Lost In Translation: The Biblical Distinction Between Soulish and “Spiritish”
I have been thoroughly enjoying David Bentley Hart’s The New Testament: A Translation, and I want to thank Olive Tree Bible Software for making it available electronically, unlike all the other Bible software programs I also love and use. If you only want to read Dr. Hart’s translation (as opposed to, say, reading it in parallel with a Bible commentary) it’s available from Amazon as a Kindle book, an audio book, and/or an audio CD. And in case you’re worrying about Dr. Hart’s academic credentials, don’t. His publisher is Yale University Press.
Fair warning: I confess to being a bit of a Bible geek. If you’re not a Bible geek, I suggest you skip this post and the one that follows it on Monday. After that, I promise to try to be less geeky.
Mark Twain famously wrote that “a camel is a horse designed by a committee.” Like Mark Twain, Dr. Hart doesn’t like committees—especially when it comes to all the committee-driven decision-making that goes into arriving at most new Bible translations. It turns out that Dr. Hart judges all other New Testament translations by looking at Jude 1:19. He says: “A sort of “acid test” for me is Judas [or Jude] 1:19, a verse whose meaning is startlingly clear in the Greek but which no collaborative translation I know of translates in any but the vaguest and most periphrastic manner.”
Dr. Hart himself translates Jude 1:19 this way: “These are those who cause divisions, psychical men, not possessing spirit.”
The Greek word for soul is psychē, and it is Jude 1:19 that (when translated correctly) makes a distinction between people who are “soulish” or psychical, and people I will now start calling “spiritish” (people Jude describes as “possessing spirit.”) “Spiritish” is my bad--don’t blame it on Dr. Hart. Dr. Hart says this:
Despite its long history of often vague and misleading translations, this verse [Jude 1:19] clearly invokes the distinction between psychē and pneuma (soul and spirit) as principles of life, and between “psychics” and “pneumatics” as categories of persons. There is most definitely no reference here to the Holy Spirit: given the construction of the sentence, the absence of the definite article alone makes this certain; and the reasoning of the sentence makes it all the more so.
And then he adds: “See 1 Corinthians 2:14 and 15:44-47, along with my footnotes, as well as my remarks on the words psychē and pneuma in my postscript.”
I think we’ll do that next week. It’s going to be another blog that only a Bible geek could love. I have every intention of behaving myself after that.
Margot Armer
