Do we read the Scriptures or a translation of the Scriptures?

Is reading a translation of the Bible actually reading the Bible? Is it still the same books, the same inspired word of God? What if it’s a poor translation, or a paraphrase?

Translation will always be an exercise in interpretation and co-creation. There is no simple mapping of one language to another, not least because each language lives in the distinct, though overlapping, worlds their speakers inhabit. To faithfully translate is not just to avoid any additions, but to attempt to be united with the author, while inhabiting another world. It is a faithful translation as long as it is a co-creation, and unfaithful as far as it is a separate creation added onto the first.

An image of a pipe is not a pipe, and a translation of a book is not that book. However, to see an image of a pipe is to see a pipe, and no one has ever seen a pipe except by seeing an image of a pipe. We see the pipe through the image, even if it’s just the image in our own eyes. Similarly, we can read a book through its translation. We might also add, that even writings in our own language need to be translated into our own minds. The words may be the same, but still the meaning must be found, and every word has a slightly different meaning to every reader.

When we read our translations of the Bible, we are not reading it on our own, and that’s a good thing, because we’re actually reading it with and through the communion of the saints. Not just the translators, but all those who influenced their reading of the scriptures, and all the faithful who have together shaped how we will read it too, both by their teaching and just by their use of the same words.

The words of scripture take on new meaning in this process (though without losing the previous meaning), as often happens when we re-encounter a piece of art, and something new is picked up, perhaps even something with new meaning in our new context. It grows in meaning with each new listener, each new day, each new context. Or rather, its divine and eternal meaning is unfolded ever more fully.

With the Holy Spirit guiding our translations and interpretations through the saints, we can happily view our translations as an extension and development of the scriptures themselves.

Not one of us has ever read the Bible on our own. We are always reading with our own context, with our society, with the society that produced our Bible (the Church), and with the society it was written in. The New Testament was written by the early Church, from a common faith, through Greek and Jewish ideas and cultures, and translated and interpreted through Roman, Latin, European ideas and cultures, and then through the ideas and cultures of the New World, and then again through the modern world, always undertaken by the Church in dialogue with the world.

God bless you!

I am a secret

I am a secret.

I am sacred.

I have been scarred.

I won’t be scared.

 

‘You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.’ — Colossians 3:3

Quotes…

‘This paradigm leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power.’
Pope Francis (Laudato Si n. 203)

‘It seems to me that an unjust law is no law at all.’
St. Augustine of Hippo

‘Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.’
St. Augustine of Hippo

‘By faithfulness we are collected and wound up into unity within ourselves, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity.’
St. Augustine of Hippo

‘God is best known in not knowing him.’
St. Augustine of Hippo

‘We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknown to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread. Furthermore, such actions can restore our sense of self-esteem; they can enable us to live more fully and to feel that life on earth is worthwhile.’
Pope Francis (Laudato Si n. 212)

‘Let us behave like the drunkard who doesn’t think of himself but only of the wine he has drunk and of the wine that remains to be drunk.’
St. Catherine of Siena (with regard to how we should enjoy God)

‘The soul is in some way all things.’
Aristotle

‘This is a subtle truth. Whatever you love, you are.’
Rumi

‘Never am I less alone than when alone.’
St. Bernard

‘To be attracted by power, by grandeur, by appearances, is tragically human. It is a great temptation that tries to insinuate itself everywhere. But to give oneself to others, eliminating distances, dwelling in littleness and living the reality of one’s everyday life: this is exquisitely divine.’
Pope Francis

‘To claim the right to abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.’
St. John Paul II (Evangelium Vitae n. 20)

‘When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a Communist.’
Dom Hélder Camara

‘Many people are talking about the poor, but very few people talk to the poor.’
Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta

‘The deepest essence of love is self-giving.’
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

I want to give you something beautiful

I want to give you something beautiful.

And I want to watch as its beauty enters your soul.

I want to see it spread as it begins taking over your body.

I’ve had different glimpses of beauty in different places,

now I want to see what this one will look like in you.

.

But beauty is elusive like a rabbit.

.

When I chase it, it runs. When I grasp it, it crumbles.

It is not mine, and never will be.

But sometimes, if I sit still…

and keep myself from desire…

It just might choose to wander up to me.

.

And if I still remain still

…It might just attack me.

.

It might joyfully consume me, and take me for Its own.

To be eaten by Beauty, digested and then built into Its bones…

Is this not the dream?

And then being no longer me, but Beauty,

I may wander up to you…

Who knows? I just might attack

God bless you!

