Introduction and General Issues

gentlemen of the Bay Psalm Book had the wit to profess their sacred principles
and their claim of having left the song of God unviolated by whims, of elegance
and decoration; at the same time they had the imaginative grace to ignore their
professions and vows before an editorial Lord and do what they could, with the
prosodic resources in their command, to transfer the magnificent psalms in the
•Authorized prose into their own metronomic yet singing verse.

A Je w ’s profile in the subway is perhaps that o f Christ; the hands giving us

our change at the ticket window perhaps repeat those that one day were
nailed to the cross by some soldiers.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Paradiso, XXXI, 108"

How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus
Ceased To Be a Jew
UNFAITHFUL TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE FOR THE FAITHFUL

In E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate, there is a scene in which Dutch

Schultz, a New York gangster, converts to Catholicism. In that passage, the priest
tells Schultz how the religions differ:

The father put down his knife and fork and leaned back in his chair still chewing.
' He looked at Mr. Schultz, his heavy eyebrows raised in compassionate priestly
skepticism. “From the Jewish to the Holy Church is a great revolution.”
“Not so great Father, not so great. We are in the same ballpark. Why else
would all your bigshots wear yarmulkes? I notice also you keep talking about our
guys and reading our Bible. Not so great." (173)

In this section, we will look into one of the great enigmas and distortions of
religious and intellectual history: how, through the manipulation of intentional
falsification of translation, Jesus, in the eyes of Christians and even Jews, ceased
to be one of “our guys.” We learn the benefits of mistranslation, of censorship
and adaptation, which inhere in mistranslation, and how, notwithstanding Mr.
Schultz’s exceptional, enlightened, and wiseguy understanding of things, Jesus,,
through the translator’s deft, authorizing hand, ceased to be a Jew.
Most analyses of Bible translation are concerned w ith accuracy, a buzz word
in religious translation for linguistic and theological purity. In practice such pu­
rity is deeply subjective (as perhaps it should be) and depends on the values,
prejudices, and religious politics of each denomination. Fidelity to the word of
the Lord presupposes the claim of word-for-word or, at best, sense-for-sense
translation, to use Horace’s and Jerom e’s prescription. Literalist fidelity in Bible
translation assumes that content of the holy events can be separated from the
problems and Parables

sound, style, tone, and form of their narration, as well as from all those qualities
that constitute the general signification of a sentence, an assumption which no
contemporary literary or linguistic theory of language would tolerate.
As we have seen in the instance of the Bay Psalm Book, the claims of fidelity
have, in older glorious translations, interfered neither with magnificence of style
nor with accuracy. Translators and exegetes alike have invented meanings and
words with the full powers of their determined imaginations.
In our century, however, the Bible has suffered ignominiously “accurate"
translations. Accurate has replaced literal as the word to justify bad translation.
Not since the seventeenth-century King James and the twentieth-century Revised
Standard versions has the Bible, unlike the other major texts of Greco-Roman
and Judeo-Christian culture, been afforded the dignity of a literary translation
into English. (An illuminating exception is Richmond Lattimore’s translation of
the synoptic Gospels, the Gospel of John, and Revelation.) The Hebrew Bible and
Christian Scriptures in English have suffered every form of modern literary
abuse.3 Imagine if Homer, Virgil, and Dante were given to us in simplified, “Good
News” translations. Consider this painfully close version by the British and For­
eign Bible Society in 1958 of the majestic beginning of the Gospel of John: "In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was towards the God, and God was
the Word. This was in beginning towards the God. Everything through him be­
came, and apart-from him became not-even one-thing. What has-become in him
life was, and the life was the light of-the men. And the light in the darkness
shines, and the darkness it not overcame.”
Because of shoddy translations of the Bible in our century, its great literature,
its poets and prophets, have not been given a contemporary voice, such as T. S.
Eliot called for in his attack on Gilbert Murray’s old-fashioned, wooden, Swin-
burnian translations from the Greek and his demand for new versions of Greek
tragedy. Eliot’s plea has since been answered in the excellent versions by Dudley
Fitts, Robert Fitzgerald, William Arrowsmith, and Lattimore, among others.
There is no equivalent in Bible translation, neither in quality nor in outstanding
translators who insure quality. But the Bible, as is so often the case with sacred
literature, has been judged by criteria alien to the art of translation.
According to our model for translation method, h,ere the modern literary
abuse of method derives from the application of a .literalist (register la) rather
than a middle-ground (register lb ) approach to a text given to us in the form of
a great work of art. All this is, or should be, clear. A deeper infidelity in Bible
translation method goes undetected, however. For although it is assumed that
the felony of contemporary Bible translators is literary insensitivity, mediocrity,
or overliteralism, few people realize that from earliest Bible translation to the
present there has been only the appearance of literalism. Indeed, in the many
moments involved in the multiple translation processes, that is, the transforma­
tion of an event into text— including witnessing, transcription of witnessing,
 Introduction and General Issues;

redaction, and formal translation— the original event, if there was one, experi­
ences radical transformations. Did Stephen actually speak to the Jewish Council
as reported in Acts 7, and, if so, how, a half century after the event, did Luke:
obtain “the verbatim text of Stephen’s speech”? Is it not rather, as John B. Gabel
and Charles Wheeler suggest in their recent volume The Bible as Literature, more
likely that Luke, as author and redactor of the Acts, recorded what Stephen
“would have (or should have) given on that occasion” in order to convince his
Christian audience (7 -9 )?
The assumption of literalism and intended fidelity has been the shield of fun­
damentalists and radical liberal theologians alike against an awareness of a pro­
found religio-political infidelity. The translations of the Hebrew Bible and the
Christian Scriptures, consciously or not, are similar to the controlled news in­
formation in authoritarian states. In other words, license (register c) and extreme
freedom has been applied to Bible translations, yet passed off as literalism (reg­
ister a). There is nothing uncommon about a misalliance of theory and practice,
of intention and realization. The gap between proclaimed intention and realiza­
tion in regard to Bible translation is extreme, however.
The many translators of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Scriptures into
the “common” languages, beginning with Latin o f the Vulgate, have conducted
sectarian, combative missions to change the recognizable identities of the people
of the Bible. Distortion of identity by means of translation holds as a pattern
throughout the English and Greek versions o f the Hebrew Bible and even more
acutely in the Christian Scriptures. Here, I will comment only on the transfer of
the Christian Scriptures from Greek into English.
Early Christianity was an invention of Jews; in the early period the new faith
was initially developed for and practiced by Jews and gentiles in Judea, Galilee,
in communities and synagogues of Rome, Thessaloniki, and Anatolia, where Paul
preached and proselytized. Some Jews dropped the specific designation of Jew,
while others, particularly Greek-speaking Jews from Alexandria who looked to
John the Baptist, James, and Jesus, came to be called Jewish Christians or Ebion-
ites. Many pseudepigrapha and noncanonical apocrypha of the day are specifi­
cally Jew ish Christian, others are Jewish with a Jewish Christian or Christian
overlay. O f the great poetry of the first centuries nothing we have compares with
the splendor of the pseudepigraphic Odes o f Solomon, Jewish Christian wisdom
poetry found in Syriac.
The Jewish Christians, according to Ron Cameron, were close to the spirit of
“Matthew, which also appears to reinterpret Jewish and Jesus traditions to pro­
vide, in part, a possible option for Jewish identity after the destruction of the
Temple” (Other Gospels 103). Matthew the Evangelist, also called Levi, was him­
self a Jew ish Christian. His audience, faithful Jews, saw the crucified rabbijoshua
as the Messiah and true interpreter of Jewish law. Their belief in the Messiah
known later by the Greek name Jesus was not necessarily conceived of as apos­
tasy but rather as in keeping with a fulfillment of Jewish tradition.
Problems and Parables

