This was profoundly thought-provoking. I didn't know about the translation problem over "Jews" or the other point about the sinful woman. You also confirmed what I have intuited in the past about the Philippians verse. Interestingly, that is similar to what I believe is another frequently misunderstood verse: Matthew 5:48 about being perfect, where the context is to treat others without distinction, not to be morally perfect. (I find that interpretation also supported by the Church Fathers in the Catena Aurea.) If you have other frequently-misinterpreted passages, I hope to see them in the future, or even perhaps collected in an article.
Because the rub for Butker, as for us, is that a bad take is often a good faith effort to follow a Scripture verse, where one's basis is that it is written in the Bible "in black and white," while one is innocent of the gray underneath. It would seem to lend credence to the popular idea (not sure if it's accurate or not) of the Church providing the laity limited access to Bible in pre-Reformation times (outside the problem of printing expense at the time) since the laity were liable to misinterpret so much of what a trained priest would catch. That problem remains now the that Church universally commends the Bible to the laity.
You also made me aware of the "Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures" document, which, skimming through, I found uninspiring overall. It started with a, per usual, stirring preface by Ratzinger about how misunderstanding the harsh God of the Old Testament was a stumbling block to Augustine's conversion. That stumbling block remains for everyone, particularly pointed during the rise of the New Atheism, where I felt the Church largely abandoned the faithful in the face of Dawkins' take on the OT God as genocidal, which at the time seemed unanswerable. Just the single sentence, tucked away in the document, that the genocidal ban demanded of the Exodus era Jews was a later addition ("At the time when Deuteronomy was written — as well as the Book of Joshua — the ban was a theoretical postulate, since non-Israelite populations no longer existed in Judah. The ban then could be the result of a projection into the past of later preoccupations.") would have been helpful to know at the time.
It's easy to feel abandoned by the Church, but the fact that you (part of its hierarchy) take the time to explain some of these problems is definitely part of the solution. The hope is that, like Augustine, God will eventually lead those who seek it to the Truth, even as one is making consequential mistakes along the way to it.
Hunter, some new recent attention to this post brought to my attention that I missed responding to you! Thanks so much for reading, and for your thoughtful comment.
Regarding Matthew 5:48, I think it’s interesting that in the parallel passage in Luke’s so-called Sermon on the Plain, the word is not τέλειοι (teleioi), which can be translated “perfect,” “mature,” or “complete,” but οἰκτίρμονες (oiktirmones), usually translated “merciful,” “compassionate,” or “having pity.” Comparing the different wordings in so-called Q or double tradition passages can be helpful in illuminating or confirming one’s sense of the meaning of one when the other seems clearer. Another example is where in Luke’s Gospel Jesus says that to follow him we must “hate” our family members, while in the parallel passage in Matthew the warning is that we must not love them more than we love Jesus. (In both cases source critics have hypothesized that Luke may preserve an older, more authentic version of Jesus’ wording, while the wording in Matthew is more of an interpretation. In the case of hating family members, I think the Matthean interpretation, if that’s what it is, is helpful; in the case of being like our Father in heaven, I think the sense of the kind of “perfection” or “maturity” that Matthew emphasizes is helpfully illuminated by the specific quality that Luke mentions.)
I find Ratzinger’s approach to the “dark passages” of the Old Testament helpful. In Ratzinger’s view, following Dei Verbum and the Catechism, divine revelation unfolds in “deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation” and in words that “proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them.” Sacred scripture preserves and transmits what God has revealed in history and to human hearts. Through divine revelation, God carries out a program of pedagogy leading Israel progressively out of the darkness of ignorance that affects all human beings into the increasing light of faith. The sacred scriptures bear witness to this process, which is a record both of darkness and of light. At times, then, we see in the scriptures signs of the limits of the understanding into which they had so far been led, or the limits of prior material incorporated into the text.
God is okay with our making mistakes! We’re all going to make them anyway.
