New Testament Greek: Some Issues Of Translation
NEW TESTAMENT GREEK: SOME ISSUES OF TRANSLATION
The New Testament is entirely written in Greek, with the exception of a few words here and there drawn from Aramaic. Yet to the Oxford and Cambridge educated classicists of the King James translation companies, it must have seemed a very strange form of Greek. It appeared to bear little relation to the classic Greek of Plato, Aristotle, or Homer. Certainly, the Greek of some New Testament documents—such as the Letter to the Hebrews, and the First Letter of Peter—can be thought of as truly literary, using a form of the language that is clearly classical in origin and influence. But many passages in the gospels—especially those relating the conversation of ordinary people—seemed to belong to a different linguistic world, one that is now lost to us.
Even as late as 1853, the form of Greek found in the New Testament continued to puzzle scholars. Lecturing at the University of Cambridge in 1853, the great New Testament scholar J. B. Lightfoot remarked:
If we could only recover letters that ordinary people wrote to each other without any thought of being literary, we should have the greatest possible help for the understanding of the language of the New Testament generally.
It was an interesting—and in some ways, prophetic—comment. But what hope was there of ever gaining access to the everyday Greek of the New Testament world? Surely it was doomed to remain inaccessible?
In the late nineteenth century, however, significant advances were made in understanding the everyday Greek of the eastern Mediterranean world into which Christianity was born. The German scholar Adolf Deissmann noticed remarkable similarities between the Greek of the New Testament and a series of vernacular papyri and other documents of the period. The type of Greek in question is often referred to as koine—an everyday Greek of the first century which has developed considerably from the more formal classical Greek of writers such as Thucydides or Plato.
From the many papyri, that is, fragments of paper made from papyrus, on which small portions of text are written, as well as fragments of pottery, and other items recovered from ancient rubbish dumps—especially in Egypt, where the dry air aided conservation—it has become clear that the Greek spoken at the time of the New Testament has moved on considerably from that of the classical period, four or five hundred years earlier—in much the same way as English has moved on considerably since 1611. Today's reader of the King James Bible is able to read the text without too much difficulty, but is aware that it is written in the English of a much earlier period.
This raises an important point concerning the companies of translators assembled by King James. There is no doubt that these included some of the finest classical scholars of the period, well used to dealing with questions of translation of classical Greek. Yet the Greek they were being asked to translate dates from much later, and seems to follow more fluid grammatical rules. To translate it on the basis of an earlier form of Greek would cause difficulties. Words change their meaning over time, alongside other shifts in use. Again, the problem can be illustrated for modern readers of the King James Bible, who will find themselves puzzled by words that now bear significantly different meanings than in 1611. At that time, the word “let” often had the sense of “hinder” or “prevent,” whereas its modern sense is “permit” or “allow.” The word “prevent” then meant something like “go before” or “precede.” Shifts in meaning can easily lead to misunderstandings of what an older translation meant. Consider the King James translation of Psalm 59:10, which reads “The God of my mercy shall prevent me.” The meaning of this verse might seem singularly unclear, until it is realized that the English really has the following sense: “The God of my mercy shall go before me.”
The same issue arose with the King James translation of the Greek of the New Testament. Changes in Greek usage over the centuries can easily lead to confusion. There is little doubt that the King James translators worked on the assumption that the same vocabulary rules of grammar that applied to the classical period also applied to the New Testament. Yet this is not always the case, and can lead to some serious misjudgments.
An example may help illuminate the point being made. In classical Greek, the word apantesis bears the general meaning of “meeting.” The King James translators used this translation without any particular hesitations, as it made sense in every case—for example, as in Luke's account of the Roman Christians coming out to meet Paul as he traveled along the Appian way (Acts 28:15):
And from thence, when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii forum, and the three taverns:
Although this translation is not misleading, it fails to appreciate the developed use of the word apantesis at the time. The word now bore the sense of “an official welcome for a distinguished visitor who has just arrived.” The word continues to refer to a meeting—but it is a special kind of meeting, indicating the esteem in which a newly arrived visitor is held. Luke's narrative, therefore, indicates that the Roman Christians traveled to meet Paul along the Appian way in order to give him the kind of distinguished welcome reserved for persons of great importance—a point that the King James Bible fails to bring out, through an apparent lack of awareness of the shift in meaning of the term since classical times. Although the King James Bible rarely leads its readers astray through its lack of familiarity with koine Greek, it occasionally fails to bring out the full depth of meaning in passages for this reason.
Yet there is a final issue that needs to be noted here. The koine Greek of the New Testament is the “everyday” Greek language of working people rather than of self-conscious literary scholars and poets. The King James translators were not aware of this fact. Their location in history denied them access to this knowledge. The result has important implications for the tone and style of those passages in the King James Bible that translate this form of Greek. The language of the workplace and the market is thus subtly changed into the high cadences of the palaces of Westminster and the high tables of Oxford and Cambridge. Many readers of the King James Bible often comment on its elegance and excellent style—yet the considerations we have just set out mean that, on occasion, the style and elegance will be those of the translators, rather than those of the passages they translated.