Lectionary Translation

[benedictgal]

In 1998, or so, the USCCB came out with a new translation of the Lectionary based upon the New American Bible, the copyright of which is owned by the USCCB. This particular version lacks beauty and, to some degree, accuracy. The other English language conferences use the Revised Standard Edition. This translation, which you can find in the Ignatius Bible, is much more beautiful and accurate.

[Edited by Moderator]

 

[benedictgal]

Here’s the rest of the article:

“In the beginning God”. Homilies and theological reflections beyond numbering have pondered and probed those four words. It is God and God alone who is in the beginning; He is the source and acting subject of all that follows. If we do not get that right, we will not get right all that follows. Very different is the NAB’s rendering, “In the beginning, when God”. Here there is no invitation to ponder and probe what and who is meant by God. The knowledge is taken for granted; the reader’s attention is immediately turned from the acting subject to His actions. “In the beginning was the Act”. That is not, from the beginning, how Christians have understood the matter. The writer of the fourth Gospel begins with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”. The great student of the fourth Gospel, C.K. Barrett, writes, “John intends that the whole of his gospel shall be read in the light of this verse. The deeds and words of Jesus are the deeds and words of God; if this be not true, the book is blasphemous”. That, says Barrett, is the significance of the tie to Genesis 1, “In the beginning God …”

From the apostolic and patristic eras up through magisterial and theological writings of the present day, the parallel between Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1 has been the source of the most profound reflections. God who was in the beginning is now revealed in Jesus the Christ who is God. The great Augustine, writing in the fifth century, insists upon the parallel wording. As in the beginning is God, so in the beginning is the Word who is God. Here he is preaching against the Arian heresy which claimed that the Son is not truly God but was created as an agent for creating the world. No, insists Augustine: As in the beginning God, so in the beginning the Word. That parallel, so crucial to the entire gospel story, is quite thoroughly obscured by the NAB. From the beginning, the NAB introduces unwarranted novelties that not only further erode what remains of a common biblical vocabulary but are often blithely indifferent to the Church’s tradition of theological reflection.

Consider the parable of the prodigal son: After his dissipation in a “far country” (NAB has “distant country”) the RSV, following the English-language tradition and the Greek text, says “he came to himself”. NAB says “he came to his senses”. No, he didn’t just become more sensible. He came to himself; he returned to who he truly was, the beloved son of the loving father. The theologically literate preacher is regularly compelled to correct the NAB translation prescribed for public reading. Those responsible for the NAB and its perpetual updatings are not heretics and I am sure they do not intend to be doctrinally subversive. It would appear that they are simply indifferent to the great tradition of the Bible in English, frequently indifferent to the history of scriptural interpretation in the Church, and almost always indifferent to good English usage.

So why do they, and so many other translators, do what they do? The answer is undoubtedly related to the fact that, without the production of novelties and revisions, translators would be out of a job. A telling indictment of the NAB is that it is not used or even referred to by non-Catholics and is seldom employed by Catholic biblical scholars who, quite sensibly, prefer other translations. It is a translation that is used at all only because its use has been made mandatory.

But perhaps a few more examples are in order. In Mark 10:9, Our Lord says of marriage, “What therefore God has joined together let not man put asunder”. (RSV) The NAB renders this, “What God has joined together, no human being must separate”. No human being must separate, but a human being may separate? Perhaps angels must separate? Then there are the much quoted words of Psalm 111, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Compare that to the never-to-be-quoted rendition of NAB, “The fear of the Lord is the first stage of wisdom”. Saint Paul exhorts Timothy to “preach the word, be urgent in season and out of season”. In the NAB – in the event you were wondering what clunky means – that becomes, “be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient”. It is too easy to imagine an NAB version of the Gettysburg address: “Approximately eighty-seven years ago, political leaders developed a system of government … ”

I’ll be putting the third chunk next.

 

[benedictgal]

Here comes the third:

The NAB assumes that readers and listeners may be a bit slow on the uptake. Here is Genesis 18 in the RSV: “Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, ‘After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?’” Here is the NAB read at Mass: “Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years, and Sarah had stopped having her womanly periods. So Sarah laughed to herself and said, ‘Now that I am so withered and my husband is so old, am I still to have sexual pleasure?’” Just in case you didn’t get it, the story is about sex. A little before that, the NAB says, “He had intercourse with her, and she became pregnant”. The RSV: “And he went in to Hagar, and she conceived”. Like the high school health text, the NAB is worried that we may miss the point.

