Kahle’s publication of fragments of Aramaic Bible translations found on scraps of parchment in the Genizah triggered a fresh wave of academic interest in the study of the Targums. The subject received a further boost in 1949 when a complete copy of a previously unknown version of the Targum of the Pentateuch was discovered in the Vatican’s archive. Suddenly, Targumic study was back on the agenda.
One of the key areas of focus for Targum scholars has been the way in which the Aramaic translations strive to eliminate any suggestion that God has a body or a physical presence. The Old Testament is full of phrases like ‘God said’, ‘the hand of God’ and ‘God came down’. Virtually without exception every Targum rephrases the Bible text to imply that God is not acting in a physical manner. They frequently use the Aramaic word Memra to do this. Memra literally means ‘speech’ or ‘utterance’;25 it is used in the Targums as an intermediary between an apparently physical action carried out by God and the purely spiritual deity. For example, Genesis says that ‘God planted a garden in Eden’. One of the Targums rephrases this into ‘a garden had been planted in Eden by the Memra (i.e. utterance) of God’.26
Some scholars saw a parallel between the Targum’s use of Memra and the first verse of the Gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’ They argued that the Memra was the background to John’s concept of the Word, or Logos as it is more correctly phrased in Greek. If so, this made the Targums almost essential for understanding the gospel of John. However this theory has been thrown into disarray by the realization that the Targums, at least in the form we know them, are generally later than the New Testament. The idea of the Logos is much more complex than a simple transplant of Memra from the Targum. There are other equally good theories as to where the idea of the Logos came from27 and if there are any apparent similarities between the Targum and the New Testament, this is probably because both are drawing on common, earlier Jewish traditions.
But scholarly investigation into the Targums hasn’t subsided and other, sometimes extreme, theories have emerged. Such as the one which takes a seventh-century Targum (easy to date since it mentions people and places which didn’t exist before then), and claims that it was written in the fourth century. Apparently it was written for Jewish priests to use.28 The fact that, by the fourth century, the Jerusalem Temple had been in ruins for three hundred years and its priests no longer had any significant religious role, doesn’t seem to matter for this academic viewpoint. Unwilling to take the Targum at face value, this particular school of thought prefers to read into the text things that aren’t really there.
Although the history of the Targum has had its contentious side, they have an especial significance. The Aramaic Targums were composed to be read out in the synagogue, for those who could not understand the reading from the Hebrew Bible. The Jews have lived in very many places, and have translated their Bible into scores of languages. Yet no other translation was ever considered sufficiently important to be given a formal role in the religious liturgy. All other Jewish translations of the Bible, in whatever language, were made solely for educational or personal purposes; never for use in the formal synagogue service. In the history of Bible translation the Targums are quite unique.
3
Old Words, New Tongues
The Language of the New Testament
The earliest known New Testament manuscripts are written in the Greek dialect spoken in Alexandria and across most of the Middle East. It is known as koine or ‘common’ Greek. The general consensus is that the language of these manuscripts is the very tongue in which the Christian Bible was originally written. This consensus is not without its detractors, because there is almost certainly a difference between the language of these early manuscripts, and that which Jesus and his disciples spoke.
Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic. Yet the earliest New Testament manuscripts are in koine Greek. But there are Aramaic phrases in the Gospels1 and all the direct speech, the things Jesus and his followers actually said, would originally have been in Aramaic. This has led scholars to believe that an Aramaic layer lies beneath the written Greek of the New Testament, one which may never have been written down; it only circulated orally, gradually being translated into Greek and then transcribed.2
If that is right, then the written Greek text is itself a translation, while any renderings of it into another language are themselves translations of a translation. This of course raises questions about the inerrancy of the text. Since every translation requires a judgement on the part of the translator as to the best word to use, when the chosen word is itself then translated it becomes easy for a text to drift further and further from the original.
A good example of how this process works can be seen in the Lord’s Prayer, which is based on the Gospels. In the Book of Common Prayer it includes the words ‘forgive us our sins’ or ‘forgive us our trespasses’. The Greek text of Matthew reads ‘forgive us our debts’ and in Luke it says ‘forgive us our failings’. Debts are not the same as sins, and sins are much more severe than failings. But there is an Aramaic word, with a root sense of ‘obligation’, which can also mean debt, legal liability or even guilt. Matthew and Luke are likely to be translating this Aramaic word, giving it different nuances; ‘debts’ in Matthew and ‘failings’ in Luke. The Aramaic word does not mean sin; the language expresses that concept using a different noun.3 So, although the English version of the Lord’s Prayer is clearly derived from the language of the Gospels, its phrase ‘forgive us our sins’ does not accurately translate the Aramaic which underlies the Greek Matthew and Luke. Translations are rarely straightforward.
