social, and intellectual spectacles enacted around the Bible—though my Quaker predecessors have been players in them. I had to try to be just a translator, concentrating on the texts as messages from the authors to the earliest readers. This is in no way to reject sectarian uses of the New Testament, but merely to confess that I have no hope of contributing to them. Anyone who asks me about ritual or theology—the latter word, by the way, did not exist until many generations after the latest Gospel—will find me even more ignorant than most Quakers. I am not equipped to deal with any later abstractions, rationalizations, or syntheses; I can only try to communicate in English what is in the ancient texts.

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  In general, I have had to be more blunt and literal than I would have liked. Various concessions to modern accessibility were of course essential. As noted above, I use the word “Gospels,” and not a direct translation of the Greek word for “good news,” in my book title and my exposition. I use the conventional system of numbering verses and chapters, though it was not instituted in full until the sixteenth century; without these numbers, it would be hard to compare my translation with others’, which would be untransparent and very irritating to readers.

  But nearly all my proper names are transliterations of the names as they appear in the Greek text. What we are used to seeing in English translations as “James,” for example, appears in the Greek as Iakōbos, so I write Iakōbos. Jesus is Iēsous; the letter J was a Renaissance invention. Jerusalem is sometimes Hierosoluma and sometimes Ierousalēm. The Greek forms of words are not always consistent, even within a given episode; Mary is either Maria or Mariam: one is more like a Greek name, the other closer to the common Aramaic women’s name. But nothing could be precisely what was heard in Judea, in a different language family and represented by a different alphabet. I feel that the halfway nature of the names in Greek is itself a good reminder that the text was, even in its rudiments, a squinting struggle to see Jesus’ world. But I don’t carry this original phonology into my own discussions and explanations; again, that would be an annoyance. A list of these new spellings, keyed to the standard ones in English Bibles, follows the Glossary below and has its own introductory note.

  The edited Greek text itself contains special markers of editorial process and judgment where the issues are worth noting—and this means virtually everywhere. I have decided to include only square brackets that are placed around words of questionable authenticity (and I include the brackets only when there is a direct enough relationship between the Greek and English words to make such inclusion practical). My reasoning is threefold. First, it seemed wrong to follow all the Bible translations I know and not include any of the markers. My retained brackets are a periodic reminder that the Greek text I use—the best text available—is an artifact of modern scholarship, not (like an unearthed mosaic, for example) the real, original thing. Second, doubt about authenticity is among the most important reactions that an editor signals. Third, these are the least distracting and puzzling of the various markers; it is common knowledge that square brackets mean weaker authority for the words they enclose.

  I’ve also kept to practices of capitalization as I see them in the Nestle-Aland edition of the Greek text. “Temple” is not a capitalized word there; neither is “God” or “Lord”; neither is the word for Passover, usually. Sometimes scholarly opinion diverges as to whether a Greek word should be capitalized; I follow Nestle-Aland rather than the lexicons.

  I mean no offense; and in my discussions, I do follow the English conventions. But I shrink from obscuring what I might call a “lowercase understanding” of certain terms in ancient minds, particularly when the terms are common and critical. The word theos for “god” tended to be generic in Greek; the Jewish deity was not sharply distinguished through the use of this particular word from a multitude of ordinary pagan male deities, or from any conception outside Judaism of a singular or supreme deity. Granted, in the New Testament, it is usually “the god,” with the definite article, but pagans were capable of referring to “the god” too. Also granted, both the Gospels and the Septuagint translation of Jewish scripture allude to the Hebrew proper name for God, Yahweh, representing it by the Greek word kurios, or “lord,” in parallel to the Hebrew adonai, for “my lord,” which was (and still is) substituted, in reading aloud, for the unutterable “Yahweh.” But the sense of a proper name in either theos or kurios, a sense tha
t would need to be borne out by capitalization, was apparently not discernible to the modern editors of the Greek text, who did go as far as to capitalize christos in instances when they judged it to be part of Jesus’ name (and I follow their usage there). I trust these editors to show what the authors most likely meant, and what the earliest audiences thought they were reading and hearing, much more than I trust later customs for presenting scripture.

