by Ethan Johnson
December 2, 2007

I have been stewing on this for some time, and have opted to empty out my thoughts here for further examination. With limited exceptions, I take a dim view of "new" translations of ancient texts, and especially so for re-interpretations (Ralph Alan Dale's treatment of the Tao Te Ching comes immediately to mind). For translations (defined as someone going over the texts of the source language and translating it into say, English), layers of translation separates us further and further from whatever the original material actually said. For re-interpretations (defined as someone reviewing either the source material, or a popular translation of same and giving his or her own "spin" to it), layers of semantics and subjective opinion take us further and further from whatever the original material actually meant.

As a result, I tend to consult the King James Bible for those moments when I need to refer to scripture, knowing that it too is flawed, but less so than the New Living Translation. I favor WHD Rouse's translations of Homer over say, Penguin Classics, as I found the Penguin version to be utterly frilly as opposed to Rouse's more plainspoken treatment - which may seem counterintuitive to my central argument, but it is not. Rouse takes pains to explain why he makes the translation decisions that he did, noting that Homer himself spoke plainly, and if anything the more flowery Penguin prose rides roughshod over the source material. So too, in my estimation, does the treatment Ralph Alan Dale gives to the Tao Te Ching, but I will have expanded thoughts on this in another article. I will note here that Dale himself explains away some of his decisions in re-interpreting (as opposed to translating) the source material as either a) what Lao Tzu and his compatriots would never dare to commit to print (eh?!), or b) what the author felt was the right message for this modern day and age. The US Constitution wasn't written with space travel and the internet in mind, and is a more recent document. I am hard pressed to believe that Lao Tzu foresaw Climate Change/Global Warming (for example) and wrote the Tao to that effect.

While I was waiting for Marlena to finish her eye appointment this weekend, I opted to thumb through a back issue of Charisma magazine (a magazine aimed at the US Christian community). I wrestled with the decision at first, citing any and all biases and reasons why not, and took the plunge since refusing to at least consider an opposing viewpoint makes me no better than anyone else I'd decry for behaving the same way. I read an article about The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins with interest. The author of the article took pains to be as reasoned and as dispassionate with his arguments as possible, under the circumstances, and I give the author credit for citing the shortcomings of the Church and Christianity/religion in general rather than re-write (or ignore) history. I suspect mainly out of necessity, the author essentially advises the faithful that arguing with Dawkins and suchlike is a losing proposition (not on merits, per the author) because frankly, the Christians won't convert Dawkins, and Dawkins won't dissuade the Christians. Extremism on either side can only benefit the other.

Paging through the rest of the magazine, I found it amusing that various proponents of Christianity were struggling to reconcile various beliefs and acts that either seemed to or outright did run counter to the teachings of Jesus. One author asked, "what am I doing to become more like Jesus every day?" Well, I'd say start with complete and total divestiture in "stuff" and eschew any form of personal recognition. The rest should follow in time.

Fundamentally (ha ha), there is a loop that Christians are trapped in unless and until one opts to ask some uncomfortable questions. I have conveniently provided some of them here for quick reference:

• What is the Bible? The Bible is a book (religious text). But it is only a book because someone made it so. There is no "Bible" in the historical sense, just independent writings and whatnot that ultimately have been bound and preserved in a manner to convey the impression that there was always a "book".
• Who wrote the Bible (semantics aside about the presentation of the material)? Men.
• How do you know? They signed their work.
• I believe that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God. It's blasphemy to think otherwise, isn't it? How do you know that the Bible is the inerrant word of God, let alone the men who wrote [it]? It says so in the Bible. Which was written by whom? God. Oh, so God wrote the Bible as an end-to-end book and handed it to someone saying "pass it on." No, He told his Word to [various men] and they in turn wrote the Bible upon His instructions. How do you know? It says so in the Bible. Which was written by whom? Men. (Repeat forever.)

At the start of the thought process that ultimately led to this article, I was going to say that I'm quite interested in knowing what the content of the documenti originali (original documents) might have said that are now thought to be the contents of the Bible. The thought of a cohesive Bible is a misnomer anyway, as part of it is the Torah, which technically stands alone. So I wondered what the age of the Torah is. Depending on who you ask, the Earth is either billions of years old, or up to 10,000. Let's travel down the 10,000 year path for a moment. The Torah (or semantically, part of it) dates back to 850 BCE. That means the Torah is 2857 years old, right? 10,000 minus 2857 is: 7143. That's over 7 millenia of undocumented history. Well, sure, it was documented by way of the Torah, but 7000+ years isn't exactly "present at the creation", is it?

Thus, I have little to no expectation that we'll ever claw our way back to the documenti originali, and discover what the first edition of the Torah really said. In fact, a web site concerning Judaism says this about the passing down of "holy" books after the creation of the Ten Tribes:

(Which holy books existed at the time?) The Five Books of Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Ruth, Kings, Psalms, Proverbs, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastics. The Ten Tribes rejected the Book of Judges, because it had been written by the Prophet Samuel, who had anointed and supported King David. They rejected the Books of Samuel and Kings because those Books supported King David, and because they were written by the Prophets Samuel, Nathan, and Gad, who strongly supported King David.

I'm not Jewish, and don't pretend to be for the purposes of this article. I hope that one might empathize with my reluctance to buy into a work as literal "gospel" when huge chunks of it were being effectively shorn to the editing room floor, way back then. I wonder why some find it appealing to beat up on Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism when even the Torah has a similar history: A book was dictated (or handed over personally, depending on who or what you believe) by a lone entity (God, the angel Moroni), to a single person (Moses, Joseph Smith) who was the only witness to the event (or had a single close associate in the know). To say Moses was lying is blasphemy; to say Joseph Smith wasn't is lunacy.

Since we have at our disposal scientific evidence that the Earth is in fact billions of years old, that's even more lost history which can only be extrapolated through various means of study, such as the geologic record. Counting rings on fallen trees in Sherwood Forest tells us nothing about whether Robin Hood existed. Some things, sadly, can only be taken on faith, or perhaps an educated guess. (For example, we know dinosaurs existed, but I am unsure as to how we can know definitively what, if any, sounds a Tyrannosaurus might have emitted - other than to interpret the fossil record against similar yet different animals of the modern era.)

Thus, while the hard sciences and religion have their own brand of faith*, what strikes me as most irksome is the insistence of the faithful (in the religious sense) to simply believe that God did whatever, will do whatever, and my personal favorite, wants whatever, merely because a single book told them so. The author who wrote the piece discussing Dawkins' book for Charisma claimed that Darwin himself was "annoyingly vague" regarding his personal views on God, which I have yet to fact-check. Assuming for the sake of argument that this is indeed true, any suggestion as to a definitive assertion either way is, bluntly, a self-serving lie.

I do think that there is value in trying to reach back to the origin point of a given thing, be it an ancient text, a belief system, the Earth, the Universe, whatever. Though it may not bear fruit in terms of making wholesale changes in the present day (such as women becoming ordained as ministers because a lost religious text said that's how things used to be), it is interesting to note what the intent behind the material was, definitively. Why was the Earth formed? Why was the Bible written? What was the intent of the framers of the US Constitution? Can we ever know for sure? And if not, should we take the "why" on faith? If so, to what end? How will future generations know (and understand) why these decisions were made? <EM>

* Specifically, as it applies to the sciences, the need to extrapolate based on known data in the absence of a given point of origin/termination. "Faith" then takes the form of making base assumptions about How the World Works until contradicted by fresh evidence to the contrary.