Author: Roger Pearse

Paying more for translations

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Over the last few years I have commissioned various kind people to make translations for us of ancient texts.  But in that time prices have not remained static; yet I have tended to offer the same money.  I only realised this last night.

Inflation is a curse, because it creeps up on you.  “Quantitative easing” is the current weasel-phrase for printing money, which makes every coin in circulation suddenly worth less.  The official inflation statistics continue to give ridiculously low figures, which tells me only that they are being fixed.

What is the real rate of inflation?  It’s much higher.  In the last few years prices have increased quite a bit.  But it’s hard to know how much, other than by feel.  This is why the dishonest inflation rates are such a curse.

But I do know that petrol in 2007 was 87p a litre in the UK on average; in 2012 it is now 134p a litre, an increase of 65%!   That feels much more like the real change in prices in my weekly grocery bill.  In the UK, admittedly, the government taxes this essential heavily; but an overall increase of 50% seems reasonable.  I only wish my income had increased by a similar amount!

I think, therefore, that I will apply a 50% increase to the money that I pay for translation.  That’s only fair to the translators.

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Some notes on the lexicon of Festus

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a manuscript in the Farnese collection, in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples (shelfmark Bibl. Naz. IV.A.3), known as the Farnesianus or F, because it once formed part of the library of Cardinal Ranuccio Farnese.  This contains a text consisting of words and definitions, entitled De significatione verborum, On the meaning of words.  The manuscript tells us that the author is an otherwise unknown Sextus Pompeius Festus.[1]  The manuscript itself is 11th or 12th century.

The manuscript consists of 41 folios of parchment, written on both sides in two columns, giving us 164 columns of text.

The manuscript has suffered damage.  More than a few of the columns show signs of burning on their exterior margin, and most of the folios show evident traces of fire.  However, for some folios, the burned portion has been cut away, and on folio 19, this means that the outer column is completely gone.  The first eight folios are often nearly illegible.  The parchment itself is often pierced here and there by small holes or cuts.

From the ninth folio, the writing is very neat and clear, but heavily abbreviated.  Each entry is begun with majuscule letters, used only for this purpose.

The manuscript seems to have been discovered in Illyria at the start of the 16th century, and brought to Italy.[2]

A good bibliography may be found in the Festus Lexicon Project, which points out that the French translation is at Remacle.org here.  I was unable to locate a copy of the W. M. Lindsay edition of 1913 online, unfortunately.

Fay Glinister writes at the Festus Lexicon Project:

The text, even in its present mutilated state, is an important source for scholars of Roman history. It is a treasury of historical, grammatical, legal and antiquarian learning, providing sometimes unique evidence for the culture, language, political, social and religious institutions, deities, laws, lost monuments, and topographical traditions of ancient Italy.

Festus is important, too, in terms of his numerous explicit citations of early Roman authors, from Fabius Pictor on. He quoted or used many ancient sources, including authors – poets, grammarians, jurists and antiquarians – whose works do not survive elsewhere.

In the case of Plautus, the quotations that survive in Festus are particularly important, as they antedate the edition from which the archetype derives, and sometimes preserve a true reading not otherwise attested.

We could sometimes wish that Festus included more: in quoting, his practice is typically to complete the line, whether or not the sense of the passage can be understood.

The text of Festus sometimes preserves very early traditions, or readings of other authors. For example, the quotation from the Augustan jurist Antistius Labeo’s work on pontifical law in Festus 474, 476L, apparently from priestly records, may be earlier than Varro’s discussion of the Septimontium in LL 5.41.

Other frequently cited authors include Lucilius, Caecilius, Accius, Afranius, Titinius, the grammarian Cornificius, and of course Varro (directly cited about twenty times; in addition a number of other entries have been attributed to him). Festus also includes many glosses of legal character, and cites jurists such as Mucius Scaevola, Sulpicius Rufus, Ateius Capito and so on.

Festus’ many sources represent a wide range of Republican scholarly antiquity, but it is also worthwhile looking at him in the context of his own time. The choice he made to work on such material is quite an interesting one. Clearly, he was interested in the Roman past, but as the first part of his work is lost, we lack any explicit personal statement of his aims.