During the intertestamental period (the time between the composition of the
Old and New Testaments), there were many sects seeking the Messiah, as con-
temp0rary scriptures confirm. Even the pseudepigraphic Genesis Apocryphon
from the Dead Sea Scrolls tells of a messiah figure among the Essenes, who like
jesus performs healing miracles, such as the laying-on o f hands. The Jewish
G n o stic s were also essentially eschatological, that is, concerned with salvation,
as were later Christian Gnostics (see Gershom Scholem’s Jewish Gnosticism); yet,
failing to find the Messiah’s return, both sects turned inward, seeking, through
gnosis, revelation and union of the soul with God. R. M. Grant speculates that
after the failure of Jewish apocalyptic hopes— that is, the messianic hope of God’s
intervention—Jews looked inside for illumination (Gnosticism and Christianity
26). So too the Christian Gnostics sought the inner realm of light when the
Messiah did not return.
But many of the religious sects, including monotheistic Pagans o f Alexandria,
eagerly awaited the Messiah; among these sects were those later to be designated
Christians. Since early Christian leaders, saints, and followers were both Jews
and gentiles, pursuing the Jewish dream of an announced Messiah, how could
two thousand years of Christian antisemitism be based largely on their Scrip­
tures, that is, on the New Testament, a collection of revolutionary texts born
from the depths of the rabbinic tradition?
By sleight-of-hand editing and translating, only certain figures of the Christian
Scriptures remain clearly identifiable as Jews— not John the Baptist, not Mary,
not Jesus, nor James and Paul: even their names are not biblically Jewish. The
disguise is in place by the time of the Greek Scriptures and is reinforced in
translation into other languages. Those seen to be Jews are depicted deplorably
and always as guilty. Yet Jeremiah and Isaiah treated their people even more
severely in their teachings, rebuking them and prophesying terrible retribution
for their transgressions. W hy then are Jeremiah and Isaiah not part of the long
tradition of antisemitism?
When the prophets reprimand Jews in the Hebrew Bible it is recognized as
an internal quest for ethical improvement. W hen transgressors sin, the prophets
are there to say so. Self-criticism within a culture, even fierce censure, does not
usually provoke external wrath. No discernible tradition exists of hatred of bib­
lical Israelites— the Hebrews, to use Christian appellations for Jews in the He­
brew Bible. In reality the books of Jeremiah and the Isaiahs are typical of biblical
and later sacred books of the Jewish tradition in which harsh self-criticism, even
ethical self-flagellation, pervades. And the synoptic Gospels and epistles of Paul
are also part of that Jewish tradition— but with a difference.
The Christian Scriptures are fearfully different because, in the Jewish'world
that they describe, all the good people are Christians and the evil ones Jews, and
the division is no longer internal but of two alienated peoples. Internal corrective
self-criticism by Jews of Jews has been transformed into the blood conflict of
gentile against Jew. How could Jewish authors produce such a fearful world of
 Introduction and General Issues

fatal hatreds? They did not. The original stories, in the process of telling and
writing, redaction, and translation, were transformed to produce a narrative that
excluded Jews from the messianic happenings in their land. Here I use translation
to mean the specific translation of the Christian Scriptures into the vulgar
tongues. But I also mean by it the larger process of transforming and transmitting
information, which includes the intralingual editing of texts. I refer particularly
to that most uncertain period when the editing and translation took place, in the
decades after Jesus’ death during which oral and written proto-Gospel sources,
whatever they were, were compiled to yield the later synoptic Gospels.
These earlier versions of the synoptic Gospels (which exclude the Gospel of
John) had a Semitic source, oral or written, in Aramaic or Hebrew, and what
survive today are versions of earlier versions which have gained authority as
original documents and are analyzed for each critical word. In the course of these
many translations and later versions in Latin and the languages of the world, the
early compilers and translators of the Christian Scriptures succeeded so well in
formulating the new documents that they created a disenfranchizing book about
Jews in which the main figures, “good Jew s,” are not perceived as Jews at all.
They are not meant to be. Jews, as the enemies of Jesus (the rabbi Joshua),
must— and will— be punished for all generations to come.
To understand the scope of the perfect realization, through translation, of the
eradication of a people’s identity, I offer a parable relating the Greek Socrates to
the Jew Jesus. It is a retelling of the story of a Greek and a Jew, although these
designations of ethnic identity are cast into curious distorting shadows of inten-
tionality. “W ho are the Greeks and who are the Jews?" stolen from Roland
Barthes’ Mythologies, might make a helpful subtitle.

PARABLE OF THE DEATH OF SOCRATES

Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Phaedo narrate the last days of Socrates, taking
us through his pathos and the calm agony of his execution. But after the icono­
clastic period (between the fifth and the ninth centuries), when the Church shat­
tered visible antiquity and ordered pagan writing burned, Plato’s work persisted
only in Persian and Arabic translations. These Platonic scrolls, still alive in the
East, offered light to the Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, but in
the West the School of Translators at Toledo, who eventually returned Plato to
Spain and Europe, was still many centuries away. From that earlier Western
darkness came this document:
“It happens that in our Italian monastery at Monte Cassino (founded in 529,
nearly a century ago, by our patron Benedictus of Nursia) parchments were dis­
covered with the Greek texts of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. These three doc­
uments are now the only records preserved from that barbaric, pre-illuminated
period misnamed ‘the age of Hellenic civilization.’ Our iconoclastic period took
care o f destroying not only every marble and basalt statue but every fragment of
Problems and Parables

