Shame, Philomela, you unbiblical liberal bird

"When we say 'built on common ground,' we mean that the Common English Bible is the result of collaboration between opposites: scholars working with average readers; conservatives working with liberals; teens working with retirees; men working with women; many denominations and many ethnicities coming together around the common goal of creating a vibrant and clear translation for 21st century readers, with the ultimate objective of mutually accomplishing God's overall work in the world."
-- Paul Franklyn, PhD, associate publisher for the Common English Bible

"All these are unpersuasive for the reasons given.  Yet Gorgias' exclamation to the swallow when she flew down and let go her droppings on him is in the best tragic manner:  he said, 'Shame on you, Philomela'; for if a bird did it there was no shame, but [it would have been] shameful for a maiden.  He thus rebuked the bird well by calling it what it once had been rather than what it now was."
-- Aristotle

If you know the story of Philomela in Greek mythology, then you know how she was raped and how her rapist cut her tongue out because she yelled out exclamations of protest and how tragically in the end the gods translated her into a swallow.  If you know the Greek language of Aristotle here in his Rhetoric (Bekker page 1406b line 18), then you know how he's calling Philomela a παρθενον /parthenon/ but how he's praising Gorgias for calling her a bird, or rather for calling this swallow a shameful Philomela, because she's pooped on him.  That's right. Aristotle himself is saying that Philomela is still a "parthenon" who [read between the lines here] pooped on the man who desired her ['Shame on you, Philomela, because you did this to a man before you were a bird and while you were still a virgin, conservatively speaking, before he transformed you into something else, you maiden.  How inappropriate of you.  How shameful of you'].  Yes, this can be subtle stuff.  And in our status quo world, so conservative and so man first, we should not read too much into these things.  And if you do, then shame on you for your protests.

If you know how male English translators care about this word, parthenon, especially when it's sacred, then you know that "conservatives" translate it "virgin" while their opposites, the "liberals," translate it "maiden."  If you pay attention to how the man Paul Franklyn divides the world, then you see his polar opposite binaries as follows:

"scholars" / "average readers"
"conservatives" / "liberals"
"teens" / "retirees"
"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities"

Opposites, in this way of thinking, are distinct even if there can be something in common between them, some common ground below them.

"a bird pooping" / "a maiden dropping protests of No! No! No! No!"

In these binaries, very subtly, not all is equal between the opposites.  Notice, if you will, how the men ordering the opposites put the better one on the left of / the lesser one. 

"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities"
"virgin as translation of παρθενος" / "maiden or young lady or young woman or (unmarried) girl as translation of παρθενος"

Now listen to the language, the ordering of pairs, from BBB blogger Wayne Leman in his recent post on the question of whether Franklyn's Common English Bible translation is "liberal" or not.  Leman is attempting to deconstruct the "conservative" / "liberal" binary.  Ironically, however, he re-constructs his own binary, with "liberal" as the still-botched category:

"Some conservatives consider translation of Hebrew almah in this verse [i.e., Isaiah 7:14] as 'young woman' instead of 'virgin' to be liberal. But is it, or does it actually reflect accurate biblical scholarship?"

"What you think might be a liberal translation of some verse may be shown to be an accurate translation, especially when you find other verses in the translation which continue to support whatever is your own theological viewpoint."

Did you see it?  Here it is:

"accurate biblical scholarship" / "liberal"

"an accurate translation" / "a liberal translation"

Of course, Leman is arguing that "young woman" (as the best English for "almah" in Isaiah 7:14) is an actual reflection of biblical scholarship that is accurate.  In opposition to that, for Leman, is the very same translation that is motivated by what would be liberal.

Commenter Joel Hoffman says something similar, quoting and with some nuance correcting Leman:

"I think everyone agrees that changing 'virgin' to 'young woman' for alma in Isaiah 7:14 is 'accurate biblical scholarship,' but the decision to prefer that scholarship over tradition is liberal."

Here, as a variation, Hoffman's binary pits what is good against what is (not "liberal" exactly but what is, rather, instead) botched "tradition":

"accurate biblical scholarship" / "tradition"

The point for both Leman and Hoffman is that which opposes "accurate biblical scholarship" is botched, is lesser, is "in-accurate" and "un-biblical" and "not scholarly."

The binary (i.e., that "either / or" division) is what allows men who know things to know them op-positionally.  And what comes first (i.e., on the left side of the pair in a left-to-right listing) is determined, actually pre-determined by them, to be naturally what's best.

---

So let's now look at how this works out in Bible translation.   Franklyn lists these binaries as opposites that must find common ground for his Common English Bible translation:

"men" / "women"
"denominations" / "ethnicities" 

When you look at the CEB team of translators (i.e., individuals on either side of his oppositions), what's interesting is how somebody like Adele Berlin on the team can neither be one of the men nor is actually able to be person of a Christian denomination.  Must Berlin, a woman, be the opposite of the men?  Is she, as not a member of a denomination, a person of some specific marked ethnicity?  Which one?  Is this a Christian / Jewish binary?

It's no secret that the problem in Bible translation with the words almah (עלמה) and pathenos (παρθενος) is the problem over whether the girl Mary (the mother of Jesus) was a virgin, or not, when these words are used.