The NAB picks up on cultural ticks. Some while back I was in conversation with a national columnist who regularly used “righteous” as an adjective of denigration. For instance, she would criticize “righteous political leaders”. I suggested that surely she meant “self-righteous”, to which she responded that righteous and self-righteous are today synonymous. I thought of this again when working on a Sunday homily. The text was Luke 18, and the NAB renders verse 9 this way: “Jesus spoke this parable addressed to those who believed in their own self-righteousness while holding every one else in contempt”. The KJV, RSV, NIV, and other standard English translations all speak of those who trust in their own righteousness, correctly translating the Greek dikaioi. It is of more than passing interest that the NAB translators seem to agree with the columnist that righteousness today means self-righteousness. But what sense does it make to say that they believed in their self-righteousness? Imagine someone boasting, “I’m more self-righteous than you are!”

Examples can be multiplied almost book by book and chapter by chapter. In II Timothy, Saint Paul declares, “I have fought the good fight”. Fight the good fight. The bracing phrase echoes and re-echoes in high culture and everyday life. What does the NAB give the Catholic people? “I have competed well”.

In the face of every affliction, Paul says in Romans 8, “we are more than conquerors”. (RSV) The NAB says “we conquer overwhelmingly”. On the Church’s relationship to earthly powers, the words have rolled down the centuries: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”. The NAB: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God”. We have taken something from Caesar and from God that we must repay? Don’t ask. The line of Matthew 22:14 is still commonly heard: “Many are called but few are chosen”. NAB: “Many are invited, but few are chosen”. What is gained by the change? What is lost?

Saint Paul to the Philippians: “Have this mind among you, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”. NAB: “Have this attitude in you which was in Christ Jesus”. Jesus had an attitude? There is a significant difference between having the mind of Christ and having the attitude of Christ. Not to mention that literate speakers of English do not speak of a person having an attitude “in” him. In the translation of the four gospels, the NAB regularly says that Jesus “cured” rather than “healed” people. In standard English, “cure” connotes a medical remedy while “heal” connotes making a person whole. At least the NAB does refer to Jesus as a healer rather than a “curer”.

The tone-deaf linguistic wreckers of the Catholic Biblical Association have a great deal to answer for. But it seems that few bishops are prepared to fight the good fight against the atrocities being perpetrated. The tradition of the Bible in English is mangled and banalized at almost every opportunity; the poetic is flattened into the prosaic and the suggestively allusive is forced to submit to the arbitrarily chosen obvious. Literalism joined to a penchant for the insipid succeeds in producing a text that is, at the same time, irritatingly quirky and surpassingly dull. It might be argued that a merit of the NAB is that it discourages – indeed, precludes – the dubious practice of teaching the Bible as literature.

Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future Catholics are stuck with the NAB in its ongoing revisions of revisions. There seems to be little chance that the bishops or the liturgy industry will make available lectionaries or entire Bibles in the RSV or in the more recent and quite splendid English Standard Version, which rivals the RSV in respecting the tradition of the King James and Douay-Rheims. Of course, younger Catholics, those born since 1970, for instance, never knew that tradition. It is their great loss.

The next chunk follows.

 

[benedictgal]

Here’s the fourth part:

The imposition of this embarrassingly third-rate translation is made definite by a provision of the otherwise welcome 2001 instruction from Rome’s congregation for worship, Liturgiam authenticam. The instruction says that “in order that the faithful may be able to commit to memory at least the more important texts of the Sacred Scriptures and be formed by them … there should exist only one approved translation, which will be employed in all parts of the various liturgical books”. The American bishops, alas, chose the NAB. Had they chosen a more worthy translation, there would have been a fierce uproar from the guild of Catholic biblical scholars who perpetrated the NAB. In addition, there is a thoroughly misplaced proprietorial pride in this being a Catholic translation: It may not be very good, but it is ours.

The result is a loss keenly appreciated by those who grew up with what literary critic Alan Jacobs describes as “a shared language, of particular words and phrases that resonated in the common ear – words and phrases whose meanings could be tested, considered, deployed, and redeployed in an infinitely varied set of contexts”. Think of those generations of English-speaking peoples “separating the wheat from the chaff”, “lying down in green pastures”, sometimes being “weighed in the balance and found wanting” but at other times “fighting the good fight” and “putting on the whole armor of Christ” – the whole vast array of discourse (much of it richly poetic) demonstrating that it is very difficult to share thoughts when we do not share words. Because Christians are counseled to “be of one mind”, we should be more attentive to the particular words that shape and form our minds. To have once again a widely shared English Bible would be a significant step toward that one mind in Christ.

It is a great pity that our churches and our culture have largely lost a common biblical vocabulary. The blame rests with academic Bible scholars and with the hustlers of the very big business of multiplying and marketing ever-more-novel versions of the biblical text. But the decay of a culture- and soul-forming tradition is also the fault of the bishops, and it is their very particular fault that the Catholic people are saddled with among the clunkiest of translations, the New American Bible. Yes, I know that there is not much to be done about it, or at least that those who could do something seem not to be interested. And yes, I know that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. But sometimes it is necessary to curse the darkness as well, just to prevent our getting used to it.