Nevertheless, his literary activity can be understood in the general context of the cultural attitudes of the second century. He is concerned with the recovery of Roman antiquities of all kinds, and with early literary works (such as those by Ennius and Cato), which fits in with the arcaising and antiquarian interests of a number of near-contemporary Latin authors such as Probus, Apuleius, and most notably Aulus Gellius, author of the Attic Nights.

Hmm.  Now that sounds interesting, although an English translation would definitely need footnotes.  She also believes he is a writer of the 2nd century, not the 4th.

I’ve had a quick look at a couple of sections of the remacle transcription, and came across one entry that seemed interesting:

SOL.  The sun is so named because it is alone.  It is named sometimes sun, sometimes Apollo: You are Apollo, you are alone (Sol) in the sky / heaven.

In this light, the cult of Sol Invictus in the late empire takes on a new meaning.

Likewise the expression “sub corona”, under the crown, is of interest.  There are versions of this in the extracts by Paul the Deacon, as well as the direct text.

SUB CORONA: Captives are said to be sold “under the crown”, because they are sold with their head decorated with a crown.  Cato says: “Let the people give thanks to the gods for giving them success, rather than see themselves sold, wearing a crown, following a defeat.”

SUB CORONA: We say “sold under the crown” because usually a crown is placed on the head of captives when they are sold, as Cato says in his book On the military art: “Let the people go and give thanks to the gods for a success, wearing a crown, rather than be sold, wearing a crown, following a defeat.” However this sign indicates that nothing is owed by the people, as Plautus also indicates in his Little Garden: “Let the crier be crowned, so that he may be sold for any price.”

I wonder whether the custom may explain the passage in Tertullian’s De corona militis where soldiers who worshipped Mithras refused to wear a crown during the distribution of the donatives from the emperor, on the grounds that “Mithras is my crown”?  The crowns were worn for celebration; but clearly it could have another meaning, of ownership.

Another anecdote:

RIDEO, INQUIT GALBA CANTERIO [“I laugh,” said Galba to his horse], is a proverb which Sinnius Capito interprets thus: “If a man falls at the first moment when he begins something.”  Suplicius Galba, setting out for the province that had been assigned to him, saw his horse fall right at the gate of the City.  “I laugh,” he said, “O horse, to see you already tired, with so long a journey to do and so short a distance from the start.”

PRAETORIA COHORS.  The praetorian cohort, so named because it always accompanied the praetor.  Scipio Africanus was the first to select the bravest men from the army, and form a body who would always accompany him during the war, being exempt from all other service and receiving a sixfold wage.

PRAETORIA PORTA.  This name is given to the gate of the camp from which the army goes out to go to fight, because in the beginning the praetors fulfilled the functions assigned today to the consuls, and directed the operations of the war: their tent was likewise called the “praetorium”.

PUNICUM.  A type of cake, the use of which came from the Carthaginians.  Also called probum, because much more delicate than the others.

PECULIUM.  Money belonging to slaves is so called from pecus, just as money belonging to the head of the family is called pecunia.

Other entries of interest that I saw were those on the October Horse and the Ordo Sacerdotum (order of precedence of the priests), but there is much else of interest to the casual reader in this work.  If Aulus Gellius can be read in English, it seems like a pity that Festus cannot be.

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  1. [1]C. O. Muller, p.ii, footnote 2, quoting Politian to this effect.↩
  2. [2]A. Savagner, Sextus Pompeius Festus, De la Signification des mots, vol. 1, 1846, preface.↩

The scientist revolt against academic journal publishing

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It seems that the scientists are getting fed up with the whole system of academic journal publishing.  A correspondent writes, drawing my attention to a rather wonderful story from the Guardian, back in April.  The story is long, and full of interesting detail.

Academic spring: how an angry maths blog sparked a scientific revolution

Alok Jha reports on how a Cambridge mathematician’s protest has led to demands for open access to scientific knowledge

It began with a frustrated blogpost by a distinguished mathematician. Tim Gowers and his colleagues had been grumbling among themselves for several years about the rising costs of academic journals.

