Episode 116: Sarah Ruden - Getting Inside the Head of Paul & Jesus
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People Podcast, Pete and Jared talk with translator and poet Sarah Ruden about how other ancient texts should influence the way we read the Bible as they explore the following questions:
- What are some difficulties of accurate translation?
- Why is author intent so important in translation?
- How does Sarah Ruden approach the translation of ancient texts?
- What kinds of texts help us understand the New Testament writings?
- What dirty jokes does Paul make?
- In what ways does Paul write like pagan authors of his time?
- Why is context so important in sacred text translation?
- Is sacred text translation different than ancient literature translation?
- What inferences can we make about Paul based on what we know of him?
- What are some problems Sarah Ruden sees in standard translations of the Bible?
- What is the Vulgate and how has it influenced our English Bible translations?
- Should we try and be objective in our Bible translation?
Tweetables
Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from Sarah Ruden you can share.
- “[Paul’s] bad tempered. He’s got a sense of humor. He is very, at times, he’s very tender, very loving toward his followers. At times, he’s absolutely fed up with them. “ –Sarah Ruden
- “This is kind of the inspiration of Paul, in that he knows his faults, yet he’s still to some degree under the control of them, but ultimately not, because he never allows them to get him down or to distract him for long, to deter him.” –Sarah Ruden
- “[Paul] needs to get attention, he needs to be clever… he’s arguing to the pagan world which has very high standard for entertainment.“ –Sarah Ruden
- “Influences is important here. You can’t say that you’re translating in the true sense… if you disregard the author’s will.” –Sarah Ruden
- “What was it about these [New Testament] books that brought such an exciting message, such a warmly received message to so many people throughout the Roman Empire?” –Sarah Ruden
Mentioned in This Episode
- Book: The Aeneid
- Book: Paul Among the People
- Book: The Face of Water
- Book: The Golden Ass
- Website: Sarah Ruden
- Patreon: The Bible for Normal People
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[Introduction]
0:00
Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People. The onlyGod-ordained podcast on the internet. Serious talk about the sacred book. I’mPete Enns.
Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.
[Jaunty Intro Music]
Pete:Welcome normal people, to this episode of The Bible for Normal Peopleand our topic today is getting inside the head of Paul and Jesus and our guestis Sarah Ruden.
Jared: Yeah, we had an interesting conversationwith Sarah, who is a Ph.D. from Harvard University -
Pete: Never heard of it.
Jared: - in Classical Philology. She was at theUniversity of Cape Town as a lecturer in classics, she’s written a few books,and, yeah, just a fascinating conversation. She’s clearly very bright.
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: And I really appreciated her ability to,maybe, kind of cut through the noise sometimes, I think, of academia and justkind of come to some really creative and interesting insights.
Pete: Yeah, I mean, and namely about translatingthe Bible. And that may sound boring, but that’s maybe only because a lot oftranslations are boring and that’s sort of her part. She doesn’t really saythat, she’s too nice. But, instead of just trying to be, like, mechanicallyaccurate, and that’s one thing that a lot of translations have in common. Theysay things a little bit differently, but they’re very similar in terms of thismechanical attention. She tries to enter into the head of the ancient personand, you know, that sounds a little esoteric, but it’s really not. It is anactive imagination, but it’s an informed -
Jared: Yeah, it’s very practical too. It seemslike, as she was talking, I just kept thinking, well, duh.
Pete: Yeah, exactly. It makes some sense.
Jared: Right.
Pete: You know, because these are real peopletrying to move other people with their words. And that’s the thing that a lotof translations miss, you know? One thing I was thinking about, Jared, is that,you know, like, how could we get into that just with our own English Bible’sand stuff.
Jared: Right.
Pete: Sometimes I tell students, like, just standup and read it out loud as if you were reading this to people and actuallytrying to convince them of something. And even if the translation isn’t great,that at least maybe reproduces a little bit of the sense of what this biblicalliterature was really intended to do. It was an attempt to persuade people onan emotional level, not just on, say, an intellectual level. And that’s, if Ihad to capture, that’s what I think Sarah was trying to bring to the tablethrough her vast experience in translating Greek and Latin classical text andthen turning your attention to the Bible, and coming at it from just a verydifferent point of view than most conventional translation committees comefrom. I’d love for her to do a whole, a Bible like Robert Alter we had on a fewweeks ago -
Jared: Right. Who did the translation…
Pete: Right. And do, just do like a New Testamentlike that. And what would it look like? I would love to read something likethat.
Jared: Yeah. Let’s get to this conversation, I’mreally excited from you guys to here from Sarah here on getting inside the headof Paul and Jesus.