  When a Gospel author merely transliterates a Hebrew or Aramaic word, I do the same, and if that word isn’t a capitalized name, I place it in italics. This would have been, after all, a foreign word, unfamiliar to many contemporary readers—perhaps a little strange to the author himself. The word used for Passover, for example, is pascha, which I retain.

  I have tried to keep the pages as directly communicative and uncluttered as possible. The original physical form of the Gospels was a set of papyrus rolls with only the text on them. Of course, a modern translation can’t be that self-contained and self-explanatory, but it is easy for readers to access maps, specialized indexes, appendixes, and so on elsewhere if they want them; such guidance tends to all be in one nearby volume, a modern Bible—not to mention scholarly resources on the Internet. But I hope readers will pursue my translation almost without pausing, which is what a scroll invited: you would unwind it at one side while you wound it back up at the other, like a roll of film. As with a film, it was a chore to hop around between different parts, and much more natural to have a continuous experience—though, as I’ve written above, few members of the early Jesus movement would have had opportunities to take in an entire scroll.

  Particularly noxious to a vivid experience of the Gospels is constant reference to the “harmony” (and lack of it) of the four texts, that plague of scholarly biblical footnotes. The Gospels—the first three most of all—tend to share episodes, and the variations in detail can be interesting. But for my purposes here, I need a special reason—something that will enliven understanding of the whole work—to go into a commonality or contrast that is mapped anyway in innumerable charts online and in print for anyone who wants to make such a detour.

  The above are mere matters of presentation, the easiest part of calling it as I see it. The heart, and the trick, of any ancient literary work is the nexus of content and style. A translator must get a plausible sense not only of what was performed, but how, as the how was usually integral to the what. In translations of the pagan Greek and Roman Classics, the nexus has, as a rule, been ignored. In New Testament translation, it’s worse: the self-expressive text has fallen under the muffling, alien weight of later Christian institutions and had the life nearly smothered out of it.

  But even when I have applied the scholarly tools I have, levered up this bulk a little, and let the text breathe easier and start to speak for itself, it does not readily get with the translation program: it speaks to itself and not to me; there is no author in his familiar role, reaching out to me across the centuries and using all his training and ingenuity. The Gospels are an inward-looking, self-confirming set of writings, containing some elements of conventional rhetoric and poetics but not constructed to make a logical or aesthetic case for themselves; the case is Jesus, so the words don’t stoop to argue or entice with any great effort, as if readers were supposed to have the choice to yawn or say “What?” or turn up their noses in the manner of an ordinary audience.

  In the Gospels, densely used modes of expression, such as the words for saying and answering and coming and going, are tedious. Many speeches are flat rather than colloquial. The influence of the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible can pull the language toward dutifulness and dullness.

  A good example is the word that I render as the command “Look” or “See”—the old “Behold.” It is so frequent, and so frequently stilted-sounding, that many translators drop most instances. The Greek is an imperative (in a few simple forms) of the commonest verb for seeing. But its ancestor is the Hebrew Bible’s demonstrative particle hinneh, used to great effect for turns in a story and for revelatory perception, including of miraculous signs. (See Matthew 1:23, quoting Isaiah 7:14.) Hinneh is never an impatient or finger-pointing word, yet the abrupt command to see is used in its place in the Septuagint and the Gospels because Greek has no such word as hinneh—nor does English, for that matter. But there seems to be no choice except to continue the crude substitution. I am not in the business of correcting the Gospel authors in their role as translators.

