Newly revised Bible translation: who cares?

So there's a group putting out a new translation of the Bible this year.  They've tried to make the language more modern and gender neutral, which I (as a member of the gender oft overlooked in traditional translations) appreciate.  For example, they've taken out the word holocaust, which has strong cultural meanings, and replaced it with its original Greek meaning of "burnt offerings."

There is a bit of a debate about this, particularly the gender neutral language stuff.  Aside from the grammatical problem of translating a language with genders (including neuter) into a language without them, thereby rendering gender in places where gender makes little difference and removing gender in places where it makes a LOT of difference, there's question of what's the proper neuter singular pronoun.  "They" seems to be the word of choice. Greek, as a language, is not easy to translate into English, so the grammatical problems are important but not necessarily vital.

What makes me laugh about this whole thing is that one of the groups arguing against this translation is doing so because replacing some of the language with more gender neutral language shifts the gender dynamics of the piece.  They believe that women should remain in the home, that men should be superior to them and only men should be allowed to hold certain positions in the church hierarchy.  They are perfectly valid in their argument that this comes from their belief that each word in the Bible was divinely inspired, and that to change it is to change the message.

Every word of the Bible... in English.  They don't care about the translation that got it into English in the first place, they're ignoring the Greek, which contains words like anthropos, which gets translated as man but really means (hu)man, a member of the human race.  Even things that seem clear in Greek aren't always so easy to pick apart.  I've watched a professor break down the "Love is" speech so often used at weddings, and some of the terms used are almost idiomatic.  Needless to say, while the message got across, my Greek professor did not come up with the beautiful version that hangs on posters in churches across the world.

So here's the point of this rant: If you're going to mess with a text, mess with it at the original language roots.  This here is less of a commentary on religion and more a commentary on the problem with translation of important documents.  Go back to the original.  Find the weaknesses between the languages and learn to work with and around them.  No translated document could ever be exactly what it was in the original, unless the original author was bilingual and wrote both versions.

Oh, and my one commentary ON religion, because while I have you all here I might as well ask.  Has anyone every read any part of Leviticus that isn't that anti-gay section?  Because it's also anti-shellfish, see, and I'm from Alaska, where that's kind of a big deal.  So maybe we can take it all with a grain of salt... and some butter, to dip the crab and shrimp in.

The City of Philadelphia: How close are you to YOUR brother?

The City of Philadelphia makes me giggle.  It's also a good place to start since this blog began with the idea of finding links between the modern world and the Classical world.

It's known as the city of Brotherly Love, and that's a pretty accurate translation of what Philadelphia meant in the original Greek (from philo, to love, and adelphos, brother or sibling).  It's even a nice sentiment: we are all brothers, and we love each other as such.

But that word, the Greek philadelphos, was applied to a person long before America was a twinkle in an explorer's eye: Ptolemy II Philadelphos, the second of the Ptolemies to rule Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great.  In his case, philadelphos meant "sibling-loving," and for good reason: he'd married his full sister.  Together, they were philadelphoi, the sibling lovers.

So that's why the name Philadelphia makes me giggle a little bit when I think about it.  Such a good and noble idea behind its naming, and so much that nobody ever hears about hiding in the history of the word.