A frequent objection to the Christian
Gospel is the translation of the Bible, promulgated by some Muslims, Mormons,
Jehovah’s witnesses and Dan Brown sympathizers.
Essentially, the objection runs along the
lines of “the Bible has been translated from translations of translations to
such an extent that its original message is barely recognizable”. It’s an
argument that is most often found amongst those who object to the claims of the
orthodox Christian churches about the full deity of Jesus Christ. According to
the objectors, the first Christians never understood Jesus to be fully and
wholly God, and the evidence
presented by the Bible has been corrupted. Orthodox churches have therefore misunderstood and misrepresented Jesus' message.
It’s an urban myth, and it is usually
extrapolated well beyond mere translation to comprehensibility, but the issue
is a serious one as all serious translators know.
Whilst not offering a comprehensive or
conclusive response, I chanced upon one aspect of the teachings of Jesus that
support the authenticity of the accounts that have survived long enough to get
included in our modern New Testament – the Puns of Jesus.
Puns are plays on how words sound. We use
them to make a phrase or statement more memorable, or even to package two
meanings into the same statement, sometimes for amusement, sometimes to delight
in the irony, and sometimes to provoke thought. Because they play off the sound
of the words, they are notoriously difficult to translate. It’s not that the individual
words are difficult to translate; puns use common words that are easily
recognized. The difficulty is in adequately conveying the vocalization.
This is exactly what’s going on in Matthew
23:23-24
Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cummin, and have neglected the weightier provisions of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness; but these are the things you should have done without neglecting the others. You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!
We all know what Jesus means; he’s
condemning the religious leaders for getting obsessed with little things, while
ignoring the big things. It’s about the comparison of little things and big
things.
But, why would Jesus compare a gnat and a
camel? Why this particular pairing of a little thing and a big thing. Why not, say, "seed" and "tree", "dove" and "eagle", "frog" and "whale"?
If we were to write this in a modern(ish)
English pun, we might say “You strain out a mote and swallow a mount”. The
vocalization of “mote” and “mount” give us the pun we’re looking for, and they vividly convey the meaning of the phrase.
Of course, Jesus didn’t speak English. As a language it had not yet come into existence,
so our version would be a clear indicator that we were projecting a foreign, later idiom onto the teachings of Jesus. In other words, we would be putting words into
Jesus’ mouth, thus vindicating the critics’ accusations.
The interesting point here is that Jesus’
quip about the gnat and the camel does not work fluently as a pun in Greek, which is the language that the Gospel-writers wrote in. The Greek words
for gnat and are konopa and kamelon, respectively (see http://interlinearbible.org/matthew/23-24.htm).
Though the Gospels were written in
Greek, Jesus spoke in Aramaic. The Gospel-writers therefore had to translate his sayings from Aramaic
to Greek. Fortunately for them, konopa and kamelon are fairly close, but they would have known that the phrase would
have sounded much better in Aramaic. The words for gnat and camel in Aramaic
are galma and gamla respectively, thus allowing the formation of a memorable pun;
you strain out a galma and swallow a gamla!
Several more examples of Aramaic puns are described in my chance-discovery ebook, the Methods and Message of Jesus of Nazareth, by Robert H Stein, including kepha in Matt 16:18 and ruha in John 3:8 .
In other words, what we see in the Greek
translation is a serious effort to capture the Aramaic puns of Jesus. This
places the source material in the Aramaic, not the Greek, which is what you’d
expect if the Greek were attempting to reliably capture the meaning and vocalization of Jesus’ original Aramaic sayings.
Its not what you’d expect from a bunch of Greek scribes attempting to put their
sayings into the mouth of Jesus.
The reliability of the New Testament in conveying
the teachings of Jesus and the first Christians rests upon much more than this
cursory exploration of Aramaic puns. However, it does add to the case for the
defence against the objections of the prosecution.
