Just thinking

Wore myself out yesterday, yet everything looks about the same. I think it was Friday, tugging at that rug. Got a crick in my neck, and it took a while to recover.

A few thoughts on the Bible: It seems to me that some of the new "translations" of the Bible are more like paraphrases, or putting the verses into what the "translators" think are clearer terms, so that children and dummies like me can understand them. The trouble, it seems to me, is that each paraphrase may really get a little bit further away from the original meaning. Maybe we can't know precisely what was intended to start with. Translating from the original scripts probably got one step away from what was intended, in some cases. As some scholars have pointed out, one word in an ancient language can have different meanings and associations, and choosing differently from what the original speaker or writer intended, can be misleading and even more confusing.

As an example: I heard one preacher comment on the Bible verse that said Jesus "had not where to lay his head." Au contraire, said the preacher, Jesus was affluent and owned a lot of houses. The verse simply meant that the disciples hadn't found or fixed up the place for Him to sleep that night. This same preacher said that when Jesus told the young man to "sell what you have and give to the poor and follow me," that He only meant for the rich young man to keep on selling his products and contributing to the poor, and to follow Jesus's teachings.

So the more you "tranlate and simplify," the less certain you are of the original meaning. I think that's why a lot of scholars, especially in bygone times, preferred to read classic writings in the untranslated versions.

Saint Jerome was close to the true meaning of the scriptures he translated. Wycliffe was farther away, but closer than we are. The men who put together the "King James" version were still farther away, but they were much closer than nineteenth- and twentieth-century "translators," and they largely agreed on what they wrote down. And seventeenth-century English is not impossible to read and understand with a good dictionary at hand.

Anyway, that's what I think right now.