Possessions and Positions of the Translator

In this post, I want to do three things: 1. to recognize a few outstanding people who are translators. 2. to rank order the best English translations of a short Greek passage. 3. to offer a bit of Bible translation by a feminist method.

1.

It’s one thing to evaluate translations; it’s quite another thing actually to translate. And there’s more: it takes great courage and skill to do both. Great coaches are not the world-class athletes; and the competitors are not always doing what they intend to do, even at their peak, as the coaches’ video tapes later prove. Nonetheless, there are rare individuals who, as C. S. Lewis puts it, “play both sides of the net.” That is, people who translate not only do something but they also can reflect on what they’ve done and what they must do. I’m thinking now of exceptional persons, some of whom are well known and others less so. I’m thinking of Willis Barnstone who translates into English from Greek, from Chinese, from Hebrew, from Spanish, from the classics, from the Bible, from poetry, from novels, both as a talented individual and as a skilled collaborator; and of the same Barnstone who writes translation theory, history, and practice, and related histories of cultures and language, and related literary criticism. I’m thinking of Anne Carson who translates and speaks of theory of translation, and who writes poetry and essays on the classics and on comparative literature. I’m thinking of Karen H. Jobes who has translated books of the Bible both individually and in collaboration; and who is theorizing textual translation by analogies with oral translation. I’m thinking of Kenneth L. Pike, the maker of a theory of language that has had wide application in more than twenty different disciplines, that insists on “person above logic,” that is demonstrable monolingually, that is constantly aware of whether the person is an outsider going in or is already some sort of an insider; Pike’s a poet, a polyglot, and a practitioner of his translation theory. I’m thinking of Carolyn Custis James, Suzanne McCarthy, John F. Hobbins, Michael Pakaluk, Tyson Hausdoerffer, Bob MacDonald, and April DeConick, who not only blog and dialog with other theorists about translation but who also actually do translating, sometimes translation that is a bit different, that makes a good bit of difference. Pakaluk actually invites others in through his challenges.

Today, I want especially to recognize Wayne Leman, Peter Kirk, and one blogger named Nathan. They’ve responded to a translation challenge of mine of a previous post:

What’s the best English translation of the following Greek phrase? What’s your method of translation? How and why is your translation one of the best?

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

Wayne, at his Better Bibles Blog, has been outlining a method of translation he’s calling “translation equivalence” (aka a new phrase for “dynamic equivalence” or DE). Lately, he’s focused readers on “possession” or “possessives” marked in English, Hebrew, and Greek. (Wayne’s post actually inspired my challenge.) When he stepped up to my challenge, Wayne has admitted that neither “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence are particularly relevant concepts here.” (We’ll come back in a moment to why there’s particular distancing from DE and why there’s no mention of Kenneth Pike’s methods.) He then gives us two brilliant translations:

“‘James, God and Jesus Christ's servant.’ Or for those who prefer to include the possessive suffix on both possessors, ‘James, God's and Jesus Christ's servant.’”

Peter likewise offers us the following wonderful translation, and an explanation:

“James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Peter does not label explicitly his methods for the translation. (He does begin parenthetically by noting that “Wayne omitted ‘the Lord’ presumably by mistake,” which would make Wayne’s translation “James, God's and the Lord Jesus Christ's servant”). In contrast to Wayne, then, Peter gives three reasons to explain why he does not “use the English possessive here” (i.e., possessive marked by apostrophe). First, such a possessive punctuation in English “makes this sentence unwieldy.” Second, “and more importantly, the rendering with the possessive suggests a definiteness not in the original or in the context, as if James is the only servant/slave or some special servant/slave of God and Jesus rather than one of a large number. Thus ‘Millie is Mr Smith's servant’ suggests that she is the only one, in a way ‘Millie is a servant of Mr Smith’ does not.”

Finally Peter appeals to, but almost only hints at, another reason, the reason I think is his most important of all: “this may be partly a matter of my English dialect.” Such an appeal forms a more implicit contrast to Wayne’s explicit statements on method. Peter is, rightly I say, personally constrained by how his own English sounds to him. Peter is as astutely attuned to how “James”’s own Greek may sound to the original writer. As understated and apologetic as Peter’s appeal to his own lect is, the constraint of his own subjective position frees him (1) to embrace the longer prepositional phrases instead of punctuated apostrophes for possession, and (2) to leave indefinite the personal possessiveness. The most important aspect of this subtle appeal to personal lect is that it leaves both to the original author and to the translator’s readers a kind of invitation to subjectivity. That is, Peter’s using his own English admittedly allows “James” to use his own Greek, and this allows readers to supply “more importantly” the indefiniteness which the context suggests. But Peter’s method is not far in approach from Wayne’s. Both are pragmatic.