papyrus, every written text. Yet these three texts (like the three synoptic Gospels
which suffice to give the history of our Lord) are enough for us to prove a few
poignant facts. The Greeks are the Socrates-killers, killers of a man who was
almost a holy Pagan in wisdom, knowledge, and virtue, and who was not a
Greek. Initially, even we believed in' Socrates’ Greekness. But that unacceptable
notion soon vanished, as, through our adjustment of the texts, we drew Socrates
into our Christian fold.
“1 am an anonymous brother of the Church, who would walk around the
globe a hundred times, with no more than bread in my pockets, were it to
advance the astute ideals I am heir to in this, our Augustinian order. Together
with other enlightened brothers, I decided to perform my decisive act for Church
and for God— no less than to reconcile Pagan thought with our own doctrines
deriving from Augustine, our benefactor, from Paul our guide, and from our Lord
the Christ. Being motivated by faith rather than by worldly beliefs, I have no
qualms about the nature of my contributions. Yet being also a pedant, one con­
firmed in the pleasures o f bookish affirmation and confession, I have decided to
set down a brief history of how my brothers and I have affected the history of
antiquity.
“Imbued with humanism, we monks set about to translate the dialogues of
Plato into Latin. However, since ours is a time when Sappho has ceased to be
recited from memory— the burning of her works was recently ordered by Pope
Gregory VII— and Paganism shows always as an insinuation of sin, we deter­
mined to treat Socrates, and his resonant and symbolic death in particular, as
our French brethren had Ovid in Ovide moralisé. We would not, however, resort
to submitting Socrates to Christian castigation, to turn the thinker typologically
into a representation of virtue. There would be no Socrates divinizzato. Why not?
Our logic was shrewd: to Christianize Socrates thoroughly would be ineffective
and undermine our higher intent, which is to praise the good men who lived on\
earth before the incarnation, to extol Aristotle and Virgil, but not to give them
the light of Christian salvation. And above all we would deprive Socrates of the
celebrations and temptations of his civilization by deracinating him, by making
him alien in his homeland. In such ways the great word of Socrates could be
used by the Church, without taint of its depraved and threatening Hellenic
origin.
“In the cold library at Monte Cassino we made an initial interlinear gloss,
then we altered, elaborated, making draft upon draft, shaping the message to
our mission. In these rewordings the miraculous transformation took place. The
falsification was never detected. Ultimately, we achieved a fresh and definitive
historical version. Yet after having performed our fabrications for the belief of
later generations, we, the authors, were the first to believe the message of the
altered texts. When the imagination has produced a sacred scripture for the Lord,
it soon becomes impossible to distinguish its own contribution, its creation, from
68 Introduction and General Issues

the original; and happy with the fruit of our hybrid trees, we were the first to
forget the old dubious dialogues of that other scribe, the homoerotic sophist and
banqueter, Plato.
“While magic offers merely tjie dexterity of illusion, miracle, which has a
transcendent deity coaching the earthly agent, not only transforms the object but
creates its new truth. Magic begins with the premise of assumed falsehood while
miracle demands the fabrication of truth. So our scribal version of the life and
death of Socrates is not monkish magic. Our perfect rendition is miracle.
“In our Monte Cassino translation, you will discover that although Socrates
and his companions inhabit Greece, they are not Greeks at all. Nor are outra­
geous Archilochos, the pious poet Pindar, the heathens Plato and Aristotle, nor
even the angry buffoon Aristophanes. None is Greek. In the city of Athens there
are no identifiable Greeks among apprentice sculptors or wives of sophists or
hoplite guards on honey-tasting Hymaetus or citizen masses in markets on the
slope of the Agora. There is only one gang of Greeks in the marble belly of
Athens— the terrible, contemptible group who condemns Socrates to death.
These are the judges in the tribunal of Athens. These are the Greeks. These Greek
judges accuse Socrates of ‘corrupting the minds of the young, and believing in
deities of his own invention instead of the gods recognized by the state.’ Even
Socrates, through Plato’s words, has identified these treacherous judges as
Greeks. In the Apology Socrates prophesies that the Greeks will not be forgiven:
‘Well, gentlemen, for the sake of a very small gain in time you are going to earn
the reputation— and the blame from those who wish to disparage our city— of
having put Socrates to death, “that wise man"— because they will say I am wise
even if I am not, these people who want to find fault with you’ (Apology 38c).
“About the circumstance and significance of Socrates’ death, we scribes have
taken our rightful revenge. Greek civilization (confined exclusively to those five
hundred judges) will hereafter live in infamy for its execution of the alien phi­
losopher. We have endowed Socrates with Christian premonitions, and it is our
hope that some poet or theologian will take him out of Limbo and place him on
the road to Paradiso. Although some say the Romans are behind the death of
Socrates, these rumors are calumny. A similar accusation against the Romans was
made some centuries later. We know now that Pilate and those Roman soldiers
who nailed Our Lord up on the raw wood and punctured Him with a spear were
not Romans but Jew s in disguise. Rome and its officers had nothing to do with
the death of Jesus, bur Christian God.
“In erasing all signs of Socrates’ supposed Greekness, we have done for the
Socratic texts what the oral witnesses and first recorders in Aramaic, those men
imbued with light and reason, did for Jesus, in thoroughly suppressing any no­
tion that a charismatic prophet and rabbi called by the people Joshua the Messiah
was a Jew. They also silenced the slander that his mother Miryam was a Jew.
Despite the lingering insinuation (I should say blasphemy) that Christ the Lord
problems and Parables

the pain of having Semitic blood befouling his veins, in their splendid
su ffe r e d
mythography it became clear that rabbi Joshua came from an unknown tribe in
Jerusalem, where he lived and where he was fatally surrounded by despicable
Jews.
“Now earlier, across the waters, Socrates had lived fatally among despicable
Greeks. There is also the lingering insinuation that Socrates had Hellenic blood
befouling his veins but that too is slander.
“As for the execution of Socrates, the Greeks alone are responsible. There are
no scapegoat Romans, as in Jerusalem , for demagogic historians to accuse. There
are only the despicable Greeks. In those extant dialogues Plato insures that
Greeks are and will be forever associated, uniquely associated, with a trumped-
up trial and an execution. But who then was Socrates? Was he a passerby from
central Asia or an immigrant Egyptian? We know only that Socrates, man of
unknown origin, lived, along with other inhabitants of similarly unknown origin,
in Athens.
“O f course we still have only the most miserly records of the genesis and
deaths of Socrates and Jesus. There exist only our uniquely translated dialogues
about Socrates’ poisoning, an d a sentence in a page from Josephus, an Alexan­
drian Jew, about Jesus’ crucifixion (a sentence, by the way, now proved to be a
very late spurious interpolation). Perhaps there will be new finds in some later
day in the buried trash heaps of antiquity, in the Egyptian Fayuum, where there
is no papyri-destroying rainfall. Then, armed with new pages to confirm the
miracle of our Latin translation of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, the wise Church
may bring Socrates into the light of Christian life and philosophy, preparing him
for inevitable canonization, which we desire for Saint Dionysios. For now, hear
my confessions. 1 personally affirm that ju st as neither Jesus nor his mother was
a Jew, so Socrates was in no way connected with the tribe of Greeks, who still
carry their guilt for his execution, as a drop of hemlock in their glass.”
This document is fiction. However, across the waters in Judea— by which of
its many names should we call that land?— anonymous scribes once recorded
the events of the life of Jesus in such a way as to rename a people and conceal
its identity. The scribes of the Christian Scriptures practiced a strategy of dis-
guisement in which their skills were so consummate that they proved, in effect,
that there were no Jews in the Virgin Mary’s house.
How was this done?
The primary method of destabilizing and deracinating a people is to rename
them and their land. Consequently, the first strategy of the recorders and trans­
lators of the Christian Scriptures was to remove Jesus from his Jewishness.
The translators changed his name and thé names of those near him. We have
already observed that Jesus is an English translation of Latin Iesus, from Greek
lesous, from Hebrew yeshua or yeshu, a contraction of yehoshua (Joshua), from
yah, “Yahweh," + hoshia, “to help,” meaning “help of Yahweh.” Christ is from
 Introduction and General Issues

