Mike,

Thanks for your diligence in this. I am fascinated, because the copy of Beyond Belief on my shelf (the 2005 paperback edition) does not appear to have a translation in it. Is it perhaps only in the hardcover version?

Judy

To: GThos / GPG

In Response To: Jack Kilmon

On: Gender PC

From: Bruce

I would like to strongly second Jack’s comment on “gender neutral” language in gThos or any other ancient text. The job of finding out what these text said is distinct from the project of adjusting it to the sensibilities of our own time. The two should not be confused or conflated. If the text is gender-specific, then a historically responsible translation should faithfully reproduce that fact. Some modern pastor may rewrite that faithful translation for homiletic purposes; that’s their business. It has nothing to do with scholarship. Those considerations should not affect scholarship, which has its own priorities and pieties.

The same applies across the board, including the historical presents in Mark. Almost no English translation since the ASV reproduces these, but they are an important aspect of Mark’s style; important enough that Matthew and Luke almost entirely suppressed them. So, quite apart from their theological differences, there is also a grammatical/literary war on between Mk on the one hand and the Second Tier Gospels on the other. If we suppress this fact, by translating the historical presents out of the text, we deprive our readers of information which may be important to understanding why one wrote, and others rewrote, as they did.

Of course, there are problems. Translation is not as easy an art as we might like. Historical presents exist in colloquial English, but they are *very* colloquial, and I have encountered them only in the speech of uneducated persons. Thus the neighbor lady, gossiping with my Mom over coffee of a morning, “So I says to her, I says . . .”  Does it demean the dignity of the translation to make Mark sound like that? Undoubtedly, to modern class sensibilities, it does.

Which (I submit) is precisely why Mt/Lk got rid of this feature. That is the point to hang onto.

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

One nice thing about translation is that it can get easier as time goes on. The expedients adopted for reasons of accuracy may sound barbarous to first readers, but there are always second readers. The KJV certainly offended many at its first appearance, but it has long since acquired the status of a language of its own; for many people, this is the way Biblical texts are expected to talk. It no longer has to establish itself. It does not matter if a word in the Bible (or Shakespeare) is no longer current in everyday English, the *style,* and in many cases the *text,* is literarily current. The same thing (by the way) applies to translations of Chinese poetry, which were labored in the extreme when first attempted, but as translators got a better idea of what they were doing, and as readers got accustomed to how they were doing it, ease of transmission and acceptance increased.

We are not alone.

BRUCE:

Of course, there are problems. Translation is not as easy an art as we might like. Historical presents exist in colloquial English, but they are *very* colloquial, and I have encountered them only in the speech of uneducated persons. Thus the neighbor lady, gossiping with my Mom over coffee of a morning, “So I says to her, I says . . .”  Does it demean the dignity of the translation to make Mark sound like that? Undoubtedly, to modern class sensibilities, it does.

David I:

I think the use of the historical present is growing (at least in the US) as a result of its common use in various ‘reality’ TV shows, e.g. the police relating the details of an investigation. This may be a deliberate attempt to give more ‘immediacy’ to the tale.

David Inglis, Lafayette, CA, 94549, USA

BRUCE:

Of course, there are problems. Translation is not as easy an art as we might like. Historical presents exist in colloquial English, but they are *very* colloquial, and I have encountered them only in the speech of uneducated persons. Thus the neighbor lady, gossiping with my Mom over coffee of a morning, “So I says to her, I says . . .”  Does it demean the dignity of the translation to make Mark sound like that? Undoubtedly, to modern class sensibilities, it does.

David I:

I think the use of the historical present is growing (at least in the US) as a result of its common use in various ‘reality̵ 7; TV shows, e.g. the police relating the details of an investigation. This may be a deliberate attempt to give more ‘immediacy’ to the tale.

--

Rev Judy Redman
Ecumenical Chaplaincy Co-ordinator
Charles Sturt (Mon& Tue); La Trobe (Wed & Thurs)
email: jredman@...; j.redman@...
mobile: 0437 044 579

web: http://borderchaplaincy.wordpress.com (Food for Life - the Blog)

_

To: GThos / GPG

On: Translating Greek Historical Presents

From: Bruce

Judy Redman: I think that when producing a translation for younger people, you would have little difficulty using the historical present, without necessarily sounding uneducated. This is a very common way of telling stories. . . [Judy goes on to retell a Jesus story entirely in the present tense].

