Choosing the Wrong Jesus

A sneak peak of my translation of Mark in its “talmudic” layout

For the last several years, I’ve been working on translating the Gospel of Mark, a project whose enjoyment is only exceeded by the amount of time it’s taking me. Part of this is that I’m trying to translate it twice, in two radically different ways, while including commentary and translation notes. (See, the illustration at right)

As I near the end of my first draft of the translation, I came to the passion narratives and in so doing, stumbled across something interesting in one of the Good Friday scenes.

The Roman governor Pontius Pilate is honoring a tradition that a prisoner go free at the Passover holiday. Two criminals are presented before the crowds for them to chose: Jesus and Barabbas. The crowd, agitated by the religious leadership, choose Barabbas.

By Dsmdgold 2005 – Rossano Gospels, Codex purpureus Rossanensis, Public Domain

And here is where looking closely at the text yielded something surprising.

Barabbas’s name (בר־אבא bar-abba) means “son of the father” while Jesus is “Son of the Father.” In Matthew’s gospel Barabbas is even identified as Jesus Barabbas. (This is not a new observation and has been frequently made.)

But further, Barabbas is described as an insurrectionist (στασιαστής stasiastēs) who had committed murder during the uprising (στάσις stasis). Both words are from the verb ἵστημι histēmi which means “to stand” and which is at the root of the word ἀνάστασις anastasis, meaning “resurrection” (lit. “standing up again”).

Thus, the crowd is being presented with the choice of [Jesus] son-of-the-father, an upriser; and Jesus, Son of the Father, an Up-Riser.

They make the wrong choice.

But, it bears noting, frequently so do we.

Naming a Virus

If you have taken even the most cursory glance at your social media feeds you have no doubt come across an exchange that looks something like this:

A: Stop calling it the “Chinese Virus,” it’s the coronavirus and its disease is COVID-19. “Chinese Virus” is racist!

B: Do we consider “Chinese food” racist? That’s where the virus came from!!

A: But the term harms people!

B: The virus came from China and the Chinese government lied about it! They’re the ones to blame in all this!

By Felipe Esquivel Reed – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

Neither side in this debate seems capable of convincing the other and exchanges like this often continue in this cycle, frequently descending into alternating bouts of accusations of racism or self-righteousness.

 

I learned long ago that whenever the answers to a question are unsatisfactory or don’t admit of resolution, it’s the question that’s wrong.

For the question of what is the proper name for a virus that originated in China is not what should we call it, but why should we call it a given thing?

When we examine the whys we find that any defense of the term Chinese virus fails—at least on any grounds that a person of faith should find acceptable.

The Fault Is in Our Grammars: Language, Gender, and Pronouns

To say that our cultural consciousness on matters of gender identity is rapidly evolving is an understatement. In a few short years, our awareness as a culture went from practically none to a kind of “how could you not know that?” state. Let me give you a quick illustration.

For many years, I had the privilege of working in a campus ministry context. The United Methodist community I served was a community of students committed to sharing the radical, all-inclusive love of Jesus Christ with a broken world through acts of worship, devotion, service, hospitality, and especially social justice. Of the religious communities on campus, aside from the Unitarians, they were by far the most progressive.

Once, at a student leadership meeting in 2010, one of the students made an announcement about the men’s group breakfast the following weekend. “So, if you like Canadian bacon and don’t have a uterus, you’re welcome to come.” In three years’ time, in that same community—a community that would invite “all female and female-identifying persons” to attend United Methodist Women meetings—this comment would have been viewed as terribly transphobic. But in 2010, no one even batted an eye—in the most progressive and social justice-conscious religious community on a very liberal campus.

The speed of this change means that a lot of people are still catching up to the understandings of gender and how it differs from sex and biology. But it also means that even for well-meaning older folks there are different obstacles that are hard to eradicate in quick order.

The Russians on The Americans

I love the show The Americans. It’s one of the best shows on television and captivates me every week.  One of the reasons I enjoy it is that I get to practice my Russian, as all of the scenes featuring Russians (the Russians who are not deep-cover spies, that is) are usually in Russian with subtitles.

But I noticed something about the subtitles a while back that fascinated me: they do not exactly translate what the Russians are saying in Russian. They translate the sense, but not the literal meaning.

This means something extraordinary for this show. It means that the Russian dialogue is not a translation of the English dialogue shown in the subtitles. That is, the script writers did not write what they wanted the Russian characters to say and then had it translated into Russian. It appears as if both the English and the Russian were composed in their respective languages as originals. I’d heard rumor that the writers tell Russian-language speakers the gist of what they want said and the conversations are written in Russian.

See, in my day, I was a pretty good speaker of Russian. But if you gave me something to translate into Russian from English, it’d bear the echoes of my native English. Whereas a Russian, expressing the thought in Russian would say it differently from the way that I would’ve come up with. But this is not the Russian on the show. Even though I, or any other competent Russian speaker, could produce grammatical and comprehensible Russian translations of ideas originally expressed in English, the Russian on the show feels more authentic. It feels more… Russian.

This is remarkable attention to detail and authenticity and really does add an air of verisimilitude to the show, even though the overwhelming majority of viewers will have no idea that this has taken place.

Language, Thought, and White Privilege

I am not an expert in race. I am not an expert in anything, really—just a dilettante in a number of areas that I find interesting. One of those areas—language—has been on my mind a lot lately as I’ve reflected on the ongoing crisis in race relations we have in this country.

As our news and social media are filled daily with continuing evidence that racism and intolerance are alive and well in America, some long overdue conversations about White Privilege and systematic racism have been taking place with increasing frequency. But as these conversations take place, it becomes clear that most of us do not realize how deeply ingrained our system of racial injustice runs. It goes far beyond explicit, intentional actions of the kind we witnessed with horror in Charleston, South Carolina last week. That kind of explicit racial hatred is easy to spot and those who insist that we live in a post-racial society will try to claim that such incidents are anomalies.  The system of racial injustice even goes beyond the institutionalized systems that privilege one racial group over another. The pattern of injustice goes right to our very thinking.

Some of us are aware of the implicit biases we have and the implicit associations we make with one racial or ethnic group or another. Others of us can, often to our horror or shame, take an online test to find out what our implicit associations are.  But we needn’t go to the lengths of taking an online test to discover our implicit biases and associations; our language betrays those for us already.