Greek christos, the “anointed,” a translation of the Hebrew word mashiah, which
becomes messiah, “anointed.” The Christ is the anointed. Mary is from Greek.
M aria or Mariam, from Hebrew miry am. Paul was once Saul, Jam es is the curious
English version of the Greek name Iakobos, whose transliteration into Greek from
Hebrew jaaq ob is seen to be direct.
To change names of people or places need not have the intention of erasing
identity. Yet it may. Confucius comes from Kong Fuzi, and I know of no intended
mischief in this transmission from Chinese. Ulysses, however, is Latin for Greek
Odysseus, and here, as in all the Romanizations of Greek classical names (increas­
ingly unpopular), there is clearly a whiff of Roman power and empire in the
Latin translation.' 1
The translators of the Christian Testament changed names for their messianic
purpose and, for the same purpose, did so inconsistently. I cite four paradigmatic
changes of title and name in translations out of Greek: rabbi, Jacob, Judas, and
Jesus.

If we are to see a pattern in the changing of names, we must begin with the
central character, Jesus. Jesus was a rabbi. The strategy to conceal Jesus’ Jewish
identity is consistent. In most instances in the Greek Gospels where he is ad­
dressed in Greek as “Rabbi" by Mary or by his disciples, the translation of Greek
rabbi (from Hebrew rabbi) into English and other languages is “Master" or its
equivalents.
Although master is the standard translation of Greek rabbi into other lan­
guages, we can also assume that rabbi, which occurs some fifteen times in the
Gospels, would have appeared one or two hundred times had there not been a
redaction of the texts as they moved in transcription and translation from late
Aramaic into Greek. How can we know this? There is persuasive evidence. In
the transfiguration episode, for example, in which Jesus appears on the high
mountains talking to Moses and Elijah, the scene, whose immediate source is the
Gospel of Mark, is related in virtually the same words in all three synoptic Gos­
pels, suggesting that the source of the Greek was the same for all three passages.
In the King Jam es Version we have:

Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; if
thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles. (Matt. 17:3)

And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; and let
us make three tabernacles. (Mark 9:5)

Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three
tabernacles. (Luke 9:33)

Although the Greek texts for these versions are almost identical, one signifi­
cant variant occurs in each Gospel: the word that is translated into English as
Problems and Parables

“Master.” In Matthew we find kyrie, meaning “Lord,” in Mark it is rabbi, meaning

“rabbi," and in Luke, epistata, meaning “teacher.” There could be an argument
for a free translation to “Master" in Matthew and Luke, but no question of free­
d o m applies to Mark. In Mark the English translation of rabbi is intentionally

false, and its purpose is the concealment of Jesus’ identity as a rabbi and, by
extension, as a Jew.
The existence of these three distinct honorific titles in the Greek, however,
sh o u ld also alert us to earlier tampering, and therefore a double concealment of
identity: not only from Greek into English but also from the earlier source into
Greek. How is it that the lost source text, in Hebrew, Aramaic, or an earlier
translation from Aramaic into Greek offered virtually identical phrases in all
three Gospels with the exception of the honorific title (all translated into English
as “Master”)? One of these three words, kyrie, rabbi, epistata, must, therefore,
have been the source word. W hich one? Rabbi is the most likely. Rabbi, meaning
a Jewish religious teacher and priest, was the obvious word to change in the
Christianization of Jesus.
In the Authorized Mark, as we saw, the Greek word was translated
(incorrectly) as “Master,” but in John 1:38, the same word is rendered as “Rabbi."
However, this disturbing reference to Jesus as a rabbi is immediately exonerated
in a blatant illustration of exegetical intentionality.4 In an explanatory linguistic
aside the English Bible informs the reader to interpret the English word rabbi as
“Master”: “Then Jesus turned and saw them following, and saith unto them,
What seek ye? They said unto him, Rabbi, (which is to say, being interpreted,
Master,) where dwellest thou?”3
This aside in the Greek text has the purpose of persuading the reader not to
read the word rabbi, which survived earlier redactions into the Greek Scriptures,
as “Rabbi,” a priest and teacher of Jews, but as “Master,” the chosen evasion of
the Jewish epithet. It divorces rabbi of its ordinary meaning, which indicates
Jewish identity, and imposes another meaning on it of messianic figurehood. It
thereby allows a reading in which Jesus becomes the Christian Master and Lord.
This is the common device of religious exegesis, and, as we have seen, Stanley
Fish’s ultimate model for imaginative reading.
From these examples of the mistranslation of rabbi, we can presume a much
more extensive revisionist translation of the Christian Scriptures from Aramaic
or Hebrew sources into Greek. We may suppose that whenever Jesus is addressed
in Greek as “kyrie” (Lord), “epistata" (teacher), “didaskale" (teacher), or “des-
pote” (master), the word in Hebrew and Aramaic was normally rabbi. If my as­
sumption is correct, then for the English translation to be faithful Jesus would
have been addressed as “Rabbi” on almost every page of the Gospels, and there
would have been no possibility of forgetting that he was a Jewish rabbi. Had this
one single politico-religious subversion of the text not occurred, the deracination
of Jesus and his followers as Jews in the Scriptures would not have been plausi­
ble. Clearly, to address Jesus as “Rabbi” identifies him as a religious teacher of
 Introduction and General Issues

