As a bit of a followup to the quiz I linked to in my previous post, I’ll point you to a post written a few days ago that I’ve just discovered. Written by Ray McCalla on his blog, Sinaiticus, the article is titled “More Than One Way To Skin A Cat” and addresses the question, “how do we translate the Old Testament (OT) in light of what the New Testament (NT) says?”
This is a question I’ve spent a little bit of time pondering lately, especially on separating translation issues from faith practice or application issues. That is, can I hold onto a position whereby OT translation should primarily focus on the original intent and context, while at the same time believing Christ to be the complete fulfillment of some of those OT passages and understanding that to read the OT and NT scriptures together as a Christian often means reading Christ back into the OT?
After working through examples from Psalm 51 and Genesis 12, Ray comes to his conclusion:
From my perspective, the intertextual approach is most consistent with Christian tradition. Excising Christ from the OT is a curious innovation of the past 200 years in the West. To my knowledge, nearly all of the early church fathers read the OT christologically–that is, through Christian eyes, seeing shadows and types (see Hebrews 8:5) of Christ, the church, the Holy Spirit, the sacraments, and eternal life.
It is unfortunate that Christian translators have emphasized the disunity of the Bible in recent years. It has led to a fragmenting of the church into those who read a Christian Bible unified by the work of the Holy Spirit, and those who read a book made up of various witnesses from various historical and theological viewpoints that may or may not be related to each other.
Certainly, when it comes to producing a Bible in English, there is more than one way to skin a cat. But how we do the skinning comes with tremendous responsibility to not just translate words and phrases, but to be faithful in our presentation of God’s Word to the world.
What do you think? Can a Christian read the Holy Bible as a unified document and maintain sensitivity to the original meaning or context of the OT? Or does our faith demand that we interpret the OT texts in a specific way?
11 Comments
E.S.,
For myself, the ideal reading would be one that knows both the original meaning and context of the OT, the meaning understood at the time of the writing of the NT, and the meaning interpreted by Christ and the early Christians into the OT.
I know that’s a lot to ask of us, but I think that all of these interpretations are messages from God and hence valuable to us. However, I think the interpretations of the early Christians and Christ are obviously the ones most valuable to us.
Whilst Christian tradition has never interpreted in the manner we have, it also has never had the tools, original literature and quality scholarship we have now. I think it’d be a bad move to turn our back on the tools God has given us to interpret his word.
But, that is simply my opinion – I’m not sure if it answers your question.
I disagree with Ray completely. The idea that we should discard the original authorial intent and regard the later understanding of OT passages as controlling stomps all over the concept of progressive revelation and the order and manner in which God saw it fit to deliver His truths to men.
To translate the passages of the OT any way other than the way the authors and original audience understood them is to tell God that He didn’t reveal things correctly the first time. Reading things like the Holy Spirit into Genesis 1 or the Trinity into the Divine Council of Genesis 1 is putting words into the mouth of God (and the authors, naturally), since presumably He could have inspired a much more explicit revelation of such concepts if He had wanted to; we risk missing out on the point of what He was revealing if we’re too busy searching the page for Waldo.
Rather, it’s only reasonable to assume that God could reveal to us what He desires in the same order in which He revealed it the first time. A circumspect understanding of the progression of revelation as originally delivered, including what teachings were initially absent (e.g., life after death) should be brought out, but it’s not capturable in translation: we need extra-biblical, or rather meta-biblical teaching to make this clear. I think an issue like this is one of the pitfalls of trying to make a plenary, self-sufficient translation that minimizes or eliminates the need for teaching and explication. We should be trying to make it read the way it was originally read, with the full understanding that this will require us to educate modern readers enough for them to understand it in its fuller Christian context.
@Damian: the meaning understood at the time of the writing of the NT, and the meaning interpreted by Christ and the early Christians into the OT.
Help me understand what the difference is… I’m working under the understanding that nothing was written in the NT prior to Jesus’ physical resurrection and immediate subsequent explanation of his fulfillment of Scripture to his apostles (“He opened their minds to understand…”).
How could the meaning “at the time of writing” be different from that “interpreted by Christ”?
Stephen – I’m inclined to agree with you. On the other hand, is it *really* necessary for every Christian to go through that process of progressive revelation? Or can we stand on this side of the NT and agree that the culminating revelation we have today is more complete than the what we would see as the partial revelation in earlier times?
I agree with you that extra-Biblical apparatus is probably the best way to treat this material – perhaps a study Bible… Oh wait, isn’t that what the Scofield Study Bible attempts to do?