Wayne is all for “simply matching the meaning of the Greek form to an English form that has the same meaning”; in contrast to Peter, Wayne assumes and works from a much more general, abstract, and universal “Greek” albeit a Greek full of “the meaning.” Wayne’s method also assumes a universally normal, native “English”: “How do native English speakers normally express the meaning of the Greek?” He muses whether his method, therefore, is to be classified a “literary translation,” and he wants to “assume so, since it is how native English speakers would say and write that English.” What general English “possessive syntax [is there] for that same possessive relationship” in Greek? He explains that such questions “would be an example of simultaneous translation and translation equivalence, at a minimum. I forget what bilingual quotation is, so it might be that also.” The thing is, he’s already said very clearly that he is not employing either “formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence,” which are two debated methods among Bible translators. Such translators have been distancing themselves from Eugene Nida’s DE, and have abandoned Pike’s monolingual demonstration and tagmemics. The pragmatics of the day is “relevance theory” as developed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson and applied to Bible translation by Ernst-August Gutt. Karen H. Jobes's invocation of simultaneous interpretation and bilingual quotation is much in contrast to relevance theory. Nonetheless, it’s the distancing from Nida and the absence of Pike that are most interesting. Pragmatics seems to allow Bible translators not to have to be accountable to formal equivalence or to literary issues or to theological constraints. (For all you non-linguistic rhetoricians, “relevance theory” and pragmatics are analogous to Aristotle’s “enthymeme” as a “rhetorical syllogism.” Sperber and Wilson are interested in “how what is only implied in a statement contributes to determining the meaning of what is explicitly said.”) But I’m digressing.

Before we move on to our third translator, let me just say this. The world class athletes may review the video tapes after they get the gold medals; they don’t always use the exact methods they’ve intended but look at what they’ve done! Bravo Wayne and Peter!

Nathan takes two days and works through four translations. They are these:

“James, slave to god and master Jesus the anointed one;”

“Yakob, slave to god and master Yehoshua the anointed one;”

“From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah;” [from the Complete Jewish Bible (Stern), to compare with Nathan’s previous two]

“Jacob, slave to god and master Joshua the Anointed;”

By way of method, Nathan wants to “offer something out of the norm.” And he likes to “label it ‘contextual translation’ or something along those lines.” Now his truly is a “literary translation”; Nathan is after both the “Jewish context” of names and also the Greek “word-play of master/slave; and perhaps theos [a]s not implying Father and Son but rather that Jesus is master/god.” The final translation Nathan provides is to avoid “a transliteration from either language” and to offer “purely English terminology” only. I have to say I really like Nathan’s English (non-transliteration) translation of Jacob’s Hebraic Greek; and I’ll say a bit more on that when I offer my own translation at the end of this post.

2.

In addition to Wayne’s, Peter’s, and Nathan’s translations, I list below here some 48 other translations all published at one point or another. (Does anyone have a copy of Julia Evelina Smith Parker’s translation, the first complete translation of the Bible by a woman ever--in 1855, in the United States?) The other translations below are listed in rank order of my preference.

My first and most important criterion for a translation is that it makes and keeps as many personal connections as possible. The connections may be between the writer and the reader, between the translator and the new readers; between the denotations and connotations that make for word play (i.e., playfulness and wiggle room). The best translations are presented with both languages side by side for a trans-translation, or an “interlation” in the “stereotext” as Mikhail Epstein coins it. But I also think any “shock” (as Richard A. Rhodes and I both are very much for) must not just be the shock of the text (either original or translated) but must also be the shock beyond the text (as something the text or its author or translator cannot easily predict or precisely intend); now I’m talking about the subjective effect that a parable-heard has; or that an inside joke involuntarily laughed-at has; or that a hyperbolic statement makes; or that a miracle in nature effects. In section 3. here, I’ll say just a bit more about methods.