[Music begins]
Sarah: In a couple places, he, you know, he makesdirty jokes. For example,you know, in Galatians, he, he wants, he wants his critics castrated. And he’son the subject of circumcision and he just loses his temper and he says theyjust ought to go castrate themselves. This did lead me to, to want to look atthe scriptures with fewer presuppositions.
[Music ends]
Pete: Sarah,welcome to our podcast.
Sarah: Thankyou, thanks. I’m very glad to be here.
Pete: Yeah,great to have you. So, uh yeah, why don’t you introduce yourself to ourlisteners a bit, and just, you know, who you are and what you do, and maybeeven how you got into this whole issue of translating things. That’d be reallyinteresting to hear.
Sarah: Okay!Well, I guess I have to describemyself as a hayseed translator. I’m from rural Ohio.
Pete: Uhhuh.
Sarah: Bothmy parents are from farms, and I was raised in Wood County, so surrounded byfields. Though, pretty early on, Iimbibed this urge, you know, to learn ancient languages and I’m still notsure where I got that urge, but I was quite a pretentious child, so...
Pete:[Laughter]
Sarah: Soanyway, Bowling Green State University was close by. My father wasteaching there, so I was able to learn, start learning Latin at sixteen, Greekat eighteen and started Ph.D. program at Harvard at twenty-one. I wastrained in what they call philology, which is the study of text.Not language, that’s linguistics, but philologists are concernedwith, well classical philologists are concerned with Greek and Roman text. So,yes, I was trained in that, but I was always more interested intranslation, which they don’t allow you to study at Harvard, they didn’t atthat time in the classics department, but I was a poet from a very, very earlyage. I would say, my mother says, you know, from the age of one or two.
Pete:[Laughter]
5:00
Sarah: Iwas, I was composing poetry. I started publishing it in my late twenties.And yes, I was just, I was absolutely fascinated with the sound of words.
Jared: Sohow did that intersect with maybe a little bit of your faith upbringing? Youknow, get a little bit of your upbringing with philology, but how does faithfit into that?
Sarah: Well, I was raised a Methodist.I became a Quaker around the age of thirty, and it was only some yearslater, this was after I returned from ten years in South Africa, thatI became interested in sacred literature. And this does have to do with myQuaker faith. It was through a Quaker institution, Pendle Hill QuakerStudy Center, that I began exploring the letters of Paul, because Quakerswanted to know more about them and it actually suited my take on literature tostart exploring, and the Quaker tradition as well, to start exploring frombrass tacks.
Pete: Mmm.
Sarah: I’d always, as a poet, been concerned withoriginality. I didn’t want other people’s words.
[Laughter]
This was a bit of a strange obsession when I wasa kid. You know, I would listen, and people would always seem to be sayingthings the that other people said and it irritated me. So, partof my poetic development was to figure out other ways to say things and thathelped me, I think, in thinking about things in different ways. Andthis led me to Quakerism, helped lead me toQuakerism, because, you know, Quakers, they emphasize silence. WeQuakers think that in the presence of God’s love and power, there isn’t alot that human beings can initially say. We worship in silence; we sittogether, and we wait on God’s will. So, this did lead me to, to want to lookat the scriptures with fewer presuppositions.
Pete: Hmm.
Sarah: Institutional, ideological,personal. All the things that are brought to the Bible that may nothave been there originally. So, I was very, very pleased that Quakers, youknow, asked me, well, what can you tell us about Paul -
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: That we didn’t know, that we’renot going to learn from standard translations.
Pete: Yeah, so Sarah, I mean, back up a littlebit because you said that, um, you came to an interest in sacred literature alittle bit later. So, after you came back from Cape town? I think, is thatright?
Sarah: Yes.
Pete: So, at whatpoint roughly in your life did you start getting interested intranslating and dealing with the New Testament, let's say. And then also, ontop of that, the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible, right? Because your background isLatin and Greek, and you just sort of picked up Hebrew?
Sarah: Well, no, it’s kind of a longerstory.
[Laughter]
Pete: Okay.
[Laugher]
Sarah: Um, Yes.
[Laughter]
Pete: I hope so, because a lot of discouragedstudents out there think so as well. I mean, you havea background in languages, so you know how languages work, andyou’re going to pick things up a little more quickly probably, but...
Sarah: Right, right. I emerged from Harvard notacademic.
Pete: Okay.
