The Jewish Annotated New Testament (160 page)

Protestant theologians have, from time to time, asked whether there is a principle behind the collection that serves to determine what is
truly
canonical, that is, a “canon within the canon.” Furthermore, if such a principle exists, not only does Luther’s relegation of Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation to the back of the New Testament with a somewhat diminished status become understandable from a Protestant perspective, but so too does the current conversation about the possible inclusion of the
Gospel of Thomas
, rejected by the church as early as the third century CE. Since all Roman Catholic churches recognize the authority of the church to determine the principle by which the canon is established, these are not issues for them.

TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE

Naomi Seidman

The New Testament is bound with the antecedent Jewish Scripture in a finely spun intertextual web: the New Testament models itself after linguistic, literary, and theological patterns in the earlier texts, and direct references are ubiquitous, as when Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6.5 in exhorting his followers, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart” (Mt 22.37) or when Paul quotes God’s words (Gen 21.9) to Abraham, “Drive out the slave and her child” (Gal 4.30). The text that lies in the background of the New Testament is often not the Hebrew Bible but rather the Hebrew Bible in Greek—often quoted from memory or modified to suit the new context. (See “The Septuagint,” p.
562
.)

The use of Greek sources by New Testament writers became a subject of intense Jewish-Christian dispute because of one particularly charged Septuagint (LXX) citation. In linking the birth of Jesus to a prophetic passage in Isaiah, Matthew 1.18–25 quotes not from the Hebrew but rather from the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7.14 (with a slight modification, either deliberate or due to quoting from memory). After the angel urges Joseph to take Mary into his home, “for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit,” the narrator continues:

All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Look, the virgin [
parthenos
] shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God is with us.”

The Christian reading of this passage, as it crystallized in the first few centuries, viewed Matthew as saying that Isaiah had prophesied the miraculous birth of Jesus through “the virgin.” A Jewish response to this reading can be gleaned from the debate between the Christian writer Justin Martyr (d. ca. 160 CE) and his fictionalized Jewish interlocutor in
Dialogue with Trypho the Jew
(ca. 150 CE). In what would come to be the standard Jewish position, Trypho argued that no virgin appeared in Isaiah’s Hebrew text; Isaiah spoke rather of
ha’almah
, the young woman; this prophecy was fulfilled, moreover, in Isaiah’s own time since it involved an imminent political and military threat facing Judah and so had nothing to do with Mary. Trypho implied that the Septuagint translation Matthew cites was simply wrong, and that Jews needed no intermediary to understand Isaiah. Nevertheless, the Jewish insistence that the Septuagint was either flawed or had been misunderstood was complicated by the awkward fact that the Septuagint was a translation composed and historically accepted by some Jews, indeed praised as uniquely perfect by such Jewish writers as Philo (see his
Life of Moses
). Some historians surmise that it was precisely this Christian embrace of the Septuagint that led Jewish communities to adopt new Greek translations in the second and third centuries CE, particularly the hyperliteral translation of Aquila, which renders Isaiah’s
ha’almah
as
hē neanis
, “the young girl.”

Jewish Bible translations since then invariably render Isaiah’s
ha’almah
as “the girl,” or “the young woman,” while translations produced by and for Christians rendered in Isaiah’s prophecy, until very recently,
the
virgin, the same virgin that would reappear in Matthew. Thereby, Christian translators avoided opening an uncomfortable gap between Isaiah and Matthew. Not until the Revised Standard Version appeared in 1952 did a mainline Christian Bible translation allow Isaiah to speak of the “young woman” while Matthew cited him as naming the virgin; the translation was burned by Christian fundamentalists for this heresy and perhaps also for the not-unrelated “sin” of including on the translation committee the well-known Jewish Bible scholar and translator, Harry Orlinsky.

The Christian position on the Matthew citation of the Greek Isaiah was complicated by an equally awkward set of circumstances: not only was the Septuagint, as Christian polemicists increasingly discovered, criticized as inaccurate by Jewish interlocutors but also the rarity of Hebrew knowledge in Christian circles often compelled theologians to defer to Jews on questions of what the Hebrew Bible actually said. When Jerome (ca. 347–420), the Christian biblical translator who produced a Latin Bible, departed from the practice of translating the Christian Old Testament portion of the Bible into Latin from the Greek, and announced his turn in his new translation (later called the Vulgate) to the
hebraica veritas
, the “Hebrew truth,” he was thus constructing a direct Christian channel to the Hebrew Bible and circumventing what had been an uncomfortable dependence on Jewish expertise. The Vulgate did, however, translate Isaiah 7.14 using the Latin word
virgo
, “virgin,” thus perpetuating the Christian practice of reading back from Matthew to Isaiah.

The Vulgate did not resolve these Jewish-Christian tensions; translation has been a major site of Jewish-Christian dispute, and Christian theologians and translators have continued both to seek and to resist Jewish language teachers and Bible interpreters. Nor did Jerome’s Vulgate settle matters from the internal Christian viewpoint. Augustine (354–430), the Christian theologian, had argued against Jerome that the established translation, the Septuagint, should be preferred to any new version. Jerome’s translation into the “vulgar” tongue carried the day, and eventually it, too, became a canonical translation as the Septuagint had once been, protected by church authority long after Latin had ceased to be a vernacular.

Martin Luther (1483–1546), who began the Protestant Reformation in 1517, produced a German translation of the Bible (NT in 1522, OT/Hebrew Bible in 1534). His was a lively and accessible German translation based directly on the Hebrew of the “Old Testament” and Greek of the New Testament, rather than from the Vulgate. Luther thus repeated the innovative character of Jerome’s enterprise even while challenging the supremacy that Jerome’s translation had achieved. Luther’s translation of Isaiah 7.14 used the German word
Jungfrau
, which has the advantage of a literal meaning—“young woman”—that reflects the underlying Hebrew, but a lexical or usage meaning—“virgin”—that does not. In this it is similar to the English word “maiden,” which can mean “virgin”— and metaphorically any entity that is about to have its first trial, as a ship’s maiden voyage or a politician’s maiden speech—but which also can simply mean “young female,” whether sexually experienced or not.

