Trying to keep Peter decent: a translation oddity

Reflecting on today’s gospel (John 21:1-19), I’ve been fascinated by what looks to me like a game of avoidance by some of the translations.

The verse I’m drawing attention to is v7. This is the NRSV.

That disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord!” When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he put on some clothes (τὸν ἐπενδύτην διεζώσατο), for he was naked (ἦν γὰρ γυμνός), and jumped into the sea. 

The NRSV has a word for word approach to the second phrase I’ve highlighted, although if it were to be consistent it would translate the first phrase something like “he belted up his cloak”. The same word for “belt up” is used later in Jesus’ prophecy of Peter’s death as the evangelist narrates it. 

I think the combination of these phrases leads many translators and certainly some older commentators (I’m afraid I don’t have a recent commentary on John to hand) astray. They end up sounding as though they’ve digested an anthropologist’s guide to the working clothes of a Galilean fisherman.

The supposedly “literal” ESV offers: “he put on his outer garment, for he was stripped for work”. The “conservative” NIV has “he wrapped his outer garment round him (for he had taken it off)”

But the “meaning for meaning” versions aren’t any better: “he put on the clothes that he had taken off while he was working” says the CEV. The Voice has “he threw on his shirt (which he would take off while he was working)” 

There seems a common desire to avoid the word “naked”.

But I wonder if that’s a rather important word. The whole story is cast as a theophany.  (if you talked about anyone other than God “showing himself” to people in any other context than a revelatory appearance, the language would more likely refer to a flasher.) Jesus after his resurrection initiates revelatory encounters with his disciples: they do not decide whether to see the risen Lord.

In that context, John, with his subtle and allusive use of language, may be inviting us to see another scriptural encounter behind the text, when a sinful Adam tries to hide his nakedness from the Lord.

Peter is not quite in the same position here: he both wants to hide himself from, and to be with the Lord. He covers up, and rushes forward. It is an ambivalence of response to God that many a subsequent disciple knows only too well.

The story begins as a clear theophany. It ends as a clear narrative of vocation. In the telling it passes through a story of challenge and forgiveness that is surely intended to call Peter’s threefold denial to mind.

In that context, it seems at least possible, and I would say probable, that we are meant to hear that echo of Adam in the garden. John is not particularly interested in exactly what Galilean fisherman wear or don’t wear to work. He is interested in telling the story of Peter, called in his ordinary working environment, called in his fallen humanity, and above all called by the one who has stayed faithful to his denier, and will lead Peter himself to become a faithful witness who will die rather than deny again.

If that is indeed part of what is going on in John’s story, then translating γυμνός by anything other than “naked” simply won’t do.

Is blogging worth it?

This post was prompted by some Twitter conversations last night. Phil Ricthie relayed a comment from a Spring Harvest talk about Christian bloggers “saying things to each other we’d never dream of saying if we were in the same room”.

I think that’s true, though Christians have been saying some pretty horrible things to (or about) each other long before the internet was invented. I don’t think it’s confined to Christians either. And comments on individual blogs are rarely as nasty as those on the big news sites, from whatever perspective.

There seems to be fairly strong evidence that people feel much freer to be nasty on the internet, especially when hiding their identity behind self-aggrandising soubriquets.

The question though is whether it’s worth still continuing to blog when that is so often the culture. Some of last night’s conversation suggested it wasn’t.

I have form on this in that I have twice (in the around 8 years or so I’ve been blogging) given up on the blogs and deleted everything in frustration, disgust and depression. The mention of depression is not merely metaphorical: I suffer from it, sometimes quite badly.

On the bright side, sometimes blogging has helped me step out of myself and my blues and engage with others in ways I’ve been able to cope with and generally kept me going.

On the dark side, the two occasions when I gave up were after being attacked while going through bad bouts of depression. The attacks on the latter occasion came on two sides from a very conservative Christian trying to police the church on the web and a particular atheist insisting that if I wouldn’t agree with him, it was because I was prejudiced against atheists rather than having a rational argument. Smug self-righteousness from the “godly” and “godless” alike (I report how it felt to me at the time) seemed like too much to bear.