  Even as a literary or rhetorical project, such correction would be wrongheaded. Naturally in the Gospels exposition, which goes in its own direction away from the character and purposes of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek command to “look” takes on new uses. When Jesus introduces a story, analogy, or precept this way, he sounds much more condescending or exasperated than, say, a Hebrew Bible prophet does in interlacing his poetic sermon with hinneh. But this difference suits who Jesus is. He is a “teacher,” but often a short-tempered, contemptuous, and withholding one—not a prophet with a passion to persuade. Moreover, Jesus’ “students” seem to deserve this treatment, as they tend to be lazy, incurious, and distractible. The motif of failed instruction is integral to this work of literature; it is thematic. Jesus, who is the point, is above having to explain himself; he is above everything, and certainly not accountable to feeble human language. And his students are so far below him that their demands for answers verge on impious rebellion.

  But I object strongly to characterizations of the Gospels as crude and lacking in charm and nuance. Both “ordinary” and exquisitely educated people have long delighted in the Gospel texts, the latter making vigorous excuses for their obvious aesthetic faults. The works, from their beginnings to their ends, somehow work—which is all the more remarkable in that there are four distinct authors telling the same story. These authors deserve the utmost effort to represent them to the best effect. If it seems that I have cherry-picked, with repetitious translations of words like “said” and “answered” (some translators introduce a range of variations along the lines of “remarked” and “retorted”) on the one hand, and on the other hand whimsical word choices to represent slang and wordplay, I can only plead that I am a literary translator, following rhetorical performance where I see it, but not creating my own on no textual basis. I have tried hard not to impose modern standards and styles on the Gospels, but to have respect for their original tones and shapes.

  In any event, I have found much more in the way of jokes, color, point, and cohesion in the Greek than in their standard English translations. Here is an example of how insensitive rendering can distort a whole episode: In standard English Bibles, Jesus seems to give a harsh scolding to a non-Jewish woman who seeks a healing miracle for her child (Matthew 15:22–28, Mark 7:24–30). But in the Greek he calls non-Jews not dogs (kunes), a straightforward insult, but the rare and comical “little doggies” (kunaria). She replies with the same word, citing the animals’ tolerated scrounging under the table, a comic image in ancient pagan literature. Her implication is that, yes, dogs don’t belong at the table, but they get their share because there’s plenty to go around. Since the “eschatological banquet” of God’s ultimate providence is an endless, joyful meal, why would there be no room for dogs under heaven’s table? Jesus instantly concedes that the woman has effected her daughter’s recovery “through what you said…” He may be actually congratulating her on her wit.

  As usual in the Gospels, however, the tone and the point depend on a single word, not on the thoroughgoing formal structures, interwoven in the narrative or discourse, that are the norm for other ancient literature. This contrast made it clear to me what kind of research is most essential for a better translation of the Gospels: scouring lexicons and electronic databases of ancient literature. In this way, I was able to move away from one-word translations that seemed to exist only because they were traditional, such as “disciple” for the Greek word mathētēs (which means �
�student”) and “angel” for the Greek word aggelos (which means “messenger”).

  But such fixes were relatively easy. Since the ancient Greek literary vocabulary was tiny yet multivalent, a bigger challenge for me was to decide which of two (or three, or seven) meanings a particular word had in a particular context, and to find an English word to approximate that meaning. Standard Bible translations tend to render an important Greek word the same way many times, with little or no attention to fit.

  Sometimes the difference made by the correct translation of a single word can be shattering. In the famous passage in John, Chapter 3, about being “born again” into eternal life, the meanings “again” and “from above” (which here implies “from heaven”) are equally valid for the Greek word anōthen. Jesus is teasing the quizzical Nicodemus with a pun, which is itself a lesson. Nicodemus never does understand what Jesus is saying about salvation; nor, apparently, is he meant to; nor, actually, can I. Through the inquirer’s obtuseness and Jesus’ scolding, the reader also is warned not to construe divine purposes as “Do this, get that”; everyone must simply trust Jesus. This is one place where a single rendering of a word is not adequate to the sense, so I write “born again, taking it straight from the top.”

  Word choices relevant to one or two passages, as in this case, are explained in footnotes. But to avoid repetitive footnotes to justify repeated new interpretations, I have included a glossary below; the entry words are the vocabulary of standard English Bibles, for easy reference.