A Word in Edgewise

I have the privilege of teaching with Dr. Peter Davids at HBU.  Peter is a world class scholar who has devoted much of his writing and research to the Catholic or General Letters.  Peter assisted with us in the theological review of many NT books for The Voice project.  I asked him recently about the portrait of Jesus in the letter of James.

According to James, Jesus is the exalted and glorious Lord who now reigns and will come again to judge the living and the dead.  James is not a Gospel, so there is no narrative of Jesus’ life and death.  Yet James draws heavily on the example and teaching of Jesus. 

While modern Christians may be focused on the afterlife, James is fixed on this life and what faith in Jesus means now.  His readers claim to be following Jesus; well, are they really?  James is a teaching letter and his ethics appear close to what we find in Matthew, particularly the Sermon on the Mount. 

There are no direct quotations of Jesus’ teaching in James, the closest we come to that is James 5:12 (similar to Matthew 5:35-37):

¹² It is even more important, my brothers and sisters, that you remember not to make a vow by the heavens or the earth or by anything. When you say “yes,” it should always mean “yes,” and “no” should always mean “no.” If you can keep your word, you will avoid judgment.

John Kloppenberg has made the case that James makes use of aemulatio, a rhetorical form where James takes a teaching of Jesus and conforms it to his setting. In other words, James reworks Jesus’ teaching to fit the current situation of the diaspora churches he is addressing. 

So James is not all that different than what we find in the rest of the NT.  Jesus is coming again as judge.  Are you obeying him now?  James’ emphasis on Jesus’ future coming implies that their present sufferings are not without meaning; so, be patient and don’t take matters into your own hands.  Trust the judge to settle all scores. 

But if James were the only account we had of Jesus’ life, we wouldn’t know much about his past.  The Church would celebrate his coming and his ascension to the right hand of the Father.  With no account of his birth, however, we would probably not celebrate Christmas.  There would be more emphasis on calling people to obedience to Jesus now.  The Church’s mission could be summed up this way: calling people to Jesus as Lord and living in the hope of his coming. 

With James as our guide, the church probably would not have developed the kind of hierarchy we see in some churches.  Yet James does speak as a patriarch of sorts, a central authority writing from the mother church in Jerusalem and instructing scattered Christian communities in the tense times they found themselves in.

According to tradition, James was a member of Jesus’ family, but the letter never makes the explicit claim.  Still it must have meant something in the early Jewish-Christian communities to have been part of the family of Jesus. Later generations may de-emphasize that fact and privilege Paul and Peter over members of Jesus family.   Still it must have been “a big deal” to have had been related to Jesus. 

Dr. Davids said that Paul is often misread over against James.  But if pressed, James would have agreed with Romans 10:9-10:  

So if you believe deep in your heart that God raised Jesus from the pit of death and if you voice your allegiance by confessing the truth that “Jesus is Lord,” then you will be saved! ¹⁰ Belief begins in the heart and leads to a life that’s right with God; confession departs from our lips and brings eternal salvation.

For James, however, saving faith is faith that goes to work for the poor, faith that obeys the risen Lord, and faith that seeks wisdom from above.  So for James—as a follower of Jesus—salvation results not only a secure future with God but ethical behavior before God.

The difference between a translation and a paraphrase is pretty straightforward.  Any time you start with one language (the donor language) and end in another language (the receptor language) you are engaged in translation.  In the case of the New Testament, if you start with the Greek text and end with an English or Dutch or German text, you have just done a translation.  Now there are levels of formality or strictness that enter into the process, but that is another question altogether.  Julia Smith, a 19th century women’s activist, did her own translation of the Bible in the late 1800s because she felt the King James was too “foot loose and fancy free.”  What she ended with is a translation, but it is so strict it is hard to read.  Obviously, it never caught on because you’ve probably never heard of Julia Smith. 

