At-One-Ment

They’re doing that with AI now. I know they’re using a lot of the Gen Z slang and everything, so I think it’s so funny when they’ve got Moses, he’s like, “The sea has been split.” And people are like… and he’s like, “I told y’all, trust the process.” And I was like, oh my gosh.

Jesus has mad TikTok rizz, y’all.

We are in the dumbest timeline. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

Rocking and rolling. Just, just out here making the world a groovy place.

And the construction going on next door to you has settled for the—

Settled for the evening? Yes.

They’ve—they’ve been bedded down for the night.

You and I have—have been—have been forced to push our—our recordings to evening, even though you prefer afternoon, because for the foreseeable future there is building.

They’re building a spaceship right next to you or something like that. How high is it reaching? You’ve got the—the foundation has been poured already, yeah? I assume. Okay.

It’s… well, they’re still in the process of pouring, so…

Oh, okay.

It’s… yeah, it’s a—it’s a fascinating thing to watch. It’s one of my favorite shows. I’ve been fascinated to see what—how the construction of a—of a, you know, six- or seven-story apartment building starts. And then it’s also—it’s also very loud and whatever. Anyway, hey, let’s do a show today. One of the things that we’re going to talk about—first we’re going to do a “What’s That?” and this week’s “What’s That?” is a big one. It’s the granddaddy of Christian theology. We’re going to talk about atonement, “at-one-ment.” Oh, man.

For the initiated.

We’ll get into that. We’ll get into that because there’s a… I had a whole thing. And then towards the end—the end of the show—we’re going to talk about translation, and—and we’re going to talk specifically about what it is, like what goes into it. Why is it… what’s the process of translating a scripture? Yeah, because it’s—it’s…

Or many scriptures or all the scriptures.

Sure, sure. Yeah, absolutely. So we’ll get to that in the latter half of the show. But first, “What’s That?” Here’s the thing, as you said, you said “at-one-ment.” Now, I looked at the word “atonement” and seen “at-one-ment” and thought, that’s a funny joke. “At-one-ment”—that. And then I’ve heard… I’ve also heard people say it means “at-one-ment” and I thought, okay, they’re just dumb. And then I… today, in… as I’m prepping for this show, I look it up and the etymology is that it’s “at-one-ment.” Like, that’s the actual etymology of the word. And now I’m furious.

Yeah, it’s… that one was a little on the nose, but yeah, the—the idea is this: the—the idea of reconciliation, satisfaction, reparation of a breach or an injury or something like that. Reconciliation, meaning to re-sit down with.

So, yeah, the idea of atonement is—is that bringing back together and repairing of—of that breach. So, yeah, I always… when, you know, we come from the—the same religious tradition wherein that is a popular way to explain atonement. And I too, when I first started hearing that was like, yeah, that’s not true.

Yeah, that can’t be right. Yeah, I know a lot about language. I’ve studied language. That’s just never how it works. Oh, it is. Okay, fine.

Screw you for judging me. That’s—that’s a deep cut. I don’t know if anybody is going to know where that comes from.

Are you going to give a hint or not?

That comes from a comedy album.

Okay, that’s it.

Just a hint.

That’s the hint. All right.

At the end of the show, if either of us remembers, which we will not…

Happen for sure, but don’t worry, go—go to like, the YouTube comment section or if you’re a patron, go to—go to the comment section of this on Patreon. And maybe—maybe someone will have come up with it.

Or you can at least ask the question, remind us to explain it and—and we’ll pop on. We’ll make… I’ll make Dan pop on and explain it. Anyway, back to atonement or the “at-one-ment.”

What do we let. Maybe we should start by just talking about. What it means, where it’s coming. Yeah. I don’t know. Where does it come from?

Because, yeah, it’s. It’s a translation of mainly a Hebrew word, but also there’s a related Greek word. But you. Because you have in. In like the King James Version, you have mercy seat and you have all these. These other words related to atonement. And you know, let me see. King James Version. And they shall eat those things wherewith the atonement was made to. To consecrate and to sanctify them. But a stranger shall not eat thereof because they are holy. So like, atonement is a word that we find in the Hebrew Bible. And, and there it’s based on a verbal root, kaphar, which can mean in one of the. What’s called a stem to smear with pitch. Oh, okay, so, so the ark, Noah’s ark, what he does to the outside of it is kaphar it with pitch in order to make it waterproof.

Right. Ish. Pitch is like, is like asphalt or tar.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah.

And. But there’s another stem, the Piel, where it is used to mean something like appease or make amends. Put in a state of. And the Piel is what’s called the factitive stem where it means to put something into the state of being X. So put in the state of being, smear with pitch. So, but the, the idea seems to be to cover over breaches.

Seal up.

Right.

Not make sticky.

No, not. Not make sticky. But that figure by figurative extension, it has to do with. With repairing these breaches.

Right.

And so idea seems to be that it is a way for humanity to re-establish, to be reconciled with deity through these offerings and, and all that kind of stuff. And, and there’s a lot that goes into how in ancient Israel and Judah, they understood the nature of this breach, the mechanism for its repair. And, and that whole conceptual framework that makes up what they would have understood as atonement. Now they don’t really talk that much about atonement in the theology of the Hebrew Bible, but once we get to the New Testament, we have, I think, two verses that, that use a word that could be translated atonement.

Okay. Is not many.