They, like many other academics, were upset that the work produced by their peers, and funded largely by taxpayers, sat behind the paywalls of private publishing houses that charged UK universities hundreds of millions of pounds a year for the privilege of access.

There had been talk last year that a major scientific body might come out in public to highlight the problem and rally scientists to speak out against the publishing companies, but nothing was happening fast.

So, in January this year, Gowers wrote an article on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest publisher of scientific journals in the world.

He was not expecting what happened next. Thousands of people read the post and hundreds left supportive comments. Within a day, one of his readers had set up a website, The Cost of Knowledge, which allowed academics to register their protest against Elsevier.

The site now has almost 9,000 signatories, all of whom have committed themselves to refuse to either peer review, submit to or undertake editorial work for Elsevier journals. “I wasn’t expecting it to make such a splash,” says Gowers. “At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up.”

Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University and winner of the prestigious Fields Medal, had hit a nerve with academics who were increasingly fed up with the stranglehold that a few publishing companies have gained over the publication and distribution of the world’s scientific research.

The current publishing model for science is broken, argue an ever-increasing number of supporters of open access publishing, a model whereby all scientific research funded by taxpayers would be made available on the web for free.

Expensive paywalls not only waste university funds, they say, but slow down future scientific discovery and put up barriers for interested members of the public, politicians and patients’ groups who need access to primary research in order to exercise their democratic rights.

Stephen Curry, a structural biologist at Imperial College London, says that scientists need to come to a new arrangement with publishers fit for the online age and that “for a long time, we’ve been taken for a ride and it’s got ridiculous”.

…

Academic publishers charge UK universities about £200m a year to access scientific journals, almost a tenth of the £2.2bn distributed to them by the government, via the funding councils, for the basic running costs of university research.

Despite the recession, these charges helped academic publishers operate with profit margins of 35% or more , while getting their raw materials and the work of thousands of taxpayer- and charity-funded scientists free.

The big three publishing houses – Elsevier, Springer and Wiley – own most of the world’s more than 20,000 academic journals and account for about 42% of all journal articles published. And, even as library budgets over the past few years in the UK and North America have been flat or declining, journal prices have been rising by 5-7% a year or more.

A standalone subscription to one of Elsevier’s most expensive journals, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, costs more than €18,000 (£15,000) a year. Most universities buy bundles of journals, however, so they can soon rack up bills of more than £1m each to access the journals their academics request.

…

It is easy for most research scientists to remain oblivious to the high cost of journal subscriptions, because they are not usually the ones having to negotiate with publishers, says Sir Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust.

As an active researcher, he had easy access to all the papers he wanted and only became aware of the costs involved, he says, when he arrived at the trust and tried to read a paper that had been produced as a result of a research grant from the charity, only to be faced with an article charge of £25. “Not surprisingly, I felt somewhat resentful about it,” he says.

This is excellent news.  The emperor has no clothes; and the fact is now becoming public knowledge.  And where the scientists lead, the humanities will follow.

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Some literary sources on the “nundinal days”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Yesterday I talked about the “nundinal days”, the “8-day week” that the Romans used for market day, in addition to the lunar 7-day week.  I thought that some primary sources might be useful here.  This site lists quite a few, and Lacus Curtius has a good article here.  So let’s look at this.

The Saturnalia of Macrobius is not accessible to me in English, but I understand that book 1, chapters 6, 13 and 16 are all of interest.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book 2, ch. 28:

In time of peace he [Romulus] accustomed them to remain at their tasks in the country, except when it was necessary for them to come to market, upon which occasions they were to meet in the city in order to traffic, and to that end he appointed every ninth day for the markets; …

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, book 7, ch. 58:

The Romans had markets then, as now, every eighth day, upon which days the plebeians resorted to the city from the country and exchanged their produce for the goods they bought, settled their grievances in court, and ratified by their votes such matters of public business as either et laws assigned or the senate referred to them for decision; and as the greater part of them were small farmers and poor, they passed in the country the seven days intervening between the markets.