So I have twice found blogging not worth it, and I’ve been very sporadic in my posting on this blog because I’m currently struggling again with depression (and have for the last six months) while resisting medication.

However, all that said, I learn a lot from other people’s blogs. I enjoy reading the very many posts out there by people who are thoughtful, have something to say, and say it generally without nastiness or rancour, even when they are clearly angry. Well-channelled anger often makes for a scintillating post, and when it comes without the ad hominems, it can be quite entertaining.

Perhaps I’ve become more selective about the blogs I read, and therefore more positive about it, but if (to name but three of my regular blogroll) the likes of the Archdruid, Phil Ritchie, or Nick Baines gave up blogging, I would feel my life was somewhat more impoverished than it is today. So I hope they won’t. Christians (indeed, anyone) with something to say who say it well in public are a good thing. If they say it with humour and courtesy as well, even better.

But perhaps those of us who benefit from the wisdom of other bloggers (including especially those who think differently from ourselves) need to do more to affirm the good posts, and not merely comment when we disagree. Or maybe I’m only preaching that message to myself.

Reading Justin Welby’s biography

I’ve been reading Andrew Atherstone’s “brief biography”:  Archbishop Justin Welby: The Road to Canterbury. It’s better, I suspect, to regard it as a well-researched piece of extended journalism than the kind of biography we might normally expect from an academic church historian.

Read in that light it’s a usefully concise romp through the new archbishop’s life to date, and assembled in a remarkably short space of time. It seems that Welby himself has remained neutral about it, having “allowed” Atherstone to approach friends and colleagues, while not giving any interview himself. The author therefore has to rely much on other people’s interviews, as well as on a wide sampling of Welby’s writings in his parish magazine and later equivalents.

In all sorts of ways Atherstone has done us a service by putting so much together so quickly, and I learnt a lot from it. I’m slightly less sure that he has done Justin Welby a service, except in perhaps two very important respects.

First, Atherstone places a considerable emphasis on Archbishop Welby’s impeccable evangelical pedigree, and continuing commitment to the core basics of that as personal faith in Jesus Christ, adherence to the primacy of the Scriptures, and trust in the sacrifice of the Cross. In that light he also in several places emphasises the new archbishop’s attachment to traditional sexual morality. That pedigree may actually give Welby the chance of a hearing by some of those who are trying hard to exclude others from the church.

The other thing is the emphasis Atherstone gives to at least one aspect of Welby’s ecclesiology: that the church is the place where we have to learn to love those we don’t like and live in peace with those we with whom we disagree violently. That underpins rather a lot of what the archbishop seems to see himself to be about.

That said, I wonder whether Welby may be terribly happy to have so many of his fifteen year old parish magazine articles recycled as though they are a fair reflection of where he stands now. There is not much sense of an intellectual journey in the book, and much more of one in which his CICCU and HTB faith, refined by suffering, is still essentially as it was in the beginning, is now, and (one senses a “please God” here) ever more shall be.

In this book, Welby is shown to appreciate some of the riches of catholic spirituality for himself, and to pick up some key ideas about human flourishing from Roman Catholic social teaching, but there seems to me to be rather more begging to be said about a growth in theological breadth and depth (from other traditions as well as in his own) under the surface of the text. For Atherstone, there is a personal spiritual discipline in Welby choosing to receive Holy Communion every day. I wonder if there isn’t also for Welby something of a rather more catholic ecclesiology in the practice of a daily Eucharist than a sacramental version of a more intense “Jesus and me” experience. I think some of what he says elsewhere about ecclesiology may say there is.

It has to be said that there is little opportunity for more reflective analysis of the archbishop’s story, no doubt driven partly by the timetable for publication. One might wonder (however gifted Justin Welby is, and however much he is providentially called from one role to the next by the Lord), whether being connected by family to the ruling classes of England, and by friendship to the most influential evangelicals of the day might not also have something to do with a meteoric rise.

