{"id":65958,"date":"2024-02-08T17:25:39","date_gmt":"2024-02-08T22:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=65958"},"modified":"2024-02-08T17:25:39","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T22:25:39","slug":"stick-it-to-the-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2024\/02\/08\/stick-it-to-the-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Stick it to the Man"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Here\u2019s another insight from David Bentley Hart that\u2019s been working on me ever since I came across this last summer in the transcript of the Plough\u2019s podcast: \u201cPloughCast 67: David Bentley Hart and the Worship of Mammon<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of this discussion is about Hart\u2019s translation of the New Testament<\/a>. \u201cThere\u2019s something about going to the text itself and becoming responsible for rendering it directly from Greek into English that makes it hard for you not to notice the things that your mind otherwise has gotten in the habit of skating over,\u201d he says. I suspect part of his aim with this new English translation was to trip up other readers to keep them from skating over or skating past the text itself.<\/p>\n

Here Hart discusses how the work of translation enriched his understanding of the Sermon on the Mount:<\/p>\n

I was made to realize how much of it really just consists in very practical advice for the poor, only for the poor over against the wealthy who because they\u2019re wealthy, are already characterized as more or less wicked. The way in which there\u2019s a figure who appears in the Sermon on the Mount, who\u2019s the wicked man, the evil man,\u00a0ho poneros,<\/em> whose presence is almost effaced by normal translations because two of the three times he\u2019s mentioned as\u00a0ho poneros,<\/em> the wicked one, many of the standard translations transformed that into evil in the abstract and in the other case, make it sound as if Jesus is talking about the devil, but actually in the Greek, it\u2019s clear that that\u2019s not what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

He\u2019s talking specifically about those who exploit the poor for profit and who use a corrupt legal system to do so and is giving advice to those he\u2019s preaching to, not at a level of spiritual exhortation, but very much at the level of just practical community organizer advice on how to deal with the man regarding staying out of debt, not getting trapped in an unjust legal system, and not being reduced to penury or slavery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is a different category than the \u201chabit of skating over\u201d that develops, the way we become inured to a text due to familiarity. It\u2019s more like the way that the word \u201cjustice\u201d was translated out of most of our English New Testaments and replaced with the increasingly not-right word \u201crighteousness<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

A term that Hart argues means \u201cthe wicked man<\/em>\u201d or \u201cthe evil man<\/em>\u201d gets translated instead as \u201cthe wicked one\u201d or \u201cthe evil one.\u201d That translation causes readers to assume the text is referring to Satan or \u201cThe Devil\u201d and these texts become cornerstones for the construction of a whole theology of Satan. Meanwhile, the wicked man is off the hook. None of the texts indicting him are even regarded as mentioning him any more so he gets away scot free, enabled and empowered to continue exploiting the poor and corrupting justice at every turn.<\/p>\n

Hart is trying to fix that. Here, for example, is one of his translations of one famous part of the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord\u2019s Prayer:<\/p>\n

Give us our bread today, in a quantity sufficient for the whole of the day. And grant us relief from our debts, to the very degree that we grant relief to those who are indebted to us. And do not bring us to court for trial, but rather rescue us from the wicked man.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s from this 2018 article, \u201cA Prayer for the Poor<\/a>,\u201d in which Hart expanded on what he said to the folks at the Plough<\/em>:<\/p>\n

In the actual text of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, at least in the original Greek, an ominously archetypal figure, identified simply as \u201cthe wicked man\u201d (\u03bf\u0314 \u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u0301\u03c2), makes a brief appearance. He is almost certainly meant to be understood as a depiction of the sort of avaricious, disingenuous, and rapacious man who routinely abuses, deceives, defrauds, and plunders the poor. It is he who ensnares men with false promises wrapped in a haze of preposterously extravagant oaths (Matt 5:37), and he whom Christ forbids his followers to \u201coppose by force\u201d (Matt 5:39), and he from whom one should request deliverance whenever one comes before God in prayer (Matt 6:13). And yet in most translations\u2014and, more generally, in Christian consciousness\u2014he is all but invisible.<\/p>\n

In the first instance, he is usually mistaken for the devil (quite illogically), while in the latter two he is altogether displaced by an abstraction, \u201cevil,\u201d which has no real connection to the original Greek at all. This is a pity. And, really, it is somewhat absurd. Christian tradition has produced few developments more bizarre, for instance, than the transformation of the petitionary phrases of the Lord\u2019s Prayer in Christian thinking\u2014and in Christian translations of scripture\u2014into a series of supplications for absolution of sins, protection against spiritual temptation, and immunity from the threat of \u201cevil.\u201d They are nothing of the kind. They are, quite explicitly, requests for (in order): adequate nourishment, debt relief, avoidance of arraignment before the courts, and rescue from the depredations of powerful but unprincipled men. The prayer as a whole is a prayer for the poor\u2014and for the poor only.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe wicked man\u201d is a literal translation of the name given to this \u201cominously archetypal figure\u201d the Gospels describe. But I think a more colloquial translation using 20th-century slang might better communicate the full meaning of this \u201cho paneros\u201d figure \u2014 this \u201cpowerful but unprincipled\u201d man, this greedy, dishonest, corrupt, predatory oppressor.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s \u201cThe Man.\u201d As in the way that Shaft and Cool Hand Luke and Heavenly Blues all used that term.<\/p>\n

The Wikipedia entry on this archetypal figure has the unintentionally hilarious, stilted quality of an aging youth minister attempting to employ \u201cwith it\u201d slang, but its basic definition still works:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Man\u201d is a slang phrase used in the United States to refer to figures of authority, including members of the government. \u2026 The phrase \u201cthe Man is keeping me down\u201d is commonly used to describe oppression, while the phrase \u201cstick it to the Man\u201d encourages civil resistance to authority figures.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am going to have to get a copy of Hart\u2019s translation to explore where else \u201cthe wicked man\u201d appears in \u2014 or has disappeared from \u2014 our New Testaments.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, here\u2019s a sense of how our New Testament might strike us differently if we refuse to let the Man be erased from its pages:<\/p>\n

\u2022 John 17:15,<\/strong> \u201d I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Ephesians 6:16,<\/strong> \u201cIn addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 2 Thessalonians 3:3,<\/strong> \u201cBut the Lord is faithful, and he will strengthen you and protect you from the Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 1 John 5:19,<\/strong> \u201cWe know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65958","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65958\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}