How this seems to mirror Gorgias' and Aristotle's own tragic problem of whether Philomela is an ὄρνιθι /ornithi/ or a παρθένος /parthenos/.  One is appropriate and not shameful; the other is inappropriate, and shameful.


The Hebrew alma is in Isaiah 7:14.  So is the Greek pathenos in the earliest translation of Isaiah 7:14.  Whoever the maiden is that this scripture and that these words refer to might have been a virgin.  And the "young woman," as the common denominator CEB translation team has translated the Hebrew, might she be the prophesied Mary, the mother of Immanuel as Jesus, or not? 

The binary way of knowing the answer will not tolerate ambiguity.  Either she is, or not.  Either this is accurate, or not.  Either it is respectable, or it's shameful.

When we get to the New Testament, then we leave the Hebrew and have only the Greek.  Moreover, both in the gospel of Matthew and in the gospel of Luke, we have the story of the pregnant Mary not being "known" or "impregnated" by her man, her fiancé, her husband, Joseph.  In both stories, she is a virgin with child by the Holy Spirit.  So now, in these contexts, is the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) any less ambiguous than the Hebrew almah (עלמה) and its Greek translation the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) in Isaiah 7:14?  Do the stories of the virgin Mary require the Greek word to be translated unambiguously in Matthew 1:23 and in Luke 1:27?

Is one translation accurate, biblical, scholarly, respectable, and the other not?

I'll let you answer.  And to help, it may be interesting to see how various translators have translated the words:

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "young woman" in Isaiah 7:14 - JPS, JPCT, RSV, NET, NEB, NABRE 2011, NAB 2011, The Inclusive Bible

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "the young woman is with child" and "a young woman who is pregnant" and "A girl who is presently a virgin" and "a young woman is now with child" and "young woman is pregnant" in Isaiah 7:14 - NRSV and Good News Translation and The Message and The Bible in Basic English and the Common English Bible

the Hebrew almah (עלמה) as "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in LXX Isaiah 7:14 - Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, NETS by Moisés Silva

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "maiden" in Matthew 1:23 - Weymouth, Richmond Lattimore

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "the unmarried girl" in Matthew 1:23 - Ann Nyland

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young woman" in Matthew 1:23 - Willis Barnstone

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Matthew 1:23 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young woman" in Luke 1:27 - The Inclusive Bible

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "the unmarried girl" in Luke 1:27 - Ann Nyland

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Luke 1:27 - pretty much all the other translations

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "girl" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - W. Rhys Roberts

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "young lady" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - J. H. Freese

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "maiden" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - George A. Kennedy

the Greek pathenos (παρθενος) as "virgin" in Aristotle's Rhetoric - anon, 1683

Is one translation accurate, biblical, scholarly, respectable, and the other not?

pt 3, Dynamic unEquivalence: Nida v. Barnstone

This is part 3 of a series. In part 1, we considered how Eugene Nida’s reductive theory of dynamic equivalence opposed Eunice Pike’s much more robust theory and practice of translating. In part 2, we looked at how Nida’s simplistic focus on language as mere communication excludes culture and Jewishness in the Bible and how it takes people like Naomi Seidman and Lynell Zogbo to point out his ethnocentrism and to recover and to give us some recovery from it. In part 3, let’s review Nida’s binary and then let Willis Barnstone propose how to bust that up.

To be sure, Barnstone’s theory of language is as robust as Pike’s. Moreover, his work in translation is informed by his theory and is incredibly prolific. And, certainly, Barnstone’s knowledge of Bible translation is equal to Seidman’s and to Zogbo’s. He’s a well-researched scholar, a poet, a historian, a theoretician, and a practitioner of translation in general and of Bible translation in particular. I think he knows the anti-Semitic tendencies of much Christian Bible translation, and just a read of his essay, “How through False Translation into and from the Bible Jesus Ceased To Be a Jew,” gives evidence. All that to say, I don’t want us to pigeonhole Pike or Seidman or Zogbo or Barnstone as specialists with tunnel vision whose particular and individual and singular respective view only offers just one of several needed vantages from which to take down Nida’s dynamic equivalence theory.

Nor do I want to box in Nida. Nor do I desire for anyone to do that. I do want to notice the problems his reductive theory has caused. I do want you to see he’s caused issues for others and how they must deal with these. So here’s Barnstone.

Barnstone’s issues with Nida include two that I’d like to highlight here. The first is that Nida’s linguistics operates on the binary principle of a sort of reductive “linguistics v. literature,” and especially literature that is part and parcel of cultural patterns and the arts. The second issue is that Nida’s “form v. message” message is an unnecessarily simplistic binary.