Well, yeah, and it depends on your translation as well. So. So we have hilasterion in Romans 3:25 , and that’s translated in the King James Version, propitiation and, and atonement in the NRSVue and. And a lot of other translations. But the idea is the, the place of atonement.

And then I think we have in Hebrews 2:17 , what is the word that we have there? We have hilaskomai which means to pardon or be propitious. So reconciliation is how the King James Version translates it. Atonement in the NRSVue. So they’re kind of somewhat related in the Greek. But the, the idea of atonement is really a framework for understanding this reconciliation that is achieved that in the New Testament is achieved by Jesus. And I think this is one of the reasons it’s critical to understand that the, the Bible is not univocal. And within cognitive linguistics, we talk a lot about metaphor theory because most language is metaphorical. There’s an argument to make that all language is metaphorical, but in a general sense most language is metaphorical because what we’re generally doing is trying to communicate in the most efficient and effective way possible.

And a lot of times we’re trying to communicate about things that are rather abstract. And so we commonly use more concrete metaphors as analogies in order to communicate more efficiently and effectively about abstract things. So we will, we can plot or map certain abstractions against more concrete schema or schemata or schemas if, if you like. And the idea there is to just take something that’s a little more complex and make it a little more easy to understand. So for instance, we talk about temperature going up and down. Temperature doesn’t go up or down. It’s a, it’s a question of molecules vibrating rapidly or more slowly. We map this notion of temperature against a thermometer basically. And you know, the mercury goes up or down and the numbers go up or down.

And so we talk about temperature going up or down. So that’s a way.

I think, I think one of the. It’s interesting that you chose that metaphor specifically because I believe if I. Someone can correct me, but one of the guys who was originally making thermometers.

Oh really?

He had cold numbers at the top and like it got hotter going downward.

Oh really?

And I, I don’t remember quite how that worked. Anyway, it would have—funny, it would have blown all of our minds. And yeah, but yeah, you’re right. Like we think of north as up a lot of the time. And that’s just an arbitrary decision about—or maybe not entirely arbitrary, but there’s no reason why north is up on the earth and south is down, other than perhaps some sociopolitical choices made in order to—

Well, even that relies on, on another image schema. Right is good, down is bad.

Right.

Up is healthy, down is sick. Like there are all kinds of these things and, and when it comes to atonement, this is a complex constellation of ideas. And so what you really want is a way to take this and say, “Think of it like this.” And that’s a way to say all this complexity, we can distill it down to something that’s simple. And so that is your atonement theory. And the problem is every different author of a biblical text was also using their own theory of what was going on. And when they talk about them, they talk about them according to their own idiosyncratic conceptualizations. And so now we’ve got to look at this cacophony of conceptualizations and somehow find a way to harmonize all of it. And so we have different models or theories of atonement. And usually it comes down to what do we want to emphasize and what do we want to kind of push to the back.

I want to. I want to get very basic about sort of the concept that we’re usually talking about when we say the word atonement in this context.

Because what we’re usually talking about is something along the lines of—and maybe you’ll find better words than I am—but something along the lines of humans being reconciled or made at one with God through Jesus in some—through some mechanism that has to do with Jesus.

Yeah. I think if we take as the foundation what it says about Jesus in the Nativity: “You will name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” In what sense does Jesus save people from sins? What is the mechanism? What has sin done to us? How does that affect our relationship with God? And what does Jesus do to repair whatever has gone on there? And one—probably one of the earliest ones, the one that I think is kind of explicitly made in Mark, at least in one of the more idiosyncratic conceptualizations that Mark presents, is the ransom theory: “The Son of Man came to give his life as a ransom for many.” And I think this is probably one of the earliest because we already have the idea of ransom in not only the Hebrew Bible but elsewhere in the New Testament.

But what a lot of—and redemption is associated with ransom, but not redemption in some—

Sort of, like, moral way or something, but like redemption as in literally, I’m redeeming this person this money or this person for the money you’re giving me or something. Like we’re talking literal ransom. Well, or like, like that’s—the metaphor is just like we’re being—someone’s being held hostage.

And then someone else pays, pays, and the hostage is released.

Yes. So to ransom means to buy back. And so the idea is that somebody is at some distance from their people, whoever, whatever the exact nature of their relationship, and they need to pay money to get them back. Now one of the guiding frameworks for the concept of redemption in the Hebrew Bible is enslavement. Like it develops based on the post-exilic notion that the exile was God selling their people to another nation and that other nation’s gods, and then the return from exile was God’s redemption—buying back their slaves from the other nation. So we were sold to the other nation and now we’re being redeemed. God has paid the ransom so that we can come back and we can be enslaved to the benevolent master. So you see this in Deutero-Isaiah quite explicitly that they were sold into slavery.

I’m buying them back, not manumitting them, but buying them back from the wicked slave master so that they can serve the benevolent slave master. And this is—we see this in the New Testament as well. Paul talks about this a lot as well, that you know, you were bought with a price and you have become enslaved to Jesus.

In other words, the ransom was paid to Satan, to the devil. And so the devil was like, here are your people back?

Yeah, this is a, this is, this stems from this idea that somehow the devil was the god was in charge of the world and somehow owned humanity in some way. Right?

Is that sort of the idea?

