P for petros and K for kephas

Joel Zetzsche is right, Sunday IS coming, and with it Matthew's gospel passage that we call "Peter's Confession," when Jesus renames Simon as Peter, which we don't "get" unless it's explained for us, because the word play doesn't work in translating from Aramaic to English or NT Greek to English. 

Lots of things don't work right, a favorite example to show and tell in Bible classes over my years was psalms that are acrostics, with verses following the letter order of the Hebrew alphabet. It only comes out in looking at the Hebrew text, or especially in listening as a Hebrew scholar reads it aloud. And discussion of problems with acrostics, including that forcing the acrostic becomes more important to the poet psalmist than that the text flows to make literary sense.

Lots of translated texts cause key features to not work as intended or for competent study, for example Mark's breathless rush of immediacy to get his gospel told, especially when modern translations edit it all out to make it flow nice and smooth. 

Also, the additions to Mark's purposefully abrupt ending.

And because we take what's on the Bible page so seriously, we miss chortle-worthy Jewish humor in sardonic campfire stories about Jacob and Esau, Jacob and God, Jacob and Laban, where the audience is meant to laugh in retrospect at future enemy distant cousins (the Edomites) getting outwitted, and trickster characters (Jacob) getting their comeuppance. 

And in the story of Ruth in which it turns out that David, and by extension Jesus, were not the pure blood Jews that we assumed; not to mention Ruth uncovering Boaz's feet to snuggle up, which reveals (as Naomi knew!) the real reason for the drunken festivities on the threshing room floor after lights out. 

We miss a lot, some of it caused by language translation impossibilities, but much of it our own fault because we take everything so seriously and inerrant-literally, and also puritanically. 

All of which is why I found group Bible studies so much fun over the years, both myself discovering, and helping others discover, what we'd never realized or noticed. In the gospel story about "Peter's Confession," it's worthwhile contemplating how Matthew entirely changed Mark's account (Mark 8:27-30) of the conversation, including to charge it with theological significance. It's also worth shifting the emphasis on Jesus' question, "Who do you say that I am?" from our usual, "Who do YOU say that I am?" to "Who do you say that I am?" - - which I once heard effectively done in a student's sermon in homiletics class at theological seminary. 

And it's worth contemplating what scholars such as those of the Jesus Seminar have to say about this entire conversation obviously being a later construct of the church, for agenda purposes. 

These are discussions that I miss very much, having retired from teaching Sunday School and from leading mid-week Bible study sessions. And while it's still fun finding delightful surprises, it's not as much fun doing them alone as it always was with a group!

As we age, though, we need to keep alert and wise about when "it's Time" -> the rector is retiring, the parish administrative assistant is retiring, the children's minister has just retired, and Old Uncle Bubba is checking the calendar and the preaching schedule, though hoping to be able to stay as long as I'm useful as Priest Helper, a call I've thoroughly enjoyed. 

Which, "useful" brings to mind more translation difficulties with word plays, Paul to Philemon about whether Onesimus is useful or useless. And so much more than's just on the page, that Paul does with words in that particular letter. 

No deep regrets, but if I were doing my life over, instead of branching over to undergraduate and graduate majors in Business Administration, I'd start with Hebrew, Greek, and German as my college undergraduate majors and go from there.  

Anyway, below: next Sunday's gospel text, followed by Zetzsche's enjoyable short essay about it.

RSF&PTL

T

++++++++++++

Matthew 16:13-20

When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah. 

August 27 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A Losing puns in translation Matthew 16:13-20 As a professional translator, I find it fascinating to remember that the “original” Greek New Testament is already a translation of Jesus’ words. We know that the language Jesus spoke most commonly was neither Hebrew nor Greek but his native Aramaic, the language of his home and his primary listeners. Get even more lectionary resources with Sunday’s Coming Premium, our expanded edition of Sunday’s Coming. Learn more. Only a handful of Jesus’ exchanges are recorded in the original Aramaic, though. In Mark 5:41, Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter with “Talitha cum.” In Mark 7:34, he heals a man who is deaf and mute by saying “Ephphatha.” And on the cross he calls out, “El(o)i, El(o)i, lema sabachthani?” according to the gospels of Matthew and Mark. Rendering his cry during crucifixion in Aramaic makes sense to explain the misunderstanding of the witnesses who think he is crying out for Elijah; in the earlier two cases, however, it appears that the main reason for Mark to switch languages is as a literary device to communicate some of the breathless immediacy that is his trademark style. One other utterance of Jesus, though recorded in Greek, lets its Aramaic roots shine through brightly. When Jesus declares to Peter that he wants to build his church on this rock in Matthew 16, his clever play with language is all but lost in translation. I know firsthand that any translation task which assumes that something can be linearly and completely transferred from one language to another will fail. That’s not how languages and translation work. Instead, my job as a translator is to find an equivalent to the original text’s force and meaning in my target text by altering or adding elements. Jesus’ word association with “Peter,” however, is an example that falls flat in almost every language. His pun connecting Peter’s name with “rock” in the Greek text (Petros vs. petra) can be overtly explained in any language, but where’s the fun in that? There are some lucky languages that can skate close to the meaning. Since Latin borrowed “petra” for “rock” from Greek, most of Latin’s descendants (such as French, Portuguese, Italian, and Corsican) can rebuild the pun, but it doesn’t work seamlessly in any of those languages, not even in Greek. While the words are similar enough that readers or listeners might get the word play, the gender of these terms is different and requires different endings. In a recent Italian translation, for instance, it was judged too risky to leave the recognition of the similarity to the readers’ judgment, so the implicit word play was made explicit. The language it really works in, naturally, is Aramaic. Here both “Peter” and “rock” are “kēpā (ܟܹܐܦܵܐ)” (which we know as “Cephas”) without any differentiation in gender. (Amazingly enough, in the New Testament translations of the Neo-Aramaic languages of Assyrian and Chaldean, both published in the early 2000s, it is still kēpā for both.) Language detective work like this allows us to listen in on a conversation between Jesus and his disciples in their native language in all its authenticity and humor. And that makes me want to listen even more closely. – Jost Zetzsche