Sarah: They didn’t really know what to dowith me, because here I was a poet, I was a translator, this is, at least backthen - I got my doctorate in 1993 - at least at that point,you couldn’t sell a classical philologist or somebody from aclassical philology program to a university for junior professorship. It just,it just didn’t work. Things were not, um, interdisciplinary enough at thatpoint. So, here they were, you know, trying to sell me to somebody and theonly department in the world that was buying was the classics department at theUniversity of Cape Town. So off I went there, and there was just too muchpolitical upheaval for the classics department even to survive, so I got offthe tenure track after three years, but I stayed in South Africa because Ihad fallen in love with the country. It is fascinating, it is beautiful,and it was wonderful. And so, I stayed nearly ten years in all in South Africa,between nine and ten years and did all kinds of things, you know, business,volunteering, medical. I did some medical writing and editing. And, but Ireally got to work on my classics translation while I was there. ButI really, eventually wanted to come home, so I came home to the U.S. andthen spent some time in, at Pendle Hill as a residentstudent in this Quaker institution, and that is where they began, purely byaccident, it emerged that, yes, I could tell them about Paul in the originalGreek. So, yeah, I thought, wow, I’m going to write this book. So, I wrote abook called Paul Among the People, which is about, here’s thesubtitle – Paul reinterpreted and reimagined in his own time.
10:25
Pete: Hmm.
Sarah: That is, I was trying to get into Paul’shead.
Pete: Well, tell us about that. I mean, what didyou find there with your own approach to translation that maybe others hadn’tthought about, or just something that caught you by surprise, or just somethingthat if you’re trying to capture Paul for other people, you know what I mean? What,like, how would you present Paul, and just who he is to people who mightbe interested. What insights did you gain?
Sarah: Well, you know, I was already used togetting inside authors heads, or at least trying to. So, I had publishedseveral classics translations at this point, and I still, I was and I still aminterested in the reform of ancient literature translation generally, so whenyou’re translating, say, Vergil, you’re translating The Aeneid. Youread the text in the original, and this was Latin, of course. Andagain, read it again and again, and you think about the author in his owncultural context. You think about his struggles as an artist, you think about,just all kinds of things and you try to make an emotional connection to him. Emotionalconnection for me is more important. I mean, we, factually,linguistically, we kind of know all about these authors, you know, all thatwork has been done. There are mountains and mountains of scholarlypublications and very, very good commentaries, line by line,exactly what’s likely that he meant by this word or that word,but to see this author as a whole, and more importantly, to hearhim, you gotta think about him as a person. You have to enlistas his servant, if you will, as his interpreter for the world, and this is thething that I thought from a very young age had not been doneproperly.
Pete: Hmm
Sarah: You have these dutiful,dull, Penguin Classics. You know, you have these condescendingtranslations for the masses, and yeah, okay, in a clunky was they are accurate,but they do not bother at all with aesthetics and the reason these works areimportant is that they were, to their hearers, gorgeous. These authors were therock stars.
Pete: Hmm.
Sarah: They were the most exciting thing going.Saint Augustine describes his Vergil fandom.
Pete: [Laughter]
Sarah: How, you know, as quite a young kidhe’s, okay, he’s reading Vergil in school and he adores it. He’s soexcited about it. He’s caught up in the tragedy of Dido, this is the Venetianqueen with whom Aeneas, the Roman, the proto-Roman hero is in love and he hasto leave her, you know, to go to Italy and found what will become Rome. So,yeah. So, Augustine is, this is his great sin, his temptation,his attachment to the beauty of Vergil. So -
Pete: So, you’re trying to recreate thatbeauty for somebody like Paul for readers today to really,maybe, move beyond things like, yeah, this is linguistically accurate, or, thisis historically accurate, but – you're not reading Paul really, right? Becauseyou’re not in his head or you’re not really recreating the aesthetic or eventhe emotion of reading Paul.
Sarah: Right, yes. Now, Paul, for Paul that’svery important, because, you know, you read him, I’m for reading sacredliterature as books. That is, forget for a little while about, you know,no matter how precious it is, forget for a little while about the liturgicaluse of these books. Forget about the Bible study that is, you take alittle passage and you go into that, you deal with things piecemeal. Thisis the normal way they’re dealt with. I’m for reading sacredliterature as books, continuously, as stories, so that they have, they havesomething like, in translation anyway, they have something like the originalflow. They have something of the dynamism, so you’re going from here, tothere, and you know, taking a, not only a narrative, but an emotionaljourney, not only an argumentative journey, but an emotional journey withthese authors and this is, I think, the way you see their world. AndPaul is really interesting in this sense, in that he’s, he’s got areally distinct personality.
15:22
Pete: Uh huh.
Sarah: He’s bad tempered. He’s got a sense ofhumor. He is very, at times, he’s very tender, very loving toward hisfollowers. At times, he’s absolutely fed up with them.
Pete: Is he sarcastic?
Sarah: He’s sarcastic.
Pete: Thank goodness. That’s my lovelanguage.
Sarah: Oh yes, yes.
Pete: That’s why I like Paul so much. Anyway,yeah.
Sarah: Yeah. He’sself-righteous.
Pete: No, that’s not me.
[Laughter]
Jared: Oh no, go on. Yeah, go on.
