Digest urth.v022.n001

Michael Straight · 03 Dec 1998, 10:56 · from urth-v0022.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Michael Straight <straight at email.unc.edu>
Subject: Re: (urth) Re: Digest urth.v022.n001
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 1998 10:56:48
Message-ID: <urth-v0022-0014 at digest.urth.net>
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On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Peter T. Cash wrote:

> Of course, we all know that the words of Jesus as recorded in the Latin
> Vulgate are themselves a translation--actually, a translation of a
> translation, since the New Testament was first recorded in Greek...which
> Jesus probably didn't speak either. We know also that even the best
> translation from one language to another risks a loss of nuance. The exact
> choice of words is often problematic--in many cases the translator can
> phrase the text in a number of different ways. Thus, I think it reasonable
> to posit that the Vulgate could easily have translated Christ's words as
> "Terminus est". Heck, it would have been a considerably more elegant
> translation, for my money. The fact that the Vulgate does not use this wo=
rd
> choice does not tell decisively against your suggestion that "Terminus Es=
t"
> can be translated as "It is finished", and your observation that this is =
the
> way Christ's last words are often translated into English.

The problem with this from a Roman Catholic sensibility is that the Church
believes it has a tradition of interpreting the Bible with a better
understanding of what Jesus meant than a 20th century scholar trying to
figure it out by guessing what Aramaic words he might have used.  The
Vulgate was likely trying to capture meanings with "Consumatum Est" that
"Terminus Est" did not carry.

Which is to say, I don't think the way to save this theory is to argue
"The Vulgate got it wrong."  Rather argue that since the English "It is
finished" can mean "It is over," "It is the end," and "It is completed,"
"It is finished" is both a possible translation for "Terminus Est" and the
common English translation of Christ's last words.  So the connection is
there via English (close enough that I can believe Wolfe intended it) and
doesn't need to be traced back via the Vulgate.

-Rostrum

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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