Bill Mounce

For an Informed Love of God

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Monday, May 7, 2018

When Bibles do, and don't, follow the Greek. A Couple Examples.

Paul tells the Colossians church, "My goal is that their hearts may be encouraged (ἵνα παρακληθῶσιν αἱ καρδίαι αὐτῶν) and knit together in love (συμβιβασθέντες ἐν ἀγάπῃ), so that (καὶ εἰς) they may have all the wealth of full assurance of understanding, for knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ (εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ μυστηρίου τοῦ θεοῦ, Χριστοῦ)" (2:2).

There are a couple things worth noting. The first is the value of keeping dependent clauses dependent. The text doesn't say "encouraged and knit together." παρακληθῶσιν is the main verb in the purpose clause, and συμβιβασθέντες is a dependent construction (adverbial participle) telling us something about how they are encouraged. Paul is not saying that he wants the Colossians to be encouraged and to be knit together. He is saying he wants them to be encouraged by being knit together.

At first glance, it may seem petty, but I don't think so. By making συμβιβασθέντες an independent construction, it diminishes the force of the single goal of being encouraged. It's also not what the Greek says (contra the NIV, CSB, NRSV, NLT) and is better translated by the ESV and NASB. The NET interestingly flips the order of the clauses to make their relationship clear: "My goal is that their hearts, having been knit together in love, may be encouraged."

The second point is that once again this verse can't be translated word-for-word, and the claim that "literal" Bible translations reflect the structure of the Greek just isn't true. As I have often said, almost every verse in the Greek Testament has had to be altered to get it into English.

Word-for-word, the last phrase is "into (the) knowledge of the mystery of God of Christ" (εἰς ἐπίγνωσιν τοῦ μυστηρίου τοῦ θεοῦ, Χριστοῦ). Of course, that makes no sense and hence the final genitive (Χριστοῦ) has to be interpreted, and translations do it rightly as an example of apposition: "and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ" (ESV).

The point is not that the ESV and other translations get it wrong. My point is that all translation requires interpretation, and none truly show the underlying structure. If you don't know Greek well enough to read Greek, then you don't know when the translations are having to be (properly) interpreted.

Comments

Submitted by Garth D. Wiebe on Tue, 2018-05-08 04:52
Point well taken, but why call that an "adverbial participle"? Why not translate it as a prepositional phrase in the English subjective, which can be done pretty much word for word: "That the hearts of them united in love may be encouraged" Perhaps "them united" might not be ideal English, so you could set it off as an appositive: "That the hearts of them, united in love, may be encouraged" Or stretch αυτων ("same") a bit more from third person plural pronoun "them" to "those" (demonstrative plural pronoun): "That the hearts of those united in love may be encouraged" In each of the above renderings, "united" is tied to "hearts" by the prepositional phrase, which is the subject of "encourage," still satisfying your plea for dependency. Obviously, this requires one to refrain from habitually rendering αυτων as a possessive pronoun ("their hearts"). It's genitive, and spelled the same way whether masculine, feminine, or neuter gender; hmm, the Mounce parsing even tags it as masculine), so why not pair it with the participle, "united," as both are in the genitive case? παρακληθωσιν ("may be encouraged") breaks down, hyper-literally, to "may be called near." I can't help but envision a bit of that sense as going along with "united" (or "knit together," as many render it). While you're exposing the non-literalness of all the English translations, your "word-for-word" may as well go a step further and be rendered "...the mystery of the god...." In modern English usage "God" is used as a proper noun, capitalized, of course, as if "God" was his name. But in prior times of the writing of the scriptures, it was used as a common noun, "god." So, they needed the definite article, του in this case, to specify "the god," which would of course refer to "the god" of Israel, whose name was יהוה ("YHWH, Yahweh, Jehovah, or however you want to render it in English), not "God." This would distinguish "the god" of Israel from any/all of the other "gods" that might have come to mind. Then, you quoted the NA28 (I assume), which reads, ", Χριστοῦ" (might as well take that comma and the capital Χ distinction out, while you're at it), but in many places elsewhere we see του χριστου, "of the anointed" or "of the christ" to specify which "anointed" or "christ" we are talking about (for us there is only one: Jesus). Then, throughout the New Testament, we have "the Jesus" (Jesus was a much more common name back then). Well, that's digressing from the point of your post, but, so much for any published English translation really being "literal."