| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Jn 1:1-8

Page history last edited by John F. Felix 14 years, 10 months ago

Toward a Non-Theological Translation of the Gospel of John

 

Looking at the first few verses of John, and despite reservations against any part of these writings being originally composed in a “Semitic” form, a “theoretical” reconstruction of a hypothetical Hebrew source text for John's poetic introduction to his Gospel becomes possible. Upon reflection, it was felt that current opinions address very poignantly the issues that divide many scholars and the laity, among members of each group and between the factions.

 

As many are acutely aware, there is much contraversy over the very first verse, and how it should be translated and interpreted. On balance, after mulling over this issue for a few years, the conclusion was reached that there are good arguments for all the interpretations, whether one's foundation is linguistic, theological, or something else. So, all these views cancel each other out, which is to say, that perhaps none of them are truly correct. Not being satisfied that there was nothing to tip the balance in favor or one or the other interpretation, it was finally realized that the way beyond this impasse was to not think in those terms at all, i.e., as if every issue is black or white. The solution seemed to lie in the direction of looking at the problem “poetically,” with the assumption that 1) the poet communicates emotion and experience through evocative language, and therefore, 2) John did not mean to make any theological statement whatsoever, as this is not the function of poetry so defined.

 

In the .pdf file attached to this page (John 1:1-8), there is an “intuiting” of a possible parallelism that was “lost in translation,” so to speak. For, as is shown in the file attachment, in English, John 1:1 is newly translated:

 

From the beginning the Word is,

and the Word is face-to-face with the Elohim,

and the Elohim is face-to-face with the Word.

 

Despite the seeming lack of examples of this type of parallelism in known texts, the Hebrew appears grammatically and syntactically sound (see .pdf), but we would welcome corrections or suggestions. Again, this is an experimental translation, but perhaps new thinking can lead the way out of such impasses.

 

Copyright (c) 2008 by John F. Felix. All rights reserved.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.