Without further ado then, here’s the list:

translation	translator	my ranking
From: Ya'akov, a slave of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah	NJPS	1
From Jacob, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Hackett	2
Ya`akov, a servant of God and of the Lord Yeshua the Messiah,	HNV	3
JAMES, SLAVE OF GOD AND OF THE LORD Jesus Christ	Lattimore	4
From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ,	NET Bible	5
From: James, a slave servant of God and of the Lord Jesus the Anointed One.	TSNT	6
This letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NLT	7
I, James, am a slave of God and the Master Jesus,	TM	8
James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	HCSB	9
JAMES, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Moffatt	9
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus, the Messiah,	ISV	10
From James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NJB	11
From James, a servant of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ.	CEV	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	GNT	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	GW	12
From James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.	NCV	12
FROM James, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	REB	13
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NAB	15
James, a bond-servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NASB	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NKJV	15
James, a bondservant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ:	Weymouth	15
James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ	JB Philip's	16
James, of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ a servant,	Young	17
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	21st Cent	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ASB	18
JAMES, A servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Amplified	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	BEB	18
Iames a seruaunt of God, and of the lorde Iesus Christ,	Bishop's	18
Iames the seruaunt of God and of the LORDE Iesus Christ	Coverdale	18
James the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	D-R	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ERV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	ESV	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	Geneva	18
Iames a seruant of God, and of the Lord Iesus Christ,	KJV	18
James a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Mace's	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NIV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	NRSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	RSV	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Third Mill	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	TNIV	18
Iames the seruaut of God and of the Lorde Iesus Christ	Tyndale	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	WEB	18
James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,	Webster's	18
This letter is from James. I am a servant owned by God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	New Life	19
James, bondman of God and of [the] Lord Jesus Christ,	Darby	20
James, the servant of God, and of our Lord Jesus Christ,	Wycliffe	21
I, James, am writing this letter. I serve God and the Lord Jesus Christ.	NIrV	22
One of Jesus’ followers named James wrote the following letter	BLB	23

3.

Now just a bit more about the feminist method of translation. (Then a translation is offered.) I’m just going to refer readers to other places in this blog, to Nancy Mairs’ statements on women’s discourse. Or find Mairs’s books, or Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s or Cheryl Glenn’s or Andrea Lunsford’s or Sonja K. Foss's or Patricia Bizzell’s. They’ve all written much very well on the personal, even sometime physical, nature of rhetoric that women employ. (And I think I’ll add, since half of us are men, that I’ve written here in this blog elsewhere a bit on how Jesus, C.S. Lewis, Kenneth Pike, Barack Obama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. have used such rhetoric in contrast to cold logic and objectivity). Personal position in and during and after translation cannot be avoided.

Now, when we’re talking about possession, we think also of the possession of one human by another. Slavery is one label for that. And when we talk about God, we think of a being who is over us earthlings, a person who created us even. Again, position, ours and the others’, is not unimportant.

And when we talk about James, we think of several in the New Testament who might have written the Greek words we’re translating into English. There’s great ambiguity here. Not only is this a human being who’s not claiming to be in the position of master; not only is he not God; but he’s also one of possibly many different men. In the gospels, if he’s not Jesus’s brother, then maybe he’s John’s brother, one of the two sons of Zebedee who’s wife brings them to Jesus to talk about being his right hand and his left hand men, to which Jesus replies something about being slaves. But whichever one in the New Testament he is (or is he Josephus’s scribe? Anyway!); anyway, whichever first century man he is, his namesake is also one of many Jacobs. And Josephus the historian does not distinguish between the Jewish patriarch and this letter writer, by name anyway: and so there’s this literary connection to twelve tribes (both from the heel wounded wrestler of God and from this letter writer). And just to be clear, A. T. Robertson, John Painter, and other contemporary scholars of the church writings agree that Ἰάκωβος and Ἰάκωβ (as a Greek transliteration without the later Greeky inflection) are variants of the same name. (Thanks to so Michael Kruse for bringing our attention to Jacob and the Prodigal: How Jesus Retold Israel's Story by Kenneth E. Bailey. I also like Gary Amirault's observations on Jacob for James).

