Lost in Translations

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Furor is up like storm waves concerning a revision of the New International Version of the Bible according to the Associated Press. Evangelical groups, fearful lest the word of God be misrepresented (!), claim nothing is wrong with the Old New International Version. The story of biblical translation is long and colorful and peppered with more than a few deaths. People, originally especially Europeans and Americans, but spreading like swine flu around the world with the missionary movement, are very concerned about being certain they have they exact words from the Author himself.

Concern with having the correct answer is natural enough, but the goal of a perfect translation is unattainable. The basic reason is that translation, like Bible-writing, is a human endeavor. And people just don’t achieve perfection. Also, words often betray us. I used to ask students what the word “die” means. Some would say to cease living, while others would say it was the singular form of dice. Some even recognized it as the nominative, feminine singular definite article in German. The truth is, however, that words do not have meanings. Words are symbols that have usages, but the letters “d-i-e” in that order mean only what we intend for them to indicate in any given circumstance. Certainty is a mirage; it can never be reached.

A few years back Today’s New International Version was published and it has been called “an emblem of division in the evangelical Christian world,” by Moe Girkins, president of Zondervan (owned by Rupert Murdoch). Even among self-identified evangelicals unanimity is illusory. Each person’s religious beliefs start to differ from everyone else’s in the privacy of his or her own head. That is because everyone is unique. The Bible can be made to “mean” whatever an individual wants it to mean. Until we became merged into some Borg-esque entity new translations will be loved by some and hated by most.

Currying Divine Favor

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The name Kerala leapt out at me from a stunning newspaper article that reeked of indulgences and simony just this week. Kerala, a southern region of India, is home to a large number of Syriac Orthodox Christians. In my time at Gorgias Press I often heard their industry praised and was informed how cheaply fellow “Christians” would work. I even saw the position of a great fellow worker at Gorgias evaporate as his duties were “outsourced” to India. Ah, Outsourcing, thy name is Greed.

I recall the days when Greed was considered one of the seven deadly sins. Apparently now it is an acceptable means of replenishing ecclesiastical coffers. An article on Thursday’s New Jersey Star-Ledger front page bore the headline “Recession hits Indian churches offering outsourced prayer”(!). The article explains that Catholic churches in the United States, hard-pressed for priests, have been outsourcing Mass intentions (dedicatory prayers) to their colleagues in India. The mind spins — American families, wanting a Mass intention dedicated to dear departed Aunt Bertha, sells the option to India where prayer is cheaper. As the headline declares, the Recession has cut into the profit margin of the Indian Catholic Church. I’m no mathematician, but it seems that a degree in accounting might help to sort all this out: Americans sell prayer intentions to priests in Kerala, who (when they aren’t working for Gorgias Press in their spare time) send them along to a God who is supposed to be omniscient anyway? And money changes hands for this? In Kali we trust!

Organized religion requires financial upkeep; only a blind naked mole rat can’t see that. Nevertheless, when religions gain enough financial leverage to become power brokers, it seems that they have slipped their moorings. I have watched hypocritical “prosperity gospel” believers benefit from the hard work of the poor, and I have seen the coffee-table books touting the immeasurable wealth of the Vatican, and I have witnessed the homeless curled up on urban church doorsteps on a cold Sunday winter morning. And I remember what Amos wrote, “For I know how many are your transgressions, and how great are your sins — you who afflict the righteous, who take a bribe, and push aside the needy in the gate…” (5.12). And I wonder who might be the safer bet, Yahweh or Kali?

WWAD?

WWAD?

Graven Images

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Religious statuary was ubiquitous among the ancients. That which the eye can perceive is so much better for focusing the attention than the amorphous unknown. In methods reminiscent of my days of toy soldiers and action figures (not dolls!), priests of Near Eastern temples would dress their statues, offer them refreshment, and take them for a public parade to reassure the populace that they were still being cared for. Citizens didn’t regularly “go to church” or synagogue, the temple was the work-space of the priesthood. So regularly scheduled public jaunts with the goods, or gods, on the shoulders helped to reassure ancient folk that all was well. If a city-state or nation lost in battle, their statuary was taken captive by the victors — what could you do if they’d taken your gods? Even in the Bible the ark is taken as spoils of war by the Philistines. They knew the drill.

Monotheism and aniconic religion go hand-in-glove. If there is only one god, then multiple images only cause confusion. Although the ancients were more sophisticated than we often suppose — they knew the statues were not the actual gods, thank you Second Isaiah — when monotheism took hold in emergent Judaism, the divine images had to go. Early Christianity shared this antipathy for graven images, for a while. Soon paintings in catacombs represented Jesus and an industry in religious art was about to boom. If the image represents a holy person, the image itself must be holy. It’s a hard idea to shake.

In the paper the other day, an article explained how a couple of people stole Jesus in Hackensack, New Jersey. “2 charged in theft of Jesus” the headline read (in part). Our would-be godnappers tried to sell a 200-pound bronze statue of Jesus for scrap metal. Even with advanced training in religious studies, and a skepticism borne of too many years as a professional religionist, I wouldn’t try to scrap Jesus for cash. The image might have some ark-of-the-covenant-type power! Once while jogging through a church parking lot, a pagan bug flew into my mouth.

An ethical morass

An ethical morass

This posed a serious ethical dilemma — if I swallowed it my decade-long clean record as a vegetarian went down the drain; on the other hand, expectoration on consecrated ground surely posed a potentially personal apocalypse with The Landlord! As I forcefully released the confused (and slightly gooey) insect back into nature, I had a moment of Kierkegaardian aangst that the job I’d recently applied for would now go to someone else. I had defiled a church parking lot with a little spittle! Religious symbols indeed have power. It takes a brave thief to sell a stolen divinity into the hands of sinners. And I didn’t get that job after all.

Origins of the Undead

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With all the talk of organ harvesting in New Jersey (see any Jersey paper over the past couple of days — you can’t miss it), my mind naturally turns to zombies. I have to confess to having enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Quirk Books, 2009) very much, particularly when the Bennett girls form the “Pentagram of Death” at a ball. Like most creatures representing humanity’s deepest fears, however, the undead have religious origins.

The evils of the slave trade and missionary work concocted a dangerous brew in the West Indies. Shamanistic “voodoo priests” claimed to have the ability to arrest a person’s soul, making that person an unthinking mercenary of their bidding. (The mind again turns to missionaries!) A similar idea enlivened the golem in medieval Jewish lore, only dirt was used to construct a golem rather than an already occupied fleshy apartment. The concept of the inculpable perpetrator of revenge in West Indian religion was first introduced into popular consciousness by the writing of William Seabrook, a noted traveler and author. Seabrook spent some time in Haiti and his account of zombies in The Magic Island captured the public imagination.

The undead aspect of zombies is largely due to the unexpected success of George Romero’s 1968 cult hit film, Night of the Living Dead. In an interview Romero noted that the zombie idea had been applied to the film rather than having been its driving plot device. The undead are called “creatures” at several points but never “zombies.” The zombie connection nevertheless took off from the movie and landed the undead directly into the supernatural monster pantheon. As people continue to struggle with death and all its implications — one of the largest psychological roles of religion — it may seem difficult to believe that zombies have only been with us since the 1960s. William Seabrook committed suicide after having committed himself to an asylum in his later years. In one of his travelogues, Jungle Ways, he describes in detail the experience of eating human rump roast while in West Africa. Perhaps he was well on his way to becoming a zombie (or at least a New Jersey public servant!)?