I’ve been offline for a while for one reason and another. But I’m back now, at least for a bit. My plan for the next several months is to publish here the Romans translation I prepared for a commentary that I subsequently withdrew from writing. (It wasn’t the right season for me to be attempting a Romans commentary, and I also discovered, while translating and working up the introduction, that I didn’t like the genre at all; it eliminates the most exciting part of the entire process of composition for me which is the discovery and articulation of the book’s internal argumentative structure.) Perhaps I will, Deus vult, write a book one day on Romans, and I certainly have enough material stored up to offer some suggestions about its interpretation, but I’m pretty sure that those won’t appear in a classical commentary form. I was left, however, after this difficult decision, with a Romans translation, attempted in very particular terms, moldering on my computer, along with 170 pages or so of introductory and architectonic material. What to do? And the answer in the digital age is, clearly, “to publish them bit by bit on the currently moribund website.” So here we go. I will be honored by any feedback offered here although, with my current energy pressures, I am unable to promise to respond. I do nevertheless hope you enjoy my “Romans for Pagans,” and find there what might turn out to be a rather different road through Romans.
My translation differs deliberately from the way in which we will find Romans translated in most Bibles. Many, if not most, other translations of Romans can seem, if read by ordinary English-speakers, clumsy and even occasionally impenetrable. The usual translations often use technical terms that to be understood would require a Divinity Degree. Perhaps this is no surprise. Paul’s translators generally have several Divinity degrees. But Paul’s original readers had no degrees. Neither were those first, simple, readers located within a church tradition packed with key theological terms and debates stretching over two thousand years that shaped their understanding. So the translation of Romans as if this complex, later, tradition was already known by its earliest recipients is profoundly anachronistic.
This problematic approach can be corrected if all translation equivalents in English to Paul’s ancient Greek words that need a book to explain them are avoided. Translations of ancient Greek words needing a book to explain their meaning for ordinary ancient readers are fine. But translations of words that need a book summarizing centuries of church teaching to explain them now—and which then pack that compendium of meaning into the translation of a word—must be carefully skirted. The original Greek in Paul’s letter was supposed to be—with one important type of exception—quite obvious. If Romans had been delivered to out-and-out pagans sitting in the ancient Roman equivalent of a café, we might say, the Greek would have been plainly comprehensible in the way that they would have understood any essay or contract or letter that came across their lap. It might have been hard to grasp Paul’s sophisticated arguments, but it would have been easy to understand his actual language; he spoke the language of the street. So my English translation has tried to capture this easy, colloquial, lucidity.
My translation will also sometimes be paraphrastic. Those who know the Greek I am translating, or the standard translations in English, might find this puzzling. But Paul was writing in a language that differed from modern English in its grammatical structure, and that was shaped by a culture two thousand years ago that was also comprehensively different. So where Paul could use a single Greek word or construction, readers of modern English sometimes need a phrase to capture what is—and was—really going on. These paraphrases are all carefully thought through, but this is not the place to show in detail how these judgments are defensible. (I hope to publish my detailed notes on the Greek in due course. But that is a task for another day.) So, if a contemporary pagan sitting in a café in some modern city, to resume our earlier test, came across my translation of Romans lying next to them on a chair, and picked it up and read it, they should immediately grasp what Paul is saying. They might be offended by his writing’s powerful challenges, or confused by his twisting arguments, but the basic meaning of what he is saying should be obvious. Indeed, our pagan reader should ideally be unaware that they are reading a translation of a text that was composed two thousand years ago.[1]
This easy accessibility, however, has one exception.
Paul quotes frequently in Romans from his Jewish Scriptures; there are over fifty such quotations. And this repeated quotation creates a different translation challenge.
Paul usually quotes his Scriptures, with occasional exceptions,[2] from a Greek translation popular in his day. Many Jews in Paul’s time lived outside of their original homeland of Judea, which corresponds to the middle section of modern Israel, in foreign countries that spoke Greek. So they could no longer understand the original languages of their Scriptures, namely, Hebrew and Aramaic. A body of Greek translations, opening up access to the Scriptures for Greek-speaking Jews, was consequently created. This Greek translation that we know now as the Septuagint,[3] took shape organically, roughly from the 250s BCE through to the 50s BCE. But it follows from this that many of its component writings were written in a more archaic Greek than the Greek Paul himself used, and in a dialect as much as three hundred years older. So we should picture here a modern English text that repeatedly quotes from English texts written from the 1900s at the latest, and as far back as the early 1700s. Paul’s quotations from the Greek Scriptures in Romans would, as a result, have been immediately recognizable to his listeners—popping off the page—in the way that if we were reading a long article in The New Yorker we would instantly recognize any unacknowledged quotations from a novel by Samuel Johnson or Jane Austen. And this creates a translation challenge. How do we capture this unevenness in style?
I have tried to reproduce this phenomenon by using an early English translation of the Bible—the King James Version—for Paul’s scriptural quotations. The KJV, which is still much loved, was commissioned by James I of England in the early 1600s. Consequently, it is written in prose that is delightfully poetic but overtly archaic. Just as Paul’s original readers who were unfamiliar with Jewish Scriptural material would have found his quotations from the LXX a little odd then, some of the modern readers of my translation will find these quotations from the OT in the Shakespearian English used by the KJV oddly antiquated. And that is the point. The archaic style marks these parts of the letter off as different, not written by Paul, but quoted from another text composed at an earlier time.[4]
[1] I have found the statement of translation principles by David Bentley Hart to be frequently close to my own views and helpful; see The New Testament: A Translation (London & New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. xiii-xxxv.
[2] His Scriptures were originally composed in Hebrew or Aramaic. Arguably, he quotes or echoes these versions in Romans on occasion; apparently these texts sometimes possessed a nuance that the Septuagint had lost.
[3] This title goes back to the legend of the texts’ translation; seventy scholars, locked up in isolation, produced the same exact version, thereby attesting to its divine authorization. The Latin word for seventy, Septuaginta, abbreviated LXX, therefore supplies the name used to denote what is really a family of rather disparate translations.
[4] Their antiquity, signaled by their language, also had another important function. Paul’s quotations from the ancient Scriptures would have felt special and significant. His listeners would have been reminded immediately that here Paul was not the only figure speaking. These sacred ancient texts conveyed the very utterances of God.