Literate converts coming into communion with the Catholic Church, of whom, despite all, there are more and more, are regularly struck by the banalities and eccentricities of scriptural readings and liturgical texts. They are grateful for being received and do not wish to complain, but the blunting of literary sensibilities should not be a price exacted for becoming Catholic.

And now I will let this subject rest for a while. I do not promise that I will not return to it at some later time. It is important that Catholics who are week by week subjected to the NAB know that someone – in the words of a former president – feels their pain. And they should know that they are not limited to this inferior translation in their personal reading and Bible study groups. Then too, those responsible for the translation might be embarrassed into reconsidering their trashing of the tradition of the Bible in English. Finally, the bishops might reconsider their choice of the NAB, or at least petition Rome to allow the liturgical use of other and worthier translations. Or maybe not. In which case, we will during the scriptural readings at every Mass have occasion to remember Flannery O’Connor’s sage observation that we frequently must suffer more from the Church than for the Church.

This is such an important issue. If I may add, there is another translation problem with the NAB that is most disturbing. I’ll put it in the following post.

 

[benedictgal]

In the Gospel Reading (taking from St. John’s account) for the Vigil of Pentecost (John 7:37-39),

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood up and cried out: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me; Let him drink who believes in me. Scripture has it: From within him rivers of living water shall flow.” (Here he was referring to the Spirit, whom those that came to believe in him were to receive. There was, of course, no Spirit yet, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Now, compare this Lecitonary translation (NAB) to the RSV 2nd edition (Ignatius Bible):

On the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed: “If any one is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive; for as yet the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus was not yet glorified.

Talk about a major difference in translation. Are we to assume, based on the NAB, that the Holy Spirit did not yet exist? What does that do to Catholic doctrine? Even though we know better, the translation certainly doesn’t help our cause.

 

[benedictgal]

The original post cited (and it was indicated before the edit) an article written by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, called Bible Babel, from Adoremus magazine. Please read this article before making any comments as the thrust of the post is based on the article.l

adoremus.org/0306BibleTranslations.html

I felt it important to quote the entire article because I did not want some of the poster to feel that I was pontificating my own opinion (as many have accused me of doing); rather, I have sought a sound source for this thread.

 

[Manfred]

The original post cited (and it was indicated before the edit) an article written by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, called Bible Babel, from Adoremus magazine. Please read this article before making any comments as the thrust of the post is based on the article.l

adoremus.org/0306BibleTranslations.html

I felt it important to quote the entire article because I did not want some of the poster to feel that I was pontificating my own opinion (as many have accused me of doing); rather, I have sought a sound source for this thread.

benedictgal,

For some time now, several of us in the Sacred Scripture Forum have been discussing/debating/arguing over the US Lectionary (based on RNAB), the Canadian Lectionary (based on NRSV), and biblical translations in general. A pox on those who accuse you of “pontificating (your) own opinion”!

I’ve read both of Fr Neuhaus’ articles (he wrote one earlier in First Things magazine), and makes on bones about his dislike of the RNAB as well as his preference for the RSV, especially for Lectionary use.

Join us over the Scripture Forum where we can go at it till the cows come home, or whenever the USCCB decides to give us a decent translation, something they have failed to do in this country ever since we stopped using the Confraternity NT (1941) in the 60s soon after Vatican II ended.

See ya there!

 

[benedictgal]

benedictgal,

For some time now, several of us in the Sacred Scripture Forum have been discussing/debating/arguing over the US Lectionary (based on RNAB), the Canadian Lectionary (based on NRSV), and biblical translations in general. A pox on those who accuse you of “pontificating (your) own opinion”!

I’ve read both of Fr Neuhaus’ articles (he wrote one earlier in First Things magazine), and makes on bones about his dislike of the RNAB as well as his preference for the RSV, especially for Lectionary use.

Join us over the Scripture Forum where we can go at it till the cows come home, or whenever the USCCB decides to give us a decent translation, something they have failed to do in this country ever since we stopped using the Confraternity NT (1941) in the 60s soon after Vatican II ended.

See ya there!

I moseyed over yonder and left a post. The reason why I brought it up at this forum is because it deals with liturgy, as it involves the Lectionary. Let’s hope that some reason will prevail.

By the way, I’m all for making Fr. Richard John Neuhaus a bishop. Maybe if he were on the Bishops’ Committee for Divine Worship things would get better !

 

[Manfred]

… it involves the Lectionary. Let’s hope that some reason will prevail.

By the way, I’m all for making Fr. Richard John Neuhaus a bishop. Maybe if he were on the Bishops’ Committee for Divine Worship things would get better !