Monday 30 September 2019

IN TRANSLATION

St Jerome

I  write this on the feast of St Jerome, who translated the scriptures into Latin around the turn of the fifth century. Jerome was a pugnacious old character, some of whose views (as for instance on the moral superiority of the single to the married state) I find a bit distasteful, and he was very unkind to the memory of Origen, a great earlier theologian. The really positive point about Jerome, though, is his fervent desire to translate the scriptures, so that they could be understood. Christianity had emerged in a Greek-speaking environment, and in New Testament times Greek was the language of the people among whom Christianity was expanding, but three hundred and fifty years later this was no longer the case, and Jerome saw the need for an authoritative Latin translation of the scriptures. By Jerome's lifetime, although reading Greek was a badge of scholarship in the Roman world, it was no longer essential, as Latin had conquered the academic as well as the administrative world. For example, his great contemporary Augustine did not read Greek. More importantly, ordinary people in most of the Empire knew Latin rather than Greek.

There was a Latin New Testament before Jerome, which the scholars call the "Old Latin" text, the "Vetus Latina", only, confusingly, it was written in what linguists call "Late Latin" not "Old Latin", nor was it strictly "a Latin New Testament", because there were many different translations of separate books. So Jerome's work on the New Testament was partly about establishing a single, authoritative, version, in a consistent prose style, and he worked from the Vetus Latina, correcting translations against the oldest Greek manuscripts he could find, and generally improving the grammar. When it came to the Old Testament, although there were Vetus Latina versions for some books, Jerome was essentially starting from scratch, producing his own new Latin version, and going back where he could to Hebrew texts, rather than just the Greek. to work from.This was controversial in itself, as the Greek Septuagint was regarded by some of his contemporaries as itself a divinely-inspired text (rather as some Christians today regard the King James Bible) and Hebrew texts were, in some eyes, tainted by their association with Judaism. For Jerome, though, it was obvious that getting back to the oldest versions of biblical texts would reveal the most authoritative text, and enable the translation to be reliable.

Ironically, Jerome's Latin Bible (the "Vulgate") only finally officially displaced all the Vetus Latina versions in the sixteenth century, at just the moment that Reformers were translating the scriptures into vernacular languages under exactly the same impulse. Liturgy and scripture need to be understood by the faithful, was Jerome's view, and that of the Reformers.

At the school Mass this morning I took the Year 4 class into the middle of the nave and got them to look up at the ceiling to see the portrait of St Jerome up there. He is, of course, easily recognisable, as he is dressed in his broad-brimmed red hat and red robes as a (completely anachronistic) cardinal. I didn't bother with the anachronism, but asked them to find a man with a big red hat and red cloak, and a big black beard. They were very pleased to find him easily. Talking about putting the scriptures into different languages makes sense in this environment where there are more than fifty different home languages among the pupils.

I was struck while I was doing this with the thought that our attitudes to translation go to the heart of the difference between Christianity and Islam. In Islam, the text of the Qur'an is believed to have been uttered by God in classical Arabic, and taken down as dictation by the Prophet Muhammad. While translations exist, they are never allowed to claim to be the Qur'an, but "versions" of it, and essentially the believer is urged to learn classical Arabic in order to approach the text. The text is given; it is the person who must change. A perfect example of the "submission" embodied in Islam. Christianity meanwhile, maintains a notion of the sacredness and inviolability of the scriptures, but accepts that translation has always taken place (even in Old Testament times) and believes that the scriptures need to be translated into the languages of humanity so that humanity may hear the message properly. We don't even know for sure whether Jesus spoke Greek; we assume he taught in Aramaic, which means that the Gospels contain translations of his teaching. He could almost certainly read and speak Greek, but the evidence suggests he generally spoke Aramaic to ordinary people, because that was their language. So Christianity has always wanted to be accessible to different cultures on their own terms (despite remoulding Christianity into a European shape in colonial times, and an American shape in the modern world).        

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