I think a biographer might also want to tease out the connections between a ministry of reconciliation, a theology of gracious acceptance, and a broken home with an attractive rogue for a father. One day, I hope there might be space and time for a rather more analytic and reflective narrative of how Welby’s life and ministry interrelate.

In part, as hinted above, I suspect some of this may also come down to the author’s own conservative evangelical faith shaping the story in a particular way: it sometimes seems a little hagiographical. Failures, such as the collapse of the International Centre for Reconciliation finances after a short period of stupendous income, or the inability to bring any real change to the relationship between Holy Trinity and Coventry Cathedral, are mentioned but quickly left behind. That may pay tribute to Welby’s resilience, but I’d like to know how he learned from the experiences.

One suspects as well that the biographer does not share his subject’s enthusiasm for the gifts and work of his predecessor in Canterbury. The subtext “Justin is not Rowan” sometimes seems a little too noticeable, and I suspect unhelpful. It was, after all, Rowan’s greatest fans who created some of the greatest fuss when he acted as an archbishop for the whole church. I would hate to see the same process happen again for the new archbishop.

In brief, this is a book well-worth reading, but best regarded as an interim write, in which the author has done a good job of amassing useful information, but perhaps ends up in danger of burdening Welby with too many evangelical and managerial expectations. Every archbishop starts as the answer to the church’s prayers and problems. Few end that way, and this book may simply contribute to the already over-high expectations with which Justin Welby starts his job.

A catholic child-murderer, allegedly

I’m a bit baffled by the amount of fuss generated by plans to re-inter Richard iii’s exhumed remains. There’s something a little odd over Roman Catholics and Anglicans, or Leicester and York squabbling over the possession of the bones of a man widely alleged by many historians to have ordered the murder of his nephews. Child killing is not generally regarded as something to boast about in either Anglican or Roman traditions.

Leaving the actual squabble to one side, I do want to comment on the mistaken preconception which seems to lie at the heart of some of the “Roman Catholic or Anglican burial” bit of the debate. Although it mainly seems to be the coin peddled by conservative Roman Catholic bloggers, there’s also an example in today’s BBC report which seems to owe at least as much to the reporter as his interviewee:

Dr John Ashdown-Hill, from Colchester, has now entered the fray saying King Richard would want a Catholic burial. … according to Dr Ashdown-Hill, Richard was “a very religious man. There is a lot of evidence that Richard III had a very serious personal faith,” he said, though added it was impossible to know what Richard III would have made of plans for burial at a non-Catholic site at York or Leicester. If Richard III had not have died, maybe the Anglican church would never have existed,” he said.

The big “what if” in that final sentence is, like most such historical “what ifs”, pretty irrelevant to the “what is” of real history. In real history, the Catholic Church in England underwent a royally commanded, but academically and episcopally led and influenced, reformation in common with many places in Europe. All the first generation of “Anglicans” – a name not then in use – were Catholics who had hitherto owed obedience to the Pope. 

The change in loyalty of thousands of hitherto more-or-less papally obedient Catholics, in England and across Europe, created a division which was unknown in Richard’s day. Until the dust of the Reformation settled down there were no such thing as Catholics in contradistinction to Protestants, or Roman Catholics as they are now known by Anglicans quite insistent on taking the “catholic” adjective seriously when reciting the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

Richard was an English Catholic of the 15th century whether “a very religious man”, an ambitious child-killer, or even both. It is impossible to say whether he would have been a monarch on the side of evangelical reformation, or papalist continuity. Other English and European monarchs and princes took different stances. Because of that the claim that he should be regarded today as either Roman Catholic or Anglican is simply anachronistic, and bad history.

The precedent of the sailor from the Mary Rose seems regularly to get a mention in this context. That was done according to the Sarum rite (a local English variation of the pre-Tridentine Roman rite) but the requiem was celebrated by the Anglican Provost of Portsmouth, with participation from his Roman Catholic opposite number. That seems tacitly to acknowledge that Christians who later divided can co-operate rather than squabble over putting someone’s remains back in the earth when that someone predated the divisions that now exist. But perhaps when royalty is involved, there’s also been a long tradition of people losing their heads.