Yeah, you, you have the, the devil as, as the god of this world in some sense in, in different parts of the Bible. And, and as kind of the, you know, the master of sin and, and, and all that. When you fall into sin and you are subject to death, you are basically subject to the devil. And so, and, and you know, if you, if you extrapolate out the logical end of this framework, it’s like, so God is like here you go so that you can be enslaved to the devil. And then I’m gonna, but you know, I’m gonna redeem this coupon right later on. So go be with the devil for a while. And this was challenged by a lot of folks who were like, do we really want to suggest that Satan has that much power and that this is a transaction right between Jesus and Satan? Where Jesus is like, here is what I owe you. And the devil is like, thank you very much.

There were folks who were like, ah, that’s dumb. And Gregory of Nyssa apparently used the metaphor of a divine bait and switch.

Where Jesus’s humanity was the bait to deceive Satan so that he could be paid back. So.

And it’s. It’s almost the idea of. And I think we’ll encounter this a lot as we. As we talk about the concepts of. Of redemption or of atonement, but it’s like, it’s. It’s like only the divine could actually redeem humans.

And. But somehow I think I. You know, I also was looking at a little bit from Gregory of Nyssa. And. And the explanation that I read about was basically just that sort of he’s. Jesus sneaks divinity into, you know, in. Into Satan’s realm. And that is. And it’s like the bait and switch is Satan thinks he’s getting the best of the mortals. And then Jesus is like, psych, I’m actually divine. I’m out. And.

Bit of a Trojan horse.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It’s like, oh, no, don’t take me. Gotcha.

You released all of the other humans for nothing. Idiot.

Makes me think of. Do you remember the Steven Seagal movie? I want to say. Was it Under Siege where he was on the train?

No, Under Siege was on the.

No, that’s on the submarine. Yeah. What was it where he was. The guy was a. He was on the train. Oh, gosh. I can’t remember what it is, but there’s a porter who is like, you know, one of the goofy sidekicks for Steven Seagal in the movie. And at the end, he’s got a gun and the bad guy confronts him and he’s like, what’s in your pocket? He’s like, I don’t have anything in my pocket. Shut your ass. And then pulls out his gun and shoots him.

Oh, man. Now you just gave this episode a PG13 rating. I hope you’re satisfied. I hope you’re happy.

I’d like to think that’s kind of the. The lowest common denominator of. Of our show, but.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So. So there’s. There’s the. The. The ransom view. And that was actually held for quite a long time. That was kind of the, the theological idea of the atonement, that made an

awful lot of sense to people because they were surrounded by a world where, you know, you had enslaved folks who would get sold and bought back like it was. It was in the air enough that made it a very cognitively cheap, efficient way to communicate about this. And this is a period when most Christians are probably not as philosophically sophisticated and a lot of these other theories start to develop as philosophical and theological sophistication begins to, to ramp up.

And so particularly in the medieval and Reformation period. So I think the Ransom theory was, was probably just one of the easier things for everybody to, to gain some purchase on, get a grip on.

Yeah, look, I read a bunch of things, but the framework that, that worked well for me. There was an article on Medium by a guy named Andrew Springer. And, and it seemed like a good way of looking at it. Anyways, the next thing he has is the medieval view, Christ as substitute, as written by Anselm of Canterbury.

I think there’s another one that I think we should talk about, which is a slight variation. Well, it’s the Anselmian one, I think is. Is related, called Christus Victor. And I think that name is something that was given much later to. To this idea, but it’s related to the Ransom Theory. And the idea is basically that it’s kind of leaning into the notion that Jesus got one over on Satan. This is Christ as Victor over the powers of sin and death and the devil. And so this is all about him just enabling humanity to participate in the divine life because he was the one who won the goal.

Well, I had seen the, this Christus Victor idea, but the article that I was looking at had it. And as sort of this Swedish theologian talking about it in the 1930s. You’re saying it’s an older idea than that?

Well, I think he tries to make the case that this is a better way to frame the theory as it was understood by the Ransom Theory. Yeah, by folks like Irenaeus and Athanasius. So I think he’s saying we shouldn’t call them ransomists or whatever. We should. We should say it’s a little closer to this since they were talking about this idea of, of Jesus’s victory over sin and death. So, so because, because these theories, a lot of times it’s, it’s not like they were consciously saying, you know, I’m a proponent of the ransom theory back in, you know, the 4th century CE. I think it’s how we characterize what they’re doing up until much, much more recently. So. So, yeah. Whether or not they would have distinguished the ransom theory from the Christus Victor theory, I. I don’t know we can say for sure, but that’s one of the models that has been proposed for how to understand.

Those early theories.

Okay, let’s get on to sort of substitutionary theory, which, which is the one that comes out of Saint Anselm of Canterbury and maybe other sources.

Yes. So this is 11th century, I think, served as. He was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109 when he died.

But, yeah, I. I have seen it referred to as the satisfaction theory. And so I think the idea is that Jesus backhands you with a glove and demands satisfaction from you, sir, and.

I will have satisfaction.

Demand satisfaction. Yeah. And the idea here is that Jesus’s death satisfies the demands of God’s justice. So if you want to look at it legalistically or in some way, human sin has. Has offended his sensitivities. They are repaired, they’re satisfied by Jesus’s death. And then there’s a. There’s. Yeah, and. And this relates to the next theory that comes up once we get into the Reformation, but.

Right. But it seems, just because I, like, I’m going to be very open and honest with all of our listeners, having done a. Quite a bit of reading about this throughout my life, but also, just in preparation for this segment, I. I have never felt like I understood what the hell we’re talking about. Like, I’ve never felt like I had a decent understanding of what is what. You know, there’s this sense that something is owed or some, you know, there is a debt to be paid. And I don’t know what that means in terms of sin, because to my mind, you know, the greatest sins are things like murder or whatever, and that is a sin against another person. So I very much understand if I steal something from you, I have created a disparity between you and me. And so somehow there is a debt there. And maybe, you know, because I’ve hurt you more than just the thing that I took, it’s a greater debt than just, you know, if I take $20 from you, but you needed that $20 for a thing like the whole thing.

