To this point, I have not been able to determine the exact NEB translators for 1 Timothy, where this phrase occurs. For what it’s worth, the New Testament translation team [source] consisted of:

• Professor C. H. Dodd (Convener)
• Dr. G. S. Duncan
• Dr. W. F. Howard
• Professor G. D. Kilpatrick
• Professor T. W. Manson
• Professor C. F. D. Moule
• J. A. T. Robinson
• G. M. Styler
• Professor R. V. G. Tasker

They were assisted by a Literary Committee:

• Professor Sir Roger Mynors
• Professor Basil Willey
• Sir Arthur Norrington
• Anne Ridler
• Canon Adam Fox
• Dr. John Carey

Whether all of these worked on each NT book or, as is more likely, each was a primary translator for individual books, I cannot say. Perhaps someone with a Cambridge Bible Commentary on 1 Timothy would be able to see if the translators are identified in the full text; the commentary itself elides this phrase.

I have, however, had more success in sourcing the phrase. As best as I can determine, it was coined by Joseph Conrad in his novel Under Western Eyes (1911), which is viewed as “a response to the themes explored” in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which Conrad reputedly detested.

[Under Western Eyes] is full of cynicism and conflict about the historical failures of revolutionary movements and ideals. Conrad remarks in this book, as well as others, on the irrationality of life, and the unfairness with which suffering is inflicted upon the innocent and poor and the careless disregard for fellow life with whom we share existence.

The phrase in question comes at almost the very beginning of the text, where the anonymous English narrator introduces himself and his Russian protagonist:

To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor—Kirylo Sidorovitch—Razumov.

If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words. Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

As has been explored in previous posts, the phrase “a wilderness of words” in the NEB/REB is used to translate the Greek mataiologia, which can be more literally translated as “empty words”, “meaningless talk” (NRSV) or “fruitless discussion” (NASB). This certainly fits with Conrad’s notion that words are “the great foes of reality” and fatal to “imagination and expression“, eventually more fitting of a parrot and the “empty talkers” of Paul’s day than of a human being.

The NEB translation team began work on the New Testament in 1946, some 35 years after Conrad’s novel was published, allowing for a generation or two of readers to become familiar with it. A 1989 article in Time magazine on the REB notes that “when the New English Bible was compiled, it was fashionable among some scholars to depart from the preserved texts of the Old Testament in favor of readings based on nonbiblical writings.”

In addition to departing from the standard Masoretic text, the NEB also departed from “the preserved texts” of the king of translations, the KJV. The NEB translators deliberately intended to use contemporary idioms in order to reach those for whom the standard KJV text was inaccessible. For the translators to thus appeal to contemporary literary idioms or phrases is not beyond the pale of imagination and fits well within their stated objectives.

* * * * *

If I may, I conclude with two related items of trivia:

The phrase “a wilderness of words” has been used as the title of a critical work exploring “the problematical sense of an ending in Conrad’s tales and novellas.” Author Ted Billy “demonstrates that Conrad’s endings, instead of reinforcing the meaning of the narrative or lending finality, actually provide a contrasting perspective that clashes with the narrative’s general drift. Hence, Conrad’s artistic endgames celebrate indeterminancy and uncertainty — both in life and in the fictions we create to give our lives meaning.”

Finally, I must note an English word that has been used in reference to Conrad’s views on the function of language: “logomachy”, meaning “a dispute over or about words”. Note the similarity between logomachy and mataiologia? The Greek roots are different (machē, “battle” vs. mataios, “devoid of force, truth, success, result”), but the similarity cannot be denied, especially when taking Ambrose Bierce’s definition of logomachy in The Devil’s Dictionary:

A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem — a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

Devoid of success indeed!