[Laughter]
Sarah: And then he backs off from it. Thisis kind of the inspiration of Paul, in that he knows his faults, yet he’s stillto some degree under the control of them, but ultimately not, because he neverallows them to get him down or to distract him for long, to deter him. He goeson and on. That is, that is the miracle of Paul, that he keeps going.
Jared: So I hear, the phrase that comes to mymind, is putting Paul kind of in his emotional and aesthetic contextwhere there’s this, like, spiral of interpretation where we’re kindof trying to extrapolate from the text themselves kind of the ethos of Paul,and then that may shape again how we go back and reread that text. Myquestion would be, how do we avoid, or how have you found avoiding putting yourown kind of emotional or aesthetics. You had talkedabout, kinda, not going to with presupposition, but when weget in this realm of aesthetics and emotion, it feels prettysubjective. So, how do you, how do you navigate that?
Sarah: Right. Well, how I handled it, how Icontinue to handle it with, with sacred literature translation, is that Ibuild, try to build a huge amount of context. Now, youknow, when you’re in a classical studies doctoral program at Harvard, theyjust, cram you with books. You read all kinds of things, great, great variety.So, I do have in my head storage, you know, a lot of, a great many pagan works,and I tell biblical scholars that, you know, I respect their work tremendously,but, they haven’t read the dirty books.
Pete: [Laughter]
Jared: Uh huh.
Sarah: It is true, they haven’t. Try to find aprofessor of divinity school who has read Aristophanes orPetronius or the Priapus poems. They’re, I’ve gotta befair, you know, that in recent generations there is moreexperience with popular literature, but, it’s very hard to find a Biblicalscholar –
Jared: And those things kind of put meat on thebones, so to speak. It is giving you this broader context in the world in whichPaul lived, where, like for me growing up, we sort of put the Bibleoutside of space and time and by reading it next to Aristophanes and otherthings, you’re sort of making these connections it sounds like,that gives you this fuller, more robust picture that’s not two dimensional, butmakes Paul human with human emotion and the ups and down of all ofthat.
Sarah: Right, yeah. I mean, when you think ofhim, he’s, in a couple places, you know, he makes dirty jokes. Forexample, you know, in Galatians, he wants his critics castrated.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: He’s on the subject ofcircumcision and he just loses his temper and he saysthey just oughta go castrate themselves or be castrated, I’m notexactly sure. Anyway, I think it helps to understand the, he was raised inthe midst of a pagan culture. Tarsus was an important portcity. So, he’s in a Jewish household but he’s just surrounded bythe pagan culture and he does have pagan literary education. So,in that context, you know, you go to dinner parties where pretty mucheverything, anything goes, you know? You drink, you make jokes, and it’s alittle hard to place, well, impossible in fact, you know, to placePaul precisely. Okay, so, who did he associate with, what would he do? Youknow, what were his limits as an observant Jew? It’s reallyhard to tell. The diaspora’s really complicated. But, youknow, he has a sense of humor that you can find parallels to, youknow, in all kinds of pagan authors. You know, he definitelyhas this, you know, rhetorical manner, so he’s just kind of grabbing atanything. You know, he needs to get attention, he needs to be clever, heneeds to, he’s arguing, you know, to the pagan world with, which has veryhigh standard for entertainment.
20:22
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: So if you kind of balance him out inthis way, and say, well, this is like this author, this is like this genre,then you have a whole lot of evidence, you’ve got a whole lot of support for anew cast that you want to put on a passage of his.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: And you can tell, you have some confidencein saying, no, this isn’t just me.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: I’m not just goofing off here, I’m notjust entertaining myself and doing something different for its own sake. No,I actually have some support here and I can build a whole structureof rhetoric in which to imagine him.
Pete: Yeah. And I think imagining him is ahelpful phrase, because, I mean, we shouldn’t fool ourselves, this isn’tabout objective historical study, but it’s trying to dive into the time more deeplyand drawing some conclusions about how you might want to present thisperson. It’s very similar to, you know, it makes sense even if you don’t knowcompletely. Now, some might say, well, that’s really taking sort of asubjective kind of risk and we want to be more accurate. But of course,that’s nonsense. Because, I mean, I think the way, you know,many Christians that we, you know, deal with and we’re familiar with thesecommunities. Like, Paul in his context, Imean, well he’s got the whole Greek thing happening, theHellenism. He’s also got the Jewish part, and you haveto remember those two things. But, at least in popular thinking, itdoesn’t go much deeper than that, but you’re actually trying toimagine what Paul’s influences might be that can never make it into a historybook, right?