So since we’re rambling a bit about Greek: the Jewish writer of this letter knows his Greek. Many theologians say he’s arguing with Paul over faith. But rhetoricians could just as easily contend he’s arguing with Aristotle over belief, a central concern of Greek rhetoric. Thus, blogger Nathan who claims his Greek and Hebrew aren’t very good does himself make very important, very personal connections, between the people who are Greek and Hebrew speakers and their God and his anointed one. Enough. Here’s an attempt at another translation, by a feminist method of humility, ambiguity, and personal positions of subjectivity and equal inclusivity:

Ἰάκωβος θεοῦ καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος

FROM: Jacob, slave, of God, and of Master Anointed Joshua

TO:

The Letter's Literary: A Personal Translation

In this post, I try my hand at translation of a book of the Bible, though I'm no Bible translator. I'm working my way through the Greek, as the host language; my English is the guest. The interlation (i.e., Greek and English side by side) below is to show the personal, the embodiment, the word play (i.e., wiggle room and playfulness in language). If Willis Barnstone attempts to recover the Hebrew senses lost in the Jewish gospels of Yeshua and in Israel's Apocalypse of Yohanan, I'm hoping to restore some of the Greek senses (for instance, the allusion to the gods in the names, such as Timothy and Epaphras). (With the English, especially the punctuation and name choices, I do confess "taking liberties," as Iyov once put it. For instance, the letter is redesigned as a memorandum; and Paul is Smally -- I just couldn't use either Pee Wee or Tiny, as those two names are infamously claimed.) I would appreciate any feedback from others, especially those who are more experienced translators, those who would have disagreement with my translation, and anyone amused by it in any way.

I'm trying, here, to translate Philemon for these few reasons:

1) It's the only book I can work through quickly to consider its whole start-to-finish context (though that itself is within the first century Roman imperial context, which looks back to various waves of Greek influence).

2) The "book" really is a letter. It is "someone else's mail" - as theologian Richard B. Hay calls Paul's first letter to the Jewish, Christian Greeks in Corinth; and that makes you and me "eavesdroppers." In Kenneth Pike's theory, then, we are principled "etic" observers, outsiders who will change the text and be changed by it, depending on whether and how we go in.

3) The little letter is highly rhetorical, and John Hobbins constantly brings attention to the rhetorical (even when he translates into English Matthew's Greek translation of a sermon of Jesus; more on Hobbins' translation in a moment, with a link to it).

4) As rhetorical and epistolary on the specific issue of slavery, Paul's letter is ambiguous in a number of different ways:

a) first, it is a letter that became a scriptural proof-text for both sides in the U.S. Civil War;
b) second, though a mere letter, it uses principles of rhetoric to make a strong argument (i.e., it delays the main point -- the freeing of the slave Onesimus and even the identification of who the letter is about -- until after the principle disputer, Philemon, has been reasonably won over by enthymeme and epideictic).
c) third, the ambiguous, rhetorical letter on slavery is applicable to other issues such as hermeneutics around whether a husband must be lovingly "over" a wife who must submit;
d) fourth, the ambigous rhetorical letter applicable to many question of human equality is literary (i.e., the proper nouns play with common nouns poetically, semantically; the incidence of chiasmus is frequent; and the implied touch of Paul's chained hand to the paper adds a splash to the poetic punch.)

Now, before jumping right in, I'll mention another huge problem right off the bat. By calling Philemon a letter but by translating it also as literature, we're mixing categories. Logic might say:

premise 1 - letters do not equal literature.
premise 2 - Philemon is a letter.
conclusion - Philemon does not equal literature.

And we could go on like that more, for to translate in a literary fashion something that is not literature is not logical. Not only it is illogical to call letters literature, but it's also unreasonable to use literary translation principles on a epistolary text. (Rather, we might more rationally use Formal Equivalence OR Dynamic Equivalence).

Peter Kirk makes this point in a comment on Elshaddai Edward's post, "Is it time for a new translation acronym?":

I would deny that of much of the Bible, in any meaningful sense of the word “literary”. The Gospel of Mark, for example, is not literary in style, nor in intent; the only meaningful sense in which it is literary is that it has been considered so by some literary critics, judged as if it were literary and found wanting. Similarly, Paul’s letter to Philemon is not “literary” but a personal letter. So, to use the term “literary translation” for Bible translation seems to imply either the false assumption that the original is literary or, in violation of Lingamish’s principle [i.e, "A literary translation will not be literary in ways that the original is not"], an attempt to distort a text which was not originally literary into a translation which is.