The next item referenced looks like a lexicon: and it turns out that “Festus” is indeed just that, an imperial-era dictionary, De verborum significatu, by Sextus Pompeius Festus, transmitted by a single damaged manuscript and supplemented by extracts made at the end of the 8th century by Paul the Deacon.   There is, remarkably, a Festus Lexicon Project, from which I borrow these details, although it has not been updated since 2009.  There are various editions, some online.[1] A French translation exists[2], facing the Latin text. 

Pompeius Festus, De verborum significatu, “Nundinalem Cocum”; “Nundinas” (p.295 and 296 of vol. 1 of Savagner’s text and translation, p.317 and 318 of the PDF above):

NUNDINAS feriarum diem esse voluerunt, quo mercandi gratia Urbem rustici convenirent.

NUNDINAE: They wanted the day to be a holiday, so that country-folk might gather at the City for trade.

NUNDINALEM COCUM: Plautus dixit in Aulularia: “Cocus ille nundinale est, in nonum diem solet ire coctum;” hic ab alis novendialis appellatur et cocum viliorem significat, quem tenuiores educebant, ut in nonum diem coqueret.

NUNDINALIS COCUS [i.e. The market-day cook]: Plautus said in the Pot of Gold, “He is a holiday coook, accustomed to cook on the ninth day;” this is called by others “novendialis” [i.e. ninth-day cook], and they give this term the meaning of a poor-quality cook, whom the nobodies give praise to in order that he will cook on the ninth day. 

That’s all that I shall look at tonight, but so far so good!

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  1. [1]E.g. C.O. Mueller, Sexti Pompei Festi De uerborum significatione quae supersunt cum Pauli Epitome, 1839, online here.↩
  2. [2]A. Savagner, Sextus Pompeius Festus, De la Signification des mots, Paris, 2 vols., 1846.  How reliable this is I do not know.  Online: Vol. 1, Vol.2.↩

The Latium parapegma and the nundinal days

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In the Chronography of 354 A.D., which may be found online here, part 6 consists of a calendar.  The days of the month are listed. I give an extract from January here:

I don’t know what the first column is.  The second column, in Roman numerals, are the days of the week, 1-7.  Each week of 7 days corresponds to one of the 4 phases of the moon, which results in the “lunar month” of 28 days.

But what about the third column?  This shows a “week” of 8 days, numbered 1-8 in Roman numerals?

These are the nundinae, the “nundinal days”.

How do we know this?  Well, we might look at the “Latium parapegma”.  This is a slab of rock with inscriptions on it, with holes against the words.  Here’s a photograph, followed by a proposed restoration.[1]

Note the “nundinae” column on the right hand side.  Note the peg hole, and the list of 8 names.  Most are the names of towns in Latium, except for “in vico”, i.e. in the village, i.e. “here”. 

This is, I am told, all about market days.  Once every eight days, there would be a market and the farmers could buy and sell there.  So there was a cycle of eight days.  It is hypothesised that each town held a market on a different day, and therefore the names above indicate which town was holding a market on that day. 

The word “nundina” is supposed by modern scholars to be derived from novem and dies, i.e. nine and day.  We count 8 days from market day until the next market day; but the Romans counted both market days in that span, making a total of 9, or so I am told.  It would be most interesting to see the data on which all this is based.

A word about peg-calendars (parapegma) is perhaps in order.  I learn from Lehoux that the peg calendar is a farmers’ tool.  It was necessary because the secular calendars did not keep in sync with the seasons. 

We all know how the Julian calendar came into being; because the Roman calendar had drifted so far away from the real months that winter was in summer and so on.  Likewise politicians would muck around with the calendar for political advantage, adding days and so on.

But this caused a real problem for the farmers, who needed to put their crops in the ground and gather the harvest at set times in the year, when the weather was right.

