Penetrating the Veil

Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you. Ephesians 4:32 NASB

In – How does one translate without interpreting when the word in question has multiple, ambiguous meanings depending on the context? The perfect answer would be to ask the author what he meant, but, of course, this is impossible. The next nearly perfect answer would be to supply all the possible meanings rather than pick one out of the herd. But that has serious theological consequences. Suppose we take this preposition, en, as agency or instrumentality, rather than sphere of reference. Then we could translate the passage, “Just as God through the Messiah also has forgiven you.” But that would mean that forgiveness comes from God, not the Messiah. In other words, the Messiah is only the instrument of God’s forgiveness. “Jesus” did not die on the cross for your sins. His death was the instrument by which God brought reconciliation to men and it is God who does the forgiving (please, don’t pull out the “Jesus is God” rebuttal here. The verse draws a distinction, not an equivalence). But this isn’t the end of the problem. En as a preposition simply disappears from Greek over time. Furthermore, when it is used in earlier periods, it seems to overlap quite a few other prepositions, in both literal and figurative cases. Apparently the ambiguity of en is built into the word itself. Good luck with picking an English translation.

Why does this even matter? Can’t we be content with “in Christ” rather than “through Christ?” If our Christology (what we believe about Yeshua) is not well thought out, subject to inherited drift or just plain dogmatic, then maybe any word will do. But if we care about the cultural background of the author and the assumptions of the original audience, then the words really matter. And in this case, if Paul is a Torah-observant, monotheistic Pharisee, it is quite unlikely that he would think Yeshua as Messiah is the author of forgiveness. The translator’s choice of “in” pushes us toward Trinitarianism, away from orthodox Jewish thought, and perhaps, away from what Paul intended to communicate.

Translation is verbalized, interpretative bias. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. It only means that the hearer in the receptor language is getting a picture drawn in his own way of thinking, not necessarily according to the author’s way of thinking. This is particular acute when the author and the hearer do not share the same historical and cultural paradigms. But that is precisely the case when it comes to translating the Bible. We need constant reminders that we are not native speakers. I don’t mean that we are not Jews. What I mean is that no one on the planet today speaks and thinks like the world of the 10^th century BCE or the 1^st Century CE. We need authors like Aviya Kushner to force us to admit that the language of the Tanakh is “beautifully unruly, often ambiguous, multiple in meaning, and hard to pin down.”[1] We need scholars like Daniel Gruber to correct our perceptions of biblical Greek and realize that it is Jewish Greek, not Western.[2] But most of all we need to come to terms with the fact that the Bible was not written to us. We are eavesdroppers on a conversation between God and Israel, and as soon as we think we are on a conference call, we will be mistaken in our conclusions.

Topical Index: in, en, prepositions, Aviya Kushner, Daniel Gruber, Ephesians 4:32

[1] Aviyah Kushner, The Grammar of God, p. xxi.

[2] See Daniel Gruber, Copernicus and the Jews, especially chpater 2.