Sarah: Right, yes. And I think influences isimportant here. You can’t say that you’re translating in the true sense, Ibelieve anyway, you can’t say that you’re doing this if you disregard theauthor’s will. The author’s drive to communicate, and this is the problem thatI have with standard translations. If they are flat, if they are dull, ifthey don’t have, if they don’t reflect that mood and the sound and theperformance of the original, you know, this song and dance that the author, theancient, every ancient author, you know, very energetically wentthrough. You are really not collaborating in what thatauthor meant to do, and the evidence did very effectively for hisoriginal audience.
[Music begins]
[Producers group endorsement]
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24:23
Pete: Yeah, I mean, there’s a whole other ton ofreasons why that might not ever happen in Bible translation because ofmarketability and keeping constituencies happy and things like that, you don’twant to be too risky. But, do you, I mean, which is a shame. Do you have, okay,this is the worst question to ask somebody like you, but I’m going to ask itanyway. Do you have a favorite English Bible translation? I get asked that allthe time, my answer is always “not really.” But, I mean, do you have one,like if someone were to ask you that question, just someone in a Quaker meetingwould ask you, what’s a good English translation for reading Paul, do you havean opinion on that?
Sarah: No, not really.
Pete: Yeah, no.
[Laughter]
Sarah: You know, in the book after Paul that Iwrote about Bible translation, Face of Water, I compare thedifferent ones and it was, you know, different very popular Bible translationsand it was a very, very depressing experience because you would take Bible’sthat you would think would be quite different - Jewish StudyBible for one, a Catholic Bible, the New Revised StandardVersion, and say, the Revised Standard Version – you know, a wholearray and you would find that they look almost identical.
Pete: Uh huh.
Sarah: They’re just making, in a typicalpassage, tiny adjustments and this is very frustrating for me whenI, ya know, can see for example in the Lord’s prayer that you havethat line, you know, “give us this day our daily bread.” Dailyis definitely not on as a translation, the word can’t meanthat.
Pete: Really?
Sarah: Yes.
Pete: You just ruined my life, explain thatfurther.
Sarah: [Laughing] Sorry, yes. No, itmeans -
Pete: Everyone out there is dropping to theirknees right now, it’s okay, go on.
Sarah: It probably means tomorrow’sbread.
Pete: Okay.
Sarah: It’s literally the bread that’scoming on, but it doesn’t mean daily. That was just a mistake translation ofconvenience –
Pete: Does it literally mean tomorrow’s, like thebread for the next, the twenty-four hour period –
Sarah: I think that’s the best –
Pete: Or is it something moremetaphorical?
Sarah: No, the best translation wouldbe tomorrow’s bread.
Pete: I've heard it like eschatologicalbread.
Sarah: Oh, yes. No, see, that’s, it’s a compoundword with ousía in it and it was mis-divided.
They made an error in construing that word, sopart of the word –
Pete: Back up, who made the error?
Sarah: Well it was -
Pete: In ancient manuscripts?
Sarah: In the Vulgate Bible, so this is theLatin Bible, it appears in the, it’s being put together around the end of thefourth century A.D.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: And the Vulgate Bible was to becomestandard in the, you know, throughout the west –
Pete: Right.
Sarah: In western Christendom.
Pete: This was Jerome.
Sarah: Yes, yeah.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: So, he was, by this time theerror had been established, that they would see in this Greek word thepart of it that looked like ousía, which means the essence. So, theother part they saw was epí, on, so the compound they saw was “onthe essence” instead of what it really means is “goingtoward.”
Pete: Okay. Oh.
Jared: Mm hmm, so it gives it that futuresense.
Sarah: Yeah, yeah. So, Jerome anyway,was convinced that this meant the panem supersubstantialem. So, giveus our bread that is transcendent. So, it is epí super, ousía–
Jared: Yeah, being, like superbeing. Transcendent.
Sarah: Yes, yeah. So, he saw,he had made this into a meta-physical bread.
Pete: Okay.
Sarah: And it’s pure error. There’s no chancethat it was meant this way by the author.
Pete: So, what does tomorrow’s breadmean? What do you think that means? Getting into Jesus’ head I guess iswhat we’re doing now, right?
Sarah: Right, yes. I don’t know.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: I don’t really know.
Jared: She’s a philologist, she just points outall the mistakes and then asks everyone else to figure itout.
Pete: Well, I guess, I wish moretheologians would say I don’t know, you know, so that’s a goodpoint.
Sarah: I should have an opinion. I wrote,you know, I was composing allof these experimental translations for the book Face ofWater.
Pete: Face of Water.
