From the issue dated May 10, 2002
Telling the Tale of Yeshua of Natzeret
Willis Barnstone's translation of the New Testament aims to restore its Jewishness
BY PETER MONAGHAN
The opening of the Gospel of Mark tells that, in preparation for the coming of God's messenger, "John did baptize in the wilderness" and that among those who came to him from Judaea and Jerusalem was Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee, whom John baptized in the river of Jordan.
It is a famous story, and it is famous, from the King James Bible and many later translations, in those words.
Not in these: "Yohanan the Dipper appeared in the desert, preaching an immersion of repentance for the remission of sin. The whole land of Yehuda and all the people of Yerushalayim came out to him and were being immersed by him in the Yarden river" – and among those people came "Yeshua," from "Natzeret in the Galil."
That arresting unfamiliarity typifies a new translation, with extensive commentary, of the New Testament by Willis Barnstone, a poet and distinguished professor of comparative literature at Indiana University at Bloomington. Literary and biblical scholars are hailing the work for both its poetry and its success in retrieving the Hebrew context of the life of the itinerant rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef. "The Barnstone is the most innovative and refreshing new translation I have seen of the Gospels," says Harold Bloom, the influential Yale University scholar and literary critic whose areas of expertise include the Bible.
Even the title of Mr. Barnstone's version, The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament: the Four Gospels and Apocalypse (Riverhead Books/Penguin Putnam), makes it clear that Mr. Barnstone has aimed for something new in Bible translation.
"I say 'New Covenant' because that's what it says in the Greek," pleads Mr. Barnstone, whose extensive list of publications includes many books of poetry, translations, and literary theory about translation. He explains: "New Testament," from the Latin Novum Testamentum of Jerome's fourth-century Latin version, was a mistranslation from the Greek kaine diatheke, the second word itself a translation of the Hebrew brit, which means "covenant."
By revisiting the vernacular Greek of the Gospels and Revelation, or "Apocalypse" in his translation, Mr. Barnstone has emphasized a perspective that has gained favor among many biblical researchers, but not among previous translators or the churchgoing and reading public: that the New Testament "should not be read as a Greek book in English but as a Semitic book about Semites, which has passed through Greek in reaching us." Using Hebrew and Aramaic names instead of "misleading" Greek or Anglicized forms, he hopes "to clarify the origins of Christianity as one of the Jewish messianic sects of the day vying for dominion," writes Mr. Barnstone in his introduction. The New Covenant, before becoming canonical in Christianity, comprised "the last major Jewish text of biblical Judaism."
In another departure from most predecessors, Mr. Barnstone renders the book of Revelation in verse form, asserting that it is "truly the great epic poem of the Christian and Hebrew Bible." In translating the Gospels, he does the same with the words that Jesus spoke, most likely in "wisdom sayings" that passed down to the evangelists writing 70 or more years after their prophet was killed. Jesus is, he says, "the great oral poet of the first century CE, who heretofore has been our invisible poet," locked within the prose of most translations.
Here, for example, is Jesus speaking in Matthew 6:22, in the King James Version: "The light of the body is the eye: If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!" Mr. Barnstone renders the passage thus:
The lamp of the body is the eye.
If your eye is clear, your whole body is filled
with light,
but if your eye is clouded, your whole body
will inhabit darkness.
And if the light in your whole body is darkness,
how dark it is!
In early reviews in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and in accolades collected by the publisher, literary and Bible experts have cheered Mr. Barnstone's approach. It is "a superb act of restoration," says Mr. Bloom. "A breathtaking achievement," echoes Carolyn Kizer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Mr. Barnstone's translation, like all Bible translations, will have to run two overlapping gantlets, one of disagreements about particular word choices – a literary test – and another of questions over the implications of those choices – a theological test.
As the author of many well-received books of poetry, including a volume of 501 linked sonnets, Mr. Barnstone (The Chronicle, April 5, 1996) emphasizes the literary accomplishment of the Gospels and Revelation (and of the other books of the New Testament, which he is translating for an expanded edition of The New Covenant, expected next year). The King James and other versions have not lacked for fine writing, but translators and exegetes have generally considered the Greek of the earliest texts to be drab. Mr. Barnstone disagrees; for example, he argues that in Mark one finds "the perfection of the ordinary, the pure, the rude, and the popular" – in fact, a "lucid minimalism."
The plain language of the Gospels is perfectly suited, he suggests, to present "Jewish and Greek thought concerning time and eternity, body and spirit, and the life of a skygod residing on earth who dies on a Roman cross and returns to the sky."