I largely agree with Stephen. Christians need to start by understanding what the Old Testament meant to its original readers, as an ancient Israelite document. That implies that it should be translated as such. On the basis of that clear understanding it is valid to move on and, to quote Ray’s words, “read the OT christologically–that is, through Christian eyes, seeing shadows and types (see Hebrews 8:5) of Christ, the church, the Holy Spirit, the sacraments, and eternal life.” But that should not be the starting point, so I completely disagree with Ray about how the OT should be translated.
I have also seen the ridiculous consequences of reading the NT into the OT in some translations: OT passages robbed of their internal consistency and meaningfulness because one verse quoted in the NT has been altered to fit how it is used in the NT. For an example see this post which I wrote at BBB last year. I would not claim that translating the OT in the light of the NT necessarily leads to errors like this, but it does become difficult to avoid them.
Thanks for the link, Peter – I appreciated your review of the passages in Hosea.
I still wonder, though, how relevant an understanding of OT Jewish culture is to modern Christian *life*. Is 21st century Christianity still an offshoot of Judaism or is it its own entity? And are our translation choices reflective of a difference?
Well, ElShaddai, how relevant is relevant an understanding of Jewish culture of Jesus’ time to modern Christian *life*? This is no argument for updating the OT to how it was understood in NT times. It might be an argument for updating both the OT and the NT to how they might be understood today, in modern western culture. And indeed some versions such as The Message tend to do this. But I do think that for a more than superficial understanding of the Christian faith we need to understand its Jewish background in both the OT and NT periods, and this is why God in his providence has provided us with the OT as well as the NT. The alternative is a kind of Marcionism, in which because we don’t admit to rejecting the OT as irrelevant instead we rewrite it to fit our own presuppositions.
Good questions. My point is that we should be honest about what the authors actually meant and not anachronistically recondition their words to match a late-breaking understanding of our own. Your question deals more with whether the level of culturally bound, conditioned, and at times maybe even limited understanding on the part of the authors of the OT should have to be parsed and translated afresh for all new believers. My answer is a qualified yes: as Peter intimated, the progression of revelation is perhaps the biggest reason to retain the Old Testament, since the revelation of Jesus Christ in the NT is wholly sufficient for our salvation.
When it comes to teaching the Scriptures, I am chary of ceding to the minimalist position that says that all we need to know is how to go about the modern Christian *life*. For one thing, this leads to reading “daily life lessons” into certain OT narratives that were never meant to be taken as such; I’m not saying that we can’t find life lessons there, but we should not be fooled into thinking that those were the primary intent God had in inspiring the OT, nor can we even determine the particular lesson to be drawn from these ancient passages without an understand of what the ancients would get out of them.
In short, even if drawing out “life lessons” is the Bible translator’s main concern, it must be recognized that as long as believers are going to use the OT, they’re going to need to be taught how to read it correctly – and that means in its original context with an accurate, if not exhaustive, understanding of the progression of revelation.
Interesting discussion!
A few thoughts . . .
I think Peter has the basic idea in that we START with original meaning for the original audience but then we move ahead seeing how that original meaning points us to Christ particularly and the gospel in general. I would also add that after we’ve done the above we apply these truths to our situations in our own day. This is the hermeneutic I think Christians must have IF we take the following passages seriously . . .
Luke 24:27 – Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.
Luke 24:44 – Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you– that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
Romans 1:1-6 – Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy Scriptures, concerning his Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh and was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord, through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith for the sake of his name among all the nations, including you who are called to belong to Jesus Christ,
Romans 15:4 – For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope.
1 Corinthians 10:6 – Now these things took place as examples (τύποι) for us, that we might not desire evil as they did.
Hebrews 10:1 – For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect.
1 Peter 1:10-11 – Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.
Great thoughts, guys – I apologize for not being a little more engaged on this. We’ve had a funeral in the family to attend to and I haven’t had much computer time lately.
Peter, you wrote: The alternative is a kind of Marcionism, in which because we don’t admit to rejecting the OT as irrelevant instead we rewrite it to fit our own presuppositions.
Going along with the general agreement that starting with the original OT context is the *best* way to translate/learn scripture, is it a fair criticism that most Christian Bibles fall into this “Marcionism” trap if we translate Christ back into the OT texts? I’m not familiar with that term, so I’ll need to read more – I apologize if I’m misapplying it.
Well, don’t take my “Marcionism” suggestion too literally. Marcion was an early heretic who rejected the Old Testament and much of the New, cutting the Bible down to edited versions of the letters of Paul and the gospel of Luke. No modern Christians explicitly do that, although there are those, respectable evangelicals, who veer in this direction by giving exegetical priority to Paul over anything else in the Bible. But if we reject the original message of the Old Testament and instead reinterpret it as typological stories about Jesus, in practice we too are departing from the Jewish roots of our faith and moving in the same heretical direction.