Bruce: Right. Unfortunately, this is not what Mark does. He has one historical present in an otherwise past narrative. The Woman of Bethany scene in Mark (more or less Judy’s example) is wholly in past tense, but here is the Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law, Mk 1:29-31, rendered with aspectual accuracy by the ASV people. I put in CAPS the historical present verbs, of which, as it turns out, there is only one:

“And straightway, when they were come out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. [30] Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a fever; and straightway they TELL him of her, [31] and he came and took her by the hand, and raised her up; and the fever left her, and she ministered unto them.”

If we are going with a vividness and immediacy theory, we might expect that the moment of cure would be the place where vividness was most requisite, and where a historical present would be most likely. That is not what Mark does. What DOES Mark do? That question is still unanswered at the present time. What a faithful preservation of Greek historical presents does, in the meanwhile, is to keep that problem visible to those reading Mark that way, in Greek or any other language, and so accumulate impressions that may one day lead to its solution.

I think Judy’s remark about child audiences has other uses too. Children (in my experience as a children’s storyteller) are as a whole much less verbally and substantively pedantic than their elders, much readier to accept the unusual word, or even the unintelligible situation, on its own terms. Or even to relish it specially. Jesus has a remark somewhat of this character, somewhere in the NT. Perhaps he was onto something. I leave that as my suggestion for Christmas Day.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
Warring States Project

University of Massachusetts at Amherst

One helpful thing to keep in mind, while reading Mark for other purposes, is the question: At what points would a kid listener laugh out loud? One place is where the pigs run down into the sea and are drowned: the basic comeuppance situation.  Would anyone like to suggest a second?

Bruce says:

Bruce: Right. Unfortunately, this is not what Mark does. He has one historical present in an otherwise past narrative. The Woman of Bethany scene in Mark (more or less Judy’s example) is whol ly in past tense, but here is the Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-Law, Mk 1:29-31, rendered with aspectual accuracy by the ASV people. I put in CAPS the historical present verbs, of which, as it turns out, there is only one: 

“And straightway, when they were come out of the synagogue, they came into the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. [30] Now Simon's wife's mother lay sick of a fever; and straightway they TELL him of her, [31] and he came and took her by the hand, and raised her up; and the fever left her, and she ministered unto them.”

[Judy:] I would suggest that this is just an aberration in the text.

If we are going with a vividness and immediacy theory, we might expect that the moment of cure would be the place where vividness was most requisite, and where a historical present would be most likely. That is not what Mar k does. What DOES Mark do? That question is still unanswered at the present time. What a faithful preservation of Greek historical presents does, in the meanwhile, is to keep that problem visible to those reading Mark that way, in Greek or any other language, and so accumulate impressions that may one day lead to its solution.

I think Judy’s remark about child audiences has other uses too. Children (in my experience as a children’s storyteller) are as a whole much less verbally and substantively pedantic than their elders, much readier to accept the unusual word, or even the unintelligible situation, on its own terms. Or even to relish it specially. Jesus has a remark somewhat of this character, somewhere in the NT. Perhaps he was onto something. I leave that as my suggestion for Christmas Day.

[Judy:] Bruce, I wasn’t talking about children. I was talking about younger adults. People in their twenties and thirties also tell stories as I was describing. And even those with university qualifications don’t necessarily see this as a problematic way of writing. J

Judy

Jack says:

To: GThomas (GPG)

In Response To: Judy Redman

On: Historical Presents in Mark

From: Bruce

Judy had noted that it is possible to render a whole story in the historical present. I gave the counterexample of Mark’s story of the Healing of Simon’s Mother-in-Law, where there is only one historical present, and all the other verbs are in the narrative past, as we expect them to be.

JUDY: I would suggest that this is just an aberration in the text.

BRUCE: If so, it is a rather recurrent one. Mark’s historical presents are scattered one, or sometimes a few more, to a pericope which is otherwise in the historical past (some pericopes have no presents at all, and are entirely in the historical past). Check the Greek text, and tell me if you find otherwise.

If not, then my previous comment stands. It seems that we have here no mere literary device, such as an “immediacy” gimmick; we have something else. Something that is too consistent, of its own strange type, to be explained as a local authorial or scribal aberration. What is Mark, the supposed author, doing in these fifty-some places? That is the question, and I would be very glad to see someone besides myself take it on, since I have a lot else to do this week.

Anybody have an idea?

Historical presents can be identified from the very careful ASV translation, available here,

http://www.ccel.org/bible/asv/Mark.htm

or from the front matter of any good (meaning, any decently early) commentary on Mark.

Bruce

E Bruce Brooks
University of Massachusetts at Amherst

As for gThos, I have the impression that there are no historical presents in it. Correct?