Joining a Long Line of Heretics?
Some believers are certain to object to Mr. Barnstone's work. Flame haunts the history of Bible translation. As recently as 50 years ago, fundamentalists burned the Revised Standard Version as "Stalin's Bible" because it was sponsored by the ecumenical National Council of Churches, which they considered worse than liberal.
In 1382, when John Wyclif, "the flower of Oxford," produced the first English Bible, appalled church fathers who claimed sole right to read the book banned him from teaching. Wyclif died before they could burn him, so they dug up his bones and burned them.
Some less-fortunate Wyclif supporters and readers went to the stake. So, in 1526, did the next great translator, William Tyndale, whom Sir Thomas More denounced as food for "the hogs of hell." Tyndale's translation particularly influenced Mr. Barnstone, who admires its austerity and mindfulness of "the farm worker at the plow and the weaver at the loom." He cites Tyndale's translation of Genesis 39:2. Where the King James would say "the Lord was with Joseph and he was a prosperous man," Tyndale had: "the lord was with Joseph and he was a luckie felawe."
With such antecedents and their perils in mind, Mr. Barnstone hastens to detail his own preparation for his "essay at translation." In 1959, he began publishing translations of Greek lyric poetry, and has since translated early-modern Spanish mystics, as well as ancient, noncanonical, Judeo-Christian holy texts in The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984). Next year, The Gnostic Bible, which he is editing with the noted Protestant theologian Marvin Meyer, will appear, with translations of Gnostic Scriptures from the 1st to the 13th centuries. Mr. Barnstone also is the author of the respected Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (Yale University Press, 1993), much of which deals with Bible translation.
No Religious Agenda
He says he approached his new translation from the Greek biblical texts without religious brief, motivated by a sense that while towering translations do exist, generally church authorities and religious publishers have required pious or archaic language that he says he finds "alien to the heart of literary translation."
"They accept Bible speech as an 'other' that is neither spoken speech nor literary speech, but a special rhetoric reserved for Bible translation, that would not pass muster for translations of, say, Sophocles or Pindar," he says. But only literary translation, he contends, can convey the New Covenant's expressive complexity.
Mr. Barnstone's translation is the first to reflect the growing understanding among New Testament scholars of the link between early Christian and rabbinic literature, says Robert B. Alter, whose own Genesis: Translation and Commentary (W.W. Norton, 1996) and The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (Norton, 1999) were acclaimed. In Jesus' time, not only was Christianity just one competing version of Judaism; it also "didn't see itself as other than Judaism, and derived many of its values and its worldview from the Judaism of that time," says the professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.
Modern readers lose sight of that – not surprisingly, he says, given the influence of the powerful, elaborate religion that Jesus' sect became. "The Christian Scriptures, as they themselves proclaim at a couple of points, came to complete, fulfill, and in some senses even displace the Hebrew Scriptures that preceded them."
Mr. Barnstone succeeds in capturing that historical moment, and "in a way that English readers will register," says David Trobisch, a professor of New Testament language and literature at Bangor Theological Seminary, in Maine. "It has always been helpful to have translations that are not edited and supervised by Bible societies in addition to those that are used with authority by faith communities," says Mr. Trobisch.
"It's a salutary turn of events," says George W.E. Nickelsburg, a leading authority of first- and second-century Judaism, "when someone comes up with a translation of the New Testament that very explicitly – not in the footnotes, but in the warp and weft of the translation itself – emphasizes the historical context." The Hebrew and Aramaic names, for example, "just keep hitting you, page after page," says the emeritus professor of religion at the University of Iowa, conveying the sense that events "didn't happen in Cedar Rapids."
That is useful, says Mr. Nickelsburg: "There are a lot of people around to whom it hasn't occurred that Jesus was a Jew."
Modern scholars of the Bible have little doubt that Jesus, or Yeshua, was a rabbi who was crucified by the Romans for sedition. But translators and editors have long obscured his Jewish identity, say Mr. Barnstone and others. Even in the earliest Greek texts that remain, when Jesus is called "rabbi" the word is sometimes followed with a parenthetical "which means, in Hebrew, teacher" – to try to explain away the religious title.
Distortions entered the Gospels' narrative, too, because of mistranslations and ecclesiastical politics. "By the time these texts were finally accepted by religious councils in the fourth century," Mr. Barnstone writes, "what had been a first-century controversy between Jewish groups, allegedly between Pharisees and messianics, was now seen ahistorically as a conflict between Jews and later Christians."