First, Barnstone seems to be very generous to Nida. Here’s an excerpt from Barnstone’s book, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice (page 224):

Returning to mainstream linguistics and literature, the joining of what might be considered science and art has not been “a happy alliance,” to use the words of Henry G. Schogt in his recent book Linguisitics, Literary Analysis, and Literary Translation. I do not wish to denigrate the work of older pioneers in translation theory: Quine’s indeterminacy of translation, Catford’s translation shifts and his application of Firth-Halliday linguistics to translation, Mounin’s linguistic techniques, which represent “un art fondé sur une science” (Problèmes théoriques 17), and the comparative discourse links expressed by the team of Jean-Paul Vinay and the late Jean Darbelnet (the latter my esteemed teacher) are all purely linguistic without reference to literature. Even Nida’s primary purpose has been to spread the Christian faith through denotative translations favoring “content over connotative and associative elements . . . content over form, and . . . decoder-oriented” (Schogt, Linguistics 104). Because their intentions and practice belong to linguistic theory, not literary analysis, they should not be reproached for what is neither their domain nor their intent.

Don’t reproach Nida, Barnstone suggests. But then he goes on to talk about the problems of Nida’s separation of his would-be communication-science linguistics from literature. Barnstone writes:

Disturbing, however, is the frequent expectation that linguistics provides a model for literary translation analysis and theory. We can easily identify the source of the temptation – translation, after all, ordinarily involves a linguistic activity between languages. So why not turn to linguistics for the theoretical frame of literary translation? Because to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literary translation is no more nor less reasonable than to make linguistics the major instrument for the analysis or theory of literature. Linguistics has essentially forsworn literary, and specifically literary translation, theory. That is its privilege and apparently for the moment its fate. Although linguistics and philosophy have largely ignored literary translation, their own work, forbidding to the nonlinguist, unnecessarily casts a shadow over the serious value of nonlinguistic approaches. Were linguistics to be serious about literary translation . . . it would be welcome.

Okay. That’s pretty heavy stuff for a blog post. I’d urge you to read Barnstone’s books, to see the various things he develops along these lines with respect to Nida and his reductive non-literary theory of translation. (For that matter, I would encourage you to read more of Nida for yourself. I’ll say more in comments if anybody is interested in what I’d recommend.)

Barnstone gets to another problem with Dynamic Equivalence, when he translates the New Testament and writes commentary on it. In his commentary, Barnstone identifies three different registers for translation. Notice three in contrast to simply an EITHER / OR two. Nida posits the simple binary:

"[T]here are fundamentally two different types of equivalence [in translation]: one which may be called formal and another which is primarily dynamic."

Nida writes of "Two [and only two] Basic Orientations in Translating," in his book, Toward a Science of Translating with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures involved in Bible Translating, on pages 120-21:

EITHER [1] translation has an orientation towards “formal equivalence . . . concerned with such correspondences as poetry to poetry, sentence to sentence, concept to concept," which “might be called 'a gloss translation,' in which the translator attempts to reproduce as literally and meaningfully as possible the form and content of the original.”

OR [2] there is, “[i]n contrast, a translation which attempts to produce a dynamic rather than a formal equivalence [which] is based upon 'the principle of equivalent effect' (Rieu and Phillips, 1954) . . . and aims at complete naturalness of expression, . . . tries to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture[, and] . . . does not insist that he understand the cultural patterns of the source-language context in order to comprehend the message.”

Barnstone rejects this binary. He says there may well be:

[1] a gloss for the reader who wants help with the source text [i.e., an interlinear] and [2] imitation for the ['translating'] writer who wants to collaborate with, adapt, or rewrite a precursor's [originally-authored] work....

There is also [nevertheless] [3] a middle ground between [1] gloss and [2] imitation, whose purpose is to hear the source author more clearly than the translator author (page 1290 of The Restored New Testament, Barnstone’s translation).

With respect to the Bible, an example Barnstone gives of [1] “a gloss” is “[t]he Jesus Seminar translation of the gospels... heavy in explanation and conceptualization of image and metaphor, [that] uses key words to clarify rather than to express.” This is Nida’s so-called “formal or literal equivalence.”

An illustration of [2] “imitation,” according to Barnstone, is “John Dominic Crossan's adroit transformations of Yeshua's sayings into minimalist poems.” For Nida, this would be closer to his ideal of “dynamic or functional equivalence.”

Finally, Barnstone’s alternative to these two is the more exemplary [3] “middle ground” translation approach, the approach that he says “is Tyndale's... autonomous restatement” and is also what Robert Alter is doing “in making the literal literary” with his translating of the Hebrew Bible.

As Barnstone himself attempts making the literal literary in translation of the New Testament, he says, “This is the difficult middle way.” He calls his work [3] “an autonomous text to be read in English as scripture. . . .” (pages 1289-91).

Barnstone gets his idea for [3] “the literal literary” not first from Bible translators such as Tyndale and Alter but from a translator of Homer's Odyssey: from Robert Fitzgerald. When Fitzgerald began to translate Homer, he first asked Ezra Pound, “How?” Pound replied, “Let Homer say everything he wanted to say.” This was the middle way between [1] glossing Homer's Greek and [2] imitating it.

There is not doubt that this advice was unusual for Pound. The translator was one who's “normal practice” was never [1] to gloss but was normally [2] to take “tremendous freedoms” as he “imitated, and intimately collaborated with or overcame the author in his best translations from Anglo-Saxon and Chinese.” Barnstone adds: “and they may be his own best poems” not necessarily giving any credit whatsoever to the original authors. Nonetheless, Pound advises Fitzgerald [3] to take the middle way between [1] literal glossing and [2] dynamic or functional equivalence license.