the Jews. To call him “Master" averts this unpleasant designation. In John 11:8
we have another revealing passage of strange contradictions: "His disciples say
unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither
again?” Now, of course the Greek word is rabbi, and the King James Version again
falsely translates it for missionary ends. This is not astonishing. W hat is amazing
is the apparent contradiction in the Greek itself, the unreason of stating, “Rabbi,
the Jews of late sought to stone thee." Is a rabbi not a Jew? Was not John himself
a Jew? In English a Master is not meant to be a Jew; the word distinguishes Jesus
from his Jewish kin and makes them two separate peoples. But in the Greek text,
how can the rabbi not be perceived as a Jew? And since a rabbi must be a Jew,
how, in defiance of common sense, can one say in Greek (or could one have said
in the original Aramaic), “Rabbi, the Jews of late sought to stone thee”? Surely
such words in Aramaic or Hebrew were neither uttered nor recorded. However,
when the word Jews was added to the text, the redactors did not, as they had in
other recensions, replace Rabbi with Master, Teacher, or Lord. That failure, that
inconsistency, draws attention to the passage and gives us a clue to the crude
adulteration of the Scriptures as they passed from their oral and written origins
into Greek.
The Kingjam es Version (1611), as its title and preface suggest, is not a formal
translation but a version, or rewording, of earlier English Bibles— Tyndale
(1525), Great (1539), Geneva (1562), Bishops’ (1568), and Rheims (1582). It is
instructive to see how each handled John 11:8: “Master, the Jewes lately sought
meanes to stone the” (Tyndale); “Master, the Jewes lately sought to stone the”
(Great); “Master, the Jewes lately soght to stone thee” (Geneva); “Master, the
Jewes lately sought to stone thee” (Bishops’); “Rabbi, now the Jewes sought to
stone thee” (Rheims); “Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee” (Kingjames).
Of these, only the Rheims-Douai Bible chose to translate Greek rabbi as “Rabbi.”
The Rheims is a Catholic Bible, translated into English by persecuted English
Catholic exiles in France (see the discussion of Bible translations in chapter 4).
In this instance it appears that its authors rejected the Latin original of Jerome
and turned to the Greek text, following a tendency more common among Prot­
estants to return to the Greek and Hebrew versions and connotations of the
Bible. So only the Rheims allowed “Rabbi.”
At an earlier stage the word Jews was almost certainly not found at all in the
texts but was rather people, a group, or some other word to suggest those people
who were not followers of Jesus. The word Jews was unlikely, given that Jesus,
his followers, those who failed to believe (which includes his unbelieving mother
and brothers; see Mark 6 :4 -6 , and John 7 :1 -6 ), as well as his outright oppo­
nents, were all Jews. In the biblical land it makes no sense to call only one
segment o f Jews ‘Jew s.” Later, however, as the early Jewish Christians assumed
their Christian identity, it was not only sensible but mandatory to disinherit Jesus
and his followers of their Jewish identity. This Christianization occurs through­
 problems and Parables

out the noncanonical apocrypha where all levels of Christian and Gnostic over­
lays guide the texts. So the alteration of identities began.
As in my earlier example of the three versions of rabbi, the process was not
carried out completely. In “Rabbi, the Jews of late sought to stone thee," me
disinheritance (at least in the Greek text) is also incomplete. Rabbi remains. Yet
the overall process o f mistranslation has, throughout the Christian Script-ares,
been efficient and effective. As seen before, it consists of dividing Jews inf j two
categories— those who follow Jesus, and those who do not— and of concealing
the true Jewish identity of the first group while making the second category of
nonfollowers the antagonist Jews. In a religious or political society whoie aim is
manipulation of information, we often see extreme infidelity to source (register
c), although the moral posture of the society pretends to responsible literalism
(register a). Such unfaithful, that is false, translation of information is .he formula
'in authoritarian states for producing propaganda. The result here is a distorting,
licentious transfer of meaning into the Greek Scriptures, with the revolutionary
script of engendering hatred for Jesus’ people.
In contrast to the synoptic Gospels, in the Gospel of John the pattern of mis­
translating rabbi as “Master” occasionally breaks down. When the people dis­
cover Jesus at Capernaum, they say to him, “Rabbi, when earnest thou hither?”
(6:25, KJV). And at Bethsaida, Nathanael links Jesus both to the rabbinate and
Israel: “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel” (1:49). In one
extraordinary instance of editorial inconsistency, the pattern breaks down en­
tirely when all the bad connections—Jew, ruler of the Jews, rabbi, Pharisee—
appear favorably in the good person of Nicodemus. We read: “There was a man
of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews: The same came to Jesus
by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from
God” (3 :1 -2 ). Ironically, the Gospel of Joh n (written by a Jew whose name has
.come to us as John), the only Gospel which may be a Greek original, is the most
fiercely astiUJeugsh in its pattern of engendering hatred for those whom John
identifies as Jews, and the w ord Jew , meaning “enemy,” appears on almost every
page of the Gospel. In the following lines, for example, we can see the effective­
ness of transforming unfriendly people in the ur-text into Jews: “Where is he?
And there was much murmuring among the people concerning him: for some
said, He is a good man: others said, Nay; but he deceiveth the people. Howbeit
no man spake openly of him for fear of the Jews” (7 :1 1 -1 3 ).
Here and throughout John and the Christian Scriptures, people who are allied
with Jesus are simply people. However, any group perceived as opposing Jesus
are Jews. Although Jesus comes from Judea (the word Jew means “one from
Judea”), those who are kin, friends, or disciples of Jesus have ceased to be ad­
dressed as Jews. The word is used not as a geographical or ethnic name but as
an epithet to malign enemies of the Christ, particularly those who do not accept
his divinity. Curiously, Jesus’ immediate family— Mary and his brothers— who
 Introduction and General Issues

are harshly criticized as unbelievers in his divinity, nonetheless remain exempt

from the negative epithet.,'
What is the background for using translation for purposes of misinformation?
Why is the word Jew at its center?
Some Jews followed a young rabbi named Joshua, later called Jesus, and es­
tablished a new sect, of Judaism called Christianity, meaning the religion of the
Messiah, the. Christ.,; The new faith realized the most profound soteriological
dream o f the Jew sfthe coming of their Messiah to deliver them. Had these first
Jewish Christians not been only some but instead the whole body of Jews, the
word Jews would either not have appeared at all in the Christian Scriptures
or would have been a complimentary word designating Jesus, his family, and
his apostles. Could Jew then have retained its negative connotations? If all
the Jews had disappeared from the earth by alteration of faith or through weak­
ness of genes, then not. There would be no harsh words for the ancestral holy
Jews. The survival of the Jews as Jews, however, has been a constant, irritating,
and extreme embarrassment to many of the descendants of those Jewish
Christians.
We can infer that the editing and translation of these texts from their un­
known beginnings only sharpened the process of subversion. By rigorously fol­
lowing this pattern, the authors, compilers, editors, and translators of the
Scriptures have, over a period of two millennia, created a Jesus whom an over­
whelming number of Christians perceive as a gentile among gentile friends and
Jewish enemies, a Christian in the land of Israel.