28:51
Sarah: So, I said the next loaf, the nextloaf, give it to us today. And I related that to the anxiety ofordinary people for getting their nextration. So, you’re talking about loaves, it’s not bread,but it’s a loaf, it’s really important. So, you have these standardloaves. They’re made with molds, so, and you get the loaf as a ration from thehousehold. So, if you’re slave you get your bread or your loaf or yourhunk of loaf, and they’re perforated so they rip apart. It’s kind of a pieshape, so you get your wedge of bread as an individual if a loaf is beingbroken up. So, or you get, also you get loaves as a dole from the state ifyou’re poor. So, this is, these are the people who are hearing andspeaking this prayer. You know, they are, they’re lowly people, they areslaves, they are poor citizens, they are foreigners, peoplethroughout the empire and so, the, some of the archeology that’s happened showsthat, if slaves who were laborer's were more or less starving. Theyweren’t fed enough. So, think of the point of view of somebody who’s, you know,he gets his ration and eats it pretty fast and maybe saves some, butas soon as he gets it, he’s thinking of the next one.
Pete: Hmm, yeah.
Sarah: So, it’s a plea for God to bethere continually providing.
Pete: Yeah, we can count on you.
Sarah: Yes.
Pete: To, yeah, okay. That’s reallyinteresting.
Jared: Okay, well, I appreciate the deep diveinto this particular verse, but something you said earlier, it has,it just struck me in a way that I haven’t thought of before -
Pete: And he can’t let go of it.
Jared: I can’t let go ofit. I gotta test this.
Pete: Can’t let go of it, right.
Jared: So, you keep coming back to authorialintent, right? The intention of Paul, the intention of Jesus, and what I hearyou saying is, maybe I’m putting words in your mouths, that’s why Iwant to test it with you. But what I hear is, in the history oftranslation, we’ve talked about authorial intent, but we’ve really only talkedabout like, half of it, which is kind of, I would call it like the logoscentric side of it, where it’s like, we assume they’re always just like,constructing arguments and we’re trying to like, pull the emotion out of all ofit, because that’s kind of the less risky thing to do. It’s the more“objective” thing to do, but what I hear you saying, which I think isfascinating, and I’d never thought of it and I thinkit’s actually really valuable to say, is that if we’re trying tounderstand authorial intention, we can’t strip it of its emotion and itsaesthetics and its, there’s some texture that I think we are scared of andin order to be “objective” or mechanical or accurate, we’ve lopped that out ofthe equation, and I hear you saying should, we need to bring thatbecause, because these were people who were writing these things, and if we’retalking about their intention and what they’re trying to communicate,communication is about more than just words on a page, or more than justthe logic A+B=C. There is a lot more to it than that. Would thatbe a fair way to look at what you were saying?
Sarah: Yes, that’s very helpful, I think that isa fair way, yes. So, you’re thinking not only of authorial intent, but you’rethinking of the reception of the text.
Jared: Right. Mm hmm.
Sarah: And reception studies havebecome really important in recent years. So, the reallyfascinating thing to me about, one of the fascinating things to me aboutsacred literature, is its very excited reception.
Pete: Hmm.
Sarah: This is, and for the New Testament, thisis particularly important. What was it about these books that broughtsuch an exciting message, you know, such a warmly received message to so manypeople throughout the Roman Empire, and these were people, you know, fromvery different backgrounds, but they responded, you know, with tremendousenthusiasm to the message, but also the form and, you know, one thing I can’trepeat enough is that form and content are more closely fused in ancientliterature.
Pete: Hmm.
Sarah: You’re going to school,okay, you’re a typical boy in the educated classes, and the mainthing you learn all through school is literature and speaking and how toexpress yourself. And, this is not really about argumentation, it’s more aboutformal speaking.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: It’s more about ornate and performativeand dramatic speaking.
Pete: Isn’t the point of that, I mean, thisis, I mean, I know a little bit but not very much about this, but isthe point of this to make an emotional appeal?
33:52
Sarah: Mmm, yes.
Pete: To sway people, not just to, like,convince them logically, but you want to, almost, draw them into your wayof looking at things and at an emotional level, right?
Sarah: Right, right. So, as a typical use towhich this education was put, was speaking in the law courts. And in the lawcourts, the law, the technicalities of the law, the letter of the law meantdiddly squat. You would only refer to it, you know, veryoccasionally. Mostly were going in there and telling the story and puttingon a song and dance and bringing people to your point of view. Now, that’syour point of view as an individual. Sacred literature is very differentin that it’s built to communicate on all occasions and to all kinds of people,so it is a super-charged rhetoric. It is of an intensity and a,an applicability, a breadth of applicability that really has nocomparison. So, you know, imagine the challenges toa simple-minded translator thinking about the enormity of this, thisliterary achievement and how to just start approaching it. Youknow, I must be crazy.