With that in mind, here is a five-book list as best as I can cobble it together:

1. William Barclay’s Daily Study Bible commentary series on the NT. A self-professed “liberal evangelical”, Barclay denied the supernatural in Jesus’ miracles in favor of non-miraculous explanations grounded in rational thought. While I may not agree with him on all of those points, I certainly agree with Barclay’s writing style for the common man. His commentaries are a treasure trove of historical context and his writing is accessible to all but the densest readers.

2. Kenneth Gentry’s Before Jerusalem Fell remains the standard apologetic for early-date authorship of Revelation and the partial preterist viewpoint. I had been introduced to the preterist view earlier, but Gentry’s book forever changed the way I read Revelation.

3. Garry Friesen’s Decision Making & the Will of God sealed a Wisdom-first approach to God and the Bible. Friesen rejects the traditional view that God has an individual Will or plan for each person that should guide our decision making process; instead we are free to make choices that can (should) be informed by the Wisdom of the Word. In many ways, this anticipates some of the Greg Boyd perspectives.

4. Calvin Seerveld’s The Greatest Song opened doors to exploring a musico-dramatic interpretation of Biblical texts. With this setting of the Song of Songs, Seerveld finds new voices in the text and brings them to life in a format that resonated strongly with me. His book of Psalms is similar, though not as multimedia focused. New translations like The Voice pick up elements of this dramatic presentation.

5. Eugene Peterson’s Eat This Book is a convincing argument that reading the Bible is not an end to itself or a means of inviting God into our lives, but instead the means by which we join into God’s narrative and live in the Kingdom. Peterson aruges that our interest in reading the Bible is driven by our active participation in the reality of the Bible, in God’s Kingdom. When we cease to participate in God’s work, we cease to be interested in understanding God’s Word.

Through lack of these some people have gone astray into a wilderness of words.

The key phrase “a wilderness of words” is a translation of the Greek mataiologia, which is literally translated as “empty talk” (cf. “fruitless discussion” in the NASB and “vain jangling” in the KJV). The essence is that words or discussion are void of meaning. In the original post, I limited my consideration to this verse, with a nod to the only other appearance of this unique Greek word in Titus 1:10 (”empty talker”).

At this time, I want to skip forward to the very end of Paul’s letter, where he concludes with some final exhortations to Timothy. Again, from the REB, 1 Timothy 6.20-21:

Timothy, keep safe what has been entrusted to you. Turn a deaf ear to empty and irreligious chatter, and the contradictions of ‘knowledge’ so-called, for by laying claim to it some have strayed far from the faith. Grace be with you all!

Note the recurrence of “stray” (Gk. astocheo) in conjunction with getting off-track in faith. However, I’m most interested in the phrase translated “empty and irreligious chatter”. The Greek is bebēlos kenophōnia — translated in the KJV as “profane and vain babblings”.

The latter Greek word, kenophōnia, is derived from kenos (”empty, vain, devoid of truth”) and phone (”a sound, a voice, speech”) and has a general meaning of “empty discussion, discussion of vain and useless matters”, which seems very similar to the definition of mataiologia outlined above.

Breaking down mataiologia again: the root adjective mataios means “devoid of force, truth, success, result” and “useless, of no purpose”, while legos means “to say, to speak”, especially in a teaching or instructional manner with the meaning of what is being spoken emphasized.

Note that both mataios and kenos carry a meaning of “devoid of force/truth”. In a general sense, the meaning of these two words, mataiologia and kenophōnia, seem close enough that it makes you wonder why Paul used different words. However, in considering legos and phone, perhaps we see that we’re viewing two sides of the same coin. The former refers to the meaning of what is being spoken, the latter to the sound of what is being spoken.

If so, Paul seems to be saying that not only have some people lost the meaning of the Law (cf. 1 Timothy 1:7), but that even the words they then use in ignorance lack effect or resonance and should be avoided at all cost.

The quote is from the essay “Evil and God”, published in the book God in the Dock:

Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another. It is this that makes Christianity so difficult to talk about. Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being. Our featureless pantheistic unities and glib rationalistic distinctions are alike defeated by the seamless, yet ever varying, texture of reality, the liveness, the elusiveness, the intertwined harmonies of the multi-dimensional fertility of God.