Their solution was to follow the fixed stars, which rise and set regardless of politics.  And they could then keep track of days using a bunch of lists, and move a peg along the list, each day.  If they had a slab with several lists on it, as in the Latium parapegma, this would synchronise all the various markers; days of winter, nundinal days, ordinary week days, and so on.  In this way the farmer could know what time of year it was and when to go to market.

It makes you grateful for modern calendars!

It also raises a question.  If illiteracy was so widespread in antiquity as some assert, why do parapegmas exist?  The answer is perhaps that middle-class illiteracy was by no means https://www.sages.org/ambien-online/ as rare as some might think, and that farm managers would need to be both literate and numerate.

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  1. [1]Both of these in much reduced form from amoxicillin Daryn Lehoux, Astronomy, Weather and Calendars in the ancient world.  Google cialis online books preview here.↩

British MP attacks Charity Commission attempt to tax the Brethren

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Good news.  British MP Douglas Carswell today writes how absurd it is that a modern quango is involving itself in deciding which religious groups are allowed to be charities, and which must be taxed:

Religious freedom means – amongst other things – allowing practitioners of a faith to decide for themselves who is, and who is not, part of their denomination. In other words, they can be as exclusive as they like.

The Charity Commission is imposing a state dogma of uber inclusivity on to a religious group that chooses to be moderately exclusive. Not very Big Society, is it?

Once again, when state officials make a decision on what constitutes public interest or benefit, actual members of the public – such as those Brethren who live in my part of Essex – have no say.  If the Brethren fail to tick all the Charity Commission’s boxes, change the Commission and their boxes.  

Instead of replacing one quango chief with another, we need to overturn the dogma that says it is any business of state officials to be sitting in judgement of faith groups in this way in the first place.

I wrote about this story here.  It is good to see that mainstream conservatives have no desire to engage in this 17th century business.

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Finereader 11 – do not install!

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I have just, this evening, finished adding manually italics to 40 pages of a scanned text in Finereader 11.  I export this to Word, and it doesn’t seem to contain my changes.  And … while I was fiddling with formatting on the very last page, and trying to export my work, it has silently erased all my formatting changes in the previous 39 pages as well!  I am unbelievably angry!  Days and days of work … silently deleted.

This product is not fit for use.  DO NOT BUY IT!

I hate Abbyy.  How can anyone ship such a piece of worthless junk as this?

UPDATE: I took a backup of my disk late afternoon.  I’ve lost all the work since 4:30.  18 pages of manual corrections, all hard on the eyes and the hands.  I really, really hate Abbyy.

UPDATE2: It has taken forever to scan 80 pages of stuff.  I think the problem has always, always been Abbyy Finereader 11.  The filters to export don’t work properly; and when you change settings, things happen which you don’t want and didn’t like.  I’m not sure what best to do, but I am quite sure that I have had enough of FR11.

UPDATE3: And I can’t even export the 22 pages of corrected stuff that I still have, without erasing all the formatting on every page other than the one displayed in the editor!

Am giving up.  I’ll export the page images out, and read them in again in FR10 and see if I can get better results.  And … don’t I have Omnipage around here somewhere?

So angry.

UPDATE4: And … I realise that all the italic text was garbage, and that I had to manually correct it.  And there is italics on every other ratted line.  I have to do days and days of work again!!!!!

So angry.  I want to hurt someone at Abbyy, really badly.  I want to stick a broken bottle up his backside and twist.  How dare they ship stuff this badly broken?!?

UPDATE5: OK … what happens if I go into the 22 page version and just do Ctrl-A, select all the contents, page by page, and paste them into Word?  Answer: word sees verse numbers and starts trying to assign automatic page numbers.  Grrrr!!!

Now trying Wordpad instead.

Two broken bottles up the backside of the CEO of Abbyy and twisting really hard.  I want to hear him scream like a damned soul.  You swine, how dare you put me through this?

Wordpad seems to work.  Setting FR11 so that the whole page is displayed before doing the Ctrl-A saves paging up and down, since Abbyy have also broken the next-page hot-key in FR11.

Well, it works more or less.  The Ctrl-A doesn’t include the * against footnotes at the bottom of each page.

