Thinking ahead to Sunday's sermon (Easter 6)
Bishop Paul Marshall
[Posted on Bakery, the interactive list of the Diocese of Bethlehem, House of Bread. Responses welcome there, at the bottom of this post or directly to Bishop Paul.]
I got some very useful responses to last week's Tuesday rambling, so I am going to dash off another first thought, ill-formed as it may be.
Next Sunday we re-encounter Paul's famous speech at the Areopagus, and as I followed the translation with the original (which anybody can do by going to Textweek.com), an old problem arose for me.
The text has Paul open his speech with "men of Athens." He is using the gender-specific "andres" and not the inclusive "anthropoi." In our altogether well-motivated principles of translation today, this comes out as "Athenians." As I say, the motivation for translating this way is very good, but is it helpful?
The NRSV translation obscures the fact that in Paul's day, at least as I understand it, Greek women were still kept at home, very much much less in evidence than Roman women, and men alone gathered in the agora (public square, so to speak) to do the philosophizing, which functioned to some degree like golf in my father's day.
Obscuring the cultural reality of the text may keep us from asking an important question. Paul's speech was not well-received by the men of Athens. Would the result have been different if women's voices had been welcome? Given who his Hellenistic supporters tended to be, I think so.
That is not the point on which the text turns, of course, but we miss another episode in the strange drama of our species if we airbrush it out. Our present translations create an image of the ancient world that appears to the naive reader to have been much like what we wish ours will eventually be.
Many of us have the comfortable illusion that we live in a post-gender, post-racial culture, or that only women or minorities own the rights to bring these topics into a conversation. Last week I attended a panel where three women psychiatrists, women in their 40s, 60s, and 80s, had amazingly similar stories to tell about how their interactions with male and female patients differed. So I tried the idea out on a Bible study group with about the level of success the Areopagus speech got (but without even the feigned interest!). I'm going to stick to my guns about this: I do not think that all preachers are sufficiently careful to lift up the stories of women, sexual minorities, and non-white people, and that we suffer for it. I tentatively say, translate according to the meaning of the original, leave the text where it is in the past, and show how it lives in the present--the fact that the Spirit continues to function is much more apparent when the contrast is real. Where the text permits inclusive translation or where gender is not playing a role in the text or subtext, have at it, but where cultural realities may be part of the story, leave it alone.
That is, having lived through the struggles of the last fifty years, and knowing the degree to which those who forget are doomed to repeat, I am experiencing doubt about the value of cosmetizing the past, a project in which my generation has been deeply invested for almost entirely good reason. What would be the point of Huckleberry Finn without the racial tension? Of The Scarlet Letter without gender inequality? Our day has seen attempts to do both, with very unsatisfying results.
Clearly the point opposite mine could be made compellingly. At the same time, how would the Easter stories be weakened if the women-men tension were glossed over ("moreover some people of our group went early in the morning...")?
I suspect from my encounter last week that we would like this issue to be gone, and that our levels of denial or weariness keep us from seeing its importance for homiletical practice.
I would be interested in knowing what you think.
+Paul
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