The italicized paragraphs below are from the transcript of Mark Goodacre’s podcast NT Pod 104: The Synoptic Translation Problem His talk “investigates a problem in English translations of the Gospels. The translations frequently mangle the agreements and disagreements between the Synoptic Gospels and between the Synoptics and John.”
The transcript is in his DropBox folder and is about a 15-minute read. That is also the length of the video.
The scriptural references in the NRSV he cites quickly are below. He cited the related Greek word, and the transcription software spelled the Greek words correctly based on my check.
- Matt. 27.50 // Mark 15.37 // Luke 23.46; Psalm 31.5 – RE: The death of Jesus.
- What it’s doing is something that you often see when one source takes over another source, you get a kind of dramatic transformation where the narrator’s words here, he gave up his spirit, are put into direct speech here, Jesus saying into your hands, I commit my spirit. Luke is also influenced here by Psalm 31.5, where you have this line. But the reason for pointing this out is that if you looked at this in a synopsis of the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, you wouldn’t realize that Luke has quite interesting parallels to Matthew, as well as to Mark.
- Matt. 26.51 // Mark 14.47 // Luke 22.50 // John 18.10 – Re: the story of the high priest’s slave’s ear being cut off.
- But what I’d like to comment on here is that the word for strike or hit, when the high priest’s slave is hit with the sword, is different. In Matthew and Luke, they use the Greek word pataso, whereas Mark and John use the word paio. But when you look at the NRSV and the NRSV Updated Edition, all four Gospels read the same, struck. The MODERN translation harmonizes the text.
- Matt. 26.6-13 // Mark 14.3-9 // Luke 7.36-50 // John 12.1-8 – Re: anointing of Jesus.
- Now, in all four Gospels, you have the same word used for the ointment or the perfume that she puts on Jesus. But in the NRSV updated edition, the synoptics all have ointment and John has perfume. So you get three lots of ointment in Matthew, three lots of ointment in Mark, three lots of ointment in Luke, and three lots of perfume in John. It is exactly the same word.
- Matt. 28.10 // John 20.17 – Re: Jesus at the resurrection tells Mary Magdalene, plus one other Mary in Matthew, to go and tell the news of his resurrection to my brothers.
- Now, the Greek here is identical, adelphoi, to my brothers. Now, the extraordinary thing here in the NRSV Updated Edition, and this is a change from the NRSV, you have brothers and sisters here in Matthew, but not in John. It’s the identical word in Greek, adelphoi. But in Matthew, brothers and sisters. In John, just brothers. So, it makes it look like either John is being less inclusive than Matthew, or Matthew’s being more inclusive than John. But actually, they’re both identical. The only reason that they look different is because different translators have worked on those different passages.
- ALTERNATIVELY – See Marg Mowczko’s post here where she says that adelphoi (plural) can also mean siblings and the inclusion of “sisters” is not improper. Separately, it is common knowledge that NRSVUE was updated to be more inclusive of women as modern perception is that the reference to man or men is to exclude women when the author’s intent was not that. But, “sisters” was only added in one place.
Now, perhaps you might think this is not that big a deal. But to me, the problem with this is it completely hides synoptic agreements, and it completely hides synoptic and John agreements. Sometimes also, it creates phantom agreements, false positives, although that’s less common.
I [MG] did actually get a little insight recently, and so I should also make a confession, which is that I was involved with the NRSV Updated Edition. I was asked to be the book editor for Matthew’s Gospel, which was a huge honour, and it was work I really enjoyed doing.
This was a few years ago now, but the NRSV Updated Edition was only recently published. And one of the things I enjoyed about that work was that synoptic nerd that I am, I’ve repeatedly pointed to places where it was necessary to do synoptic checks, making sure that the term was translated the same way where it was paralleled in Mark and Luke. Because if you change it in Matthew, but then you don’t change it in Mark and Luke, you will actually create false agreements and false disagreements.
But the Synoptic Gospels and John are a special problem, and they do require a huge amount of cross-referencing. So my suggestion for the future, for my ideal translation, my translation that would take the Synoptic Gospels and John seriously, perhaps even an update of the updated edition, give one person the task of checking across all the parallels, making sure that things are translated in the same way in the different gospels, if they are the same, and translated differently, if they’re different.