UPDATE6: Well, I have rescued, more or less, my 22 pages in a .rtf file.  I am loathe ever to touch FR11 again.

UPDATE7: Looks like I have lost most of the italics in the first 40 pages as well!!!!

The trouble is, if you can only work at things for an hour or two here or there, you rely on the software to keep things straight.  In this case, I shall have to stop work tomorrow, and not look at this again for ages.  So … when I come back, will I even remember where I am?  And will I remember how the software has been biting me?

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Official: Christians banned from operating adoption agencies in UK

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s now official.  In Britain, you may not operate an adoption agency if you are a Christian.  That is, according to a doubtless carefully selected judge, the law.  The establishment have kept the story quiet, as well they might; but there is a report in the Daily Mail:

… a  four-year legal battle by the adoption  society Catholic Care against  equality laws making it place children with gay  couples. … Mr Justice  Sales rejected the claims of the Leeds-based agency.  His ruling means it will now abandon its  100-year-old adoption service, which found families for ten children every  year. …

Catholic Care said it will now be  forced to  close its adoption service. Ten other Catholic adoption  societies have already  stopped all their adoption work.

Labour’s Sexual Orientation Regulations came  into force in 2008 and became part of the Equality Act passed in  2010.

And why is this?  Because gay lobbyists insist that every adoption agency must provide boys to “gay couples” if they desire it, and the establishment has enacted laws that mean resisting this absurd and evil demand is “discrimination”.

The classic method of religious persecution is to demand of a religious group that they do something which the person demanding it knows is forbidden by their beliefs; and then discriminate against them when they refuse, by denying them various civil rights.

Well, Catholic Emancipation was nice while it lasted.  What was it?  150 years in which being a Catholic was not a bar to employment or running a business?  The charity has provided adoption services for nearly all that period, since 1865.  But no longer.

And how do those responsible report this?  Here’s the Huffington Post, in a gorgeous example of deliberate dishonesty.  The emphasis is mine.

Catholic Charity May Close Adoption Services Over Gay Couples Ruling

A Roman Catholic charity said it might close its adoption services after a tribunal ruled that it cannot refuse to help gay couples adopt.

Catholic Care, the care agency for the Diocese of Leeds, has already been told by the Charity Commission it cannot opt out of equality laws that force it to offer adoption services to homosexuals.

Following the ruling, it said: “Without the constitutional restriction for which it applied, Catholic Care will be forced to close its adoption service.

“In doing so, it will be joining many other faith-based adoption services that have been forced to close since 2008.

“The reason for this is that the services permitted by the current constitution are in conflict with the aims of the charity.

It is good that the charity has persisted with this case.  For it lays open the bigotry of the establishment, from the Charities Commission, which would rather leave children in orphanages than have Catholics find homes for them; to the corrupt judicial system which knows very well that freedom of conscience is a basic human right, yet finds against those who appeal to it; to the dishonest BBC, which does not even report on the story (as far as I can see); to the left-leaning blogs like Huffington Post that misrepresent the story; to the newspaper owners who follow the line; to the supposedly “alternative” TV stations like Al-Jazeera, which faithfully trot out the dishonest, blaming the victim for failing to conform.  I had not realised myself until tonight, I admit, that stations like RT and Al-Jazeera on UK television were also under the control of the same handful of evil people; but there can be no rational reason why a Moslem TV station would otherwise endorse this.

Let us, however, remember the scripture: bless those who persecute you.  For this world is nothing: eternity is what matters.  Let us look at other blessings that have accrued here, and how God has allowed this evil that good may come from it.

The difference between the church and the world is once again evident.  The gay lobbyists and their allies, in their rage, have caused Christians to witness their sincerity and self-sacrifice for Christ before the whole world.  The Catholic Church stands forth, before the eyes of the whole of the UK, as the true church, willing to be persecuted rather than conform to what is wrong.