Barnstone explains this [3] “middle ground” approach as “both literal and literary.” We might use Nida’s terms and call it “both formal and functional” and “both literal and dynamic.” Barnstone says:

    The translator in service of the source author becomes more invisible as the art intensifies, permitting the reader [3] to see Homer or Dante or the Bible and, as Pound suggested, [3] to hear them have their say. By contrast, in the inevitable collaboration between author and translator, as we move from [1] re-creation to [2] imitation, the earlier author tends to disappear, overcome by the voice of the translating author. (page 1292).

Nida, to be clear, advocates [2] the dynamic or functional imitation of the text's effect on receptors. Thus, I'd like to end the post now with a contrastive illustration of Nida's approach and Barnstone's.

In his entry "Bible translation," for the first edition of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, Nida gives an example of a translation of his from the New Testament. He writes:

Since the relevance of a message is not in the formal features of a text but in its semantic content, some measure of freedom is required if the target audience is to understand the biblical text. The heavy weight of tradition, however, often stifles a translator's creativity and obstructs a reader's comprehension. For example, most English-speakers have no idea what Hallowed be thy name (the first petition of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6:9) really means. The Greek text can be translated literally [1] as 'Sanctified be thy name', in which 'name' is a Semitic way of avoiding a direct reference to God, and 'sanctified' must refer not to the character of God, but to the manner in which He is recognized by peole as being truly God. Accordingly, it is more relevantly rendered [2] as May all people realize that you are God or Help us to honour you as God or even as Help us to honour your name. (page 26)

Barnstone, in contrast, avoids either [1] literally translating or [2] telling readers what must really be meant by the Hebraic Hellene ultimately rendered "relevantly" in a non-Jewish but English "reader-comprehensible" sense.

By the way, the Jewish Matthew translates and writes the spoken Jewish words of the Jewish Jesus to his Jewish audience by this Jewish Greek:

ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομα σου·

Barnstone works, likewise, to Let Matthew let Jesus say everything that he wanted to say. They give voice to Yeshua ben Yosef. "Yet hear that voice and hear a poet." Barnstone lets Matthew, who is Mattityahu, say everything that he wanted to say. He gives voice to Mattityahu:

hallowed be your name.

A literary literal rendering of a Jewish prayer. So who's stifled whom and who's obstructed what?

residue

I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us.
--Anne Carson, poet, translator, woman

The men of the Better Bibles Blog are in a long conversation with John Hobbins, and now Joel Hoffman has entered.  This is going on in comments of the BBB post by David Ker on his blog-book on how to read the Bible:  “Christianly,” he says.  And so, these men are arguing over which Christian-male-committee-produced translations is better than the others.  The fellas have agreed on using the binary:  "First Covenant first" vs. "Old Testament plus Christianity"; "Exegetical" vs. "Communicative"; "literal" vs. "functional"; and so forth and so on.  They've even made up categorical boxes in which to classify the Bible translations and by which to draw their best conclusions.  In some cases, they are linking to other posts with other categorical boxes.  In many cases, they're linking and now cross-posting some a few blogposts from their own blogs.  So they're of the same culture.  They are agreeing on the sort of language and logic to use.  But however and nevertheless, they are in divided disagreements about their conclusions of exactness.  Sharply.  And this is important.  Anyway, it's a long discussion, as I mentioned. 

And we might note that there's residue.  In the talk of these men, there's some residual silence.  In their strife for exactness, for knowledge of the world of the English Bible, there's rigor but there's silence, residue.  How silent?  What residue?

Well, John has invoked Wayne Leman, who does eventually show up and speak up with some precision.  But so far nobody's invited the "late" BBB contributor Suzanne McCarthy.  No woman yet at all has either been invited to the table nor has seen fit herself to join (although John uses marked language to try to startle David, as if his only readers for his book, his collection of blogposts for his book, are women:  "What I like best about this collection is the fluster and bluster of your style; it moves the reader and forces her to take sides").  And it's pretty public knowledge now that Suzanne has left BBB for her own reasons and that she's perpetually monitored and censored over at John's blog.  So there's the silence of women in this long, binarying BBB discussion about David's blog-book, a sharp discussion about the Bible, an exacting arguing conversation of men. 

But there's methodological silence and methodological residue too. 

The little quotation of Anne Carson, the epigraph to start this post of mine, gets to this.  We could've, instead of Anne, quoted Suzanne.  My favorite BBB post by Suzanne was the one in which she said: 

"The psalms are uniquely suited for the study of commentary through the centuries, for seeing how diversely and personally the Hebrew has been translated by one generation after another, for simply surrendering the rational mind to an acceptance of ambiguity in the original text....  I regret that there is no recent Bible version which reflects this pattern of multiple meaning in the way the KJV does. Leland Ryken makes a good point with respect to ambiguity and literary quality. However, I am slowly coming to the realization that the Christian scriptures are not represented in any modern translation in a manner which does justice to the literary style, the ambiguities and multiple meanings of the original. Have we 'lost our humility' vis-á-vis the text?"   