In the opening lines of the Greek Christian Scriptures appears the first of two
genealogies o f Jesus. Among sixty-five names from fourteen generations we find
the name Iakobos. While Jesus’ biblical Hebrew nam ejoshua (orjeshua) has been
translated from Hebrew into Greek as “Iesous,” and translated from Greek (via
Latin) into English as “Jesus,” Jaco b ’s Hebrew name ja a q o b has not been altered
in the Greek text but remains a transliterated “Iakobos.” And consistent with the
Greek Iakobos of the period, the translators have in every English translation with
which I am familiar, including the more accurate Jerusalem Bible, given us “Ja ­
cob” in English. Jacob is familiar to us from the Hebrew Bible as Jacob son of
Isaac, and also in the Matthew genealogy as Jesus’ grandfather, the father of
Joseph.
The cognate translation of Greek Iakobos into English is “Jacob.” Yet in the
following examples, the translation is first “Jacob” and then “Jam es.” It cannot
be both. But it is, and there is a logic to this inconsistency.
After the first lines of the Kingjam es Matthew in which we find Iakobos trans­
lated as “Jacob,” Greek Iakobos becomes English Jam es when referring to: the
Aposde James, son of Zebedee (Matt. 10:2, Mark 3:1 7 ); the Apostle James, son
of Alphaeus (Matt. 10:3, Mark 3 :1 8 ); or the brother of Jesus (Matt. 13:55), also
said to be the author of the Letter of James. In the Greek text, however, these
Problems and Parables

four figures are Iakobos, Iakobos, Iakobos, and Iakobos. Why, then, is the name in
its first appearance translated as “Jacob" and thereafter rendered in all four Gos­
pels as English “Jam es”?
If however, “Jam es” is the preferred translation of Iakobos, why is Iakobos
originally “Jacob”? The inconsistency is perfectly understandable and purposeful.
Every later translation of Iakobos as “Jam es” refers to a new Christian: to Jesus’
c o m p a n io n s or his brother. To use “Jam es” for the reference to a figure from the
Hebrew Bible would actually be unthinkable; the change here is dictated pre­
cisely by the need not to associate James, one of the coterie around Jesus, with
Jacob, the patriarchal figure centrally identified with the earliest ancestry of Ju ­
daism. So to keep things safe for the practice of separating Jew from Christian
in English, Greek Iakobos is Jewish “Jacob” in the Old Testament and Christian
“James” in the New.
Again, the translators from the Greek have created a labyrinth of disguisement
and concealment in order to separate Jesus and sacred figures of Christian Scrip­
tures from those inhabitants of Judea identified as Jews. In such manner Jesus is
not seen, and in large part never has been seen, as a Jew.
In the revolutionary struggle to break away and initiate a new religion, to
suggest that Jesus, his apostles, or Mary, his mother, are Jews like those hated
culpable figures would subvert the message o f authentic Christian faith; appar­
ently, such was the reasoning, consciously or by obedient convention, of the
translators of the Christian Scriptures.

But which of Jesus’ associates should retain his association with the Jews? The
traitor Judas Iscariot, of course. Yet to achieve this required some complex ma­
neuvers; for the Greek name loudas, from Hebrew yehudhah, refers in the Hebrew
Bible to the fourth son of Jacob, son of Isaac, and in the Christian Scriptures to
Jesus’ favored disciple and apostle, the traitor; to Jesus’ second brother; and to a
disciple and apostle who may be the aforementioned brother and who is said to
be the author of the last Letter in the Christian Scriptures. Here we have four
figures (or perhaps three, if the brother is the letter writer) who were all yehudhah
in Hebrew and loudas in the Greek scriptures. How to separate these figures
from each other? The translators saw a problem of identity and allegiance in
having four such disparate figures with the same name. They resolved it as we
have seen them deal with the translation of other names.
The Greek distinguishes between the four loudases by use of cognomens. The
English translators might therefore have followed the Greek pattern and referred
to Judas the son of Jacob, Judas Iscariot, Judas the brother of Jesus, and Judas
the author of the Letter of Judas. But the betrayer of Jesus, they felt, should stand
alone. He would be known as Judas.
In the King James translation, the Old Testament loudas, the earliest men­
tioned Judas of the genealogy in Matthew, is correctly and cognately translated
as “Judas." In the Revised Standard Version, however, which has no basis in the
 Introduction and General Issues

Greek text, “Judas” is changed to “Judah.” In spite of the correct example of the
Authorized Version, the authors “revised” “Judas” into “Judah." (It perhaps never
occurred to the English translators to go back to the original Hebrew yehudhah.)
They evidendy considered it better to have one of Jesus’ direct ancestors, even
in the Hebrew Bible, be called untainted Judah rather than Judas.
There is also the other, shadowy Judas, who is actually listed as one of Jesus’
three brothers (Matt. 13:55, Mark 6:3), and has only two, negative functions in
the Scriptures. In Matthew 1 2 :4 6 -5 0 , Mark 3 :3 1 -3 5 , and Luke 8 :1 9 -2 1 , Jesus
snubs and rebukes his mother and brothers for doubting his divinity, for they
hear the word of God and do not act upon it. Jesus rejects them because they
are not his true kindred. His true mother and brothers are those who hear the
word of God and act upon the word, that is, those who follow him: “Then came
to him his mother and his brethren, and could not come at him for the press.
And it was told him by certain which said, Thy mother and thy brethren stand
without, desiring to see thee. And he answered and said unto them, My mother
and my brethren are those which hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8 :1 9 -
21, KJV).
In Matthew 13:55 and Mark 6:3 Jesus complains that a prophet is not honored
in his own country. Actually, the famous aphorism in English (and in most mod­
ern languages) that grew out of this complaint ignores the specific reference to
the prophet’s mother and brothers, whom Jesus is again rebuking for failing to
recognize his divinity. The actual setting for the plaint is the country where Jesus,
in the company of his disciples, performs miracles. Among the unbelievers are
his mother and three brothers, one of whom is loudas, now in the Kingjam es
Version and earlier English Bibles curiously spelled “Juda” rather than “Judas,”
in another linguistically unjustified change. Although Juda lacks faith in his
brother Jesus’ divinity, because he is a relation he is not, as other unbelievers are,
called a Jew in this version.
In the biblical passage, the people in the synagogue ask, after Jesus has been
teaching there: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James,
and Joses and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark
6:3, KJV). Jesus “marvelled because of their unbelief,” yet “said unto them, A
prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin,
and in his own house” (Mark 6:4).
W hat is significant is not “a prophet in one’s own country" but the pointed
target “his own kin, and iri'his own house.” Although Jesus is harshly reproaching
his mother and brothers for not recognizing his divinity, the translators will not
go so far as to let these unbelievers, not only Juda but his mother and other
brothers, be called Jews, for they share the same blood. We have a bizarre anom­
aly, for in the Greek Scriptures as a result o f purposeful mistranslation, “Jews”
are, by definition, precisely what unbelievers in Christ's divinity came to be
called. A Jew is an unbeliever in Christ, the human Lord. Then are Christ’s un­
Problems and Parables