Pete: [Laughter]
Jared: Can I make a leap here, I want to see,because I think there’s also, I keep thinking of, you know, I love hearingabout translation work, but I also know, like, our listeners aren’t really evergoing to try to go translate the Bible, but I see some parallels and even,like, things like, I started in my mind with like Shakespeare, where eventhough it’s written in English, in some ways I think it needs a translator fora lot of people today, like figuring out what it means. Like, you know,when you talk about the wittiness and the sarcasm of Paul, I feel like some ofthat gets lost with Shakespeare, which seems ultra-formal to ustoday, but what he was really trying to do is, you know, was widelyrecognized in his own day in a different way than maybe howwe would see it. And I wonder, when you think about the New Testamentand the Old Testament, and people who just read English, like, what aresome principles that you’ve learned in your translation work that might helppeople approach the Bible differently even if they’re just reading it inEnglish? Because I think some of what you’re saying, even as I think about theNew Testament in English, some of what you’re saying to kind of make Paul humanand understand it that way, impacts how I would even read it inEnglish. So, do you have other ways of thinking that may help people whoaren’t going to translate, but just read the Bible in English?
Sarah: Oh, well. Read my books.
[Laughter]
Pete: [Laughter]
Sarah: She says shamelessly.
[Laugher]
Pete: There ya go.
Sarah: I’ll give you an examplebecause I -
Pete: We teed that one up for you didn’t weSarah? That’s it, alright.
Sarah: Yeah.
[Laughter]
I do not see anything in the original text thatother scholars do not see.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: It’s all right there, you can find itin footnotes, there are ways that you can get at it, but my goal is tomake it much more accessible. You know, to bring it out, incorporate it in thattranslation. If it can’t be expressed, and there aren’t many cases ofthis, but then, if it can’t in any way be expressedEnglish, then an accessible footnote will do. But that reallyhardly ever happens, and I’m just continually tearing my hair. Youknow, when I see what hasn’t been, you know, could easily be included in apassage but hasn’t been because people are nervous. They think about thereaction of the Sunday school class and of the Bible study class and theythink, “oh, no, no, I can’t, I can’t”, but, you know, I’m a Quaker so what canthey do to me?
Pete: Right.
Sarah: I’m not part of that culture. Infact, you know, I do a lot of lecturing and discussion with mainlinechurches, Catholic churches, evangelical churches, and, youknow, that I find in, you know, my actual experience that evenquite conservative readers of the Bible are not resistant to translations thatare more accurate -
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: And more nuanced, more literary. And,they’re kind of tickled, in fact to find out that in, for example, in Matthewand Mark there’s the scene of Jesus with the Syrophoenician woman-
Pete; Mm hmm.
Sarah: So, she is of Canaanite extraction,she’s Venetian, so you know, huge differences from Judaism, then shebarges in to Jesus and demands for her daughter –
Pete: Yeah.
38:46
Sarah: And he, in standard translations, makesthis really cutting remark. Tells her that she’s asking that the children’sbread be tossed to the dogs. That doesn’t say dogs.
Pete: Really?
Sarah: It says little doggies.
Pete: Little doggies?!
Sarah: It’s not kuōn –
Sarah: Little doggies.
Pete: Little doggies.
[Laughter]
Sarah: It’s not kuōn, it’s kunarion. Kuōn would be an insult. You know,dogs, filthy outcast animals -
Pete: Huh.
Sarah: So, unacceptable ethnicgroups. Fine, that would be an insult, but that isn’t what the Greek says.The Greek says kunarion, which is a rare diminutive, this is the only time it occursin all of Scripture, these two incidences. These two twin stories -
Pete: It’s in both inMatthew and Mark, it’s in both.
Sarah: Matthew and Mark, yes.
Pete: Okay.
Sarah: Yeah. And this is a wordthat you would find in Aristophanes, you find it in a sort of comicalpassage of Plato and it means little doggies and it’s a funny word, it’s a cuteword. And, she throws it right back at him. And he’sapparently delighted, and he says because, you know, because of whatyou said, your daughter is healed. Get out of here.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Jared: So maybe take a second, andmaybe reframe, right. So, there’s one way of taking this, whichis Jesus is insulting this woman and she kind of bitingly comes backand it’s a very serious episode. So, given this change, even in that one wordto little doggy, maybe give us a sense then, of the tone and the,yeah, the tone and the texture of this, and how is it different?
Sarah: Okay, you have to goand look at the literary context. This is a process that I was describingbefore, so you have to go to other examples in ancient literature tosee what the tone is of this word and how it’s typically used. So, it doesn’tmean puppies, it’s not simply little dogs, it’s cute little dogs.
Pete: [Laughter]
Sarah: Lap dogs. So, you’ve got tothink, so, we’re too removed, cultural removed, this is not a term that youcould easily imagine the historical Jesus saying, so he’s speaking inAramaic and he, you know, he’s a provincial Jew, a pious one. So, he doesn’t,you would think, have any conception of lap dogs. This is what we’re reallytaking about, lap dogs.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: In the Greek or Romanexperience. So, this is not what he’s saying, but the tradition has it, he saidsomething that the Greek author, or the Greek speaking author interprets ascutie dogs, lap dogs. And in pagan literature, the dogs being fed under thetable, the dogs getting scraps, are getting them at some kind of joyous,very generous, very rich feast.