I understand a debt that I owe you. If I kill someone, I understand that some reciprocity makes sense between me and that person’s family or that person themselves, even though they’re dead, I don’t know. But this is so much bigger than that. This is a thing between us and God. And I still really struggle to understand what that is and where. And is there, is there a framework in the Bible that helps us understand this or is this all post-biblical discussion?

I think you have, you certainly have different ideas about what sin does to people socially and, but I think what you’ve, what you’ve probably got is a way to try to offload the problem to something that is transcendent and to say this is God telling us this. This is not our understanding of how we can get along best as a society. This is, this is God telling us this. And obviously ultimately it is just people speaking on behalf of God—people coming up with their own ways to do this. But then once you get into, you know, the Persian period and you’ve got the problem of evil becoming a big question. And people are wondering, why do good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people? And then you develop this notion that, you know, all of the accounts will be squared in the afterlife, whether that means reward or punishment.

Then you’re kind of creating this alternative reality where all of this is ultimately being controlled and where all of this will ultimately be resolved. And so I think it’s that creation of these alternate realities that is kind of the fulcrum of all of this. We’ve created these realities, we’re passing them on to the rising generations. They’ve got to deal with them in ever-changing circumstances. And cumulatively they’re just adding more and more to these alternate realities. And I think the people just start thinking in more general terms about how to unify all of this, how to make this all make sense in a way that works out best for the people who are doing what we determine they’re supposed to be doing. Because in pre-exilic Israel and even to some degree with like the Sadducees and in Job and things like that, it’s kind of like, hey, you know, to quote the great poet, “happens,” and you’re just serving God so that you know you’ll have good things happen to you in life maybe, and then that’s it and then that’s the end of things.

Yeah, but once once we project everything into these alternate realities, I think that makes for a larger scene and a larger backdrop. And now we’ve got to fill that with… we’ve got to unify that with everything that’s going on here. And yeah, people have to just, you know, they’re reading the scriptures and they’re interpreting it in ways that make the text of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament meaningful and useful to them and they’re just coming up with different frameworks for unifying it all. Yeah.

I mean, I guess there’s this idea that somehow our sin separates us from God.

Right.

And so somehow we need something, some mechanism to at-one us with God. Okay. So the substitutionary… we need to get back into. We’re not going to get through this thing if we’re not careful.

The substitutionary… we’ve always taken a bigger bite than we could

chew. Yeah.

This is, this, we could just go on and on forever. And neither of us is a theologian, so that’s a tricky thing as well. But the substitutionary thing is basically somehow, and correct me if I’m wrong, it’s something like Jesus was able to satisfy in some way the debt that our sin accumulated to God.

Yeah. Whether, whether you understand it in a legalistic sense or in an honor-shame sense, that’s one way people understand it as well. What Jesus does is Jesus is the substitute for what we owed. So Jesus steps in and takes the place of the debt that we cannot pay. Which leads us in the Reformation period to penal substitution theory and whatnot.

Oh my gosh, my brain immediately jumps to penile. No, penal.

Well, my, my brain jumps to what league you’ve been playing in—California Penal Code—so that’s major league. But this is the idea that it is the punishment that Jesus takes on in place of us, satisfying God’s wrath and justice. So it’s not just separation. It’s not just like God’s like, “Oh, I miss those guys.” It’s that God is like, “I’m coming for you because of what you did.” And Jesus steps in the way and takes the punishment. Penal substitution is the idea.

So like the oldest child who doesn’t let dad beat his younger siblings or something.

Something like that. Yes. And they have… We talked about Romans 3:25 . God presented Christ as a propitiation, which could be the idea of the substitute for the target of God’s wrath. “He was pierced for our transgressions” is Isaiah 53 , according to a Christological interpretation of that passage that originally had nothing to do with any future Messiah.

They’d be Calvinists. And.

No, because, because ultimately what folks like Calvin were doing is looking at the whole of the text and trying to, trying to unify it all. And of course, you have to give priority and preference to certain passages and you have to subordinate others. But ultimately, like, Paul, Paul was—didn’t really care about any of the other things that, that folks were saying. Paul was going to be Paul. And you know, the Pastoral Epistles and Colossians and Ephesians and maybe Second Thessalonians, they weren’t even Paul. So.

Right.

But, but yeah, it would be interesting to, to be able to talk to those folks and be like, if you could just break it down.

Yeah, just settle a bet for me.

Yeah. So. But penal substitution theory is, yeah, very Calvinistic, where God’s wrath plays a central role in this and, and this.

So, so yeah, this now we’re getting very much rather than a sort of idea of, of God’s honor being reconciled. It’s, it’s—it’s that there is a, like you said, a legalistic idea here where the, you know, a—an infraction has been committed. There are—there’s a set sentence for, for that infraction. And, and rather than us having to do that, Jesus somehow stepped in and, yeah, and—and I don’t, I, again, I don’t know what the mechanism is. Like, what Jesus—

Well, I guess it’s a death on the cross.

Yeah, but other people died on the cross and it didn’t do anything. So I don’t—so that doesn’t mean that—that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Well, his, his death was probably amplified.

