On Friday, I had one of those Greek sessions. It was a meeting which I left feeling giddy and ecstatic over. Last semester I translated the letter to the Galatians from Greek to English. While I loved doing it, I haven’t started the revision process with Dr. Schmidt until this semester. While we’re revising my version, he’s also doing his own version for the Westar Institute’s new translation project of the Complete Letters. He was on the team that worked on The Complete Gospels and in that project, he worked especially on Mark. So, with this translation project, we’re both working on our versions of the letter. Granted, his will be published, but it’s still fun for me to see the progress on his and get some advice into different translation issues.
We spent the first half-hour of the session on Friday working on how to translate the Greek preposition when it’s used in the phrase, ἐκ πίστεως. The main problem we have is that there isn’t a great way to always translate it in English using one-word prepositions. This preposition is usually translated using ‘from’, ‘of’, or ‘by’; however, in all of these cases, those really don’t tell what the relationship is to faith (πίστεως). Simplifying it to one word just doesn’t seem adequate. So Dr. Schmidt and I did some research. Between us I think we pulled 4 or 5 books off of his bookshelf and looked at how some scholars have sorted through the issue. We decided that the relationship was one similar to ‘by means of’ or ‘on the basis of’, but those are wordy and also inadequate for the situation. He still hasn’t decided how he’s going to do his version of it, but I decided to verbalize the prepositions. I’m going to do something like ‘rooted in faith’ or ‘stemming from faith’ to give it a better description without seeing too technical or boring!
I decided to remove the resume section of my website since I don’t really want to post it for everyone to see. In it’s place I’m going to do a section on projects that I’m working on. It’ll be a great place to publish my Galatians translation as well as any other projects that I finish (there are couple in the works at the moment). That’s all for now, but wait to see the site switch in the next week (hopefully).