So I'd like to go back to the N-dimensionality of language, that Kenneth Pike talks about. Language is not so logical as, well, syllogistic logic. Language's categories (despite all Noam Chomsky's helpful theorizing) do not have the government and binding of "either/or" binary features manifesting in the performance of deep structure grammatical competence, if you'll allow the repetition of the jargon. Aristotle might like that if Chomsky would just translate his theory back into Hellenistic writing. Pike reminds us again and again: Person Above logic.

So now we can mention again John Hobbins' translation of Matthew 23. Note Hobbins' perspective on a sermon (i.e. a discourse with "hortatory" features): he calls it literary. And I say, if it fits as Matthew's Greek translation of Jesus's Hebrew Aramaic sermon within the context of Matthew's Greek gospel within the context of a multilingual multicultural first-century Israel, then why not allow "literary translation" of the literature. Barnstone flat out calls Matthew's gospel literature (while not denying its prosaic qualities, which he says most English and most Christian translations reduce the text to).

And note how Sir Philip Sidney writes The Defense of Poesy. How ironic that he must use rhetoric and Prose to defend Poetry. Why not use Poesy (i.e. Poetry)? And could poetry prove the worth of rhetoric and of prose too? Of course! Again, it is we the people writing and reading and speaking and listening who see the various qualities (sometimes ironic, sometime unintended by the author) as various letter or literature, poetry or prose, formally equivalent or dynamically equivalent or literarily equivalent.

So here is Philemon, first in the original Greek (with some re-formatting -- it's my poor html that doesn't quite do what I want), and second in a kind of original English:

1 Παῦλος δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ
καὶ Τιμόθεος ὁ ἀδελφὸς

Φιλήμονι τῷ ἀγαπητῷ καὶ συνεργῷ ἡμῶν
2 καὶ Ἀπφίᾳ τῇ ἀδελφῇ
καὶ Ἀρχίππῳ τῷ συστρατιώτῃ ἡμῶν
καὶ τῇ κατ' οἶκόν σου ἐκκλησίᾳ

3 χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη ἀπὸ θεοῦ πατρὸς ἡμῶν καὶ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ

4 εὐχαριστῶ τῷ θεῷ μου πάντοτε μνείαν σου ποιούμενος ἐπὶ τῶν προσευχῶν μου 5 ἀκούων σου τὴν ἀγάπην καὶ τὴν πίστιν ἣν ἔχεις πρὸς τὸν κύριον Ἰησοῦν καὶ εἰς πάντας τοὺς ἁγίους 6 ὅπως ἡ κοινωνία τῆς πίστεώς σου ἐνεργὴς γένηται ἐν ἐπιγνώσει παντὸς ἀγαθοῦ τοῦ ἐν ἡμῖν εἰς Χριστόν

7 χαρὰν γὰρ πολλὴν ἔσχον καὶ παράκλησιν ἐπὶ τῇ ἀγάπῃ σου ὅτι τὰ σπλάγχνα τῶν ἁγίων ἀναπέπαυται διὰ σοῦ ἀδελφέ 8 διό πολλὴν ἐν Χριστῷ παρρησίαν ἔχων ἐπιτάσσειν σοι τὸ ἀνῆκον 9 διὰ τὴν ἀγάπην μᾶλλον παρακαλῶ τοιοῦτος ὢν ὡς Παῦλος πρεσβύτης νυνὶ δὲ καὶ δέσμιος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ 10 παρακαλῶ σε περὶ τοῦ ἐμοῦ τέκνου ὃν ἐγέννησα ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς Ὀνήσιμον 11 τόν ποτέ σοι ἄχρηστον νυνὶ δὲ καὶ σοὶ καὶ ἐμοὶ εὔχρηστον 12 ὃν ἀνέπεμψά σοι αὐτόν τοῦτ' ἔστιν τὰ ἐμὰ σπλάγχνα 13 ὃν ἐγὼ ἐβουλόμην πρὸς ἐμαυτὸν κατέχειν ἵνα ὑπὲρ σοῦ μοι διακονῇ ἐν τοῖς δεσμοῖς τοῦ εὐαγγελίου