It was special. It was special.

Yes. God was like, “we’re gonna—this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it’s gonna hurt me.” And that’s kind of the point. Now I’m quoting a Batman comic book.

There you go.

When, when Joker kills Robin, beats him to death with a crowbar, he says, this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts.

Joker kills Robin.

Spoiler alert.

Oh, God. This is from, like the, like, what, 89 or 90, 91, something like that. This is.

I’ve never, I’ve never read a comic book in my life.

Oh, gosh.

I know.

I’m leaving for Comic Con tomorrow.

I’m a heretic in all of the ways, Dan, I understand.

But, but we have even more.

Oh, okay.

But wait, there’s more.

Don’t stop now.

Yeah, tell them what else they get, Dan.

Yeah, they get Christ as, as an example, as a, as a moral influence.

Yes, the moral influence theory. I was about to say moral influencer theory, just, just to be fun, but sure, yeah.

Jesus on his TikTok like, “hey, Christian gang.”

Oh gosh, they’re doing that with AI now.

I know.

Oh gosh. And, and it is so bizarre to see, you know, the, the one—I, I—because they’re using a lot of the Gen Z slang and everything. So I, I think it’s so funny when they’ve got—no, not Noah. Moses. He’s like, the, the sea has been split and people like, “oh.” And he’s like, “I told y’all, trust the process.” And I was like, oh my gosh.

Jesus has mad TikTok rizz, y’all.

We are in the dumbest timeline.

Anyway. Talk about the moral influence thing.

Yes. So the idea here is that Jesus’s death demonstrates God’s love and this inspires humanity to repent and to live morally. So the main deliverable is this inspiration, this moral influence on humanity. So it is less about satisfying divine justice or wrath or paying the ransom, and more about offering a catalyst for the transformation of the hearts of humanity.

Okay, so I ask a question about that.

No. Yes, you may.

I guess my question is just when can it kick in ever, please? Because I would very much like for. Look, I’m very happy for Jesus’s atonement to mean that everyone sort of takes his example and acts nice to each other. Yeah, just anytime. Just kick it in. Yeah, anytime. Now.

These days you have. We are just a couple of days removed from another one of those. Oh, shoot, now I, I don’t even remember the organization. Jubilee. One of the, the Jubilee things with Mariya Hussain where you had people who were up there like, “Yes, I’m a fascist. I’m 100%.”

And, and they’re like, “I’m Catholic,” and oh my. And then you’ve got Royce White, who got fired, and now he’s raising money on some GoFundMe-like place. And a bunch of people are like, “We got to support our own.” And it’s like, your own what?

Yeah, if that’s your own, you’re in trouble.

Yeah. And so bad to the degree that the third commandment means you are a representative of Jesus and don’t do stupid stuff while you are bearing his name. There’s an awful lot of commandment breaking going on these days. So, so yeah, that’s, that’s probably a strike against the moral influence theory.

I mean, we had the WWJD bracelets for a while.

But that didn’t stick.

Didn’t seem to make it. Didn’t seem to move the needle much. No.

All right. Well, and that kind of brings us up to today. Those are sort of the main theories that we’ve had thus far, it seems. I’m, I’m still a little mystified, I’m gonna be honest. You haven’t gotten me there. So, just in terms of, like, understanding. Well, I mean, I understand what each of these theories is. I just don’t understand what we’re talking about.

Well, we didn’t even get to governmental theory.

Or the scapegoat theory, which is the idea, it’s the mimetic theory, Rene Girard, based on his anthropological insights. The idea is that Christ’s death exposes and breaks the cycle of scapegoating violence in human societies. So as the innocent victim, he reveals the injustice of scapegoating.

And isn’t he literally, in this case, a scapegoat?

Scapegoat. I didn’t come up with the theory. I’m just pointing out there are other theories out there. So. Okay, well, and then the governmental theory is basically like, there’s this bureaucracy of righteousness and morality, and this is just part of the process. Yeah.

So I, I admit to being quite mystified by theologies in general. They, they all feel like they break down fairly quickly and easily when pressed even slightly.

Yeah. Which, which, you know, I, I think it makes a lot of the folks out there who are so convinced that their particular approach is right. It’s like once, you know, once you get into atonement theory, you see very quickly that you’ve got a lot of ground to cover. Yeah. And it’s not looking good there.

Okay, well, as is our tradition here on the show, I feel that we have not made anything better nor have we explicated this in any real way that’s helpful.

So we’ve muddied the water and now we’re going to scurry away.

Now we scurry away. So let’s move on to our next segment, Lost in Translation. And today’s Lost in Translation, we’re literally talking about translation. And I think a lot of the problems with people getting in trouble with the Bible happens when people believe that their interpretation isn’t an interpretation, but is rather actually just what the Bible says.

And that’s, you know, your book talks about this at length about “the Bible doesn’t say anything.” But that’s a tricky thing to explain in a short amount of time. But what we’re talking about is just sort of the Bible is, you know, the authors of the Bible were trying to transmit meaning to other people in the form of written language, and not everybody. And so, yeah, there’s the problem of just like, just that I write words and then you read them in the same language and hope.

Oh, yeah. I mean, nobody’s ever been on a family text chain where they understood what everybody else was saying at all times.

Right.

