‘The scholarly translators...have, I firmly believe, done us a considerable disservice in respect of Matthew.’ Photo: by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Lost in translation? James Gordon digs deep into Matthew’s Gospel
Matthew 24:22: ‘If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but [through] the [just] those days will be shortened.’
It is perhaps novel for Friends to be poring over the precise meaning of ancient texts, and may even be offensive or divisive for some. But the elders at my Meeting recently chose a passage for reflection from the gospel of Matthew (25:35-40), and it prompted me to some close consideration.
It is my personal conviction that Matthew 24, the preceding chapter, is particularly relevant to the present times. Neither of the chapters are ones that Friends today tend to prioritise, and 25:35-40 (which is preceded by a sharply-polarised metaphor of the sheep and the goats, the stark division into the saved and the damned) is one that may in fact make us deeply uncomfortable. I can fully understand and appreciate why.
For Matthew 24:22 the Authorised translation has:
‘And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.’ The Greek for ‘elect’ is ‘eklectous’, and is from the same root as ‘ekklesia’ (Greek and Latin for ‘church’). The idea goes back to the notion that God has chosen people through whom to work. This was basic to the Old Testament, the mission that the people of Israel took to have been given them by the Almighty. Paul controversially (at the time) reassigned such ‘election’ from the Jews to the growing Christian church, which he did so much to help found and propagate.
In Matthew 25:37 the word translated as ‘elect’ or ‘chosen’ does not appear. Instead we have the word ‘iust’ [just], reflected in Wycliffe’s 1382 version: ‘Thanne iust men schulen answere to hym, and seie, Lord, whanne siyen we thee hungry, and we fedden thee; thristi, and we yauen to thee drynk?’ Here ‘iust’ clearly refers to the sheep of the parable, and the act of separating them is no different from the word for ‘chosen’ or ‘elect’ in the earlier verse 24:22. According to Matthew, this is part of the same discourse. Chapter 25 leads on directly from 24 with no change of time or place. The sheep are clearly to be identified with the ‘chosen’, the ‘elect’.
I have checked over twenty different translations of these passages into English (easy to do these days with the internet), and in every case the words διὰ τοὺς ἐκλεκτοὺς (dia tous eklektous) are translated ‘for the sake of the [elect/chosen]’. Wycliffe has ‘for the chosen’, and the Latin Vulgate, which Catholics rely on to this day, has ‘propter electos’, where the preposition means ‘because of’. We need to be clear. Jerome (author of the Vulgate in the fourth century CE) was using the Greek that we have, which is the nearest we have to an original (scholars think Matthew and possibly Mark may go back to Aramaic originals but, if so, they are lost).
The scholarly translators have, on the whole, made a quite wonderful job of translating the Bible (the best example I have yet seen of a functioning horse designed by a committee). But they have, I firmly believe, done us a considerable disservice in respect of Matthew chapter 24. The best known of their mistranslations, but still highly influential, is the notion that the Bible prophesies ‘the end of the world’. It is clear from Matthew 24:22 that the promise (and it is nothing less – Jesus says those days ‘shall be’ shortened, not that they ‘might’ or ‘could be’) suggests quite the opposite, and the proper translation should anyway have been ‘the end of the age’ (Greek ‘aionos’ not ‘kosmou’).
Why is this all this a disservice? The Catholic translation is shown to be at least accurate, but it is misleading. The devil, if you will, is in a rather important detail. The word διὰ (‘dia’) is the normal Greek word for ‘through’ and when applied to persons, as here, it means: ‘through, by aid of, by means of’. The meaning ‘for the sake of’ or ‘on account of’ (Latin ‘propter’) is nowhere given.
How important is this? To me it makes all the difference at a time when human beings (not God, whether or not you believe in said entity) are now known to be the ones responsible for the hideous events predicted in Revelations – the environmental apocalypse. It is true that Revelations (and Jesus himself in the Gospels) ascribes these events to God. How, in an age where swords alone could rule much of the known world, could anyone conceive of humans being able to bring any of these things about, let alone all of them?
As we now know from David Attenborough and others, however, we are the ones responsible, we the ones who so recklessly continue to hasten the end of our species (and one-eighth of all the rest) by our actions and lifestyle. Such human complicity, indeed sole responsibility for all this, could not have been understood by the King James Bible Committee, still less Jerome, so the translation ‘propter’ or ‘for the sake of’ seemed natural enough. Human conduct was the criterion by which we were to be judged. They could not imagine that that conduct could extend to destroying or preserving the planet itself, or its species, including our own. So the translation of ‘dia’ had to be not ‘through’, but ‘for the sake of’. Especially with an eye on Jerome’s ‘propter’.
David Attenborough, in his memorable film A Life on Our Planet, tells us it is not too late to save the planet, and he puts some time and effort into telling us just how. Friends, since it is not ‘for the sake of’ the chosen that this will occur, but through them, and the elect is clearly defined in Matthew 25 as the just, it surely means that those who feed the hungry and welcome the stranger, and visit those in prison are the same people as will save the planet and up to a million of its threatened species, including our own. Maybe those who engage in Extinction Rebellion…
We are not to wait virtuously for Jesus to arrive on his cloud. Not even symbolically or metaphorically. With so many people in power so clearly determined to do all they can to ignore age-old warnings and destroy the world, it is incumbent on those of us who can hear that call, to do so. It is through these that Matt 24:22 actually predicts that the destruction of all flesh will be cut short. Will.