Even more new quotes

I’ve added these quotes to the quotes page, and I’m sharing them in this post because I doubt you want to regularly check it for new quotes. Enjoy :)

‘Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.’
Theodore Roosevelt

‘We cannot be sure of having something to live for unless we are willing to die for it.’
Che Guevara

‘Cruel leaders are replaced only to have new leaders turn cruel!’
Che Guevara

 

‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’
Rumi

‘Love is the bridge between you and everything.’
Rumi

‘A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.’
Neils Bohr

‘Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.’
Albert Einstein

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.’
Albert Einstein

‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.’
Albert Einstein

‘Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.’
Albert Einstein

‘He who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.’
Albert Einstein

True Beauty

Some people say we’re too obsessed with beauty, but actually the problem is just the opposite. We’re obsessed with “beauty standards”. But in all its forms, there’s never anything standard about beauty. Beauty is alive. Beauty is impenetrable. Beauty touches the newness of eternity itself. Standards are dull and dead. To see a standard is to miss the beauty.

We too often view reality as composed of static objects and lifeless facts, but in truth, nothing is static and nothing is lifeless. Even stillness is dynamic, because being itself is the supreme gift. Beauty is not in this or that, but in and beneath each and every thing, in their communion with and beyond each and every other.

We must abandon the idea of imposing standards from the outside, and instead bring out the true beauty already in all things, especially those that have been damaged.

Our world isn’t obsessed with beauty, it’s blind to it.

Peace and love

Yet more quotes

‘The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.’
G.K. Chesterton

‘And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.’
J.R.R. Tolkien (The Return of the King)

‘To God’s servants, brother, money is nothing but a devil and a poisonous snake.’
St. Francis of Assisi

‘You know, brothers, that poverty is the special way to salvation, as the stimulus of humility and the root of perfection, whose fruit is many, but hidden. For this is the hidden treasure of the Gospel field; to buy it, everything must be sold, and, in comparison, everything that cannot be sold must be spurned.’
St. Francis of Assisi

‘If you wish to glimpse inside a human soul and get to know a man, don’t bother analyzing his ways of being silent, of talking, of weeping, of seeing how much he is moved by noble ideas; you will get better results if you just watch him laugh. If he laughs well, he’s a good man.’
Fyodor Dostoevsky

‘One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.’
Fyodor Dostoevsky

All these and many more are on the “Quotes” page, if you want more.

…male and female he created them

I will begin by admitting that I myself am male, and in the standard ways. To me, women are incredible. I don’t mean they confuse me by their differences from men, or how attractive I find them, or how impressive their skill sets are. I mean that the idea of woman, much as it eludes me, takes my breath away. I really don’t know what woman is, though I feel the biological role of motherhood expresses it beautifully, almost as an analogy (in a similar way, I suspect biological fatherhood is a beautiful analogy of man, though I (as a man) have almost no idea of man at all).

In the Genesis story, Woman is created after Man, from his rib. Perhaps I spent too long accepting this literally, but I believe there is deep truth in this account. I can’t escape the feeling, that there is something primordial about man, relative to woman. Perhaps this is just because, being a man, woman is something special. But I suspect it is more than this.

Woman is created after Adam. In the creation account, perhaps the first thing to notice, is that each day creation is getting better. From just light, we get stars and suns, from just plant life, we get birds, fish, and mammals. Much as you can argue about it being “better”, creation is expanding into new dimensions of its existence, with incredible new possibilities. At the end of this upward progression, God finally creates woman. Yes; I’m suggesting that Woman is God’s finest creation.

And yet, Eve is also from Adam. Man seems to make sense on his own, in a way that woman does not (hmmm… I thought I had “almost no idea of man”…). To use my earlier “analogy”, fatherhood is conceivable without motherhood, but motherhood is inconceivable without fatherhood (pardon the pun), and in a certain way, I feel the same may be true for man and woman. That being said however, it was looking at man sitting on his own, that God said for the very first time, “It is not good…”

With trepidation, here is my suggestion: Man is the ‘wholeness’ of humanity, but woman is the ‘perfection’, though in such a way that men aren’t comparatively imperfect or women comparatively incomplete. The seed contains the wholeness of the tree, but the fruit is its perfection; yet it is ridiculous to claim one is more wholly or perfectly the tree, or that one is greater than the other. Having said that, I prefer ‘perfection’, and I prefer fruit.

Jesus, Mary, and the Church

I will further suggest, that this is why it was fitting that Jesus be male (and consequently both priesthoods, old and new covenant), so that the wholeness of humanity is embraced in him. By his life, death and resurrection, Jesus taught us what it is to be human, and is truly the most wholly human of all.

With regards to Mary, she is the most perfect creature of all, and the one most perfectly redeemed. In her, we see the perfection of humanity, yet not in such a way that she is “more perfect” than Jesus.

With regards to the Church, the Bride of Christ and our mother, its role is to bring to completion and perfection the work of our Lord Jesus. It is, after the example of our other mother, Mary, to bring Christ forth, to the end of the earth. I think it’s for this reason that Mark titled his gospel, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”, as the good news is still happening in the work of the Church, “the Lord working with them and confirming the word by the signs that accompanied it.”

I hope you’ve found these thoughts insightful at all. Pope Francis said, “We have to work harder to develop a profound theology of the woman”, and I hope I’ve helped, however little. I ask for your honest criticisms and corrections, because I know how incomplete my thinking here is, and how important the subject is.

Thank you for reading, and God bless you