I’ve got, I’ve got family in-laws that I know I’m not going to understand their text. Like, I hear the ding and I see the face come up and I’m like, here we go. I don’t know what they’re going to say. So, yeah, there’s even people who, you know, people go to therapy to figure out how to learn to communicate in ways that, that their spouse can understand. Not that I’ve done that, but no, spoiler, I have done that.

Right, Exactly.

Yes. So. But a lot of people don’t understand the role of translation and what’s going on because there are a bunch of decisions that have been made before you even get to a Bible that you can open and read. Yeah. And I just wanted to briefly go over some of the process of, of translating the Bible and, and I was talking with you, Dan, prior to hitting record about how we could talk about what I was involved in, which is translating the Bible into other languages that either don’t have a lot of translations or don’t have any translations at all of the Bible, but we also have Bible translations into languages that have a lot of translations. And, you know, the one that most of us, if you’re listening to this show, have some grasp of is English.

Right.

And you know, We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of translations of the Bible into English. And the process of creating one of those is very different most of the time from the process of, of creating a Bible into. I, I said Nivacle, when I was giving you an example, and you were like, Niva what? Which is a, a language that also, I think probably more commonly in previous generations was referred to as Chulupi. But that’s, that’s.

I like both of those names. Those are, yeah, that’s, those are my two favorite languages and they’re the same language.

When you get to say names of languages like that, I mean, it’s a fun job. But that’s a language that’s spoken in some of the grasslands of the area around Uruguay and Argentina and Paraguay. So. But anyway, there are a bunch of decisions that have to be made before even a translator decides how to translate a passage as well, because they need a source text. And so the first step for if you’re going to sit down and say I’m going to translate the Bible, which oddly enough is something that I have done, it’s a long process. But when you sit down to do that, you need a source text. And there are a handful of different ways that you can go about that. If you want to do as little work as possible, then you can just go find yourself a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible and a critical edition of the Greek New Testament.

And then you have what is widely considered an acceptable base text, an acceptable source text.

Maybe talk, tell me what is a critical edition? What, what separates a critical edition from a non-critical. One of them’s like, I don’t like what you’re wearing.

So a critical edition means that it’s the kind of edition that a scholar could use to translate the Bible, but it’s generally going to contain what’s called a critical apparatus. And this is where editors will go through and they will provide significant variant readings in the footnotes. And some people who don’t know a ton about the Bible, if they flip through a critical edition and see that there are variant readings in virtually every verse of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament that might spook them a little bit. Yeah, but that the, these critical editions, there are also two different kinds of critical editions. We can, we can broadly distinguish what’s called an eclectic edition from a diplomatic edition. And so the Hebrew Bible, mostly scholars use a diplomatic edition. And what that means is it is reproducing a single ancient manuscript. And then you, you just deal with it from there. And so for the Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex from about 1008 CE is generally considered your starting point.

And so a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, like the BHS or, or the, something like that is going to be reproducing the text of the Leningrad Codex. Exactly.

I feel like a lot of our listeners were just sort of had their minds blown by the number. By the fact that it was a thousand years after Jesus and that’s the earliest text. Or that’s, or that’s, or that’s the text that people are using.

Like that’s, yes, that’s the earliest complete manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible in Hebrew.

Right. And the Hebrew Bible. So, and if that’s the case, then we’re talking it’s almost 2,000 years after what, when some of that Hebrew Bible was meant to have been written, right?

Yeah, very small fragments of it. But, but yeah, it’s, it’s pretty recent. And so scholars who are going to translate the Hebrew Bible are going to compare what they’re seeing to earlier editions. So one of the, one of the main things they’re going to compare to is what’s known as the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, because we have manuscripts that contain pretty much the entire Hebrew Bible in Greek translation that go back to around 325, 375, 400 CE. So we can, we can move back, you know, 6ish centuries if we just look in a Greek translation.

But, but it’s already been translated.

Right. And so there, when you see differences between the Leningrad Codex and the Septuagint, you’ve got to figure, well, is this because the translator may be interpreting it in a weird way, or if it’s a result of their source text reading differently in Hebrew? And so you have this continuum from what they call translator exegesis all the way to variant source text and what is most likely there. And there are a lot of times when people will say, I, I think the Septuagint had a different Hebrew source text, and I think that Hebrew source text is probably more original than what is in the Leningrad Codex. And so you might decide, I’m going to translate what’s in the Septuagint rather than what’s in the Leningrad Codex, or you might go to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are even earlier than most manuscripts of the Septuagint, and point to some things in there. And there are a lot of places where scholars are in widespread agreement this preserves an earlier reading than what’s in the Leningrad Codex.

So if you’re translating the Hebrew Bible, you have to grapple with these variant readings from earlier manuscripts, right? So you have to be a bit of a text critic. In fact, the Jewish Study Bible and the JPS Tanakh, so the English translation of the Hebrew Bible that is prepared by the Jewish Publication Society, as a rule, they are basing their text on the Leningrad Codex on the traditional Masoretic Text. However, there are a bunch of places where you just can’t make sense of it, where the Hebrew just doesn’t make sense or we can tell that something has been lost. So even though it is a rule that they’re supposed to stick with the Masoretic Text, the Leningrad Codex, you find a bunch of footnotes where they’re like, we don’t know, but the Septuagint says this. And so there is some punting to the Septuagint that takes place. And so even if you’re just translating the Hebrew Bible, you have to be a bit of a text critic.