I learned long ago that sitting down and reading a book about something is an ineffective way for me to learn a new skill. I need to be hands on, working the skill and learning from what I can and can’t do. There is a lot of trial and error this way, of course, as I struggle with unlearning old programs while exploring new and different options. As I’ve been thinking about and working through this process, I was struck by some similarities in my Bible reading – or should I say, lack thereof.

We’ve all been taught that the Bible is a massive compendium of God’s divine wisdom and moral revelation, and that it holds the answers to the whats and whys of Life. But how is someone who doesn’t naturally click with reading as a form of instruction supposed to interact with this massive ediface?

Sometimes I open the Bible and am faced with a swarm of sentences, a wilderness of words – yes, I can see that they have meaning, but finding meaningful application is like Indiana Jones staring across the chasm at the chamber of the Holy Grail, knowing that there is an invisible bridge, but so hesitant to take that first step. How do you learn to apply? How do you find the motivation to read when there is no application?

If our works of faith are rooted in Biblical wisdom, what other ways does a Christian have of gaining knowledge? Sermons are good, but 30-45 minutes a week of oral learning seems limited. Small groups certainly engender learning through discussion, though laced with personalities and other restrictions. How else can the Bible be presented to facilitate learning? Oral recordings are perhaps one approach, though I just can’t shake the bleary eyed image of a college lecture hall from my mind. Or perhaps dramatic resettings like The Voice or the work of Calvin Seerveld? Yet the remonstrations of blogdom’s scholars against such so-called pornifications of the sacred texts rings loud in one’s ears. Still – I happen to like them.

If I cannot read the Bible and learn in a manner effective to me, then I must be defective. I must be hard of heart. I must not be regenerate. The text is holy and if it is inaccessible to me, then I have no hope. If I have no hope, I have no faith and the Bible is a dusty book that is interesting, but ultimately useless…

Or. An alternative. A thought, a revelation. We are called Christians, not Biblicans. Christ is who we serve. Not the Bible. Those who study the Bible must remember that. Study to serve. How do we serve? Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength – and love your neighbor as yourself. Apply that. Only that. All the rest comes from that. Do that. First.

* * * * *

This week’s passage was 1 Peter 4.1-6, but I just want to focus on the first two verses, especially 4.1b. First in the NIV, then the TNIV that I was reading along with, followed by the NLT and HCSB, which I also use quite frequently:

1 Peter 4:1-2

At first glance, it seems evident that to avoid the NIV’s masculine “he/his” in 4:1b, the TNIV editors simply updated the text with “those/their” and changed the verb accordingly. This is all well and good, unless your pastor chooses to dwell on the “he/his” as a typographical example of Christ. That is, because we have the example of Christ, who suffered in his physical body in order to conquer sin, we should not shy away from suffering for the will of God, but bear it along in our hope and faith of his salvation. Christ is the one who is done with sin, not us — we can only be done with sin through Christ, not of our own physical suffering.

Note that the HCSB even more explicitly takes the approach that my pastor did – by marking off the phrase in question with parenthetical dashes and capitalizing “One”, it is made clear that they consider this passage to be solely referring to Christ and not ourselves.

So what happens when you read this in the TNIV? The passage become more inclusive – not only from a gender perspective, but also placing our suffering alongside that of Christ. He suffered and we suffer. He finished with sin, we (will) finish with sin. Our suffering is shared in his suffering (cf. 4.13).

The NLT adds an explicit “for Christ” to this passage–effectively denying the HCSB’s interpretation and placing the emphasis back on the reader, though the NLT Study Bible *does* admit the possibility of the Christ-focused interpretation in the study notes.