14 χωρὶς δὲ τῆς σῆς γνώμης οὐδὲν ἠθέλησα ποιῆσαι ἵνα μὴ ὡς κατὰ ἀνάγκην τὸ ἀγαθόν σου ᾖ ἀλλὰ κατὰ ἑκούσιον 15 τάχα γὰρ διὰ τοῦτο ἐχωρίσθη πρὸς ὥραν ἵνα αἰώνιον αὐτὸν ἀπέχῃς 16 οὐκέτι ὡς δοῦλον ἀλλ' ὑπὲρ δοῦλον ἀδελφὸν ἀγαπητόν μάλιστα ἐμοί πόσῳ δὲ μᾶλλον σοὶ καὶ ἐν σαρκὶ καὶ ἐν κυρίῳ 17 εἰ οὖν με ἔχεις κοινωνόν προσλαβοῦ αὐτὸν ὡς ἐμέ 18 εἰ δέ τι ἠδίκησέν σε ἢ ὀφείλει τοῦτο ἐμοὶ ἐλλόγα

19 ἐγὼ Παῦλος ἔγραψα τῇ ἐμῇ χειρί ἐγὼ ἀποτίσω

ἵνα μὴ λέγω σοι ὅτι καὶ σεαυτόν μοι προσοφείλεις 20 ναί ἀδελφέ ἐγώ σου ὀναίμην ἐν κυρίῳ ἀνάπαυσόν μου τὰ σπλάγχνα ἐν Χριστῷ 21 πεποιθὼς τῇ ὑπακοῇ σου ἔγραψά σοι εἰδὼς ὅτι καὶ ὑπὲρ ἃ λέγω ποιήσεις 22 ἅμα δὲ καὶ ἑτοίμαζέ μοι ξενίαν ἐλπίζω γὰρ ὅτι διὰ τῶν προσευχῶν ὑμῶν χαρισθήσομαι ὑμῖν

23 ἀσπάζεταί σε Ἐπαφρᾶς ὁ συναιχμάλωτός μου ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ
24 Μᾶρκος Ἀρίσταρχος Δημᾶς Λουκᾶς οἱ συνεργοί μου

25 ἡ χάρις τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ τοῦ πνεύματος ὑμῶν

FROM:

1 Smally -- A Chained Prisoner of Anointed Joshua
and God Guy -- A Brother

TO:

Buddy – Our Loved-One and Co-Worker
2 and Loveless – Our Sister
and Horseman – Our Co-Warrior
and the Entire Group Called to Your House, Buddy

TO YOU ALL:

3 Favor and Peace

FROM:

God – Our Father
and Joshua Anointed – Our Master

4 Blessed favor goes to my God when my memories of you, Buddy, are made vivid in my prayers. 5 I keep hearing about your love – and your belief, which you hold in your possession before Master Joshua – for each one made supremely special. 6 So I’m praying that your partnership in belief is actively birthed – in the expansive knowledge of everthing that’s good in each one of you – for our Anointed One.

7 What I hold in my possession is joy, and much of it -- not to mention a call from beside you to be encouraged – and that’s all because of your love Buddy. And that love through you, Brother, refreshes the supremely special ones to their gut-level core. 8 Now, much of what I hold in my possession – from the Anointed One – is boldness: a boldness to order you to do the right thing. 9 Through love, there’s much more: a call to you alongside, to encourage you, Buddy. This is Smally here, the old guy; and now I’m even a chained prisoner of Anointed Joshua. 10 I’m beside you, calling you around now to my child -- the one I birthed in my chains -- I’m talking about Handy. 11 He’s the one who was useless to you once, but who is now -- to me and to you -- very useful in the most blessed ways. 12 He’s the one I’m sending back to you, Buddy. He’s my gut-level core. 13 He’s the one I had been counseled to hold in possession for myself, so that you, Buddy, could serve me in these chains of that Blessed Announcement to the World.

14 Apart from your knowing all about it, though, I didn’t have any wish to make a single move. I did wish that -- by no obligation -- there’d be that goodness of yours, rather by your own free will. 15 Perhaps, in fact, he was apart from you an hour, so to speak, so that for ages to come you’d hold him in your possession -- 16 no longer as a slave -- rather, as above a slave: a loved brother -- especially to me -- but so much more to you, Buddy, not only in the flesh but also in the Master. 17 If you hold onto me now as a partner, then take him back as you’d take me. 18 If, however, he’s committed some injustice, or has a debt, against you, then state that on my bill.