And I don’t think you can make your way through the entire Hebrew Bible without giving priority to a Dead Sea scroll manuscript or a Septuagint manuscript or something like that here and there. So. So that’s part of what goes into just getting the source text. Now, okay, that’s a diplomatic edition. Then you’ve got what’s called the eclectic edition. And the eclectic edition is where you don’t have a single manuscript. You’re going to cobble one together. You basically go through verse by verse and decide what manuscript reading is most likely what was written here. And we’re going to use that. And that usually means you are cobbling together a Greek New Testament from 200 different manuscripts. And, you know, some of those manuscripts may account for 70% of what you have. Some of those manuscripts may account for one word of the New Testament. But this is why we need to be aware of all the thousands of manuscripts that are out there.

So when you get a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, this is an eclectic edition for the most part. You know, you, you do have people who will translate into English, you know, Codex Sinaiticus or something like that, right, where they will use the Septuagint as their diplomatic source. But for the most part, it is a critical edition which is cobbled together from all these different manuscripts. And they keep coming out with new editions. The kind of, most authoritative ones are the United Bible Societies, which I think they’re. I, I think they might be in their fifth edition. I’m pretty sure they are. And then you’ve got the Nestle Aland, which is in its 28th edition. And so every time they have gone back over the manuscripts and been like, we now think that this preposition is right and this prep.

Right.

But if you’re doing the New Testament, that’s what you’re translating. And that critical edition does not match any existing manuscript anywhere. So I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear that when we look at an English translation of the New Testament, that is a Frankenstein’s monster of manuscripts of the New Testament.

So, but, yeah, that’s what you. And, and if you just reach for one of those to, to translate the New Testament, you could go all the way through and, and just rely on what the editors have, have given you. But you have a lot of folks who will go through and be like, you know what? I like this reading better over here for this particular passage. And usually, you know, translators, they don’t have to, like, for most, most translations, they don’t have to make a case for why they gave preference to this reading over and against that one. But if they’re translating for a group like for the United Bible Societies or something like that, they usually have to provide translator notes. So if they deviate from a given critical edition of the New Testament, they’ve usually got to defend their decision to whatever group is overseeing their translation. So that’s just getting the source text. That’s before you ever set finger to key, right? You, you have to get a source text that you’re going to translate.

So, so step one is figure out what your source text is going to be.

Yeah, it’s. So it’s so much more complicated than just taking, you know, Harry Potter and figuring out how to make it Turkish. Like, like, like, it’s, it’s as if 200 people wrote Harry Potter and then 8,000 people rewrote it. But, like, may have added their own thing. And yeah, it’s. Wow, it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

And, and then you’ve got to get into interpreting it. And that’s where translators, most translators have a good background in biblical studies. They’re aware of the controversies, at least a good number of them. They’re aware of the traditional readings. They will rely on resources. Usually translators will compare, you know, they’ll have all different kinds of translations up to see how it has been done in the past. And there may be a, there’s usually going to be one or, or a few that they like, that they’re going to kind of give preference to, but they will also often use other translator resources like a translator handbook or something like that. And, and these will be kind of like commentaries, but commentaries intended to aid specifically the translation of the Bible. So there, there are different groups out there that publish translator handbooks on John, on Matthew, on Obadiah, on Haggai.

And so a translator will get one of those. And, and every verse they will, they may or may not consult this. And, and usually it’s going to be where they run into some. Something sticky where they’re like, oh, well, I thought this was going this way, but I looked at these translations. They have something entirely different. What am I to make of this? And so you want to go get a sense of where the, the controversy lies and then how you’re going to solve that. If you’re responsible with what you’re doing, a lot of folks will just blaze on through and, and, but the better translations are going to seriously engage with the conversation that is out there. So, for instance, Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible is a very literary translation. He’s, he’s a literary scholar. And so you’ve got a lot of discussion of the different options and why he’s giving preference to one option over another. And he even published alongside of his translation a book called The Art of Bible Translation, where he discusses his methodology and why he, you know, answered certain concerns the way he did.

Yeah, because there’s, there’s, there are like a lot of the concerns. You could think, okay, well, I just translate it word for word, and then we were done. But that’s the worst idea because there are, there are idioms and there are, there are ideas being transmitted in a way, and they’re being transmitted to, to people in a context that doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah, absolutely. And then that’s, it’s, it’s a huge challenge. And this is, there’s a famous example of they were trying to do a translation into a First Nations group up in Canada, I think. I don’t remember the name of the particular people group, but they, they were trying to translate Lamb of God and these people didn’t really know what a lamb was.

Right.

And they didn’t, I don’t know that they had a word for lamb. And so the, the translators were, tried to get an understanding of how are, how are we going to communicate this idea to this culture based on the very specific and, and comparatively limited kind of cultural domains that they were familiar with. And what they went with was… and, and I think to the degree they may have understood a lamb, they thought of it as a pet, right, or more than something that would be slaughtered or sacrificed. And they—the translators—decided that seal was closer to… to how they understood, yeah, what they… or closer to… to what they wanted them to understand.

As cute animal metaphors go. Sure.

So that I don’t remember… I wish I remembered when exactly this was. It was a bit ago. And, and what language it was. But the idea was… or the idea was Seal of God.

There you go.

Yeah. And there’s a… there’s another example of an African language, tribal language where there was something about one’s heart being full. I don’t remember where the passage is. I think it’s somewhere in Paul. But filling up somebody’s heart or something like that. And in their culture, to have a full heart was to be greedy and selfish. You’re hoarding everything for yourself, and so your heart gets fat. And so they didn’t want to do that. That would have given the wrong idea. And so they actually reversed it. And they… they talked about your heart shriveling.