(I did not, however, ask my own in-house ace copyeditor Sarah to proofread before publishing, as I often do…we were both too busy. Which is why I’m still catching typos a day and a half after going live!)
Benjamin, in absolute candor: While I might be tempted to take such a remark as condescending from some people, after everything that I’ve read from you over the years, not just in your capacity as an ace copyeditor, but simply as a reader commenting on writing you appreciate, there is probably no one I can think of whose “extremely well written” would mean more to me than yours. (And I did work my ass off writing this piece!)
My deacon often just renders the translation the way he sees fit when proclaiming the Gospel. I don't think this is appropriate, but I also wish he weren't placed in this position to begin with.
Thanks for the awesome write-up. Even if you're not an expert on the ancient languages involved, I feel this article is a great resource and starting point for someone who wants to investigate this issue more fully.
Isn't it just the Jews as opposed to the Christians? In other words it's the Jews who rejected Christ and still today reject Christ. Basically it's the talmudic Jews after the temple was destroy as Christ predicted because they had like 40 years to come around and instead decided to go their own way when the temple was destroyed and they've been "adversaries to all mankind" ever since.
Let’s be clear, first of all, that the Talmud dates to centuries after the completion of the NT canon—and since 1 Thessalonians is generally reckoned the *first* NT document written, about 20 years or less after Jesus’ death and about the same length of time *before* the destruction of the Temple, Paul certainly isn’t writing about post-Temple Jews or any subset thereof who had “like 40 years to come around.” As I argued above, he was in this passage explicitly writing about Judeans, and plausibly about the very leaders who agitated for Jesus’ crucifixion. And he certainly did not call them “adversaries to all mankind,” a paraphrase of 1 Thessalonians 2:15 followed by no translation I know of. “Adversaries” (which I find only in the old Douay-Rheims) I take to be a poor rendering of ἐναντίων, an adjective not a noun, meaning something like “set against” or “contrary to.” “Mankind” I take to be an interpretive gloss on πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις or “all men,” which here seems to mean something like “everybody [else].” Finally, if you are here to promote anything like E. Michael Jones–style “Jewish revolutionary spirit” antisemitism, please say so as clearly as possible.
Yes I mean this is something I've also frequently thought about as a Catholic of Jewish descent. I appreciate you spreading the word somewhat, though I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion.
On the one hand, my historian and philologist brain tells me that you're emphatically right, and that simply translating "the Jews" as "the Judaeans" would pretty much solve all the immediate linguistic issues and confusions and discomforts we encounter in hearing the Bible.
The conceptual nexus around the term in the NT, particularly in John, is very confusing to modern ears when joined with what for us is primarily a "religious" (in our modern sense of a voluntary belief-group scattered throughout the world) or "ethnic" (in the sense of a linguistic or cultural group also scattered throughout the world) or even racial term, "the Jews." Swapping it out for a regional/national term, though, gets us much closer (though not all the way) to the ancient concept of an "ethnos." The Judaeans are the native ethnic/national group of the kingdom-then-province of Judaea, who exist both in that original area and in a broader geographical dispora, and (like all ethnoi in the Roman Empire) have distinctive religious traditions and customs and a central cultic leadership associated with a temple that takes in pilgrims and tangible resources for sacrifices from members of that ethnos everywhere. "Christians" are initially a religious grouping originating in and mostly composed of Judaeans, who have drawn from and modified Judaean religious customs and so are at odds with the Judaean cultic and national leadership. "Judaean" is used by these people in many different contextual ways, positive and negative, that are all linked to this ethnos and which would all have intuitively made sense to the people who heard them.
