The earliest of the four Gospels, the book portrays Jesus as an enigmatic figure, struggling with enemies, his inner and external demons, and with his devoted but disconcerted disciples. Unlike other gospels, his parables are obscure, to be explained secretly to his followers. With an introduction by Nick Cave
In this dazzling reconsideration of the language of the Old and New Testaments, acclaimed scholar and translator of classical literature Sarah Ruden argues that the Bible’s modern translations often lack the clarity and vitality of the originals. Singling out the most famous passages, such as the Genesis creation story, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes, Ruden reexamines and retranslates from the Hebrew and Greek, illuminating what has been misunderstood and obscured in standard English translations. By showing how the original texts more clearly reveal our cherished values, Ruden gives us an unprecedented understanding of what this extraordinary document was for its earliest readers and what it can still be for us today.
The Translator's Reference Translation (TRT) is a comprehensive, yet concise, reference tool for every stage of the Bible translation process. It is designed for use by everyone involved in that process, including national translators, editors and reviewers, as well as expatriate or national translation advisors and consultants.
THE TRANSLATORS NEW TESTAMENT IS a "worshippers' Bible" for translators, pastors, deliverance evangelists, missionaries, Bible teachers, home schoolers, home churches, family devotions, etc., any one who wants to get back to the actual words spoken by Jesus and His Apostles.
An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”
Truth in Translation is a critical study of Biblical translation, assessing the accuracy of nine English versions of the New Testament in wide use today. By looking at passages where theological investment is at a premium, the author demonstrates that many versions deviate from accurate translation under the pressure of theological bias.
This commentary series is established on the presupposition that the theological character of the New Testament documents calls for exegesis that is sensitive to theological themes as well as to the details of the historical, linguistic, and textual context. Such thorough exegetical work lies at the heart of these volumes, which contain detailed verse-by-verse commentary preceded by general comments on each section and subsection of the text. An important aim of the NIGTC authors is to interact with the wealth of significant New Testament research published in recent articles and monographs. In this connection the authors make their own scholarly contributions to the ongoing study of the biblical text.
This book is the first English translation of a text that Michael Cahill identifies as the first formal commentary on Mark's Gospel. Thought to have been written by an early seventh-century abbot, the commentary was for almost 1000 years attributed to St. Jerome and as such exercised incalculable influence on subsequent commentary. St. Thomas Aquinas drew on it freely in his Catena Aurea, for example, as did the highly influential Counter-Reformation commentary of Cornelius a Lapide. Renaissance scholarship demoted the work to the pseudepigrapha of Jerome and it clearly lost status as a result. However, the contemporary recovery of interest in the commentary tradition ensures a welcome for the publication of this translation. Irrespective of authorship, the text is important in the history of biblical interpretation--it is the first commentary on Mark, and has had wide influence in the Latin west. It is written in the allegorical style, and attempts to provide an application of the gospel text to the practice of Christian discipleship. It is characterized by the use of other biblical texts, and through the use of bold face and italics in the translation, the reader is able to see the extent of quotation, paraphrase, and allusion. The extensive notes are designed to provide information on source material and on the author's technique. As the first Markan commentary this text holds a unique place in the history of biblical exegesis. This translation will make it available to scholars who do not read Latin, and will serve as a useful introduction to early and medieval Bible commentary, both in format and content.
This 1999 book was the first to use all the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to reconstruct original Aramaic sources from parts of Mark's Gospel. The scrolls enabled the author to revolutionize the methodology of such work, and to reconstruct whole passages which he interpreted in their original cultural context. The passages from which sources are reconstructed are Mark 9.11-13; 2.23-3.6; 10.35-45; and 14.12-26. A detailed discussion of each passage is offered, demonstrating that these sources are completely accurate accounts from the ministry of Jesus, from early sabbath disputes to his final Passover. An account of the translation process is given, showing how problems in Mark's text arose from the difficulty of translating some Aramaic expressions into Greek, including the notoriously difficult 'son of man'. A very early date for these sources is proposed, implying a date of c. 40 CE for Mark's Gospel.