19

I will repay so that there’s no statement of your debt, Buddy: that you owe me your own self. 20 Yes, Brother, I myself need something handy from you as you’re in the Master: refresh me to my gut-level core in the Anointed One. 21 Persuaded by how you’ve heard me before, I’m writing to you now, Buddy, seeing once again that you’re going to go above and beyond to make good on this statement. As you’re doing that, please get a guest room ready for me. 22 I’m expecting, in fact, that the requests each one of you is making will bring favor to you all.

23 GREETINGS TO YOU BUDDY FROM:

Aphrodite’s Guy – my co-inmate in Anointed Joshua
24 And my co-workers – Warrior, Valorman, PopulaceMan, and Lukan

25 WITH THE BREATH OF EACH ONE OF YOU:

The favor of the Master – Joshua Anointed

The Best Teachers

On Monday, one of my teachers passed away. On the same day, another of my mentors “no longer with us” joined me by video to help me teach a class of aspiring language teachers. The former is Mildred Godwin Taylor, who lived 93 years on this planet. The latter is Kenneth Lee Pike.

Both teachers in very personal ways continue to teach me. For instance, Aunt Mildred and Dr. Pike renew my reluctant respect for Aristotle (if only in this respect):

As of Monday, I’m reminded that 17th century Lincoln School Headmaster John Clarke opined that “Alexander was right in claiming that he had owed more to Aristotle his teacher than to Philip his father.”

Is this all that different from Philip Yancey’s learning from Fred Rogers (aka “Mr. Rogers”) the value of giving personal and public credit to one’s best teachers? Yancey, “recovering from church abuse,” is inspired by Rogers to write the book Soul Survivor: How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church. The author details all that he’s learned from Martin Luther King, Jr., G. K. Chesterton, Paul Brand, Robert Coles, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, C. Everett Koop, John Donne, Annie Dillard, Frederick Buechner, Shusaku Endo, and Henri Nouwen.

Now I’m challenged to do this if just briefly in a blog post. And I’d like to make it a meme:

Who are the thirteen teachers who have most personally influenced you and how?

Would you share your baker’s dozen of mentors with the world?

Here, in some chronological order, are my teachers and the greatest bit of what each one has taught me:

1. Mom, taught me to read and, then, still teaches me to learn from good *teachers.

2. Dad, teaches me the measure and the capacity of a man.

3. Aunt Mildred modeled humility and service to students, even a 16-year-old atheist who watched her enjoy and contemplate her incarnate God.

4. Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος models humility and service to many, translating a 16-year-old boy out of his atheism into enjoyment and contemplation.

5. Dr. Richard Cutter taught me enthusiasm in learning Greek by his electric eccentricity in teaching.

6. Julie, my best friend and life partner, teaches me to live passionately with honesty.

7. Dr. Kenneth Lee Pike taught me good language and behavior for being an outsider and an insider (either one moving towards the other).

8. Schaeffer, my one and only son, teaches me to be loyal to friends and to enjoy one’s compulsions.

9. Hallie, my eldest daughter, teaches me to talk thoughtfully with high ideals.

10. Amelia, my youngest daughter, teaches me to laugh a lot.

11. Dr. Charlotte Hogg teaches me feminisms and rhetorics of those in the margins from my places of privilege.

12. Dr. Richard Leo Enos teaches me rhetoric of the Greeks and Romans by his own masterful rhetoric of complex simplicity.

13. Dr. James Reeves teaches me how the ceiling on my spiritual maturity is my social-emotional immaturity (and that there are twelve steps ahead).

*My other teachers, the other top 13 my Mom by teaching me to read taught me to learn from, include these I’ve never met: Anne Lamott, Anne Carson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Nancy Mairs, Edith Schaeffer, Francis A. Schaeffer, C. S. Lewis, Philip Yancey, Dallas Willard, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Now I tag these friends:

• Billie
• Jason
• Suzanne
• Wayne

In a late update, I tag some very interesting bloggers:

• Deborah
• Debra
• Hugo
  
• Iyov
• John
• Lingamish
  
• Stefan