Lost in Translation

Before I delve any deeper into what the Bible does and doesn't say, a dear friend of mine suggested that I should focus a little on the problem with translations. More specifically, I will focus on the bias that can be imbued on the final product and the fact that it is easy to wrongly translate things.

To begin with, unless you are fluent in ancient Greek and Hebrew and have the original manuscripts in front of you, it will be impossible to correctly translate what was originally recorded. Seeing as the original manuscripts would be thousands of years old by now, chances are slim that many survive to this day. And the copies that do exist are so different that it's difficult to say which the most accurate. Just take a look at the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example. These are a collection of manuscripts found in a series of caves near the Dead Sea, which have been dated to be from 150 BCE to 70 CE. As such, they are the oldest surviving copies of the Bible. But there are discrepancies between what scholars have been able to translate based off these scrolls and what we have in the Bible today. The scrolls contain passages from almost every book in the Old Testament, so you can easily pull up the accepted modern day text and compare it to what was written on these scrolls. These scrolls usually uphold what we find in the Masoretic Text, which is essentially the Hebrew Bible.

One of the more interesting deviations between the Dead Sea Scrolls and what we find in modern Bibles is a few verses from Psalms 22. This is a passage that Christians can look at as a prophecy of Jesus' crucifixtion. In the Contemporary English Version of the Bible, verse 16 reads "For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet." In the K'tuvim, you would find the corresponding verse in the book of Tehillim, verse 17, "For dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me, like a lion, my hands and feet." However, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it reads "Like a lion, they pin my hands and feet.” For the sake of being thorough I went through older English translations to see if I could pinpoint when it went from "pinning" to "piercing." The earliest English translation was the Wycliffe Bible (completed in the 1380s), but I could not find a complete version that includes this passage. And please enlighten me if you do know where this passage is located in the Wycliffe Bible. So, strike one. I think it should be important to note that in the 1490s, Oxford professor Thomas Linacre decided to learn Greek. After comparing what he read in Greek to the Latin Vulgate (the 5th century Latin version of the text), he came to the conclusion that "Either this (the original Greek) is not the Gospel… or we are not Christians." I was able to find a copy of the John Rogers version, which is much more complete than the Wycliffe version. And it does say "pierced" and not "pinned." So as of 1537, this was the official translation: "They pierced my hands and my feet, I might have told all my bones: as for them, they stood staring and looking upon me."

But you may be thinking to yourself "What's the big difference? Aren't pierced and pinned synonyms?" As a noun, a pin is something you would use to fasten something with, usually something long and narrow. However, as a verb, it has a completely different connotation. I could pin you down on a cross with something other than a spike, like a piece of rope or wire. Piercing, on the other hand, is defined much more violently than pinning. It specifically says that a hole is made when something is pierced, whereas there is no mention of a hole when something is pinned. When I think of pinning something, I think of a corsage being pinned to a shirt. When I think of piercing something, I think of body piercings, which would be much closer to what happened to Jesus than pinning. Piercing sounded more violent and painful than pinning, so it's now favored as the correct translation of the text. The Christian translators decided that in order to have this as a prophecy about Jesus, all they had to do was change that one word and it fit. They sound so similar, what's the harm, right? You should note that if you were to look up pierce and pin in the dictionary, you would not see them listed as synonyms of each other.

And that, dear readers, is how easy it is to change things in order to fit your religious views. Next time, more of what Jesus taught us as interpreted by yours truly. But why should you listen to a word I say? Afterall, the whole point of this post was that it's easy to read something and interpret it as you wish. Well, let's just say that I'm trying to put a different view of Christian ideology and stories out there. Stay tuned for more developments.