Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Should we keep quote, unquote Slaves in the New Testament by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:10] I've been talking about Paul's view of slavery in light of the Book of Philemon. This seems to be a good time to talk about a very big issue connected with translating the New Testament from Greek into English. It may seem fairly straightforward, but in fact is incredibly thorny.
[00:00:27] What English word is best to use for the Greek word that refers to a person who is owned by another and compelled on every level to do what the owner requires?
[00:00:38] It's slave, right?
[00:00:40] How can it be complicated?
[00:00:42] Let me put it in a bigger picture.
[00:00:44] For a very long time I've been interested in the question of how to translate ancient texts such as the Greek New Testament into modern languages.
[00:00:53] Early in my scholarly career, my interest was piqued by the work I did as a graduate student working as a research grunt for the Translation committee for the New Revised standard version. My Dr. Vater, Bruce Metzger, was the chair of the committee and he asked me during my graduate studies to be one of the scribes for the Old Testament subcommittee. In that capacity, I recorded all the votes that were taken by the translators for revisions of the text of the Revised State Standard Version in whichever subsection of the committee I was assigned to.
[00:01:23] Normally the subsection would have maybe five scholars on it. They would debate how to modify the text of the RSV verse by verse, word by word. They would then take a vote by a show of hands and I would record their decision.
[00:01:36] This was an eye opening experience for me. Bible translation, or the translation of any foreign language work for that matter, is an inordinately complicated procedure. It is impossible to replicate the exact meaning of one language in another, since the nuances of words vary from one language to another. Let me give an example from the Greek of the New Testament. In English we have different terms that mean something like love, for example, adoration, passion, lust, like, and lots of others.
[00:02:08] Each has its own connotations.
[00:02:11] Greek too has a variety of words, and they all in principle could be translated with the word love, but they all too have their own connotations, which don't always map well onto the English words and their connotations.
[00:02:25] That is, it's hard to find an exact English equivalent for any of the Greek words that could loosely be translated love.
[00:02:32] So what's a translator to do?
[00:02:35] What they invariably have to do is to pick the closest equivalent English word to what the specific Greek word appears to mean in its context and hope it conveys the right idea.
[00:02:46] Other problems involve the fact that historical, social and cultural factors make words suggest something different from one context to another.
[00:02:54] This is a big problem with the Greek word doulos, which does mean slave, that is a person who is owned by another person.
[00:03:03] One problem is that in our American context, when we think of slave, we tend to think of black slaves in the American south before the Civil War and all the horrors associated with the institution. Institution of SLAVERY Slavery was extremely common in Greek and Roman antiquity, but it was very different in that context. It wasn't based at all on race or national origin. Most slaves were either prisoners of war or people who had sold themselves or family members to avoid starvation.
[00:03:32] The institution was far more common then throughout cultures and regions. There was an enormous range of suffering connected with the institution, depending on what kind of a slave the person was.
[00:03:44] Some slaves could be highly educated, wealthy and own slaves themselves.
[00:03:49] Many slaves were better off than lower class people who were free and on and on.
[00:03:55] So the problem is, if you translate the word as slave, then it probably conjures up the wrong connotation.
[00:04:02] On the other hand, there is not a good alternative.
[00:04:05] Servant doesn't work, even though a lot of translations use it, since a servant is not owned by another bondservant, which is sometimes used, doesn't work so well since it's not a term anyone uses anymore. And well, there is not a good alternative.
[00:04:23] And so how to deal with the problem in general? How can a translator translate any word, including doulos, and get all the nuances?
[00:04:33] The short story is that it can't happen.
[00:04:36] When the NRSP committee was working on the translation of the nt, they could not decide among themselves whether to translate doulos as slave or servant or bondservant.
[00:04:48] I suppose other options were suggested. Today, many scholars would probably argue for enslaved person, since that more clearly indicates why the person is in the state they are in, rather than defining them by that state.
[00:05:01] But that too would create debates both ideological and linguistic. The latter because enslaved person is not particularly malevolent.
[00:05:12] In the end, there was a three person committee that had to make the final decision.
[00:05:17] They voted. It was 2 to 1 in favor of servant that decided it. But a few hours later, one of them called from the airport on his way home and changed his vote.
[00:05:29] So that decided it. They went with slave.
[00:05:33] More recently, the updated edition of the NRSV came out.
[00:05:37] I have heard the scuttlebutt on this one. The committee, apparently after much debate, decided to keep with slave.
[00:05:45] The overseers of the translation at the National Council of Churches reversed their decision.
[00:05:51] These were not professional translators, but church administrators. But since they own the copyright and so now it is servant, in my view, that is too bad.
[00:06:02] I understand the arguments, but the reality is that the Bible was written in a different context than ours, and moral issues that we find problematic plague the Bible. It is a thoroughly patriarchal text in many places. For example, if we translate the patriarch out of it, we misrepresent both what it says and what it means.
[00:06:23] If we pretend that slaves were actually hired servants, we do the same thing.
[00:06:28] In my opinion.
