www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Scripture and Patristic Writings St. Mark 9:35, Inclusive Example

Found this today via Bettnet.com

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

"And a little �it� shall lead them
That�s what was bothering me last Sunday. Something about the Gospel reading for this past Sunday (Mark 9:35) always bothers me and it is the way that the Lectionary, taken from the USCCB-approved New American Bible, of course, refers to the child Jesus places before the apostles as �it.� I always thought that was a strange pronoun to use, but seeing it next to other translations I realized the problem: Referring to a child as �he� would �damage� the psyche of little girls and �disenfranchise� women.

Jeff Miller and Custos Fidei noticed it too:

RSV (Catholic Edition)
And he took a child, and put him in the midst of them; and taking him in his arms, he said to them,

Douay-Rheims
And taking a child, he set him in the midst of them. Whom when he had embraced, he saith to them:

NAB
Taking a child he placed it in their midst, and putting his arms around it he said to them,

Does anyone, especially Catholics, ever refer to a baby as an �it�?

Nothing like de-humanizing children in order to make a gender-neutral, politically correct point."

This terminology "it" is used in the Revised NAB NT and not found in the original older NAB NT text...

james

James:

Would it help to know that the RNAB has never received the recognition from Rome for publication? It seesm that Rome gave the recognitio to the original NAB, published in 1970, but no one submitted the RNAB New Testament or RNAB Old Testament to Rome for approval. The publishers simply played a bit of fraud and put the original letters of approval inside the new text and published it.

Neat, huh?? :rolleyes:

Those who have control of liturgical translations and Biblical translations seem to be bent on going to any length to promote feminist language. Is it any wonder people are seeking out the older translations?

How about the implications? If a child is an "it," how far is it to aborting and "it"? An "it" is property; a child is a gift and a stewardship responsibility for parents.

In Christ,

BOB

Brother Theophan,

It appears that the Greek text reflexs a neutral word and whomever revised the text neutered it and reflects a literal rendering according to the comments for that blog entry...

I understand the new Lectionary will be based on the RSV...as used in Catechism.

james

James:

Whether the Greek text uses a neutral word or not, the usage does not carry over well to English. English is not directly affected in its development by Greek but rather by the Latin language. Actually standard English is based on the way meaning carries over from Latin. When I studied English and Latin--before the push for feminist language--we used to say that if one could translate something into Latin and back, one had good standard English.

The implication in the deep structure of the grammar here is that the use of "it" dehumanizes the noun and the person signified by that noun since "it" cannot be used to refer to human beings in English.

We also have another problem in that we Catholics have an instruction from Rome that we are to compare the translations we are making to the New Vulgate text when there is a question about how a passage should be translated so that the Scripture we use corresponds to the liturgical language we use.

Beyond all that, it seems to me that we side step the truth that the Holy Spirit has been alive and well when the Church has selected one manuscript over another and made the selected one the standard for liturgical use and evangelization efforts over the centuries. It also seems to me that the "quest" to find some pristine time when there was some more perfect text for Scripture (before our own most recent past) is another attempt to undermine the authority of the Church and her teachings that derive from the selection of texts to all other aspects of her efforts to spread the Good News of Christ.

As for a new lectionary, there was already one in print and approved before the current one went into effect that was based on the RSV. It is said that some bishops have asked for permission for a return to its use. It also seems to me that there is some place that the bishops conference has already returned to that usage.

In Christ,

BOB

Friends,

The use of "neutral" and "neutered" in this discussion is incorrect. The grammatical gender in question is called "neuter". "Neuter" is Latin for "neither" (the same word, you see i.e. "neither masculine nor feminine". In Latin, like modern Russian, all words for people were shifted into Masculine or Feminine and the third gender was then termed Neuter. However in the older system of genders the third gender included words for "child" as its main reference, as Greek teknon, Bulgarian dete or German Kind. In German, diminutives are third gender because diminutives share the characteristics of a child. That is why German Maedchen and Frauelein are "das" words, not because German speakers have difficulty recognising girls as female!

It is true that calling a child "it" does not sit well in English where there is no grammatical gender to speak of at all, and he, she, it denote the biological sex of the referent.
Latin is irrelevant to the issue of English usage.

I don't have access to a New Vulgate text, but my 1957 version reads: "Et accipiens puerum stauit eum in medio eorum..." giving both a noun and a pronoun in the masculine.

Summing up, the Greek presumably uses the third-gender word for child and the corresponding pronoun. St Jerome was confronted by the same problem of translation as the English translators, and found it natural to use the masculine.


Here as elsewhere, the problem with inclusive language is that it can often result in a rendering which is less clear and less gramatically correct than the "non-inclusive" form.
In any case the child had to be either a boy or a girl and the point of our Lord's remarks does not depend on which. If I had set a text like this for translation I would grade "boy" and "him" as the best rendering on purely linguistic grounds.

And this is certainly not the first such rendering of Mark 9:35 in this form; Monsignor Ronald Knox' 1955 translation of the Scriptures ("translated from the Latin Vulgate in the light of the Hebrew and Greek") has

And he took a little child, and gave it a place in the midst of them; and he took it in his arms, and said to them:

I somehow doubt that my copy (reprinted in 1955) was a feminist tract of some kind. But of course, just as the gender of pronouns in Italy between the World Wars is said to have become a matter of political allegiance, we run the risk of judging ANY translation not as a translation, but as a polemic. "Hermeneutic of suspicion", anyone?

Yours in Christ,
Jeff Mierzejewski

Now that is interesting and worth further study...

james

Whether or not "it" is a good translation in Mark 9:35, there are plenty of other reasons to be disappointed with the NAB. I have come to the conclusion that the only Bible I am confident in is the Revised Standard Version. It is accurate, elegant and beautiful. I sincerely hope that the RSV replaces the NAB in all of the Rites of the Church.

Regarding the Knox version: I like the Knox version, it is a joy to read.

Jeff:

I have a copy of the original Knox Bible published in Great Britain in 1940. From what I know of the slight variations in English usage from American usage to British usage, I think I'm farily safe in saying that this might account for the use of "it" in reference to a child where we might use "he."

On the other hand, language usage is always in a state of flux or we wouldn't have usage manuals issued annually by such organizations as the Moderna Language Association or the National Council of Teachers of English--not to mention various usage manuals issued by universities as the standard for their students.

Have to agree with lanceg, too, that it is a joy to read.

In defense of the NAB, I'd have to say that the original 1970 version was not caught up in feminist language. And the 1986 version never received the "recognitio" from Rome that the original one had. I'm told that the revisers simply reprinted the approval carried in the original edition in the front of the NAB and published it. That may be the reason that when the most recent lectionary for use at Liturgy was prepared on the basis of the NAB, it had to have extensive reworking before Rome would approve it for use in worship.

BOB

Though Msgr. Knox's bible was an english translation done "at the request of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster" it was not universally acclaimed, and the original publication contained the prominent notice just under the title:

For Private Use Only