The crude accusations that the gay lobbyists and their allies have told redound to the glory of their victims; for who needs to misrepresent the facts about criminals?  Rather, the misrepresentations show that the Christians are in the right; for those who are in the right can only be opposed by deceit and misrepresentation.  Let us then bless the gaystapo, as they have rightly been called, for their testimony to Christ.

Catholic Care have demonstrated, before the eyes of heaven and earth, that they serve only one God, Jesus Christ; and are faithful whatever the cost.

Well done, you good and faithful servants.

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From my diary

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve continued to work on the transcription of Theodoret’s Commentary on Romans.  It seems like I have been working on this forever!

Last night I downloaded a copy of all the works of Synesius from Jona Lendering’s site, Livius.org.  Jona very kindly agreed, quite a long time ago now, to allow me to include these in the public domain collection of texts, but I never even acquired a copy of his pages on this.  At least I did that much!

I’ve also continued reading Daryn Lehoux’s book on Roman peg-calendars, which continues to be very clear and lucid.

In the 70’s and 80’s the “Restoration” movement set out to return churches to a New Testament model of organisation.  Their magazine, also called Restoration, was digitised recently into PDF’s and is available on CD for the rather large sum of nearly £30, including P&P.  A copy of this arrived this morning, but I haven’t yet looked into it.  I have already found, however, disclaimers by the movement leader, Bryn Jones, of the excesses of the “Shepherding” movement of the early 80’s.

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Does reading the New Testament in Greek undermine your faith? And what can you do about it?

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Christians revere the word of God.  We base our lives on it.  We study it, trying to immerse ourselves in it, in order to shape ourselves into what God wants us to be.

But we do this using translations of the word into English (or French, if we are French; German if we are German; and so on).  Inevitably we come to think of the standard translation of our day as the word of God, and its phrasing as divine.

If we come to Christ in our teens, the bible that our church uses will be the one that shapes our thinking, whose wording is embedded in our soul.  The songs we sing will use those words.  When we pray, and listen to His voice, those words are likely to shape how we hear His response.

So what happens to us, psychologically, as teenagers, if we then go to college and learn New Testament Greek and start studying it in the editions such as Nestle-Aland?  If the bible we know is “just a translation”; if we know that the “original Greek” is regarded as more authoritative, then there is the risk of two psychological effects.  Indeed it will be rather difficult for the ordinary teenager to avoid being influenced subconciously by one or both of these.

Firstly, we will certainly find ourselves asking how can we treat every word and subclause of the English translation that we knew as baby-Christians as the very words of God, when we can see the Greek, and see how the translators had to turn a knotty bit of syntax into something that made sense in English?  Does this not, inevitably, cause us to value the English less?  How can it not?  How can you treat something as divine when you can see where it deviates from the Greek?  Note that here I presume no error worse than the occasional paraphrase or mistake — the deliberate mistranslations of the new NIV are worse still, from this point of view.

How do we avoid this loss of trust, when we know that the Greek is authoritative?  And worse yet, when we see all the variants in the Greek, how can we even trust that?  What does it mean to believe that “For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished” (Mt. 5:18) when we know that the dots and iotas vary in the mss?

The second problem derives from the first.  A youthful mind, observing that knowledge of the Greek allows one to see mistakes and infelicities in the English, is naturally prone to become somewhat superior in its attitude to those who have never seen the Greek, and don’t even know of the problem.  Youthful superiority quickly becomes arrogance, a contempt for those trusting in the word in English, and the results are never pleasing.  The victim of it is likely to turn into something to which none of us would give house-room, all the while priding himself on his knowingness, while in reality knowing little more Greek than an undergraduate course in Biblical studies can teach him.  We can all think of blogs written by such fools, who, having abandoned any trust in the word of God, now parrot unthinkingly and even unknowingly the values and ideas of the society in which they happen to live, and which they have never evaluated.   Unconcious influence does not tend to produce critical thinking.

But what do we say, in response to this, even if we manage to avoid the laughable mistake of the second kind?

In the days when we all read the Authorised Version, there was a short answer.   The problem was reduced to some extent by the sheer prestige of that version.  It was possible to consider that God had inspired also the translators — and why not? –, and therefore to sidestep the issue.

But does anyone today suppose this of, for example, the translators of the New International Version, who shy at the word “heretic” and translate the plain old Greek word for “brothers” as “brothers and sisters”?  I think, in fact, if they had resisted the urge to tinker with the translation and left it alone, this might have happened; that the NIV translation would have become authoritative.  But I don’t think that will happen now.

I would suggest that we need to step back, and remember the fallenness of the world.  Let us suppose that God dictated an English version of the scriptures to me tomorrow (which, happily, is unlikely), perfect in every way.  Naturally I type this up in Microsoft Word, send it to the printers, the books appear and … there is a typo on page 1.  Or the typesetters omitted the last paragraph on page 397.  Or there is something.  What then?  Or, if this seems improbable, just run the book through a few reprints, and the same problems will certainly appear.

Imagine our position, in that situation.  Do we, or do we not, have the version that God dictated?

The answer of course is that it would be crazy to say that we didn’t have the gospel as revealed to me, in this illustration.  Of course we have the word; but in a damaged form.

The damage is inevitable.  We live in a fallen world.  We have treasure from heaven, but in earthen vessels.

God knows this.  We know this.  The English translations must be imperfect, because English is not a perfect language and the translators are not perfect men.  The Greek text must reach us in imperfect form, because the world is not perfect, and the scholars and the printers of the world are not perfect.

But assume that we did have the Greek text in perfect form.  Could we know, certainly, exactly what the meaning of each and every word was, in 80 AD?  Living as we do, almost 2,000 years later?  And we must remember that also, in some parts, the Greek is itself a translation of words uttered in Aramaic by our Lord.

Does any of this mean that we do not have the text?  Fools would answer yes, forgetting that the same argument applies to every book ever written on any subject.  We, as book-reading people, do not pay attention to this to any considerable extent when we read Livy or Tacitus or Jane Austen, and nor should we.  We live in an imperfect world; and we adjust to it.

What we do, in practice, is to minimise all these obstacles to hearing what God has to say.  Yes, the bible is inspired, word by word.  The words contained in it work in our hearts for God — we know this, not just from theory, but because we see it all around us.  We have to grapple with damage; damage in translation, damage in Greek, and much more powerful than any of these, damage when we read and don’t understand what God is saying to us.

The bible is a tool that God has given us.  It is as perfect as He can make it, and no doubt He interferes to help things along.  But not even God can prevent printer errors!  Nor should we expect it.

The English translations, then, are divinely inspired.  They may contain limited damage; yet in truth this is very limited.  A translation has to be very bad before the sense cannot pass through the translators words.  The Greek text is divinely inspired, even though we may not know precisely where the iota and dot should go; because a text has to be very bad before the sense of the sentence is lost.  And when we read it, we pray: so that our understanding is not so bad that we do not hear what God is saying.

It would be very nice if we had a bible that fell from heaven, graven on sheets of water-resistant PVC, which appeared in our hands miraculously when we are saved.  (It is not difficult to see why this is not so, if we imagine what would happen in our fallen world if it was!).  But this is not the case.

Long ago I heard a story of a group of Moslems who had no bibles, and yet, from reading the Koran, came to believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah and the Son of God, and were converted.  Whether it is true I do not know, yet it could be so, and it shows how God works.  God will deal with people where they are.  He can cope with translator error, in order to speak to our souls.  He can cope with the trivial copyist errors that we find in what is, after all, far and away the best preserved Greek text of antiquity.

It is right to study the Greek, so that we can know most accurately what it actually is, and what it actually says.  But I have great doubts that, in the last few centuries, all that effort has actually caused us to learn that a single sentence of scripture was wrongly understood.

The answer, then, is a sense of proportion, and an understanding that the perfection of God’s word is in that word, not in any particular version, damaged as it must be, that comes our way.  We work with what we have, we learn it word for word, and we trust in God to keep the damage at bay, in the text, in the translation, and in our understanding.  And He does.

(And if I have inadvertantly fallen into heresy in this, I pray that God will show me and I will correct it).

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