Bishops and benefits

Bishops mixing in politics seem to upset the Daily Mail and assorted secularists in equal measure, albeit for very different reasons. And for that reason alone they deserve a big cheer.

I’ve been pondering my own reaction to yesterday’s letter from 43 bishops to the Telegraph (an interesting choice of destination) on the proposal to cap benefit increases.

I think the archbishop’s measured defence of his colleagues and his own views gets it about right in saying that this is a question about one little bit of a programme which needs some rethinking, not an attack on the whole programme, far less an attack on Iain Duncan Smith’s moral seriousness.

I also thought our own suffragan in these parts, the Bishop of Dudley, did a pretty good job of putting forward the case on the news programmes yesterday, and I’m generally persuaded this cap is not the best way forward.

However, I am a little concerned that fighting this particular battle may make it rather harder to fight for changes to what I think is a more important issue coming up. That issue is the payment of universal credit.

While there’s a lot to be said for the overall proposal, I worry about two specific parts of the plan as stated by the DWP:

• claimants will receive just one monthly payment, paid into a bank account in the same way as a monthly salary
• support with housing costs will go direct to the claimant as part of their monthly payment.

However much the Mail and its friends on the Tory right might exaggerate the problem of feckless scroungers, not everyone in receipt of benefit is going to direct their childcare to their children or their housing costs to their landlord. For some families, paying the whole benefit monthly to the claimant is going to feed drinking, drug and smoking habits with money intended for food, clothing and shelter.

At the very least weekly payment (even if it costs more) will be better, and paying rent to the housing association or landlord almost essential if people are not going to be put into significant debt or made homeless quite unnecessarily. 

(I note there’s a problem with housing benefit probably creating higher rents all round. I think part of the answer must lie in rent control. To those who think the latter distorts the market, I would say housing benefit has already done that and rent control is about correcting the market.)

To put it generously, some people need much more help to get to a point when they can budget.

Putting all the benefit money monthly into some people’s hands will, in my view, do more to hurt children than a below inflation cap on increases. And part of me is worried that by focussing on the cap, attention is being drawn away from a more serious problem we’re in danger of creating for ourselves.

But I’m no expert (and certainly less of one than our often very well informed bishops), just a slightly worried and ill-informed observer. 

Don’t mention the Scottish sex-play

I believe …

It tends to be the case that people who have done something wrong try to deny it if they can. Either we learn this in childhood, or it’s evidence that the myth of original sin still has something important to say.

In institutions the tendency to lie one’s way out of trouble is compounded by questions of group loyalty. This leads to an instinct for cover-up. We’ve seen it in the collapse of the News of the World, in parliamentary expenses, and in the churches’ paedophilia scandals, to name but three.

People who dislike, deny or can’t cope with aspects of their own behaviour tend to be more critical of that behaviour in others. We see it in trivial day to day examples of office clashes as well as in larger stories.

People who suppress aspects of their character often find themselves ambushed by their shadow side when they are in situations of stress, depression or isolation. It’s a commonplace of therapy and counselling.

If the world was full of people whose only moral aspirations were things they could easily achieve, we would probably all be a lot worse off. In character and behaviour, as in so much else, it’s not a bad thing if our reach exceeds our grasp. 

I don’t know which of those are the more accurate observations regarding Cardinal O’Brien. Nor, despite the column inches of speculation, does anyone else.

It’s bad and sad for those with whom he abused his position of power in apparently unwanted sexual contact (although the extent of the abuse seems open enough for people to read a range of possibilities into it). We know O’Brien failed in his responsibility to them. It looks as though others did also by making it hard for them to tell the truth. But we may never know whether others failed in their responsibility to O’Brien – his spiritual director, those who put him forward for promotion, even his friends.

But I’m struggling to read a much bigger lesson out of it than one man’s fallibility, and one institution’s group loyalty. There will be plenty of other examples of both to be found wherever human beings hold power, and organise themselves.

