Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: kilroy@mimsy.umd.edu (Darren F. Provine) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Translation (and still "Re: I Corinthians 7:1") Message-ID: Date: 25 Oct 89 09:20:33 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742 Lines: 95 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Disclaimer: My dog Brandy is against over-literalism, but we don't know about the University. In article bnr-fos!bmers58!davem@watmath.waterloo.edu (Dave Mielke) writes something that shows he didn't understand my earlier article: > > [ Dave points out that God didn't have to give us the Bible at all. ] > >Let us be greatful and thankful for what we have and do our best to be >as truthful as possible to it. We ought never use the apparent >difficulties in the understanding of any given passage as a means to >ignore what God is telling us. If we are not expending every possible >effort not only to understand what God is saying but also to sincerely >desire that it become our way of life then we are not really >recognizing Jesus as the Lord of our lives. Dave, I'm sure you don't intend it, but the way I read this is rather insulting. Your article suggests that I am ungrateful for the Scriptures God has given us, or that I'm not interested in learning from them because of the problems encountered. Let me assure you, both of these ideas are wrong. I do not disagree with you because I have some hidden agenda against the Bible, or because I want to make excuses and do things I know are immoral. I disagree with you because I don't believe that your interpretation is correct. I feel that your method of interpreting Scripture is not well-considered, and that your interpretation of 1 Corinthians 7:1 illustrates exactly what is wrong with your method. The KJV may seem to support your position, as it appears to have been written in plain English. But I think a more thorough examination of everything that goes into this leads to a different conclusion than the one you've reached. Consider the following: a) The KJV was written several centuries ago, and the English language is not the same now as it was then. (I offer as evidence the fact that most editions of Shakespeare's plays currently published come with notes that explain what many of the words and idioms mean, and that most people cannot fully understand the plays without them.) This disparity in language means that what seems like `plain English' may in fact be an idiom or expression that actually meant something else when it was written. b) The word in question, `touch', has numerous definitions in modern English (my dictionary lists 42). c) _Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament_ has 7 column- inches on the word Paul used, illustrating that there was no single locked-down meaning at the time; further, Thayer mentions that when used with the word translated `woman' it refers to "carnal intercourse with a woman, or cohabitation", and lists 1 Corinthians 7:1 as an instance of this usage. -=-=- In other words, Dave, my evaluation comes up the same -- in the absence of evidence that you are a trained translator, I must conclude that you don't have the experience or knowledge that is required to make an interpretation like this. And since the people who do have the necessary experience disagree with you, your interpretation loses out. You are apparently basing your understanding on a literal reading of a language you don't really speak, and you are ignoring the advice of Christian scholars who have studied Greek and are trained translators. And your position on this passage demonstrates exactly what I said in my last article: a word-for-word translation lends itself to misunderstandings, because people read the words but don't know what they are intended to mean. -=-=- Please note that I do not claim to be a qualified translator myself, but that I am only citing the opinions of scholars from books I own. If there are any people who know Greek well (Michael Siemon comes to mind), and who wish to point out my mistakes, I welcome their comments. kilroy@cs.umd.edu Darren F. Provine ...uunet!mimsy!kilroy "It is also important to note that although certain meanings of a word in one language are sometimes translatable into a word in another language there are very few if any words in two languages that are the same for all their meanings." -- R. Lado, _Linguistics Across Cultures -- Applied_ _Linguistics For Language Teachers_, pp 84-85