Note the change in voice in the NLT as well, as v.4:1b-2 pick up the second person “you” and modify the text accordingly. It seems to me that, if a Christ-centric interpretation was preferred, the TNIV could have hewed somewhere between the NIV and NLT:

Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result, you need not live the rest of your earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God.

In this manner, it is clear what is “you” and what is “he”. Whether it is correct or not, I couldn’t say.

Of the texts considered, I happen to think that the HCSB is the clearest text here from a plain reading approach. However, the question in my mind begins to coalesce around the point of whether the NIV and more specifically the HCSB have chosen their wording in order to avoid a whiff of suggestion that it is the effect of our physical work and/or an aesthetic of suffering that is victory over sin.

To be more blunt, is this a Protestant interpretation that seeks to keep the source of salvation centered on Christ rather than on our own effort? And is this interpretation accurate for these few verses?

Note:

* * * * *

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that my church is standardized on the NIV for its pastoral and pew Bible translation. As a conservative evangelical Baptist church, this shouldn’t raise any eyebrows, except perhaps for the fact that we don’t use the ESV. However, I’ve never used the NIV myself, preferring the NASB in my youth and an eclectic mix of translations for the past few years. Instead, I usually bring a TNIV or HCSB to church with me – I’ve found that more often than not those two translations are close enough to the NIV that “readalong distractions” are minimal.

There were a few discrepancies today (April 26), however, that held my attention a little longer – mostly because they were directly related to the point that the pastor was making. So I wanted to take a closer look – first at the NIV “original”, then at the TNIV that I was reading along with, plus the HCSB for comparison sake.

For the past six months or so, we’ve been studying 1 Peter, verse by verse – today was 1 Peter 3:17-22, plus a few verses out of Romans.

1 Peter 3:18

Is the preliminary point that Christ died or that Christ suffered? And where did the universalism go in the TNIV?

Romans 1:17

This verse is consistent with the criticism that N.T. Wright levels against the NIV – that the “righteousness” is positioned as something given to us, rather than something inherent to Him, as in the TNIV and HCSB.

Romans 3:25

The TNIV reads the clearest (to me) here, but I do like how the HCSB retains “righteousness” instead of switching to “justice” and manages to include a “passover” reference in this passage. My issue with the NIV and HCSB is that it is unclear who is placing faith in Christ’s blood – us or God.

Yet despite the paucity of new content, the analytics of this blog have remained relatively stable in averaging ~150 unique visitors a day. Not great, but evidently good enough to land me on the “Top 50″ list last month…

In reviewing the site stats, the importance of archived content in maintaining the “blood pressure” of a blog is clearly underscored. From the beginning of April through mid May, these have been the most visited individual post pages (obviously, I cannot track posts read on the home page):

1. Dinner prayers
2. A new NLT Reference Bible?
3. What were you doing on December 17, 1994?
4. Wretched translations! ESV vs. HCSB: Romans 7:13-25
5. Maybe the question is not “what versions of the Bible do you use”…
6. Isaiah 40:31

Two posts from 2007, two from 2008 and two posted after my “return” last month – that’s a healthy mix. Incidently, the Romans 7 and Weinland (December 17, 1994) posts are the two top posts when I look at all blog activity, at least from the relaunch in April 2008. FWIW – stats are derived from Google Analytics as my Wordpress Stats plugin has corrupted itself and is reporting spurious data with no sense of reality (seemingly assigning all the site visits to one random post from archives).

I’m encouraged that people are finding things to read, even when I don’t have the time to write. I’ve thought about going “off air” again, but the benefit of keeping archived content available to those looking is greater than any benefit to me in shuttering the site.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. (Deuteronomy 6:5)

Specifically:

• Compare “all your heart” — e.g. your mind and intellect — to the selfish “lust of the eyes”;
• Compare “all your soul” — e.g. your entire emotional and spiritual being — to the “pride” of possessions, wealth, lifestyle and achievement;
• Compare “all your strength” — e.g. your physical being — with “the lust of the flesh” and its appetite for physical pleasure.