If there is a lesson for the church and for O’Brien, it’s a reminder that true spirituality is meant to lead to self-knowledge, and not provide a romantic or theological facade behind which we can hide from the truth about ourselves. But that’s easier to know than to do. 

When Jesus nearly said “stuff happens”

Sadly the phrase γίνεται σκύβαλα is not found in the New Testament. However, today’s gospel is as close as it comes outside the books of Ecclesiastes and Job, and Jesus is the one making the point.

I confess that in reflecting at mass today on the opening verses of Luke 13, I had to work quite hard to remember to say “stuff happens” and not “shit happens”, which has always struck me as a better and more eloquent expression of the sentiment. Sometimes swearing is an enrichment of our vocabulary, not the sign of a limited one.

More often than I would like, I find people asking “But what’s she done to deserve that?” as if cancer or bereavement and so on were part of some kind of moral calculus. It seems ingrained, as if Job had never been written. 

In today’s reading Jesus is quite clear that accidents do not only happen to the deserving, they can happen to anyone. In his response to his questioners he challenges people to examine their own lives instead of speculating on other people’s fate. (Cranmer would have agreed: the whole point of his funeral service is to say to the mourners: “You’re ALL going to DIE! “)

Elsewhere in the gospel tradition Jesus remarks: “God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous (Matt 5:45).” Oddly, most people regularly misquote it, but only when the sun is shining (“God makes his sun shine on the righteous”), except for one piece of variously attributed doggerel:

The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella,
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.

We can’t control what happens to us, and in human terms it will often look like “the righteous were punished, even though their hope is of immortality” (Wis 3:4). Shit happens. There is no moral arithmetic which results in being either the victim of random disaster (the tower of Siloam) or someone else’s violent oppression (Pilate’s mingling the blood of the Galileans with their sacrifices).

What we can do is look at how we can make meaning out of meaningless circumstances, how we can try to bring love into loveless situations, or how we can bring or receive the light of hope in the darkness of despair. Faith is finding the ability to do that in the face of a seemingly silent heaven, not a glib assurance that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

When a word for word translation has merit

Translation is a tricky thing, and some words (or phrases) are more difficult than others to translate. I’ve been reflecting on one word since I was caught unawares in a class the other day by someone telling me what their BIble (the first version of the NIV) said for Galatians 3:3.

After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?

More recent editions of the NIV have reverted to the traditional (and more ambiguous) translation of σάρξ (sarx – here translated human effort) as “flesh”. However the early NIV is not alone. CEV goes for “Do you think that by yourself you can complete what God’s Spirit started in you?”. GNB has “You began by God’s Spirit; do you now want to finish by your own power?”. NET has “Although you began with the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by human effort?”.

What all these have in common is their attachment to a Protestant theology which has broadened the specificity of “works of the Law” to a rather vague “works”, and then, having identified faith with the work of the Spirit, has made “flesh” the equivalent of “effort”. It’s all very ingenious and a clear example of just how interpretative a task translation is. It’s also, I would argue, some way away from what the first-century Pharisee who became Paul the apostle believed about Law and faith, flesh and Spirit.

(Ironically the so-called Complete Jewish Bible does exactly the same thing as these translations, providing yet more evidence that many forms of modern “Messianic Judaism” owe their shape to Zionist American evangelicalism.)

Now I’m not arguing as a general rule for any kind of word-to-word correspondence, but in this case I think it’s justified for rather more occurrences of σάρξ (sarx) than not. Mainly that’s because Paul usually uses the word in combination with (or opposition to) other anthropological terms, and in those contexts maintaining English words which correspond to Greek words has some justification, leaving more of the interpretation to the reader and allowing more possible ambiguities in. The flesh – Spirit binary opposition is common enough for it to be so rendered whenever it occurs.

In this specific case it also seems to me that whatever else Paul intends by πνεῦμα (pneuma) and σάρξ (sarx), there is also a reference to the initiation of the Spirit (indicated by experience of “works of power” v5), and the initiation by circumcision which is quite literally in the flesh. Sometimes something of the multivalent meaning of a word in the source language can be carried over to the target language, and this, I think, is a case in point.