Nearly everyone agrees that the earliest written versions of the New Testament were in Greek. But there is one version which some people argue was translated directly from the oral Aramaic. It is the New Testament Peshitta, the Syriac sibling of the Old Testament translation that we came across earlier. Some people in the Church of the East believe that their Peshitta was transmitted to them in its original Aramaic language. And although this claim has long been dismissed by western Bible scholars, the advocates of so-called Peshitta Primacy feel strongly that the Greek New Testament is not the authentic version.4 It is not a disagreement that has hit the headlines, as many later translation controversies did. Nevertheless, it is another example of the powerful emotions that translating the Bible generates.
The New Testament Peshitta
Like its earlier, Old Testament cousin, the New Testament Peshitta also originated in Edessa and is written in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic. Those who don’t accept the claims of Peshitta Primacy argue that it is by no means the earliest Syriac version; they point to an earlier work in the same language known as the Diatessaron, a Greek word meaning ‘From Four’. The Diatessaron is a condensed version of all four Gospels woven together into one text. It was an ambitious exercise that seems to have been quite unique for its time.
The Diatessaron is traditionally thought to have been compiled by Tatian, a second-century convert to Christianity who described himself as having been born in the ‘land of the Assyrians’.5 As a young man he travelled to Rome where he studied under Justin and then went back east. His peregrinations have generated some doubt about whether he wrote the Diatessaron in Greek before it was translated into Syriac, or whether Syriac was its original language. Although the prevailing view is that it was translated from Greek,6 the debate is not helped by nobody having seen a full copy for over a thousand years. The Diatessaron started to vanish from view early in the fifth century when the bishop of Edessa decreed that his congregants were to use the four separate gospels in its place. A few years later another decree by a local bishop resulted in the destruction of over two hundred copies.7
Fortunately, we know quite a bit more about the early history of the New Testament Peshitta. Our knowledge comes courtesy of the dogged efforts of a small number of nineteenth-century treasure hunters and archaeologists.
In 1843
the British Museum ‘acquired’ a collection of manuscripts that had been preserved in the Syrian monastery of St Mary Deipara, to the south of Alexandria. It’s interesting how often Alexandria crops up in our story! The manuscripts were obtained by Henry Tattam, the Archdeacon of Bedford, during a visit to Egypt. Quite how Tattam came across the manuscripts is a matter of conjecture. The church architectural journal The Ecclesiologist, in its 1849 edition, suggested that by plying him with sweet raisin wine, the Archdeacon had managed to so inebriate the abbot of the monastery that he willingly gave up treasures that the monastery had steadfastly guarded for a millennium and a half. The Ecclesiologist, quite understandably, frowns upon this, declaring with all the severe pomposity of its age that ‘We must say that when such manoeuvres are practised on the poor monks, and their success boastfully recorded, not only by worldly laymen but by grave divines . . . morality must be at a very low ebb amongst us.’8
But Tattam also brought many other manuscripts back from Egypt. It’s quite possible that he acquired his collection legitimately. The assistant keeper of manuscripts at the Museum, William Cureton, must have thought so; he seems to have had no qualms about examining the Archdeacon’s finds. He recognized one of the manuscripts as an ancient Syriac text of the gospels made up of three separate documents, ‘taken as it would appear, almost by hazard, without any other consideration than that of their being of the same size, and then arranged so as to form a complete copy of the Four Gospels’.9 A note on the first leaf records that the book originally belonged to a monk named Habibai, who presented it to the monastery.
Cureton, who describes the manuscripts as ‘Venerable Remains of Christian Antiquity’,10 transcribed the text and published it in 1858. He dedicated it to Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert. It briefly flourished as the oldest known Old Syriac, Gospel manuscript. It didn’t keep the title for long.
Later that century the twin sisters, Mrs Agnes Smith Lewis and Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who would in due course lead Solomon Schechter to the Cairo Genizah, were on one of their several trips to Egypt. They were carrying out research in St Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai when they came across an ancient parchment, the original writing of which had been scraped away and a new text superimposed. This technique, designed to make the best use of scarce and expensive parchment, was not uncommon; a manuscript overwritten in this way is known as a palimpsest.11 The top layer of the palimpsest they found was venerable in its own right; it dated from the eighth century. But the original layer, which as a result of the ageing process had become just about visible again, was far older. Although this was long before digital photography, or even rolls of film, the sisters took four hundred photographs which they sent back to Cambridge. When the photos were deciphered, it became clear that the original layer was similar to the manuscript that the British Museum had acquired, although somewhat older. It dated from the fourth or fifth century, and contained most of the text of the four Gospels.
The dialect and style of Syriac in the palimpsest suggested that it had been translated from the Greek in the late second century, making it the earliest known text of the Gospels. It differed in some significant ways from the versions of the Gospels that are known today. Most notably, the palimpsest did not contain the last twelve verses of the book of Mark which narrate Jesus’s resurrection. These verses were also missing from the two oldest, surviving Greek Gospel manuscripts but up to this point nobody had been sure whether this was because they were never there, or whether a page had just fallen away. The Old Syriac Palimpsest, as it is often known, helped confirm that these verses were indeed a later addition to Mark, probably copied across from one of the other gospels.