Scholars agree that such distortions, and the de-emphasis on Jesus' Jewishness have helped fuel anti-Semitism. For centuries, churchgoers "have been imbibing the sense that the Pharisees and scribes were the ones who were battling Jesus," says Mr. Nickelsburg, adding that it would be "a healthy and stimulating thing" for Mr. Barnstone's translation to be read in certain Christian churches.
Readings like Mr. Barnstone's are almost commonplace today in religious studies. Now, say some specialists, they have a translation of the New Testament that reflects contemporary scholarship.
'Literary Archaeology'
Bible translations typically provoke not just religious controversy but literary debates. Mr. Barnstone says his goal is not to disparage the lofty and resonant King James Version – "anyone would be a fool not to adore it," he says; it has shaped the course of English literature. But he wished, he says, to do for the New Testament what some recent translations have done for other classic texts, such as Richmond Lattimore's Homer; the Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) of the Irish poet and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney; and, especially, the Genesis of Mr. Alter.
To that end, Mr. Barnstone sought language that was "dignified and ordinary, which a Bible from common but inspired people should be." He avoided "churchy or pompous speech" and "tampering with the extraordinary metaphors," heeding Mr. Alter's warning against "the heresy of explanation," or imposing abstract or conceptual meanings on concrete images.
When Matthew talks of "hypokrates" making a lot of noise in the temple, the King James translates this as "hypocrites." But the word primarily means "actors," and Mr. Barnstone prefers to let the concrete image of "actors making a lot of noise" speak for itself.
He also sought "the better word, not the sanctified one" – avoiding clichés favored during centuries of Bible translation that "are often inaccurate and help enforce traditional misunderstandings of the Greek." So, he uses "student" rather than "disciple," "church" rather than "ecclesiastical," "messenger" instead of "apostle."
Today, Mr. Alter points out, expectations of translation differ starkly from those that were used to judge, say, Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad in the 18th century. Then, "it was inconceivable to any cultivated person that a great poem could be a great poem without sounding like the poetry of their own age, and therefore being cast, among other things, in heroic couplets."
"We've come almost 180 degrees from that time," says Mr. Alter. Now, "we want to get a sense of literary archaeology in our translations."
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Barnstone's translation stands a chance of making a mark. Mr. Lattimore's 1979 translation of the New Testament, while now recognized by specialists as a masterpiece, went largely unnoticed at the time. How likely is Mr. Barnstone to forge a change in standard practices of Bible translation? "These things are always unpredictable," says Mr. Alter. "But I think it has a good shot."
Mr. Barnstone, at 74 only theoretically retired, has plenty to do in the meantime. The New Covenant has so far occupied him for seven years, although during that period he has also published many original works and translations from several languages. During the next year, he will publish a book about the "poetics of ecstasy" from Sappho to Borges; a translation of the complete poems of Antonio Machado; and two more books of his own poems, including one of verse he wrote in French.
Meanwhile, he proceeds with translating Letters and Acts of the Apostles – "Activities of the Messengers," in his version. He says he draws the guiding principle from the translators' preface to the King James Version: "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light."
If it were only so simple. Mr. Barnstone is picking up where he left off, with these words at the end of Apocalypse, a sort of dire warning of dark damnation for bad translators:
I give my testimony to all who hear
these words of the prophecy of this book.
If anyone adds to these, then God will add
to them the plagues recorded in this book.
2 VERSIONS OF THE LAST SUPPER
In The New Covenant, Commonly Called the New Testament, Willis Barnstone attempts to restore the Jewish context, and the concrete language of the original Greek.
The description of the Last Supper in Matthew 26:26-30, in the King James Version:
And as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed it, and brake it, and gave it to the disciples, and said,
Take, eat; this is my body.
And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it
to them, saying,
Drink ye all of it;
For this is my blood of the new testament,
which is shed for many for the remission of sins.
But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth
of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I
drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom.
And when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of Olives.
Mr. Barnstone's translation:
As they were eating, Yeshua took the matzot, and after giving thanks he broke it, gave it to his students, and said,
Take it and eat.
This is my body.
Then he took the cup and after giving thanks,
he gave it to them, saying,
Drink from it, all of you,
for this is my blood of the covenant,
poured out for the many for forgiveness of sins.
I tell you, I will no longer drink this fruit
of the vine
until that day I drink it new with you
in the kingdom of my father.
And they sang a psalm and went out to the Mountain of Olives.
Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