Analogously, a person of Greek origin in America might sometimes use the term "the Greeks" or "Greece" in an inclusive sense for himself and people in Greece as opposed to "Americans," sometimes use it to refer to the actions of the current Greek government that he opposes, and sometimes use it to refer to people actually living in Greece, in contradistinction to himself, an American; and would similarly speak of "Greek Orthodoxy" as his religion, and might even conceivably refer to his religious beliefs and practices simply as "Greek." The case is stronger with more "ethnic" religious like Hinduism tied more immediately to a particular national/geographical grouping. Linguistically/etymologically, a "Hindu" is just an "Indian," so even today, say, a person of Indian descent who lives in Kashmir and is a Muslim might use terms approximating "the Indians" sometimes religiously in distinction to himself, sometimes politically to designate the government of India in its mistreatment of Kashmiris, sometimes as an ethnic term for Hindi speakers in contradistinction to himself as a Kashmiri, but also sometimes use it as a political term to include himself as an Indian citizen.
I feel like I'm making this unnecessarily complex, but as I said I think the basic reality is that there are few uses of "the Jews" in the NT that wouldn't intuitively make sense to people in this way, if we simply replaced the term "the Jews" with all its historical baggage and modern complexity with a distanced historical geographical/national term like "the Judaeans."
However, when I put on my "Jewish Christian" brain (and even my "descendant of Holocaust victims" brain), I'm honestly not sure this would be a good thing to do at all. The temptation for Christians has always been to separate the Jews we see around us (who call themselves Jews and who we call Jews) from "the Jews" we encounter in the Bible. And certainly (putting back on my historian brain) there are plenty of practical differences between the modern Jewish people and the ancient cultic-national ethnos that we see (and see frequently and harshly criticized by prophets and Apostles and many others) in the OT and the NT.
I think, though, that this is ultimately a temptation that is very dangerous for both Jews and Christians. It is important that "the Jews" we see around us are in the eyes of God and the Church fundamentally the same people as "the Jews" we see in the Bible--not only theologically, but also practically. The idea that all or even most anti-Semitism originates from the reading or hearing of the Bible is rather overstated; while this has sometimes been true (though almost always buttressed by bad catechisis or bad theology) the presence of "the Jews" in the Bible was also used in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the primary theological and legal basis for the extraordinary and unusual granting of tolerance and religious sanction and legal protection to Jews by Popes and rulers alike; and of course has equally been used by the modern Papacy and Church to oppose anti-Semitism and forge closer ties with Jews as our "elder brothers."
Even on the most immediate level, "I appear in your religion's Scriptures" is not a bad basic claim for for an insular, divergent religious and ethnic minority group to make on the majority in order to preserve their rights and existence. Historically, Christian anti-Semitism has much more frequently been tied to theologies and movements that went out of their way to deny the continuity and identity between "the Jews" of the Bible and "the Jews" living next-door. I.e. if the Jews we see around us and quite probably come into conflict with aren't really the same as the people we hear about every week in Sunday Mass, then they're just an insular minority group with a different religion, and we can talk about them and do to them what we would do to any other such group. That's much more frightening on a basic level.
So while it may make us uncomfortable to read or hear criticisms of "the Jews" (in whatever precise sense) from the pulpit of our churches, I'm not convinced that that discomfort is a bad thing ultimately, for the Jews or for us. Ideally that discomfort would lead Catholic leaders to *explain* and *catechize* their people on what the Scriptures mean by "the Jews" and what the Church actually teaches about the Jews today and how they should be treated by Catholics. Even in my own experience hearing these Scriptures has led to good conversations with friends about Judaism.
If we just write "the Jews" out of our translations, though, while the people already in the know or with sensitivities may feel better, I'm afraid that the vast masses of lay Catholics will simply go merrily through their lives without ever thinking about the question until they encounter real anti-Semitism out in the world, flowing from a thousand different political and ethnic and historical and even religious sources; and then they'll have no defenses against it at all.
Again, though, this is far from a definitive take, and I'm grateful to you for bringing it up.
This was profoundly thought-provoking. I didn't know about the translation problem over "Jews" or the other point about the sinful woman. You also confirmed what I have intuited in the past about the Philippians verse. Interestingly, that is similar to what I believe is another frequently misunderstood verse: Matthew 5:48 about being perfect, where the context is to treat others without distinction, not to be morally perfect. (I find that interpretation also supported by the Church Fathers in the Catena Aurea.) If you have other frequently-misinterpreted passages, I hope to see them in the future, or even perhaps collected in an article.