In the translation because that meant you were giving of yourself. You cared so much about everybody around you that you just wanted to give, and that caused your heart to… to shrivel.

Interesting.

When… when you look into how the Bible gets translated into different cultures, into different languages, into different circumstances, it’s just so fascinating what translators have to do to try to connect all these dots. And if you’ve never translated a text as long as the Bible, it’s thousands and thousands and thousands of dots that you have to connect and you have to try to be as thoughtful and as critical as possible with every last one of them, and it becomes phenomenally complex.

Yeah. It sounds almost infinitely complex. Like it can be… it’s not really a thing you can do.

Yeah. No.

Can we just admit that you can’t actually translate the Bible? It’s not really possible.

It’s… it’s impossible. Like, there’s a… there’s a… another school of thought that talks about how the… the only accurate translation would just be to reproduce the source text.

Just like, you know, run it through a copier. There you go. Because the instant that you are translating it, you’re changing it. Because there are no two languages that have exact isometric one to one matches for every possible conceptual unit. Yeah. It’s just not.

We can’t know. I mean, you talked about the Lamb of God thing and you mentioned sacrifice and I realized that my contextual context, context for a lamb is it’s just a cute little baby sheep. And I don’t even think about it… it being… it being sacrificed. I might think of it being slaughtered for food, but it means something different for it to have been sacrificed in a sort of ritualistic way. And that’s something that our culture has no context for.

Yeah, yeah, it’s…

There’s so much. You know, it’s funny, I… in… when I was gearing up for this conversation, I ran a bunch of quotes through online translators sort of… and sort of played a game of operator where I would take it, you know, to… to German and then to Hebrew and then to Lithuanian and then back to English or whatever.

Yeah. To see what kind of nonsense comes out the other side.

And I wanted to do just regular things. And here’s the thing. Some of these now, now they’re AI sort of run a little bit or they’re, you know, they’re… so some of them, if you put in a… a famous quote, it just translates it back to the famous quote. It knows the quote and just feeds that back to you. So, yeah, okay, you’ve defeated the purpose.

That’s why you can’t really do the Bible, because they’ll just give you the King James Version or something.

Right, right. Yeah, exactly. I tried to do it with the Bible and it just came back. I tried to do it with John 3:16 and I ran it through all these different things and then it came back and it was just like, exactly.

Right. Yeah.

And what it came back as was life is what happens when you make plans. And that’s literally the opposite meaning.

Yeah, but it, but I.

One can understand like why the idiom was missed, why the idiom of that quote, the sort of the, the tongue in cheek gesture of the quote was missed in the translating it through all these different things. Because. Yeah, because a lot of care is taken. A machine doesn’t know how to take that care with transmitting meaning along with language.

Yeah yeah, there’s, there’s connotation and there’s denotation and the connotation is, is where a lot of the nuance is, but the connotation is, is often where we load up our intent and particularly with idioms and things like that, where we assume that language is just A plus B plus C. And a lot of, particularly with idioms it is A plus B equals S. And you know, you can’t, you can’t really teach a machine that. You can, you can have it experience that and in some way that’s kind of trying to replicate how humans learn language. But yeah, there’s, there’s a degree to which that’s just not going to work. And, and yeah, that in, in the world of Bible translation, particularly in new languages where you either only have a few translations or you don’t have any translations, machine translation is a huge deal. They’re, they’re trying to do machine translation, but the, the idea isn’t just feed it into a machine and there you got your translation.

It’s do that and then go have experts comb through it and figure out where they’ve. They have misunderstood or something like that. And, and you go back and forth between experts comparing the source text to the target text and then a general readership who is checking it for how readable and natural it sounds. And you go through like multiple phases of, of these reviews to try to take what the machine has given you and, and either improve it on your own or after each cycle feed it back into the machine to get back something else. And, and the intent there is just to cut down the, the time of the translation from, you know, 10 years down to two years or maybe even one or something like that. So if, if that’s what you’re doing, you’re on the lookout for machine translation as something a lot of people are trying to make work more effectively.

And although the problem is that, I mean, you know, famously Robert Frost, I think it was said that poetry is what’s lost in translation. And, and I think machine translation would, would quintuple that effect like. So there you go. Just to honor him, I actually translated. I did my translation operator trick with a, with Robert Frost’s most famous poem, the Road Less Traveled one, the Road Not Taken. Yes. Maybe I’ll, maybe I’ll close this out by reading the multiply translated last stanza of his thing, which is close to what he originally wrote but not quite there. So the translated and then retranslated version goes. I will tell this with a sigh. Somewhere, hundreds of years from now, two roads diverged in a forest and I, I chose the one less traveled by.

And that changed everything. If you know the poem, you know it’s wrong. But there you go once again. Thanks so much for that. That was a. I, I think it’s just good. I think, I think the good conclusion is just you. Yeah. The Bible is not, is not something that we can look at as an infallible book because we don’t even know what the book is.

Yeah. There’s no single Bible.

Right.

There are Bibles.

Right. All right. Well, thank you so much, listeners for checking in with us. If you’d like to become a part of making this show go and in return receive an early and ad free version of the show, potentially get the bonus content that we do every week, go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you’d like to write into us, it’s contact@dataoverdogmapod.com. Dot com is what I’m trying to say. Thanks so much to Reed Gowdy for editing the show, especially this week, and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

At-One-Ment

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology