Today’s Post
Last week we saw how the evolution of language was either precipitated by or led to increased use of the left brain hemisphere to make sense of things differently in Athens than in Jerusalem.
These two major modes of thought can be seen to re-merge in many ways with the advent of Christianity. As Sacks points out, a simple observation on this unprecedented new religion is that “Christianity got its religion from the Hebrews and its rationale from the Greeks”. Today we will begin to address this confluence by addressing the issue of language.
Why Greek?
The gospels, the stories of the life and teachings of Jesus, never appeared in the Jewish dialect, Aramaic, that Jesus spoke. They first appear in Greek, so would not have been understandable to Jesus. Sacks considers this to be very important in understanding the unprecedented dual foundations of Christianity:
“Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, but every book of the New Testament was written in Greek. Jesus wouldn’t have been able to read the New Testament”, therefore, “We have here a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.”
Sacks sees the key influence here as Paul, who was not only Greek educated, but had the objective of carrying the message of the gospel to the Gentiles. He saw Greek scriptures as more suited for dissemination into a wider non-Jewish, Greek-educated culture.
The story of how Paul succeeded in pursuing his objective is told in the Epistles of the New Testament. These ‘epistles’ tell of the struggle with James and Peter, who considered the followers of Jesus to be a new Jewish sect. Had Peter and John succeeded in this struggle, the Gospels would probably had been first documented in Jewish or Aramic.
As Sacks sees, using Greek translations of the gospels, Paul
“..found a ready audience among the Hellenistic Gentiles of the Mediterranean, especially those who had already shown an interest in elements of Jewish practice and faith. It was the Greek- not the Hebrew/Aramaic speaking population that proved to be the fertile soil in which Christianity took root and grew”
The Issues of Translation
The resulting action of translating the Gospels into Greek thus reflected Paul’s goal of making them available to the world at large, but not without issues. As James Barr, Christian Biblical scholar (Biblical Faith and Natural Theology), remarks on the Bible in Greek:
“The attempt, at one time popular and influential, to argue that though the words might be Greek, the thought processes were fundamentally Hebraic, was a conspicuous failure.”
Sacks explains why:
“Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence. But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilizations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.”
Sacks agrees with Barr that you can’t translate a right-hand text to a left-handed one without changing some of the meaning. The resulting translation will be different in small, but important, ways. As we saw in an earlier post, many of the wonderful concepts developed by the Greeks have no counterpart in Jewish thinking, and vice versa; their different understandings of reality are, as we saw earlier, orthogonal.
The results are not necessarily contradictory, but effect new understandings of the original Aramaic gospels, and ultimately of the whole of the ‘Old’ Testament (also translated into Greek), due to the influence of the left brain as it reads the texts originated in the right brain.
The Next Post
Many issues arise in the translation from a left-handed language to one oriented on the right. The larger issues arise from the coupling of Jesus’ Jewish right-brained thinking, to Paul’s left-brained, Greek thinking, and eventually to that of the ‘Fathers of the Church’ who followed him. We will address this unfolding of thinking in the next post.
Perhaps Jesus would not have been able to read the scriptures translated into Greek, but wold he have recognized them if they were read back to him in Hebrew or Aramaic?
Or, did Paul not only transcribe Hebrew into Greek but also intentionally distort what other apostles of Jesus had written? Did Paul initiate a new religion, one other than Jesus taught?
Jesus knew enough about Jewish scriptures to be able to extensively quote them, so yes, he was probably able to read them.
Paul didn’t transcribe the scriptures, but it is believed that they were initially written in Greek, which by itself introduced some departures from the original. What Paul did was to bring a Greek perspective to interpreting the ‘stories of Jesus’, which perspective, as it took hold with the Gentile embrace of the new religion, infused this mode of thinking into the ongoing development of the institutional church. I don’t believe there was any ‘intentional distortion’, or that Paul initiated a ‘new’ religion, but his understanding of what Jesus said and what it meant was somewhat different from the understanding of Peter and James, who considered it to be another Jewish expression. The Greek influence really took off with the Western rediscovery of the Greek masters several hundred years later, when writers such as Aquinas began to develop ‘metaphysics’ which shored up Christian beliefs with Greek objective science.