Paid school governors: Ofsted’s worst idea yet?

I have no confidence in Sir Michael Wilshaw, Ofsted’s chief inspector. It is reported today that he wants to see paid school governors providing professional leadership to schools.

It seems to me that this is almost entirely to misunderstand the reason some schools are “underperforming”, and the way in which governing bodies are ideally about community ownership of the local school. It is also almost entirely at odds with David Cameron’s one headline (if vague and inchoate) idea of a “Big Society”. Paying professional governors would be a bigger state, and a smaller society.

There should already be a professional leadership team in schools: the senior management team led by the headteacher. In most schools it’s very good. Turning local volunteers into a second tier of management not only disrespects and devalues the expertise of the professional teachers, but it makes it harder and harder to find governors, risks setting up two competing leaderships, and damages the role of the governor as lay adviser, critical friend and community link.

At the same time it ignores the real problem which is that schools, particularly but by no means exclusively in deprived areas, are expected to take on the burdens of failed parenting, alongside family and community breakdown. Busing in professional governors will not only fail to address that problem, but is likely to worsen it by further distancing the school from the community.

The most recent indicator of that is the number of children who now start school still not having being toilet-trained, so that teaching assistants and and teachers alike are having to deal with children soiling themselves as a matter of routine rather than exception. How does Sir Michael expect paid governors to address the impact problems like that have on schooling?

A school cannot by itself address, far less mend, the ills of a breaking society. What needs addressing is the burden placed on schools already to deal with poor parenting, family breakdown, social alienation and the creation of a state funded underclass.

That is not to be complacent about academic standards in maths, science and English (amongst others) but it is to say the problem is not primarily one of school governance and leadership, but social collapse combined with an unrealistic understanding of what schools face and a hopelessly idealistic expectation of what education in school can achieve without supportive character formation in the home and wider community.

I see no way in which professional and paid governors would do anything to address that except to take more funding out of the provision of front-line services already stretched past their breaking point. Expecting to address major social problems by paying a few more people to digest ever more dead trees filled with the buzzwords du jour of an excessive and over-regulatory bureaucratic quango is to live in a fool’s paradise.

In short, we have a chief inspector of schools who doesn’t understand what today’s schools are like. He should go out there and get an education.

Paul was not a Protestant

I wonder how much common pictures of Paul, academic and popular, really stop us reading the kind of evidence he provides for the earliest churches.

It is true that significant revisionist strides have been made by the majority who accept the larger part of Sanders’ reconstruction of Second Temple Judaism as “covenantal nomism”: at least in terms of Law and Gospel the academic Paul looks far less Lutheran, individualist and anti-semitic than he once did. However, I regularly feel that other parts of the picture – especially a Paul who is primarily charismatic, and dependent on private revelation rather than tradition, church and authority, have yet to be rethought in the light of more general shifts in scholarship.

In particular, I wonder whether the evidence of 1 Corinthians, despite the huge amount of scholarship devoted to its sociological and anthropological study, is really being taken seriously.

In that letter we have not only two explicit examples of handing on received tradition (11:23-26, 15:3-7), and an early appeal to the sensus fidelium (11:16, cf 7:17), but we have two explicit and significant references to the Jesus tradition (7:10 especially contrasted with 7:12, and 9:14). The first of those references – a rare factual example of how the earliest churches used Jesus tradition – seems to have been cheerily ignored by most theories of how they used, adapted or invented it. The second shows how the relevance and significance of it can be open to interpretation then as now.

The picture that we get in 1 Corinthians, of a Paul concerned with tradition and catholicity is set aside by all those who prioritise the clearly polemical and angry arguments of Galatians. Yet privileging Galatians as a template for understanding Paul is clearly a theological decision that owes much to the matrix which reads him as the first Reformer. Given how much the picture of Protestant Paul has been dismantled in the 35 years since Sanders published Paul and Palestinian Judaism, how tenable is it still to sideline the more complex evidence of 1 Corinthians?