Translation
Debate
Round
One
Response
From
Barry Hofstetter
First of all,
thanks to Scott for his willingness to engage in this debate. I will be responding here primarily to
his documentation and argumentation, since I fully stipulate his opening
statements, and that he has fairly described the issues. I will use a variety of resources in
responding, and my arguments will primarily be from the original languages,
using the Nestle-Aland/United Bible Societies Text for the Greek New Testament,
and the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia for the Hebrew Old Testament. References will include, but not be
limited to, the Brown-Driver-Biggs Hebrew lexicon (BDB) and
Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich (BDAG) lexicon for the New Testament. I will document all sources using online
citations where possible. I will
use slightly modified standard transliteration in citing Greek and Hebrew
words.
Genesis 3:15
Mr. Windsor’s
arguments from the Hebrew text here demonstrate an inadequate knowledge of how
grammatical gender works in the language.
He has also misidentified the actual translation issue.
Grammatical Gender
Just for a quick
review, English distinguishes gender with regard to personal nouns, men/women
and so forth. We often do this for
pets, or for personified objects such as ships. For everything else, we use the
impersonal pronoun “it.” Other
languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin among them, have the quality of grammatical
gender. A noun in Greek or Latin
may be masculine, feminine, or neuter.
Hebrew has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine. What’s important to remember is that
this has nothing to do with the actual gender of the object – it’s strictly a
grammatical category (some beginning textbooks attempt to avoid using this
traditional distinction, calling masculine nouns “a class,” feminine nouns “b
class,” and neuter nouns “c class,” but the terminology is literally
ancient). My favorite example is
the word spirit. The Greek is
pneuma, a neuter noun. The
Hebrew is ruach, a feminine
noun, and the Latin is spiritus, a masculine noun. It’s important to realize that this
grammatical category makes no difference to the meaning of the noun
whatsoever. In terms of translation
we look to the meaning of the noun to supply the appropriate pronoun in
English. If the noun is truly
personal, the translator must provide a personal pronoun. If the noun is impersonal, we use the
impersonal pronoun.
Now what this
means is that that the grammatical gender of (aQeB, heel, has nothing to
do whatsoever with whose heel the serpent “is lying in wait for.” It’s simply the normal gender for the
word, i.e, there is no masculine form of the word. Hebrew does have a gender
determined possessive suffix which
identifies to whom an object belongs, but the author does not use that suffix
here, instead assuming that his readers will understand the possessor from
context. Since not using a
possessive pronoun in other languages often sounds awkward or even
unintelligible, the ancient translations (The Septuagint and Jerome’s Vulgate)
supplied a pronoun in Greek and Latin to make it understandable to readers of
those languages.
Actual Translation
Issue
The real
translation issue is therefore not the gender of the word “heel,” but the gender
of the subject of the verb “crush” and therefore the gender of the pronoun which
must be supplied for “heel” in the translations. Hebrew provides a pronoun as the
subject, H)U, which in earlier Hebrew can be translated either he or she
in context. What helps us here is
the verb, YiShUPKa, from YaSaP.
Hebrew finite verbs (verbs with personal subjects), unlike Latin and
Greek, are gender qualified. Here
the verb is third masculine singular, meaning that the subject is considered
masculine in grammatical gender.
What could be the antecedent, therefore, of the pronoun? The only candidate is ZeRaH, “seed,
offspring” which is a masculine noun.
What Jerome gives
us, however, is the pronoun ipsa, which is feminine. As the Hebrew text stands, this can only
be a mistranslation. Is it possible
that Jerome had a Hebrew text which actually used a third feminine singular
verb? As far as I can determine,
there are no Hebrew manuscripts which have the feminine form of the verb as an
alternative reading. The
Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation, provides the masculine/neuter pronoun
autou with heel, which shows that they did not read a feminine verb
either.
The variation in
the KJV and the ESV with “it” and “he” is dependent on whether we understand the
Hebrew word ZeRaH as the impersonal “seed,” or as the personal
“offspring, descendent.”
There is one other
significant translation issue here that does not directly affect the point, but
which I may address later if it becomes pertinent.