Paraphrase involves starting and staying with the same language.  To paraphrase means to restate the meaning of a text using using different words in the same language. If I were to paraphrase Thoreau’s famous line: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” I might say “Most people endure life’s frustrations calmly and peacefully.”  Now my version isn’t as artful as Thoreau’s, but it means roughly the same thing.  “Brevity is the soul of wit” as Shakespeare noted. In other words, “It’s always better to use fewer words if you can.”  You get the picture.

So if you were to take the King James Version, remove the “thees” and “thous” and replace them with more modern pronouns, and then put some of the harder theological language in more contemporary idiom, then you would be paraphrasing not translating.  The goal of a paraphrase generally is to make something clear or to explain it.  You could preface a paraphrase with “in other words” or “to put it another way.”  

Recently I’ve heard some people refer to Eugene’s Peterson’s, The Message, as a paraphrase.  They weren’t aware that Peterson worked from the original languages.  Because he did, The Message is a translation.  People often mistake an informal “sound” with paraphrase. If it “sounds” to them informal or different than what they are used to, it must be a paraphrase. Not exactly.  Translation and paraphrase are processes not a result. When you begin with one language and end in another, you’ve got a translation on your hands. 

The Voice Bible is also a translation even though it may “sound” different than what someone is used to hearing.  This is because we made a number of translation decisions which earlier translations did not make.  We approached dialogue, poetry, divine names and titles, differently than other versions.  We started with the original languages (Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic), worked with them, came back to them, and wrestled with how to render these amazing texts for a new day. 

C. S. Lewis said in the preface to J. B. Phillips translation of Paul’s letters (and I paraphrase) that if we are to have translation at all, then we must have periodic re-translation.  You can’t translate something once and be done with it for language is a changing thing.  Our language, like our technology, is changing at a staggering pace.  Every generation has the obligation to retell these amazing stories for their own day.

Alan Segal was a friend.  He died in the spring of 2011 leaving behind a big hole in the world of many friends and his family.

Alan helped me get my first book published.  He read my manuscript on a flight from New York to San Francisco in the early 1990s.  Not long after he wrote to Professor Martin Hengel and recommended my book for publication in the series known to many New Testament scholars: Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament (2nd series).  Old Testament Yahweh Texts in Paul’s Christology was published in 1992 by J. C. B Mohr.

As the years passed, I had the privilege of traveling with him to conferences and rooming with him during several of  the national meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature.  To know Alan was to be invited to dinner along with 20 other people he met on the way to the taxi.  Alan was able to order food in seventeen different languages. Alan always had a big table.   As the food came, he would entertain everyone with his stories and good humor.  To know Alan was to be made to feel welcome and important.  I wonder how many young scholars Alan helped along.

To walk with Alan across a hotel lobby meant being stopped fifteen times by his friends and admirers.  It took forever to go from Point A to Point B, but the time it took went quickly.

In the middle 2000s, Carey Newman of Baylor University  Press and I brought together a team of scholars to publish a Festschrift for Alan Segal and his good friend, Larry Hurtado.  We tried to keep the project a secret, asking Alan to write an article for Larry and Larry to write for Alan.  At the time they didn’t know it but they were contributing articles to a Festschrift dedicated to both of them.  Israel’s God and Rebecca’s Children was published in 2007 by Baylor University Press.

Today, I received an email from a film producer, Robert Orlando, about a movie dedicated to Alan Segal.  The movie is called “A Polite Bribe,” and I can’t wait to see it.  At the bottom of the email was a 2 1/2 minute video of Alan Segal talking about the Apostle Paul, a subject near and dear to both of us.  The video is on the blog post of a new friend, Dr. James McGrath of Butler University.  See the link below.

The last time I saw Alan was in December 2010.  Larry Hurtado, Carey Newman and I flew to New York to see him.  We knew he was very ill but we never thought we’d never see him again.  He died just a few weeks later.

Today when I saw the video of Alan, a rush of emotions came over me.  Here was Alan, looking well again, sounding strong again, talking once again about Paul.