And instead of Anne and Suzanne, we might have quoted Catherine Z. Elgin, who provides alternatives in philosophy, in epistemology -- alternatives to the long male-dominant tradition; alternatives such as put forward in her book, Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, as if there's only either the absolute vs. the arbitrary.  And, instead of Anne and and Suzanne and Catherine, we could have quoted Nancy Mairs.  Nancy would quote Julia Kristeva, discussing how her language was not merely binary but was talk, "Possessing an 'irreducible identity, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid,' [by which] a woman [talking or writing] may be driven 'to break the [binary] code, to shatter [male pre-dominant] language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and the emotions, to the unnamable repressed by the social contract.'" 

Perhaps I'm just being arbitrary today.  I just chose Anne.  So can we listen to her a little more, a little more closely?  Here's from her talk on "The Question of Translation", her conclusion:

One of Francis Bacon's favorite paintings is a self-portrait by Rembrandt. He mentions it in several interviews. What he says he likes about this portrait is that when you go close to it you notice the eyes have no sockets. Let us place this explanation alongside a sentence of Hölderlin's that haunts me and I can't say quite why. On the right-hand margin of a page on which he had already drafted a poem, Hölderlin at a later date began to write an essay. It contains this strange remark:

Öfters hab'ich die Sprache, öfters hab'ich Gesang versucht, aber sie hörten dich nicht.

Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn't hear you.

Something about the way the pronouns in this sentence come face to face with themselves reminds me of Rembrandt's eyes. Those socketless eyes are certainly not blind. They are engaged in a forceful looking, but it is not a look organized in the normal way. Seeing is going on but (is it possible that) seeing is entering Rembrandt's eyes from the back. What his look sends forward, in our direction, is deep silence. Perhaps rather like the silence that followed Joan of Arc's response to her judges when they asked her, "In what language do your voices speak to you?" and she answered: "Better language than yours."


I was trained to strive for exactness and to believe that rigorous knowledge of the world without any residue is possible for us.

This residue, which does not exist—just to think of it refreshes me. To think of its position, how it shares its position with drenched layers of nothing, to think of its motion, how it can never stop moving because I am in motion with it, to think of its tone of voice, which is casual (in fact it forgets my existence almost immediately) but every so often betrays a sort of raw pity I don't understand, to think of its shadow, which is cast by nothing and so has no death in it (or very little)—to think of these things is like a crack of light showing under the door of a room where I've been locked for years.

Notice how Anne Carson here quotes men, but particularly the man Francis Bacon.  Now, I know there are at least two Francis Bacons, and Anne is talking about the painter, about someone who cares about representation.  And from there, as we see, she makes analogies to something she cares about:  translation.  It's silence in translation, silence in the language being translated from and being translated to that is what Anne cares about here. 

And this makes us think of Kenneth Pike, Evelyn Pike, and Eunice Pike, and their forgotten care about the n-Dimensionality of language (pre translation and post translation and in translation).  I'm nearly out of time, but let me say these things quickly.

• Kenneth Pike was once a leading theorist in Bible translation among the organization that most of the BBB boys are somehow a part of.
• Ken was one of my professors as I was getting a degree in linguistics, the linguist who influenced my work in another degree of mine in rhetoric.
• Ken, for Suzanne too, is one who has "had the most immediate and lasting influence on how [she] read[s] the Bible."
• Ken is no longer an influence in the aforementioned organization.
• Ken's view of language, as n-dimensional, is very like Anne's, Joan's, Suzanne's, Catherine's, Nancy's and Julia's.

Kenneth Pike in “Why Poetry?” in his book Stir-Change-Create says something similar to what they've said:

“Simultaneity, not sheer linearity, may be the goal. By all these devices [i.e., "crucial words with multiple meanings, lexical devices, grammatical balance"] multiple experience is elicited, to be relived by the reader. Since life itself is n-dimensional, some [language]–for some people–seems astonishingly closer to life than [other language] can be. Just as the child is not the scholar, but surpasses him in learning to speak the multiple dimensions of a new language, so [some language] can mirror the n-dimensions of experience in a compact packet…. Except we become as little children, we can neither learn a new language without a bad accent, nor become charter citizens of heaven–nor experience that multiple fullness of the n-dimensional experience, which poetry tries to help us capture. Poetry compacts life in language–as an oak forces all its eternal blueprints into one nutshell.” (page 108).

That's language.  But, with respect to translation, by and large, the work that Ken developed and was so a part of has now sadly been abandoned his teachings.  Even in translation, Ken recognized the N-Dimensionality of language. Where N = Infinity.  Ken, when discussing “substantial ambiguity (or range of meaning)” in language, notes that “[m]ultiple alternative translations are possible from one language to another, with different emphases.” Accuracy, he seems to suggest, “is not dependent upon the exact degree of precision obtained if the generalizations are acceptable (Pike 1961:3f) [... i.e., general] coherence with background pattern expressed, implicit or intended….” (Talk, Thought, and Thing pages 11-13).

This borders, as binary linguists fear, on absolute relativism and sounds an awful lot like postmodernism with its deconstructivism.  However, as much as Ken had his own struggles with deconstructivists, he wasn’t worried and never reduced his theory of language (aka, Tagmemics - i.e., language in relation to a unified theory of human behavior) to the binary.

