Grim's Hall quoted from another site about a version of the gospel translated into Saxon about AD 800-850. (Or at any rate that site says it was a translation. The Wikipedia article the site itself points to says it was a poem based on several sources; scholars seem to disagree. If your Saxon is up to the job read it yourself.) It allegedly celebrates the warrior spirit in its retelling. Judge for yourself, and see if the modern problems with translation compromises are new. This is from Humphrey's post on the Quodlibeta site. You will note substantial points of difference with the original...
Christ’s warrior companions saw warriors coming up the mountain making a great din
Angry armed men. Judas the hate filled man was showing them the way.
The enemy clan, the Jews, were marching behind.
The warriors marched forward, the grim Jewish army, until they had come to the Christ.
There he stood, the famous chieftain.
Christ’s followers, wise men deeply distressed by this hostile action
Held their position in front.
They spoke to their chieftain, 'My Lord chieftain', they said, 'if it should now
Be your will that we be impaled here under spear points
Wounded by their weapons then nothing would be so good to us as to die here
Pale from mortal wounds for our chieftain'.
Then he got really angry
Simon Peter, the mighty, noble swordman flew into a rage.
His mind was in such turmoil he could not speak a single word.
His heart became intensely bitter because they wanted to tie up his Lord there.
So he strode over angrily, that very daring Thane, to stand in front of his commander
Right in front of his Lord.
No doubting in his mind, no fearful hesitation in his chest he drew his blade
And struck straight ahead at the first man of the enemy with all the strength in his hands
So that Malchus was cut and wounded on the right side by the sword.
His ear was chopped off.
He was so badly wounded in the head that his cheek and ear burst open with the mortal wound
Blood gushed out, pouring from the wound.
The men stood back; they were afraid of the slash of the sword.
If this, as some scholars seem to claim, is a poem designed to celebrate Jesus but not profess to be a reliable translation, I think it is in dubious taste. If it is supposed to be a representation of the gospel, it goes too far in trying to meet the biases of the Saxons. Can you tell where I come down on the Muslim Bible question? No? Good.
4 comments:
The liberties they took with the Gospel are perhaps less shocking when you consider the context. The method of conversion universally accepted at the time was conquest, followed by a forcible mass baptism of the population. You had to convert to the religion to find out what was in it, kind of thing. This was almost at the low point of what we used to call the Dark Ages, but now I guess is called Late Antiquity or the Early Middle Ages. Literacy had all but disappeared even in the remnants of the Roman Empire and I guess was basically unheard of among the Saxon barbarians. You have to wonder whether even the conquering Frankish Christians had a very firm grip on what the Bible actually said.
You know, I always thought the gospel needed more Beowulf influence.
Conversion didn't have to be quite that dramatic, if I understand correctly. The civil and religious functions weren't widely separated, so if the local ruler decided to become Christian, the local rites changed. A chief didn't have to use swordpoint to march people to the river. After all, where else would you go to get your crops or your weapon blessed?
That joining of the civil and religious functions also made Christianity unattractive. The principle use of civil authority is to protect from foreign enemies and internal criminals, and they wanted a religion that would strengthen their hands and inspire their followers, and not confuse the issue with humility or turning other cheeks. (At least that's what I take away from the descriptions; not many old Saxons or Danes seem to be left to interview in detail.) Celebrating celibate professions probably wouldn't add much to chiefly enthusiasm.
As I understand it, sometimes the ruler converted and his people followed along more or less peacefully. Other times, especially if the ruler and/or populace had "converted" and backslid before, the irritated conquerors got a little more radical about the mass-scale forced baptisms.
It was also a time when people took conversion and damnation more seriously, and more absolutely, than we generally do today. Many people thought that the physical rite of baptism was lots more important than the specific beliefs of the converted. Today, a very strong belief that unbaptized infants are doomed to hell is fairly eccentric. Not so back then -- not many universalists among the Carolingians, I'd guess. They didn't tend to think that God would somehow work it out for unbelievers after death, for instance. So it would have been easier to justify tricking people into conversion, though to us moderns that seems a contradiction in terms. And of course they were interested in conversion as a purely political tool of control as well.
And then the Church's whole approach toward pacifism has been problematic in more centuries than the 9th.
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