In response to the activities of the Protestant reformers, the Roman Catholic Church convened a council of bishops, which met in the city of Trent (Trento, in northeastern Italy) from 1545 to 1563. The session that met in 1546 awarded the Vulgate canonical status in response to Luther’s bold new translation. This meant that both the Latin of the translation, and the contents of the Bible itself (including a larger canon for the Old Testament), were affirmed against the Reformation’s call for Bible translations into languages actually spoken at the time and for an Old Testament canon that followed the contents (but not the order) of the Hebrew Bible. The action by the Council of Trent affirming the importance of Latin, therefore, could not obviate the need for new translations. Of course, as time went on, the natural tendency of the Reformation-era translations—for instance, Luther’s in Germany and the series of English translations beginning in the sixteenth century and culminating in the early seventeenth century with the King James Version (1611)— was to acquire, with time, their own quasi-canonical status. The history of Bible translation by Christians, from this perspective, moves restlessly between innovation and institutionalization, between the Bible as universal message to be spread in every language and the Bible as untouchable sacred text.

Although such tensions may characterize all traditions with sacred texts, it is particularly acute for Christianity, given its beginnings as a movement that sought to cross ethnic and linguistic lines. The imperative of translation is addressed in the New Testament itself. According to the book of Acts, Jesus’ followers have gathered in Jerusalem, and on Shavuot (the Greek term is Pentecost), the first pilgrimage festival after his death, the Holy Spirit (
rua
ḥ
hakodesh
, in its familiar Hebrew designation) descends upon them in tongues of fire. They begin to speak in languages understood by the multiethnic and multilingual gathering of Jewish pilgrims, “each … in our own languages … we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power” (Acts 2.8–10). The New Testament can in fact be read as already a translation, presenting in
koinē
Greek, the dominant language of the Roman Empire, experiences that largely took place in other languages, most notably Aramaic, the language of Galilee and Judea; a few passages give tantalizing glimpses of what appear to be Jesus’ Aramaic
ipsissima verba
, as in
talitha kumi
(Mk 5.41) and
Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?
(Mt 27.46; Mk 15.34).

This process of translating Jesus’ Jewish-identified Aramaic into the Greek of the empire sometimes extends to an erasing of Jesus’ Jewish context. For example, while Jesus is referred to in John 1.38 as Rabbi (followed by a parenthetical explanation, “which translated means Teacher”), nearly everywhere else in the New Testament Jesus is addressed with Greek terms that obscure his Jewish affiliations.

In Matthew 9.20, when the woman with a bloody discharge comes up behind Jesus and touches the “hem of his garment” (KJV) or “the edge of his cloak” (NIV) [in the Greek,
tou kraspedou tou himatiou autou
], she is touching his
tzitzit
, the ritual fringes mandated in Numbers and Deuteronomy, which is similarly (mis)translated in the Septuagint as
kraspedon
, meaning hem, edge, or border. On this point, the NRSV (New Revised Standard Version) correctly reads “the fringe of his cloak.” As this example demonstrates, the transformation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek begins not with the New Testament but rather with the Septuagint, which already obscures the Jewish specificity of a number of key biblical terms. Indeed, the Septuagint’s translation of “Torah” (the Hebrew is best translated as “instruction”) as
nomos
, or “law,” underlies the common Christian view that Judaism is legalistic and interested in the “letter of the Law” rather than in faith and grace. More recently, translations have begun to adjust this translation at least as far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned. The NRSV, for example, translates Isaiah 51.4, “
Torah
will go out from me,” as “teaching,” not “law” as in the RSV and previous translations. (See also “The Law,” p.
515
.)

Today, missionary New Testament translations for Jews have sometimes attempted to translate the Greek into an English version that “sounds Jewish” and thus quell the sense among potential readers that they are encountering an alien text. David Stern’s
Complete Jewish Bible
(CJV), a 1998 Messianic-Jewish translation of both testaments, is in an English sprinkled with Yiddishisms, as if to reinforce the point that the characters of the New Testament are authentic Jews: in Luke 10.4, the apostles are warned: “Don’t carry a money-belt or a pack, and don’t stop to shmoose with people on the road.” Alongside the translational questions surrounding the Jewishness of Jesus and his first followers are those that involve the Jewishness of those who opposed Jesus. The term
hoi Ioudaioi
, generally translated as “the Jews,” occurs more than 180 times in the New Testament, 150 of them in John and Acts, usually in describing the adversaries of the Jesus movement. As scholars have pointed out, the term emerges not from the events of Jesus’ own day, in which nearly all the major protagonists were Jews, but rather from the enmity and separation arising from the expulsion of the Johannine community from the synagogue (an event “predicted” by Jesus in Jn 16.2). This anachronistic labeling of Jesus’ enemies—but not his family or friends—as “the Jews” has contributed to the Christian persecution of Jews. Barclay Newman’s 1995
Holy Bible: Contemporary English Version
was heavily promoted for combating Christian anti-Judaism by translating John’s references to
hoi Ioudaioi
as, variously, “the Jewish authorities,” “the leaders,” or “the crowd.” Such attempts have not been universally lauded: The CEV has been attacked, and not only by fundamentalists, on the grounds that it mistranslated the clear words of the New Testament to avoid giving offense to Jews. (See “Ioudaios,” p.
524
.)