There’s a line in Ecclesiastes that says:
with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief (Eccl. 1:18).
I don’t know how much I wisdom I’ve accumulated in my short span of years, but I have accumulated knowledge of certain subjects, and it can indeed cause grief. This frequently comes home to me when I am at Mass and listening to the way the standard American liturgical translation butchers what is said in the Scriptures. A few years ago, this really drove me nuts, and every time I would go to Mass (which was basically daily), I would tense up at the readings, waiting to see what would be translated wrong this time.
But I got over it.
I realized with time that God doesn’t want us to give away our peace to others, including incompetent translators. Getting mad has a purpose if there is something one can do about it, but if one can’t do anything to bring about positive change then it only hurts oneself. God doesn’t want that. So I chilled out, and these days it takes a bit more to rattle me. But it does happen from time to time.
Yesterday, Palm Sunday, it did.
You may recall how a few years ago a new lectionary for Sunday Mass and there was a big hullabaloo about the use of gender-revisionist language in it. The Holy See appointed a commission of three American cardinals to go over the text and strip out the revisionist language. This they did–almost. They left in some allegedly "minor" instances of "horizontal" revisionist language, such as representing St. Paul as having said "brothers and sisters," where in fact he said "brothers."
I’ve never been happy with this. Any tampering with Scripture to suit a social-political agenda is sacrilege, as far as I’m concerned. The text should be translated as faithfully as possible, given the capacities of the receptor language, and any needed side explanations (like the fact that Paul includes female Christians when he says "brothers") should be made as needed in the homily. It is, after all the function of the homily to explain the readings (not to share jokes and anecdotes and bland exhortations to niceness).
Well, yesterday at Mass I ran into another–particularly inept–manifestation of gender-revisionism in the readings at Mass. Here’s the relevant passage:
They lit a fire in the middle of the courtyard and sat around it, and Peter sat down with them. When a maid saw him seated in the light, she looked intently at him and said, "This man too was with him."
But he denied it saying, "Woman, I do not know him."
A short while later someone else saw him and said, "You too are one of them"; but Peter answered, "My friend, I am not."
About an hour later, still another insisted, "Assuredly, this man too was with him, for he also is a Galilean."
But Peter said, "My friend, I do not know what you are talking about." Just as he was saying this, the cock crowed [Luke 22:55-60].
When I heard those "my friend"s in the text, I said to myself, "There’s no way that that’s what’s in the Greek," and indeed, it’s not. What Peter says is anthrōpe (pronounced AN-throw-peh), which is a form of direct address translating as "O man" or just "man." There is no way it means "friend," much less "my friend." That’s simply not what Peter said (and if he had, the guys might have turned to him and said, "You’re no friend of mine!"–not wanting to be associated with a follower of Jesus).
What makes this instance of revisionist language particularly inept is that the text has not been consistently gender-sanitized. Notice that Peter is left saying "Woman" to the maiden, which is what he does say in Greek (gunai, pronounced GOO-nai). This suggests that the gender revisionists who were at work on this text had a specific agenda. They weren’t trying to bring about gender "neutrality" in the texts, but to eliminate references to men.
The final twist in this is that there is another gender bungle in the text. You will notice that Peter is twice identified as "this man." Yet the word "man" is not in the Greek. The word is the pronoun houtos (HOO-toss), which just means "this." It’s true that this is the masculine form of the word, so you’d use it for a man (or a boy, or a thing referred to by a noun of the masculine grammatical gender), but the word "man" isn’t there. I’d want my Greek students to translate it as "this one" and save the word "man" for when the word anthrōpos or anēr is in the original.
What a mess. Too bad the cardinals didn’t get it completely cleaned up.