Here is a link to James McGrath’s post about the movie.  At the bottom there is a brief video about Paul featuring my old friend, Alan Segal.  I can’t tell you how much I miss him.  If you knew Alan, then you will want to see this.  If you didn’t know him, then perhaps you will hear in his voice or see in his face a truly great soul.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/exploringourmatrix/2013/09/a-polite-bribe.html

Recently I have talked with a number of Christian leaders from various denominations.  They have told me they are giving up on any private reading of the Bible.  They said it with a bit of uncertainty in their voices, wondering if they were doing the right thing, wondering if they were secret heretics.  You see it has been drilled into them that a good Christian has a quiet time every day and part of that includes personal Bible reading.

Now these leaders aren’t giving up on the Bible altogether, they have just concluded that Bible reading ought to be communal practice not individual.  They point out correctly that the books of the Bible were not addressed to private readers; the various authors expected these books to be read to gathered audiences of the faithful.  Even letters addressed to private persons like Philemon and Titus were supposed to be read publicly. Consider Paul’s admonition that “faith comes by hearing” (Romans 10:17); the apostle assumes one who speaks for God and one who listens to the good news.  Revelation 1:3 pronounces blessings upon those who read—that is, those who read aloud to the congregation—and those who hear the words of the prophecy.  The one who reads is one; those who hear are many.

These leaders also cite church history, particularly, the development of the daily office and other regular gatherings of the faithful to chant the psalms and read the Scriptures.  In particular, lectio divina—the  spiritual reading of Scripture—is  not intended as a solitary enterprise; it expects  that believers gather and listen to the Scripture. It assumes a community of people who are living life together and not just a haphazard collection of people with some common interests.

It’s clear to me these leaders are feeling a bit guilty and are unsure about their decision.  They want to be good Christians.  They see themselves as good Christians.  They want others to see them as good Christians too.   It’s not that they have found private Bible reading unproductive; it’s that they have found engaging the Bible publicly more productive.  It seems to me they have arrived at this point along their spiritual journey in good faith.  They aren’t trying to get out of anything or take any short-cuts.  They’ re serious in their Christian commitments.

For my part, I’m not ready to give up on private Bible reading.  While I understand and can appreciate the concerns expressed by these Christians leaders, I’m not convinced that private Bible reading is not already a communal event.  Let me explain.  When I sit down to read, say Mark’s Gospel, I am in a very real sense not alone.  Think for a moment where this text has come from and how it has come down to us.  Thousands of people have been involved in the process of bringing these books down to us.  Though the Gospel itself is anonymous, Christian tradition associates it with Mark, a missionary companion of Peter and Paul.  When Mark writes, he is writing to the church of his day.  They are the first consumers of this letter.  But because these Jesus-followers valued it for what it communicated about him, Mark’s Gospel was copied by hand for 1400 years along with all the other books that make up our Bibles.  Think about all the monks and scribes who took part in that process.  Along the way, it was translated into dozens of languages we know of and many more we don’t.  Beginning in  the 14th century–and indeed before–courageous Christian scholars began the difficult process of gathering these texts together and translating them into English, my mother tongue.  Protestant reformers took the churches of Europe back to the sources (ad fontes), collecting and sorting texts of the Greek and Hebrew Bibles.  That process of discovering manuscripts, transcribing them, relating them to other manuscripts, and translating them for the church today continues.  In a real sense when I sit down to read the Bible I meet the church.  When I work through Mark’s Gospel or Paul’s letter to the Galatians or a psalm, I think about all the saints painstakingly and carefully at work  to make sure later generations like ours have the Scriptures in our language.  Bible reading, even private Bible reading, involves “the communion of the saints.”

So, what do you think?  Have you given up on private Bible reading?  Or do you think it is time you did?   If so, why?  If not, how would you convince these leaders that private Bible reading is a practice worth pursuing?