Luke 1:28
Again, Mr. Windsor
shows some confusion as to his understanding of the issues regarding Luke 1:28,
particularly confusing grammar/syntax with semantics. I understand the confusion, since it is
present in the source which Mr. Windsor quotes.
Grammatical/Syntactical
The verb, lexical
form χαριτόω, charitoõ, is a perfect
middle/passive participle (I don’t know why the article cited calls it a
“present” perfect – that is not really a category used in any Greek reference
grammar with which I’m familiar).
The passive voice simply means that the noun the participle modifies
receives the action from an agent.
The perfect tense simply means that the action is completed in the past,
often with the sense of continuance into the present, e.g., “I have written a
book.” What Mr. Windsor’s source
does, however, is add the word “fully” as though this is part and parcel of the
meaning of the perfect. In fact,
it’s not. The perfect tense only
refers to the completion of the action.
If there is any idea of “fully” complete, that must either be supplied by
some sort of descriptive adverb, or implied by context. It is not inherent in the syntax of the
perfect itself.
Semantic Issue
Even if the context implies that the action is fully complete,
that does not mean that it is proper to translate “full of grace.” To paraphrase what I’ve written above,
the perfect tense means that the action of “gracing” would be fully complete,
but the idea “full of grace” is a semantic issue, an issue regarding the meaning
of the word, not an issue regarding the use of the perfect. What does
charitoõ
mean? From BDAG, the standard reference for NT
Greek and early Christian literature:
χαριτόω
(χάρις)
1 aor. ἐχαρίτωσα;
pf. pass. ptc. κεχαριτωμένος
(Sir 18:17; Ps 17:26 Sym.; EpArist 225; TestJos 1:6; BGU 1026, XXIII, 24 [IV
a.d.]; Cat. Cod. Astr. XII 162,
14; Rhet. Gr. I 429, 31; Achmes 2, 18) to cause to be the recipient of a
benefit, bestow favor on, favor highly,
bless, in our lit. only w. ref. to the divine χάρις
(but Did., Gen. 162, 8 of Noah διὰ τῶν τῆς ἀρετῆς ἔργων χαριτώσας ἑαυτόν):
ὁ κύριος ἐχαρίτωσεν αὐτοὺς ἐν πάσῃ πράξει αὐτῶν
Hs 9, 24, 3. τῆς χάριτος αὐτοῦ
(=τοῦ θεοῦ),
ἧς ἐχαρίτωσεν ἡμᾶς ἐν τῷ ἠγαπημένῳ God’s
great favor, with which he favored us through his beloved (Son)
Eph 1:6. Pass. (Libanius, Progymn.
12, 30, 12 vol. VIII p. 544, 10 F. χαριτούμενος=favored;
cp. Geminus [I b.c.], Elem.
Astronomiae [Manitius 1898] 8, 9 κεχαρισμένον εἶναι τοῖς θεοῖς)
in the angel’s greeting to Mary κεχαριτωμένη one
who has been favored
(by God) Lk 1:28 (SLyonnet, Biblica
20, ’39, 131–41; MCambe, RB 70, ’63, 193–207; JNolland, Luke’s Use of
χάρις:
NTS 32, ’86, 614–20); GJs 11:1.—DELG s.v. χάρις.
M-M. TW.[1]
Notice that “full
of grace” is not a meaning cited for the word. The closest we get is “favor highly,”
but that does not mean “full of grace.”
We find the word used only elsewhere at Eph 1:6 in the NT, where no
translation renders it “full of grace.”
Luke however, does
use a phrase which is fairly translated “full of grace.” This is at Acts 6:8, πλήρης χάριτος, plêrês charitos. John
also uses this expression (e.g., John 1:14). If any person knowledgeable in both
Latin and Greek in the ancient world were asked to retrovert plena gratia
into Greek, he would certainly use the phrase found at Luke 6:8, and not
charitoõ.
Closing
Argument
Mr. Windsor has failed to include *all of* and confused the grammatical,
syntactical and semantic arguments to support his position. Properly
understood, these issues actively argue against the viability of the
Catholic Vulgate/DRB rendering of these texts. Mr. Windsor has therefore
failed to demonstrate that they are viable translations.
[1] Arndt, W., Danker, F. W., & Bauer, W. (2000). A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament
and other early Christian literature (3rd ed.) (1081). Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Word Count: 1451
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