Ken approached language the way Einstein approached physics: particle and/or wave and/or field. More than that, he approached translation the way Heisenburg approached physics: “person above logic” and “the observer not only changes the observed data but is also change by the observing.” I remember Ken Pike telling the story of when he was a student; he heard his teacher saying, “Language ideally has one and only one meaning per word.” The young pupil replied, “But, sir, how would we learn language.” Ken understood that the multiple perspectives on language (or “talked about reality”) led to learning and to change. His most famous rhetoric and composition textbook was entitled, Rhetoric: Discovery and Change. Pike would love to quote Nelson Goodman, saying “What we need is ‘Radical relativism within rigid restraints.” Notice how Catherine Elgin, like Ken Pike, learned so very much from Nelson!  (To be sure, however, some of Ken’s most serious followers would focus all too often on those rigid restraints. They would chart everything into tagmemic boxes.  The would employ the either/ or binary.  Looks like that's still going on.  Alas.)

To those who don't know Ken's work, probably the place to start for some good Pike in good context is his Linguistic Concepts: An Introduction to Tagmemics. An initial one-sentence paragraph starts much: “In this volume person (and relation between persons) is given theoretical priority above formalism, above pure mathematics, above idealized abstractions” (page xi). One reason language is viewed as N-dimensional is because of the personal. Ken, just a few lines later, gives one of his nods to Heisenberg saying, “A particular language, of a particular culture, in relation to a particular person with [her or] his particular history constitutes an implicit theory for that person . . . . [T]he observer [whether a cultural insider or an outsider] universally affects the data and becomes part of the data.” Ken goes on to discuss the various (traditional) linguistic vectors of language that humans do and can choose to observe from any number of perspectives.

One of Ken Pike’s first published uses of “n-dimensional” in reference to language is Stir, Change, Create, a 1967 book for missionary linguists, for himself perhaps, with rather wordplayful writings and musings. We've already read a quote from it above.  Does knowing it was for fellow missionaries make you like that quote more, or less?  Ken in this book baldly confesses what he much later was very quiet about (in research, publication, and teaching anyways):

“The greatest proportion of my time is devoted to scholarship. I am a Christian. I am devoted to Christ, risen from the dead, my Lord. Is it strange to hybridize these two roles of mine?”

If you know the historical context, then you know he was the first in his organization to achieve the Ph.D. and was an avid promoter of academics as a means to enrich theoretical-practical linguistics.  Like Anne, he loved poetry, saying:  “poetic writing can be called anti-redundant because of its n-dimensionality.”

Ken's audience for such statements was the not-yet-academic (remember, he was the first to get the Ph.D. among his fellow Bible translators); and yet, academic linguist Deborah Tannen quotes from Ken's book for laymen in her wonderfully edited volume, Linguistics in Context : Connecting Observation and Understanding : Lectures from the 1985 LSA/TESOL and NEH Institutes. One of Pike’s later works to include discussions of the n-dimensionality of language is his 1993 Talk, Thought, and Thing: the Emic Road Toward Conscious Knowledge; but he published an essay that year which explicitly references the notion: “Matrix formatives in N-dimensional linguistics” which built on earlier co-researched, co-written 1980 article, “Constraints on complexity seen via fused vectors of an n-dimensional semantic space (Sarangani Manobo, Philippines)”.  I'm bringing all of this up because, once upon a time, men were more willing to consider talking outside the box when it came to language, to translation, to Bible translation, and even to Christian Bible translation.

It's the residue and the silence that Anne is willing to speak of that I'm interested in. 

Letting God Out of Hell

In Between the Absolute and the Arbitrary, Catherine Z. Elgin maps a constructivist alternative to the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic. Under the standard conception, unless answers to philosophical questions are absolute, they are arbitrary. Unless a philosophy is grounded in determinate, agent-neutral facts, it is right only relative to a perspective that cannot in the end be justified. Elgin charts a course between the two poles, showing how fact and value intertwine, where art and science intersect.

--the publisher's description on the dust jacket

Yesterday, I started a blogpost with a quote from Dr. Elgin, one of the world's pre-eminent philosophers.  Today, I'm doing the same in order to look with you at the problem of pre-dominant and dominating tendencies in male logic. 

The tendencies are to insist on avoiding ambiguities and to demand that what is observed by the observer by boxed up into categories and classifications on the hierarchical map of knowledge.  Many Bible readers get stuck in this mode.  Many bloggers and tweeters have tended to worry with whether Rob Bell's book's hell is a universalist's hell or whether universalist doctrine is heresy.  "It's either a universalist book or it's not."  "It's either heresy or it's not."  "There are either absolute and sensible answers to be insisted on here or all we're left with is random, nonsensical, and arbitrary wishful thinking."

Male logic?, you might ask.  Why qualify it this way?  Why not just "the standard Anglo-American conception of philosophy's problematic"?  Are you saying Anglo-Americans are male dominant?

Well, you don't even have to know that Aristotle coined the word and formalized the system of logic, by which he, a male, boxed up females as naturally inferior, even as botched males, as NOT males.  If you yourself are not male or if you're abused by another male who uses the binary on you, then you "know" the answer without even having to take a college class in logic.  Maybe for you like for me, it was your father, who gave you the experience of male logic.  Then reading how Nancy Mairs writes of the binary, then you get it:

In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object. The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. . . [in] a dimorphic world.

--Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer (page 41)

Let's come back to Mairs in a moment.  If God is like the patriarchy with this fundamental structuring of his world in splitting binary fashion, then -- follow the logic -- we on the other side may have hell to pay.


Suzanne has been writing a series, Blogging heaven and hell (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 – and another I'll link to below).  She invited some of us to join in as she continued; she'd mentioned Sheol, then מְצוּלָה, and so I brought up Gei Hinnom as New Testament translator Willis Barnstone has had to deal with that hell.  The male binary logic, we might have noted right at that point, has a problem.  It has a decision to make.  If heaven is not hell and if not hell is heaven, then is Sheol NOT Gei Hinnom?  Well, it's not much of a problem if you read the reviewers protesting Rob Bell's book, because he does mention (they say) the various words for "hell" in the Bible.  (I've only tried to read one of Rob Bell's books, and didn't like it enough to continue, so I'm not sure I'm going to make it through this most recent one).  His book's critics are saying it doesn't matter that there are not-the-same words for hell since there's just one absolute hell, which is a place in opposition to the one absolute heaven (and never mind what Jesus said about many rooms or mansions in his father's house, which really must be the one heaven, and NOT the one hell.)  The whole line of argument here is Western logic, inherited from Aristotle. 

I get that because, when I was an undergraduate student, going to the same university where my father had graduated from, I took the same logic course from the exact same logic professor that my dad had had.  Dad was real interested, when he learned, to see whether I could achieve the same grade he'd made.  He made my taking the same course into a competition.  Either I would be as good as he was academically, or I would not.  And I've continued to be quite familiar with Aristotle, and with his logic, even academically, even to the point of defending a dissertation on the subject successfully.  My own point here is that we try to keep things abstract, in the realm of Truth, sort of impersonal, as if being in heaven and out of hell is something that depends on logic.  (If you're still reading but protesting, "Hey, stop rambling; get on with your point."  Then I'll just say, "I'm sorry."  And add this, "What if our ears are so attuned to western logic that we sometimes miss what's in the personal, what's in the narrative, what's in the stories of life, which the binary will lop out as "not much of a point" and, therefore, as "less than important"?)

Suzanne's most recent post (the 8th so far in her series) shows what Robin Parry's book The Evangelical Universalist does.  (This post, it's interesting to note, comes after Peter's dis-agreement "with Suzanne’s tentative universalist position." He nonetheless feels compelled to add:  "But I strongly agree with her that it is wrong to use threats of hell as a way to impose one’s will on others, in the church or in the home.")  Suzanne brings out the fact that Perry shows "that scripture passages disagree - we have scriptures on both sides of this debate."  In other words, even the statements of the Bible, taken as a canonical whole, present the reader with ambiguity.  The Bible teaches exclusivism; the Bible also teaches universalism.  Ambiguities.  (Avoid ambiguities, is what Aristotle taught his male only, elite only, Greek only, students.  Following him and his logic, Aristotle's students would not have liked the Bar-Bar-ous Bible.  And for the historical record, Aristotle said little that would make his students or any of us believe that he believed in hell.  Here, he departs from his teachers.  Maybe he saw the logical difficulties with abolute claims about the afterlife, which he could not box up so easily on his hierachical map of knowledge.)


Suzanne got me looking at and reading other books by Robin Parry.  One is Universal Salvation?: The Current Debate by Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge.  At amazon.com, reviewer  makes this astute observation:

Ambiguity is the devil's volleyball, said former President of Yale, Kingman Brewster, Jr. Robin A. Parry and Christopher H. Partridge's book, Universal Salvation? gives us a well matched game of back and forth with the theological hot potato that is at the heart of the book's "debate." While the writers in this volume are articulate and responsible in handling this (again) current hot topic among evangelicals, if there is one null theme the critical reader may pick up is that the debate is fueled, in part, by the inherent ambiguity of the concept in the biblical text that all sides claim for their points of view. Biblical ambiguity is the one reality few seem ready to confess when conceding an opponent's point on the issue.

Well, I'm not so sure "inherent" is a useful modifier of "ambiguity," but we can understand what this reviewer is saying.  We readers of the Bible do well to see the ambiguities in it as the writers of the Bible have written it.  Maybe the writers of the Bible, maybe its translators, intended to avoid ambiguities in their writings.  And yet, stories will often have unintended ambiguities.  It's pretty much Western or male-dominant logic that insists on ridding a text of its writer's ambiguities.  And Nancy Mairs has already suggested why men (and women using male logic) will so insist on the binary. 

So Catherine Elgin says there's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  And Nancy Mairs does too.  Mairs says we can get beyond the either / or fix.  We can do this, she shows, with "woman's language," a delightful alternative to boxed-up male logic, to binary patriarchal structuring of language.  She calls it "women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it."  (And I've blogged elsewhere to call this the ironic but useful "feminist binary.")
In thinking about the Bible, then.  In thinking about God in the Bible. In talking about the hell of the God of the Bible.  There's more than just either the absolute or the arbitrary.  There's more than just a need for logic to really know, to really understand, to get it and then to live my real life.  There's thinking that meets the emotions, the head and the heart connected in such awareness.  And Nancy Mairs, if we'll listen to her and can read some of her writing, is most helpful. 

