Getting the key point right

There are two choruses that make me think of Ken Pike. I got to know him well in his last years at the University of Michigan where I was a grad student and then a junior faculty member. We went to the same Reformed Church and he and Evie hosted the monthly Wycliffe prayer meeting when they were in town. We never missed it.

One of the choruses is It will be worth it all. It was Pike’s theme song. The other is Turn your eyes upon Jesus. (OK, so the second one is really a full hymn, but for years I only ever sang it as a chorus.) I'm not sure why I connect it to Pike other than that it seems that I sang it a lot in Wycliffe contexts.

Why am I talking about these choruses?

Well, we sang Turn your eyes upon Jesus in church last week and it’s been running through my head for a week now. And this got me thinking about Ken Pike and Wycliffe and how all Bible translation for languages other than those with a long history of translation is done on the basis of dynamic equivalence. These translations, by the way, are overseen by very theologically conservative folks and nobody bats an eye.

One wonders why.

Maybe it’s because the folks in the non-theologically-driven Bible translation business know enough not fall prey to the most insidious misunderstanding regarding dynamic equivalence: that it is somehow unconstrained, that the translator is allowed to say anything.

They know that nothing could be further from the truth.

And it just so happens that singing Turn your eyes upon Jesus at Berkeley Covenant provides a great parallel about what it means to translate something and get the key point right.

At Berkeley Covenant Church we have blended worship. We sing contemporary worship music and hymns from the hymnal all in the same set. There is a pianist some Sundays, but the worship is guitar driven. We never play hymns straight from the book with four part piano accompaniment (although we have been known to sing a verse in four part a cappella every now and again). You’d think that guitars would ruin the hymns but they don't. We’ve learned how to translate hymns from piano to guitar.

The secret is that most hymns have a hook — one particular part of the hymn — and if you get that right, it counts as the hymn, even to the old-timers like me, and even if the rest is only an approximation.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus is a good example. If you get the right chord progression on strangely dim, you can approximate the rest and it still feels like Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Most of the available guitar transcriptions miss this. So the Worship Archive has:

  C        G        Am C7
Turn your eyes upon Jesus
    F          Dm7        G7
Look full in His wonderful face
        C         C7               F      Fm
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
      C             G7        C
In the Light of His glory and grace.

Nice, but not quite right. Play the third line like this

          C    G7   C         G7     Am  C7  F
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim

with a walk down bass on the last three chords, A - G - F, and you have a winner. You can even leave out the G7’s, as long as you get those last three chords. (BTW, unless you’re a bass or a low alto, you might want to capo up three or four frets. The hymnals pitch this one in F for good reason.)

A similar situation holds for Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee. Get the progression around the circle of fifths at the end of the third line

 D7   bm   B7     em7   A7   D
Drive the dark of doubt a - way

and it sounds like Beethoven.

You get the idea.

Well, that’s the way dynamic equivalence works. There’s a key point to the communication and if you get that right you have a good translation. That was what I was getting at when I put up a post about a joke last year. Examples of the need to decide what the key point is just to wrest the text into English are everywhere in Scripture.

This Sunday’s sermon was on I John 2:18-27. The pew Bibles are NRSV. The first two verses read:

Children, it is the last hour! As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. From this we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us.

This is pretty much literally Greek although with one interesting deviation which I will mention later:

18 παιδία ἐσχάτη ὥρα ἐστίν καὶ καθὼς ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἀντίχριστος ἔρχεται καὶ νῦν ἀντίχριστοι πολλοὶ γεγόνασιν ὅθεν γινώσκομεν ὅτι ἐσχάτη ὥρα ἐστίν 19 ἐξ ἡμῶν ἐξῆλθαν ἀλλ' οὐκ ἦσαν ἐξ ἡμῶν εἰ γὰρ ἐξ ἡμῶν ἦσαν μεμενήκεισαν ἂν μεθ' ἡμῶν ἀλλ' ἵνα φανερωθῶσιν ὅτι οὐκ εἰσὶν πάντες ἐξ ἡμῶν

Last night my wife asked me what I thought John meant. I believed I had a pretty good idea, but we thought we’d look and see what other, more English-sounding translations had, starting with Phillips:

Even now, dear children, we are getting near the end of things. You have heard, I expect, the prophecy about the coming of the anti-Christ. Believe me, there are anti-christs about already, which confirms my belief that we are near the end. These men went out from our company, it is true, but they never really belonged to it. If they had really belonged to us they would have stayed. In fact, their going proves beyond doubt that men like that were not "our men" at all.

And I was also interested in what Peterson’s take was:

Children, time is just about up. You heard that Antichrist is coming. Well, they're all over the place, antichrists everywhere you look. That's how we know that we're close to the end.

They left us, but they were never really with us. If they had been, they would have stuck it out with us, loyal to the end. In leaving, they showed their true colors, showed they never did belong.

So we started talking about whether you could argue from the Greek that it says:

Little children, the end is near! You have heard that a False Messiah, an opponent of the true Messiah, will arise. In fact, many have already become opponents of the true Messiah. That’s how we know the end is near. They were among us but they left. They aren't real believers. If they had been, they would have stayed. By leaving they have shown that they never were real believers.

The basic question is what are the key points John is making? It's pretty clear that they are:

1) the end of time will be soon
2) someone will show up who is the opposite of Jesus
3) there are former church people who oppose what is true
4) they aren't saved even though they were in the church

You can judge for yourself how well the translations (including mine) convey these ideas in English. All of them leave things out that are in the Greek, most notably the word play around the word ἀντίχριστος which can't be expressed in English. ἀντίχριστος is ambiguous meaning either the end times false Messiah or opponents of the Messiah in John’s time. I tried to capture that with some paraphrasing, and that, in turn, allows me to use the verb become in the third sentence, which is exactly what it says in Greek (γεγόνασιν). Ironically that makes my translation more literal than the literal one, at least on this point. This is a key point that the literal translation misses altogether.

In evaluating the translations you should ask yourself what are the key points? Does the translation get the key points right?

If so, that’s dynamic equivalence.