Monday, March 21, 2011

Ancient Greek Poetry?

John Hobbins of Ancient Hebrew Poetry takes a break from Hebrew to give us a schooling in translating the NT.
Is it hard to translate the gospel of John? Not really. Its diction in the original is clean and terse. The author relies on a bundle of bright oppositions expressed through cascades of words that repeat. A faithful translator does well to mirror such in translation. Why do so many modern translations take away from the text by adding to it? Why set aside repetends and parallelisms in the source text if they can be reproduced? It boggles the mind.
Interesting how the comments completely ingnore the issue of translation and get stuck into arguing about  universalism and evangelicalism, go figure.

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Jesus treats the Syrophoenecian Woman as a Disciple

[This is an extract from my essay "Breaking Bread: The Power of Hospitality in the Gospel of Mark" which you can read in full and ...