Words Matter

Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo in Tombstone

The 1993 film Tombstone opens with a scene of violence as members of the ruthless gang known as the Cowboys invade a wedding party.  The priest hurls words of Scripture at them in Spanish, and one of the gang translates, albeit loosely, for their leader, Curly Bill Brosius.  Fearsome gunslinger Johnny Ringo, however, knows better what was said.

Cowboy:  Patron, he say, uh, someone will come to revenge for him.  Something like a, a... sick horse who comes to sit with him.  He talk crazy.

Ringo:  That's not what he said, ya ignorant wretch.  Your Spanish is worse than your English.

Later, as the Cowboys help themselves to food from the wedding banquet, Curly Bill revisits the topic.

Curly Bill:  Hey, Johnny, what'd that Mexican mean..."a sick horse is gonna get us," huh?

Ringo:  He's quoting the Bible.  Revelations.  "Behold, a pale horse.  The man who sat on him was Death.  And hell followed with him."

Words matter.  Translators bear an enormous responsibility, one that is almost impossible to fulfill perfectly, and this is the reason the Italian expression traduttore, traditore exists.  The translator is in one aspect or another nearly always a traitor.

Consider the story of the woman caught in adultery that is told in John, chapter 8.  When the Pharisees bring the woman to Jesus, they cite the law of Moses for what should happen to her, and both the original Greek and the Latin of the Vulgate are quite clear.

ἐν δὲ τῶ νόμῳ ἡμῖν μωϊσῆς ἐνετείλατο τὰς τοιαύτας λιθάζειν.

In lege autem Moyses mandavit nobis huiusmodi lapidare.

In the law Moses commanded us to stone women of this sort.

The key words here are τὰς τοιαύτας in the Greek and huismodi in the Latin.  They both indicate categories or types.  The Pharisees are applying the general to the specific.  In general, women caught in adultery are to be stoned.  This particular woman was caught in adultery, and the consequence is clear.

Most English translations of the Bible get this right, but one, the New Living Translation, misses the mark.  It translates John 8:5 to say, "The law of Moses says to stone her."  As we just saw, the implication of the law is precisely that, and so, on one hand the NLT scholars were justified in this translation, yet they have also proved the truth of the Italian expression traduttore, traditore, for they have betrayed a key aspect of this verse.  The Pharisees see the woman merely as a category, but Jesus sees her as something else, something more.  He sees her as a person.

Fr. Mark Toups in The Ascension Lenten Companion has this to say about what happened that day just east of Jerusalem.

They stand behind her, the scribes and the Pharisees, each of them teeming with righteousness.  They bend down, looking around, hunting for the perfect rock to hurl so that they can crush her to death.

They do not see a woman.  They do not see a person.  They see a category.  To them she is a category, a thing with a label:  "an adulteress."  They are ready to stone her, to kill her, because they want to remove the category.

Jesus does not see a category; he sees a woman.  Jesus sees a person.  Jesus sees this particular person.  To Jesus she is not a category:  "adulteress."  No, she is a person.  She is a person who has made an egregious mistake, but she is a person who can be forgiven.  (p. 135)

By rushing on to the implication of the law for this particular moment, the NLT passes too quickly over what is really going on here, but if we stop for a moment, we see a profound lesson for ourselves.  How often do we in the shrill age of screeching social media merely see people as the categories into which they seem to fit?  It is easy to rail against Debbie the Democrat or Rob the Republican, Harry the Hollywood Elite or Charlotte the CEO, especially from the anonymity of a social media screen name, but what do we actually know of Debbie or Rob or Harry or Charlotte the human beings created in the image of God who have the same opportunity to accept redemption through Jesus Christ as any other man or woman?  Of course, Jesus was right in Matthew 7 when He said that we can know people by their fruits, which is to say, by their words and actions, but what does that mean?  Does it mean that we can use what people say and do to assign them to categories that we can then proceed to pillory, reject, or dismiss?  Or does it mean that we can use those fruits to see when people are not walking with Christ so that we can reach out to them as the salt and light Jesus has called us to be?

This gospel story convicts me, for I, like most people these days, can get caught up in the bloodless blood sport of sitting around with like-minded friends to skewer with wicked wit groups of people whose words and deeds seem out of alignment with what we think is right.  We should not turn a blind eye to sin, nor should we excuse sinful behavior, but we must be careful not see people merely as categories and rather as Jesus saw them, as He has seen each of us, as friends in need of His grace.