Pete: Mm hmm.
Sarah: So, we’re talking,okay, theologically about the eschatological banquet. This is the feastingin heaven at the end of time, and there is so much food there that, you know,even the dogs under the table, they get stuffed. And that’s the image that youfind in comic literature such as the novel, The Golden Ass,mid-second century A.D. So there’s a wedding banquet, the bride isrescued from fearsome kidnappers, and she’s a, she’s a very rich, verynoble young lady, so the whole town just has this wild feast and this is thebest thing that’s ever happened, you know, that she is safe and she is marriedand the dogs, the dogs are rendered just helpless and bloated, they eat somuch.
Pete: [Laughter]
Sarah: Yeah! That’s the ultimate joy.And you’ve got to, you know, think about the general poverty thatprevailed in the ancient world. You know -
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: You feast, and youeat meat, you know, a couple times a year if you’re an ordinary person and you’re kindof hungry all the time. But, and then, for the dogs to get enough, that’samazing. So, you know, think of this in relation to the people of, themulti-ethnic audience, mainly of people with pagan backgrounds who are readingthe Gospels as the Christian religion spreads and this is themselves,right?
Pete: Mm hmm.
43:28
Sarah: They are included. They areheirs to the kingdom also. Everybody. The most ordinary people they canimagine, you know, a banquet in which, you know, it never stops. And noone is lowly enough to be excluded enough, no one excludedbefore is going to be excluded now. I think it’s a very tenderpassage.
Pete: Yeah. It becomes more tenderand more hopeful -
Sarah: Mmm.
Pete: Than more like a concessionthat Jesus makes, which is, that’s the morally troubling partof that for a lot of people. Like, he seems to not be treatingher very nicely.
Sarah: Mmm.
Pete: Yeah, so. Well listen,Sarah, this is, I feel like we’re just getting started here. There’s so muchhere to just rethink some things in the Bible by using, let's say, an informedimagination for thinking about what these things might mean that we take forgranted, but we’re coming to the end of our time here and, do you have an onlinepresence? Can people find you online? Can they stalk you somehow?
Sarah: [Laughter] I am at https://sarahruden.com/, that is my website.
Pete: Okay.
Sarah: And my books are all shown there. I’mworking on number ten or eleven; it depends on how you figureit.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: Some are written with otherpeople, and some of my poetry is there. So, yes, I wouldlove people, for people to visit me there.
Pete: Wonderful. And they can getinformation on your books and other kinds of things too, like maybe speakingschedule or things like that on there too, or -
Sarah: I do not have, I donot put my speaking schedule on there -
Pete: You should get that outthere.
Sarah: I probably should getthat, get that up there.
Pete: Yeah, that way people can say,oh! She’s in my area. I’m going to go listen to her. So that’s fantastic, so-
Sarah: Right, right.
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: Well, yes. If anybody is interestedin me speaking, visiting, the information is there about how to contactme.
Pete: Wonderful.
Sarah: And I am very delighted tovisit, you know, any kind of religious group, any kind of institution, and toshare about my work. Yes. And I do this -
Pete: Yeah.
Sarah: It’s my great delight to talkto a great variety of people.
Pete: And samehere. So, listen, Sarah, thank you so much for taking the time.
Jared: Yeah, it’s great to have youon.
Pete: Yeah, wonderful. We learned alot and it’s fantastic, so -
Sarah: Thank you so much!
Pete: Alright, Sarah, thank you.See ya.
Sarah: See ya,bye bye.
[Music begins]
Jared: Thanks everyone for listeningto this episode of The Bible for Normal People. We really appreciate allof your support. And if you want to continue the conversation and getinvolved more in the community, you can head tothebiblefornormalpeople.com. There’s all kinds of blog posts, writtenby mostly Pete, some of me. But, also you can find us online, ifyou don’t want to go to, you know, that’s kind of old school going to awebsite. I mean that’s like -
Pete: Who does that?
Jared: Websites?!?
Pete: Yeah.
Jared: But you can goto social media, we’re there. You can look up Pete, you can look up Jared,you can look up -
Pete: Instagram. We’re onInstagram.
Jared: Instagram.
Pete: The Bible for NormalPeople Instagram.
Jared: We’re Instagramming all overthe place. I mean it’s just, it’s obscene.
Pete: You can see my cat and my dogsand my grandchildren.
Jared: Yeah, so we hope to see youonline continuing the conversation, or back here next week when we havea brand new episode of the Bible for Normal People.See ya then.
Pete: See ya folks.
[Music ends]
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