believing brothers Jews? No. The Lord’s mother and shadowy brothers alone have
the privilege of denying Christ’s divinity while escaping, by their presentation in
the Scriptures, any insinuation of Jewishness.
Jesus’ resentment against his actual brothers is shown once again in John 7 :1 -
6 where, as elsewhere, he implies that his brothers do not believe in his divinity
until it is proved by the resurrection. In this passage as in others, the Jews are
sin g led out for disparagement, making them a separate people from Jesus and
“his true brothers,” who are those who are with Jesus in belief. Since Jesus and
his followers are not discerned as Jews, the “Jews’ feast of tabernacles,” men­
tioned there, appears not to be a feast pertaining to Jesus. This pattern suggests
that in the many translations and redactions of the Scripture, the editors have
chronologically moved farther and farther from the reality of the recorded stories
and more into sectarian religious politics. Here we see a fiercer presentation of
the Jews and of Jesus’ brothers who lack faith: “After these things Jesus walked
in Galilee: for he would not walk in Jewry, because the Jews sought to kill him.
Now the Jews’ feast of tabernacles was at hand. His brethren therefore said unto
him, Depart hence, and and go into Judsea, that thy disciples also may see the
works that thou doest. For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and
he himself seeketh to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to
the world. For neither did his brethren believe in him [italics mine]. Then Jesus said
unto them, My time is not yet come: but your time is alway ready” (KJV).
So much for Judas the brother of Jesus. The brother is presented so unsym­
pathetically he might just as well be called Judas here in the King James Version
rather than Juda, as he is called in the Revised Standard. But when it comes to
the author of a Letter in the canon, placed between the Third.Letter of John and
Revelation, and when the first line of that Letter’s introduction names the author
“servant of Jesus Christ and brother of Jam es,” Judas will no longer do. Now
having risen to being declared the author of an epistle in the Christian canon,
the brother of Jesus must be fully distanced from the infamous Judas Iscariot,
who by his betrayal can no longer be a Christian disciple but must revert to the
role of treacherous Jew. The name loudas is consequently translated not “Judas”
but “Jude," giving us the Letter of Jude. The decision to invent new names for
the other Judases from loudas—Judah, Juda, and Jude— then, lies entirely with
the translators of the Greek texts into the secular tongues, who are as faithful in
their religious mission as they are faithless as translators of the Greek text into
English.

The above examples show ways in which the Christian Scriptures have been
fashioned out of the Greek into English translation. The most inspired and fun­
damental name change in all the Christian Greek Scriptures occurs in the trans­
lation of the name of its central dramatis persona, the new-found Jewish “man
God”; it occurs when his Hebrew cognomen becomes in its Greek equivalent the
 Introduction and General Issues

most' famous name in the world, and is thereafter translated into other modern
languages not from the original Hebrew but by making the Greek version of his'
name sound English or German or Italian. As a result of the ethnic cleansing of
his name through double translation, the name has become absolutely discon­
nected from its Hebrew original, and indeed his name in Hellenized translations
is now so rem ote from the Hebrew original that were it simply transliterated
directly from Hebrew into other languages, that name, Joshua, would for many
be apostasy.
It must be accepted that for a breakaway religion to establish its identity, it
must dissociate its leader from his compromising background. The execution of
the antagonist father-precursor is Freudian, Bloomian, and plainly ordinary pol­
itics of church and state.
In the genealogy in the Luke (3 :2 3 -3 8 ), therefore, we read in Greek “tou
Iesous tou Eliezer tou Iorim” (3:29). The translation into English of these lines
in the Kingjam es Version reads, “the son of Jose, which was the son of Eliezer,
the son of Jo rim .” The translation is false. Elsewhere in the Kingjam es Iesous is
“Jesus,” not “Jose.” W hy in the Luke genealogy is Jesus changed to Jose? Clearly,
the false translation took place to disguise the notion asserted in the Greek text
that Jesus had an Old Testament ancestor named Jesus.
The Kingjam es Version is not alone in changing “Jesus” to a more acceptable
name for an Old Testament Jew. The Tyndale Bible and the Great Bible came up,
with the imaginative evasion of “Jeso .” The next generation of English Bibles,
however, the Geneva and the Bishops’, takes us a bit further from “Jesus" by
giving us “Jo se.” Their “Jo se” was surely the model for the Authorized evasion.
Again, only the Catholic Rheims rendered Iesous as “Jesus.” The Revised Version
(1881) and its American equivalent, the American Standard (1901), chose to
“correct” the text and, like the Rheims, used “Jesus.” But the next major revision,
in our century, the Revised Standard Version (1946, 1960), could not stomach
“Jesus” as the translation for the Iesous who was an Old Testament progenitor of;'
Jesus, and so it translated Iesous as “Joshua,” the closest parallel to the original
Hebrew name from which Jesus derived. By calling Iesous “Joshua,” the authors
of the Revised Standard insured that no ordinary reader would associate Jesus
by name with any Hebrew Bible Jew .6
The existence of an Old Testament progenitor of Jesus named Jesus has deeply"
troubled New Testament translators. In these examples from major English Bibles
ranging from 1525 to I9 6 0 , the translators have found four different ways of
rendering one word into English: JeSo, Jose, Joshua, and Jesus.
These translation inconsistencies are not an error with regard to the deeper
religio-political Christian mission. On the contrary, the inconsistencies obey a
higher order of consistency ju st as translation faithlessness obeys a higher order
of faith. Here faith demands that the translation extirpate all evidence suggestive
problems and Parables

