Synoptica XXV - Excursus on Mt. 5:25 -- A Mystery of Translation

I remember many years ago wanting to get a New Testament in Hebrew, long before I had a source for such things on-line (and before I even had an Internet connection). Why did I want such a book? Well, it seemed to me that a good, literal translation would be very enlightening in terms of wordplay: puns, alliteration, and catchwords, in particular. I was not wrong. The first such translation to come into my hands was the nineteenth-century ttranslation of Franz Delitzsch. I remember reading the Gospel of Matthew (always my favorite) in that book, with a focus on the Sermon on the Mount. I did, indeed, find instances of wordplay, and I remember that I was particularly struck by some alliteration in Mt. 5:25.

Here's the way the verse goes in English (RSV):

"Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison;"

Now the word that appears as "guard" in the RSV, and as "officer" in the NASB and KJV, and as "ministro" in the Vulgate, is the Greek word "uperétes," which literally means "servant." But NOBODY has translated it as "servant." I don't have as many Bibles as I used to have (I did check eleven Bibles), but I do have one in Spanish, and the word used there is "alguacil," which means "beadle, court apparitor." Why is the Greek word, which means "servant," translated in all these other ways, but not as servant.

In the nineteenth century, Delitzsch (and also Salkinson, following him) used the Hebrew word "shoTEr," meaning "constable," which goes nicely with "shophET," "judge," which is repeated, to create a nice three-part alliteration. But in Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew, the word used is "eved," which means "servant."

Now, we have already seen a lot of evidence that our Greek Matthew was translated from Hebrew. Our canonical, Greek Matthew (which I call Matthew III), uses the same word as Shem-Tob's Hebrew Matthew. But (and this is what drew my attention) the word "servant," "eved," causes the presumed alliteration to be lost.

If we check the parallel verse in Luke (Lk. 12:58), we see that canonical, Greek Luke uses the word "práktor," which literally means "supervisor, monitor," and which the RSV translates as "officer."

One of the possibilities with which we are thus presented is that "guard/officer" where Greek Matthew has "servant" may be a case of harmonistic translation, influenced by the word in Luke.

But that explanation may be a bit too facile. According to my theory, the synoptic part of Luke was  translated into Greek from a stage of Matthew's Gospel intermediate between Matthew I (the version used by Mark) and Matthew II (Shem-Tob, approximately, but before the medieval revisions to bring it into closer agreement with the Greek). If this is true, some such word as "shoTEr" (constable, officer, guard) must have at one time been present in the Hebrew text, making the alliteration complete.

But why does the word "servant," appearing both in Shem-Tob's Hebrew and in canonical Greek never (at least in my library) get translated as "servant?"

A clue may be found, perhaps, in the word "ministro," used in the Vulgate. Let's remember that Jerome's 382 CE commission from Pope Damasus I was not to translate the New Testament from Greek, but to revise the Old Latin to bring it into closer agreement with the Greek. Let's also remember that the Old Latin, part of the "Western," or "Syro-Latin" textual tradition is older than the standard, canonical, Greek textual tradition. I submit that the use of the word "ministro" in Vulgate Matthew where one would expect "servant" may be a relic of that earlier textual tradition. We have already seen another such example in this Synoptica series, and we know that the translators of the KJV were heavily influenced by the Vulgate.

So far, so good. But why was our hypothetical "shoTEr" replaced by "eved" in the later edition of the  Hebrew, ruining the alliteration and, arguably, impoverishing the language of this verse? I'm not sure why it would have been done, but it seems to me that there are a couple of possibilities: 1) It was an intentional "dumbing down" of the text, replacing a relatively rare word with one that everybody knew, or 2) the Greek translator was himself unfamiliar with the word, a word that was probably chosen for the sake of alliteration. In this latter case, the presence of the alliteration-ruining word "eved" would be explained as a later (probably medieval) revision of the Hebrew text to bring it into closer agreement with the Greek.

As an illustration for this blog entry, I'll include a screen print of the relevant page in Salkinson's Hebrew translation, which in this case I find to be slightly preferable to that of Delitzsch.

Text © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.