...there’d
be some changes made. I would start by entirely omitting the Old Testament. I
think two thousand years of trying to construe patriarchalism as spirituality
has been enough. Look what it has done for us, or done to us...
But then. The New. To begin with, I would
delete practically all of the first two Gospels. I would make an exception for
Chapters Five, Six, and Seven of Matthew so as to get the Sermon on the Mount,
the Beatitudes, and the Lord’s Prayer. (And why is the Lord’s Prayer so
specifically important? My reference on this is a line from the philosopher Max Scheler: ‘God was not a father till Jesus called him one.’)
Of Luke’s Gospel, I would keep the beginning and the end,
those being the sections which emphasize the primary role of women in the
Salvation process.
Of John, the most or the only philosophical gospel, I would
need to make a more extensive selection. It would certainly include the
beginning of the first Chapter – but not without retranslating the
all-important first sentence.
The traditional version, so well known that it is used and
misused in all sorts of totally secular writings and contexts, is ‘In the
beginning was the word.’ I do not have a scholar’s or even a good knowledge
of Greek, but I have studied this passage
sufficiently to know that ‘word’ here is way wrong. It is one of the most
influentially misleading translations ever made. Whatever exactly the Greek logos means here – and it can have many
meanings – it certainly cannot be just ‘word’ in anything like the ordinary sense.[1]
My own version of that passage, the so-called Prologue, is
this:
In the beginning was the sense
and the sense was of God,
bespeaking God from ever.
All things have become of that;
nothing not of that becomes.
And the sense is
alive:
its life is the light of the human,
breaking the hold that the darkness would have had.
The true light comes into the world
with every one of us,
comes upon its world
that was not aware
before:
the sense becoming
human,
dwelling where we
are.
Going on with John, I would maintain
Chapters 15 and 17. By doing so, I would preserve the key passages about the
relativity or transcendability of the human person – its ability to morph and
merge, hence transcend, in resonance with another person or persons.
But
there are other chapters of John that I would also include – 4, 6, 8, 13, and
18, so as to include Jesus’ famous (or infamous) predicateless ‘I am’ sayings.
I wonder if I could resist the temptation to retranslate them so as to sound
even more as if they applied not only to Jesus but to every one of us who says ‘I
am.’
But
then it would seem strange to exclude the other ‘I am’ sayings, so I suppose I
would have to add Chapters 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 19. And would it then
make much sense, having put in 16 of the 21 chapters of John, to leave out the
other five? So, I guess I would maintain all of John.
If
you are now wondering ‘if you substantially leave out three of the four
Gospels, why do you still call it The New Testament at all?’...I’ll just tell
you the answer straight out. I do not believe the essential import of the New
Testament really comes out in the so-called ‘story of Jesus’ or Synoptic
Gospels (i.e. the first three). For me, it is in what comes after: in parts of
John, in that thrilling and I think quite believable story we call the Acts of
the Apostles, and in the superb, ever-haunting, humanly plausible Letters of
Paul.
I
know that in many people’s minds, Paul is the great perverter (or great pervert
– ‘didn’t he have something against sex?’) – the one who distorted a supposedly
pure-and-pristine ‘real’ Christianity into an alien philosophy. To me, he is the
one who made Christianity worth more than passing attention, more than the
world’s so-manieth system of unworkable moral pronouncements based on myth-like
stories of a bygone Wonder Worker. Paul brings up the side that was lacking in
the Gospels: the inner and experiential dimension, the notion of a personal and
psychological growth. Above all, he points us to a sophisticated notion of ‘body’
such that the mere individual ‘body of this death’ is subsumed in the
surviving, still-growing Body of Christ in which we all, even now, participate.
(If you don’t believe this, read 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, and the one in which
it is all ‘colossally’ expanded to include the cosmos – Colossians.)
But
what about the question of ‘authenticity’: whether the historical Paul of
Tarsus was really the one who wrote the texts attributed to him? I say: ignore
this. If you don’t, you will lose the glories of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
including its Chapter Eleven, the so-called Faith Chapter, in which we are
urged to carry on regardless, since even the great champions of faith in the
Old Testament never really lived to see their faith fulfilled.
Faith
is not a matter of fulfilment. It is about a sense in living. The living of a
sense. A sense that is known in the living of it.
--Lloyd Haft
[1]
Obviously I am not the first person in history to think this. Erasmus, in one
of his own versions, treated it as the Latin sermo, meaning something like ‘conversation’ or ‘discourse.’ Many
Chinese versions use Dao 道 which in the first instance suggests not so much a ‘word’
as an overall ‘way’ or ‘principle’ or ‘guiding view’ of something. The modern
Dutch translator Pieter Oussoren makes it not ‘word’ but ‘speaking.’ The 20th-century
Dutch theologian Miskotte once wrote ‘word is a happening between persons.’