Because the rub for Butker, as for us, is that a bad take is often a good faith effort to follow a Scripture verse, where one's basis is that it is written in the Bible "in black and white," while one is innocent of the gray underneath. It would seem to lend credence to the popular idea (not sure if it's accurate or not) of the Church providing the laity limited access to Bible in pre-Reformation times (outside the problem of printing expense at the time) since the laity were liable to misinterpret so much of what a trained priest would catch. That problem remains now the that Church universally commends the Bible to the laity.
You also made me aware of the "Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures" document, which, skimming through, I found uninspiring overall. It started with a, per usual, stirring preface by Ratzinger about how misunderstanding the harsh God of the Old Testament was a stumbling block to Augustine's conversion. That stumbling block remains for everyone, particularly pointed during the rise of the New Atheism, where I felt the Church largely abandoned the faithful in the face of Dawkins' take on the OT God as genocidal, which at the time seemed unanswerable. Just the single sentence, tucked away in the document, that the genocidal ban demanded of the Exodus era Jews was a later addition ("At the time when Deuteronomy was written — as well as the Book of Joshua — the ban was a theoretical postulate, since non-Israelite populations no longer existed in Judah. The ban then could be the result of a projection into the past of later preoccupations.") would have been helpful to know at the time.
It's easy to feel abandoned by the Church, but the fact that you (part of its hierarchy) take the time to explain some of these problems is definitely part of the solution. The hope is that, like Augustine, God will eventually lead those who seek it to the Truth, even as one is making consequential mistakes along the way to it.
Hunter, some new recent attention to this post brought to my attention that I missed responding to you! Thanks so much for reading, and for your thoughtful comment.
Regarding Matthew 5:48, I think it’s interesting that in the parallel passage in Luke’s so-called Sermon on the Plain, the word is not τέλειοι (teleioi), which can be translated “perfect,” “mature,” or “complete,” but οἰκτίρμονες (oiktirmones), usually translated “merciful,” “compassionate,” or “having pity.” Comparing the different wordings in so-called Q or double tradition passages can be helpful in illuminating or confirming one’s sense of the meaning of one when the other seems clearer. Another example is where in Luke’s Gospel Jesus says that to follow him we must “hate” our family members, while in the parallel passage in Matthew the warning is that we must not love them more than we love Jesus. (In both cases source critics have hypothesized that Luke may preserve an older, more authentic version of Jesus’ wording, while the wording in Matthew is more of an interpretation. In the case of hating family members, I think the Matthean interpretation, if that’s what it is, is helpful; in the case of being like our Father in heaven, I think the sense of the kind of “perfection” or “maturity” that Matthew emphasizes is helpfully illuminated by the specific quality that Luke mentions.)
I find Ratzinger’s approach to the “dark passages” of the Old Testament helpful. In Ratzinger’s view, following Dei Verbum and the Catechism, divine revelation unfolds in “deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation” and in words that “proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them.” Sacred scripture preserves and transmits what God has revealed in history and to human hearts. Through divine revelation, God carries out a program of pedagogy leading Israel progressively out of the darkness of ignorance that affects all human beings into the increasing light of faith. The sacred scriptures bear witness to this process, which is a record both of darkness and of light. At times, then, we see in the scriptures signs of the limits of the understanding into which they had so far been led, or the limits of prior material incorporated into the text.
God is okay with our making mistakes! We’re all going to make them anyway.
This is amazing stuff, Steven. Just amazing, and thoughtful, and scholarly, and all those good things.
Gawrsh! Thanks so much, Benjamin—I can’t say what that means coming from you.
Well, then, maybe it's OK if I confess that I'd also written "and extremely well written" but deleted it because it felt a little patronizing.
(I did not, however, ask my own in-house ace copyeditor Sarah to proofread before publishing, as I often do…we were both too busy. Which is why I’m still catching typos a day and a half after going live!)
Fussing with things after they're published is one of my favorite things to do!
Benjamin, in absolute candor: While I might be tempted to take such a remark as condescending from some people, after everything that I’ve read from you over the years, not just in your capacity as an ace copyeditor, but simply as a reader commenting on writing you appreciate, there is probably no one I can think of whose “extremely well written” would mean more to me than yours. (And I did work my ass off writing this piece!)
The work shows and absolutely doesn't, and you know, as I do, that that's the idea!
My deacon often just renders the translation the way he sees fit when proclaiming the Gospel. I don't think this is appropriate, but I also wish he weren't placed in this position to begin with.
Agreed on both points, Kevin.
Thanks for the awesome write-up. Even if you're not an expert on the ancient languages involved, I feel this article is a great resource and starting point for someone who wants to investigate this issue more fully.
Isn't it just the Jews as opposed to the Christians? In other words it's the Jews who rejected Christ and still today reject Christ. Basically it's the talmudic Jews after the temple was destroy as Christ predicted because they had like 40 years to come around and instead decided to go their own way when the temple was destroyed and they've been "adversaries to all mankind" ever since.
Let’s be clear, first of all, that the Talmud dates to centuries after the completion of the NT canon—and since 1 Thessalonians is generally reckoned the *first* NT document written, about 20 years or less after Jesus’ death and about the same length of time *before* the destruction of the Temple, Paul certainly isn’t writing about post-Temple Jews or any subset thereof who had “like 40 years to come around.” As I argued above, he was in this passage explicitly writing about Judeans, and plausibly about the very leaders who agitated for Jesus’ crucifixion. And he certainly did not call them “adversaries to all mankind,” a paraphrase of 1 Thessalonians 2:15 followed by no translation I know of. “Adversaries” (which I find only in the old Douay-Rheims) I take to be a poor rendering of ἐναντίων, an adjective not a noun, meaning something like “set against” or “contrary to.” “Mankind” I take to be an interpretive gloss on πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις or “all men,” which here seems to mean something like “everybody [else].” Finally, if you are here to promote anything like E. Michael Jones–style “Jewish revolutionary spirit” antisemitism, please say so as clearly as possible.
Yeah it seems like you have your panties in a bunch. So good luck with that.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Weuoro, is everyone in your camp incapable of actually responding to things that people say, or is it just you?
Yes I mean this is something I've also frequently thought about as a Catholic of Jewish descent. I appreciate you spreading the word somewhat, though I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion.
On the one hand, my historian and philologist brain tells me that you're emphatically right, and that simply translating "the Jews" as "the Judaeans" would pretty much solve all the immediate linguistic issues and confusions and discomforts we encounter in hearing the Bible.
The conceptual nexus around the term in the NT, particularly in John, is very confusing to modern ears when joined with what for us is primarily a "religious" (in our modern sense of a voluntary belief-group scattered throughout the world) or "ethnic" (in the sense of a linguistic or cultural group also scattered throughout the world) or even racial term, "the Jews." Swapping it out for a regional/national term, though, gets us much closer (though not all the way) to the ancient concept of an "ethnos." The Judaeans are the native ethnic/national group of the kingdom-then-province of Judaea, who exist both in that original area and in a broader geographical dispora, and (like all ethnoi in the Roman Empire) have distinctive religious traditions and customs and a central cultic leadership associated with a temple that takes in pilgrims and tangible resources for sacrifices from members of that ethnos everywhere. "Christians" are initially a religious grouping originating in and mostly composed of Judaeans, who have drawn from and modified Judaean religious customs and so are at odds with the Judaean cultic and national leadership. "Judaean" is used by these people in many different contextual ways, positive and negative, that are all linked to this ethnos and which would all have intuitively made sense to the people who heard them.
Analogously, a person of Greek origin in America might sometimes use the term "the Greeks" or "Greece" in an inclusive sense for himself and people in Greece as opposed to "Americans," sometimes use it to refer to the actions of the current Greek government that he opposes, and sometimes use it to refer to people actually living in Greece, in contradistinction to himself, an American; and would similarly speak of "Greek Orthodoxy" as his religion, and might even conceivably refer to his religious beliefs and practices simply as "Greek." The case is stronger with more "ethnic" religious like Hinduism tied more immediately to a particular national/geographical grouping. Linguistically/etymologically, a "Hindu" is just an "Indian," so even today, say, a person of Indian descent who lives in Kashmir and is a Muslim might use terms approximating "the Indians" sometimes religiously in distinction to himself, sometimes politically to designate the government of India in its mistreatment of Kashmiris, sometimes as an ethnic term for Hindi speakers in contradistinction to himself as a Kashmiri, but also sometimes use it as a political term to include himself as an Indian citizen.
I feel like I'm making this unnecessarily complex, but as I said I think the basic reality is that there are few uses of "the Jews" in the NT that wouldn't intuitively make sense to people in this way, if we simply replaced the term "the Jews" with all its historical baggage and modern complexity with a distanced historical geographical/national term like "the Judaeans."
However, when I put on my "Jewish Christian" brain (and even my "descendant of Holocaust victims" brain), I'm honestly not sure this would be a good thing to do at all. The temptation for Christians has always been to separate the Jews we see around us (who call themselves Jews and who we call Jews) from "the Jews" we encounter in the Bible. And certainly (putting back on my historian brain) there are plenty of practical differences between the modern Jewish people and the ancient cultic-national ethnos that we see (and see frequently and harshly criticized by prophets and Apostles and many others) in the OT and the NT.
I think, though, that this is ultimately a temptation that is very dangerous for both Jews and Christians. It is important that "the Jews" we see around us are in the eyes of God and the Church fundamentally the same people as "the Jews" we see in the Bible--not only theologically, but also practically. The idea that all or even most anti-Semitism originates from the reading or hearing of the Bible is rather overstated; while this has sometimes been true (though almost always buttressed by bad catechisis or bad theology) the presence of "the Jews" in the Bible was also used in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages as the primary theological and legal basis for the extraordinary and unusual granting of tolerance and religious sanction and legal protection to Jews by Popes and rulers alike; and of course has equally been used by the modern Papacy and Church to oppose anti-Semitism and forge closer ties with Jews as our "elder brothers."
Even on the most immediate level, "I appear in your religion's Scriptures" is not a bad basic claim for for an insular, divergent religious and ethnic minority group to make on the majority in order to preserve their rights and existence. Historically, Christian anti-Semitism has much more frequently been tied to theologies and movements that went out of their way to deny the continuity and identity between "the Jews" of the Bible and "the Jews" living next-door. I.e. if the Jews we see around us and quite probably come into conflict with aren't really the same as the people we hear about every week in Sunday Mass, then they're just an insular minority group with a different religion, and we can talk about them and do to them what we would do to any other such group. That's much more frightening on a basic level.
So while it may make us uncomfortable to read or hear criticisms of "the Jews" (in whatever precise sense) from the pulpit of our churches, I'm not convinced that that discomfort is a bad thing ultimately, for the Jews or for us. Ideally that discomfort would lead Catholic leaders to *explain* and *catechize* their people on what the Scriptures mean by "the Jews" and what the Church actually teaches about the Jews today and how they should be treated by Catholics. Even in my own experience hearing these Scriptures has led to good conversations with friends about Judaism.
If we just write "the Jews" out of our translations, though, while the people already in the know or with sensitivities may feel better, I'm afraid that the vast masses of lay Catholics will simply go merrily through their lives without ever thinking about the question until they encounter real anti-Semitism out in the world, flowing from a thousand different political and ethnic and historical and even religious sources; and then they'll have no defenses against it at all.
Again, though, this is far from a definitive take, and I'm grateful to you for bringing it up.