In her book, A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith, Mairs discusses her own "meta-noia," and for that reason alone the book is worth reading.  (I'd recommend reading it after reading some of her earlier books just to get the direction of some of the changes in her, in her thinking.)  This Lent, then, it may be worth our listening and thinking about giving up some of our binary thinking.  Maybe even some of our binary thinking about Hell.  Maybe we can let go and let God out of an absolute hell concept.

Maybe Nancy Mairs can help.  Here's a page from her book:


     Some people, troubled by ambiguity, collapse the world into just two categories, "good" and "eveil" (which too often means "everybody whose beliefs differ from my own"), and claim to know who or what belongs in each, a certitude that smacks of the sin of pride, of pretending to be "like God."  The trouble with this view of morality lies in its inflexibility.  Every group, defining its own beliefs and behaviors as good, righteous, even stamped with God's personal approval, has only the idea of an opposite with which to identify all who believe and behave differently.  They share the vision fo the Puritan Jonathan Edwards predicting Judgment Day:  "When the saints in glory, therefore, shall see the doleful state of the damned, how will this heighten their sense of the blessedness of their own state, so exceedingly different from it!"  It is a closed system in which everybody, regardless of creed or practice, thinks in the same way.  When Muslim extremists point at America and scream, "You're the Great Satan and we have to blow you up," we shout back, "No, you're the Great Satan and we have to bomb your countries," for all the world like the fractious children who made God wish to have stopped with the elephants, only grown large and deadly.  No one dares step outside the good/evil paradigm and invent some altogether different structure for human interaction.  We could have helped to overturn any number of dictators if, instead of squandering billions of dollars on ordnance, we had bombarded their countries with butter, medications, and wireless devices; a healthy, well-fed, and well-informed populace is much less vulnerable to oppression.  If battles there must be, they can fight their own. 
     To our peril throughout the ages, dualism has been humanity's most prevalent mode of constructing the world, however.  Is it because we have two of everything?  If we grew three hands or three feet, would we think outside the binary box?  Fortunately, it is possible, without drastic evolutionary modification but with vigorous practice in discernment, to conceive the world otherwise:  not in terms of dyads--good opposed to evil, right opposed to wrong, you opposed to me--but more realistically and fluidly.  Those who can do so--and this includes not only Christians but practitioners of all faiths--make no judgments on God's behalf but pray for guidance in their own decisions and actions and then for mercy for all the times these fall short. 
     Any number of times when I've attended an Ash Wednesday service, the priest has observed, looking out across the overflowing chapel, that more people go to church on this day than on any other.  Neither the great festivals, Christmas and Easter, draw as many worshipers.  Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the second great penitential season in the liturgical year, and such high attendance attests to a fundamental human characteristic:  our preoccupation with wrongdoing and atonement.  Knowing ourselves to be sinners, we aren't satisfied simply to acknowledge our transgressions.  We want to do something about them.   People who envision God as a remote and fearsome judge may be motivated by the fear that they will be thrown into hell in punishment for breaking divine decrees too numerous to mention (there are more than six hundred such laws in the first five books of the Bible alone).  Those of us for whom God is a beloved presence manifest in everyone we meet, because we believe that God grieves our faults, seek to make amends to anyone we have injured.  Regardless of impetus, believers wolcome Lent as a period of contrition.

Splitting Bible Words Into Two

Today, [in English,] “zealous” and “jealous” mean different things, and while there are zealots, there are no jealots. In Hebrew, on the other hand, the word never split into two, and to this day, a kana’i can be a jealous husband just as well as a Zealot. He still cannot, however, be a Canaanite, the Hebrew word for which is k’na’ani, not kana’i.

--Philologos, "Yes We Kana’i: On Language," The Jewish Daily Forward

The pseudonymous Philologos is answering a reader's question: "Zelotes is a Greek word used by Josephus that has made its way into English. Is there a Hebrew equivalent for it in the Talmud or Midrash?" And the answer points to "an amusing error in the Greek New Testament."

The error is revealed:

In the Gospels, one of Jesus’ 12 disciples is in several places referred to as Simon ho Zelotes, “Simon the Zealot”; yet in the third chapter of the Gospel of Mark, he is called Simon ho Kananaios — or, as the King James Version has it, “Simon the Canaanite.” On the face of it, this is absurd, since not only was Canaan no longer a term for Palestine in Jesus’ time, but all of Jesus’ other disciples were no less Palestinian Jews than Simon the Zealot. The epithet makes sense only if we assume that the original Greek text read Simon ho Kanaios, or “Simon the Kana’i,” and that a later Christian scribe who never had encountered the Hebrew word changed it to the more familiar though senseless Kananaios.

Would a Christian Bible reader or translator respond? How about a linguist or a Greek scholar or a theologian? Is this an "error"? Does Mark's Greek "split" a Hebrew word by mistranslation? Is our English more equal to this problematic binary Greek than it is to the original language of the Bible?