From the third century onwards the Old Syriac version underwent frequent revision.12 By the fifth century, after it had gone through several incarnations, the work had become known as the Peshitta. It is the name by which it is still known today, giving it an affinity with the earlier Syriac translation of the Old Testament, even though they are completely different works. The Old Syriac versions are the first known translations of the New Testament into any language. Their considerable scholarly value lies in the fact that they are the earliest snapshot of the original text.
The Peshitta continued to be reworked by succeeding generations, bringing it closer all the time to the Greek. In 615, Thomas of Harqel wrote that the text had been revised ‘with much care by me, the poor Thomas, on [the basis of] three Greek manuscripts . . . to keep the profitable accuracy of divine books’.13 Poor Thomas’s version did not prevail. His translation technique was so literal, imposing Greek nuances, style and word order into the Syriac text, that what he wrote, while accurate, was virtually unintelligible. Despite his efforts, the earlier version of the Peshitta remained the popular choice for Syriac speakers; it became the standard text for the Eastern churches, and remains so today.14
Meanwhile, back in the West, the ubiquity of Greek as an international language was fading. The Septuagint and the Greek New Testament were both maturing into little more than venerable curiosities, revered but generally impenetrable. There was an urgent need for a new standard translation of both the Old and New Testaments into the language most educated people understood: Latin.
Jerome’s Vulgate
The ancient Syrian city of Antioch, where the Spice Road originally terminated, had been a Christian centre since the earliest days. The apostle Peter is said to have evangelized there, happily eating at the same table as the pagans, until he received a message from Jesus’s brother James which shamed him into withdrawing from heathen society. Paul travelled to Antioch during his first missionary journey. He preached to the city’s large, independent community of hellenized Jews, converting many of them to his new faith and establishing Antioch’s reputation as the pre-eminent theological and spiritual capital of Christianity.
In the year 374 a young man, not yet thirty years old, had a dream in Antioch. His name was Jerome. He was one of the few Bible translators to leave enough of a legacy for us to be able to trace large chunks of his life story and personality.
Jerome was born into a well-off, Christian family in Stridon near Aquileia, which lies at the head of the Adriatic, seventy miles north-east of Venice. His parents sent him to Rome for his education. There, under the tutelage of the best teachers in the city, he immersed himself in the study of classical writers and poets. He also started to take an active interest in his religion. On his return home he joined together with some friends and formed a small monastic community.
The monastic ideal didn’t last too long. A quarrel with his friends in the community coupled with a falling out with his family, led to his abrupt departure from his homeland. It was to be a pattern of behaviour he would repeat throughout his life. In a tirade against his birthplace he wrote, ‘Men’s only god is their belly. People live only for the day and the richer you are the more saintly you are held to be.’15 Such grumblings are the earliest evidence of a developing character trait; Jerome’s acerbic nature comes across frequently in his many writings.
Jerome travelled east, on a long and exhausting journey, eventually arriving in Antioch, where he fell sick. It was there, possibly while he was fevered from his sickness, that Jerome had his famous dream. He saw himself standing in front of a heavenly court. The judge asked him his religion. ‘I am a Christian,’ replied Jerome. ‘You’re a liar,’ replied the heavenly judge. ‘You are not a Christian, you are a devotee of Cicero.’ Jerome was mortified. It was his love of classics that he feared defined him in the eyes of heaven, rather than his Christianity.
The dream was the kick that Jerome needed to start him off on his life’s work. As soon as his strength had sufficiently recovered he journeyed to a monastery in the desert of Chalcis, a little way south-east of Antioch, where he tried to return to an ascetic life. It seems however that his asceticism was not all-consuming; he tells us in his writings that he was ‘often present at dances with girls’.16
During his stay in R
ome, Jerome had accumulated a library of classical works. They didn’t sit well with his renunciation of Cicero and his new ascetic lifestyle. He disposed of his books in Chalcis, throwing himself instead into the study of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. He learned Hebrew, under the guidance of a converted Jew named Baraninas. It was a name which would return to haunt him later in life when he was castigated for Jewish sympathies. Rufinus, a former friend now turned critic, sneeringly called Jerome a disciple of ‘Barabbas’.17
Jerome’s stay in Chalcis did not last long. Theological differences with his fellow monks and hermits made life intolerable for him. Once again he stormed out of a monastery, echoing his earlier intemperance, this time complaining that ‘It is preferable to live among wild beasts rather than with Christians such as these.’18 He left the desert and settled for a second time in Antioch.
Jerome was a prolific writer. He developed a reputation as a Bible commentator, penning introductions and commentaries to many of its books. When not commenting on the Bible he wrote biographies, polemics and letters, dozens of which have survived. And even though he had given up his classical studies, his youthful education started to prove its worth. He started receiving commissions to correct Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. On one occasion he translated an Aramaic gospel known as pseudo-Matthew into Greek. Neither language was his native tongue.
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 5