that Jesus was a Jew or came from an ancient family of Jews. To allow the ac-
^ ted Christian name “Jesus" to appear in the opening lines of the Gospel of
LUke m a ^ey passage in a genealogy that includes David, Levi, Noah, and Adam
; yij.destroy the pattern of segregation of Jews from Christians,
si ’ An attentive reader of Scripture should know that Jesus was indeed a Jew, a
iabbi profoundly in the Jewish tradition of Jobian questioning, Davidian rebel­
lion and perhaps Essenian revisionist orthodoxy. Yet few until our time— and
jew tocjay outside of enlightened academies— popularly think of Jesus as a Jew
or of his early followers as Jewish Christians. Curiously, recognition of Jesus’
Jew ish n ess remains an iconoclastic, defiant posture. In earlier periods the dec­
laration was virtually unthinkable. It would not have saved a Jew in danger, and
such “blasphemy” as declaring kinship with Jesus might even have cost a life.
Curiously, there has been no denunciation of these texts that do their best to
c o n cea l Jesus’ Jewishness. Jesus has not been accorded the dignity of truthful
acce p ta n ce of who he was. Because he limited his ministry to Jews and instructed
his twelve disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town o f the
Samaritans” (Matt. 10:5), I find it unthinkable that he would have agreed to the
petty denial and concealment of who he was.
The universal attribution of guilt to Jews for Jesus’ agony only makes sense in
light of polemical denials of Jesus as Jew, of misrepresentation, all formulated
through the power of redaction and translation. Christian antisemitism begins
'with and derives historically from the New Testament, from the falsifying trans­
lations into and out of the Christian Scriptures in which Jesus ceases to be a Jew.
The result of this transmission of the history of Joshua the Messiah has been two
millennia of hatred and extermination, from diasporas and ghettos to pogroms
and holocaust.
. These examples of the strategies— and ultimate effects— of translation in the
Christian Scriptures can be found on virtually every page. And the changing of
names is only a more obvious and effective means to subvert identity.
The translators of the Hebrew Bible employed similar translation methods.
The most notorious and successful means of deracinating the Jews from their
own Bible has been to change the very name by which they are addressed there.
They are called Hebrews (with reference to a language) or Israelites (with refer­
ence to a place). They are often referred to as “the ancient Hebrews” as we speak
of ancient Greeks, thereby further distancing them, as a mythic, legendary, or
symbolic people, from any real association with the Jews of the Christian Scrip­
tures and thereafter. But the Jews of the Christian Scriptures are also presented
as a deracinated people, separated from their biblical ancestors. They are never
Jews, and certainly not “the ancient Jew s,” which might identify the prophets
and patriarchs even more closely with them. And no quibbling about etymology
can disguise the purposes of deracination and concealment of the ancient Jews
 Introduction and General Issues

of the Bible through the magic of editorializing translation. In the Hebrew Bible
the people are sacred figures, and therefore they will not normally be called
Jew s.7
The Jews do not appear as jew s until the Christian Scriptures, when the word
Jew uniformly means “unfriendly,” “unreformed,” “unrepentant,” and much
worse. It is used to designate all the implicit enemies of thé sect that is being
born, which will later be called Christianity. Yet again through magical transfor­
mation, the participants in these first moments of the foundation are themselves
exempt from their heritage. They are just there, with no designation of race or
religion (later they will anachronistically be called the first Christians), and Jesus,
his family, and his entourage are not Jews, ancient Jews, or even Hebrews or
Israelites (which might at least link them to worthy ancestors), but simply un­
affiliated people.
Yet let us dream. Imagine if the Christian Scriptures were retranslated today,
and instead of encountering Jesus and Jam es; Mary, Peter, and Paul, we found
Joshua and Jacob; Miryam, Kepha, and Saul. Or better, if the New Testament were
redacted without tribal references to Jews as distinct from Jesus’ tribe. Imagine
if the criticism there were Jewish self-criticism, as in the writings of the prophetic
books, rather than Christian antisemitism. Given these miracles, the deracination
of Joshua the Messiah, his followers, and his believers, would end. The presen­
tation o f Jesus and the Virgin Mary as Gentiles among alien Jews (the parabolic
equivalent of Socrates and Plato as non-Greeks among Greek judges) would, after
two millennia, be ineffective.
Had we but world enough and time to cancel time and re-collect, retranslate,
and re-edit documents, the four Gospels would, like the Dao de Jing, be books
of wisdom and love, while containing, as in the divergent views in Akira Kuro­
sawa’s Roshomon, four literary retellings of the murder of the wise man. More, a
great narration would no longer be the primary document to incite and justify
the hatred, persecution, and killing of the descendants of Joshua the Messiah.
Even in textual dreams, we see the translator’s powers to transform.

Given the unpleasantness which effective translation can lead to through the
manipulation of information transfer, I should like to present a very pleasant
example of misunderstanding, or perhaps, higher understanding, which the
translation of the Bible elicited among the Chinese jew s who followed the He­
brew Bible.

PARABLE OF THE CHINESE JEW S

The Italian Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci (1 5 5 2 -1 6 1 0 ), was a

cultivated man of letters, who reported Chinese thought and ways to the West.
He also translated Western religious and secular classics into Chinese, which he
Problems and Parables

had confided uniquely to the amazing memory palace of his brain. In his mem­
oirs he recorded an incident that amused and impressed him.
Among those books that Ricci had made known to the interested Chinese
literati was the Bible. Although he sought and found few converts to Christianity
in China, word of the bishop and his Bible reached the ancient community of
Jews in Kaifeng, who had for centuries been cut off from their Western co-reli­
gionists. They sent a delegation to Beijing of their leaders, who by now were
perfectly Chinese in manner and appearance, to speak with Ricci. They had
heard that a Jew from Italy was in China, a devout Jewish priest spreading the
word of the Bible. They came to ask Ricci whether he would come back to Kai­
feng and be the rabbi for their synagogue. They were unconcerned that the mis­
sionary had with him some additional Scriptures, the Christian Scriptures. Ricci
did not persuade them of the m inorsectarian distinctions. In this true story from
China is a parable which puts some of our problems of translation and reception
of the Bible in a cheerfully clear perspective.

"For God knows that when you eat o f it your eyes will be opened, and you
will be like God, knowing good and evil." So when the woman saw that the
tree was good f o r food , and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree
was to be desired to m ake one wise, she took o f its fruit and ate; and she also
gave some to her husband, and he a t e . . . .
The man said, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me
fru it o f the tree, and I ate.”
Genesis 3 :5 -6 , 12

Adam was a snitch. He blam ed Eve. Yet Eve opened our eyes. By eating that
fru it she became author o f her being, a god translating herself and Adam
from darkness into light, fro m ignorance into wisdom.
Pierre Grange, “God the Eternal Translator,” Dream Time
and Other Earthly Signs

Thirteen Quick Looks at Sacred Originals

* All originals are sacred in the eyes of the translator.
* All translations are profane in the eyes of the world.
* But at times translators forget, suppress, or conceal the original, thereby making a
profane transformation into a scared original.
■ Much o f the Old and most o f the New Testament is disguised translation, and so the
Bible passes uniformly as a sacred original.