From the Kitchen Table: Easter Morning

A direct look at the part of this text that rarely gets preached.

What I read

How you render this one word determines the meaning of the whole paragraph. A translator has to decide, and the decision is already an interpretation. Readers deserve to know that a decision was made.

What I read

Reading the non-canonical material alongside this shows how wide the shared vocabulary of the period really was. Looking only at what was eventually collected hides that width entirely.

6神と交わりをしていると言いながら、もし、やみの中を歩いているなら、わたしたちは偽っているのであって、真理を行っているのではない。
ヨハネの第一の手紙 1:6（口語訳（日本語））

Pull a single verse out of its paragraph and you can make it say almost anything. This particular verse has been made to say a great deal. Which is precisely why it deserves to be read with what stands on either side of it.

17Then all the people were wonderfully astonished, and bowed themselves, and worshipped God, and said with one accord, Blessed be thou, O our God, which hast this day brought to nought the enemies of thy people.
ユディト記 13:17（Brenton 訳・七十人訳から（英語））

Anticipating the objection

Put the translations side by side and the same verse arrives differently each time. One is soft, another is severe, and the original is a third thing that is neither. That difference is itself a way in.（ホセア書 14:9）

（エズラ記第5章）

This is where I stopped. I could not go forward, so I stayed with the same few lines for a long time. I have come to think the staying was the point.（ガラテヤ人への手紙 5:13-15）

A word about ordinary life. I think about this passage in the kitchen and on the train, almost never in a pew. I have come to suspect that is not accidental.

Before we start

There are obvious objections, and I don't hold this reading with much confidence. What I would defend is narrower: that the text leaves room for it.

Now set it back into its own century. What was the community that first heard this actually worried about? Simply imagining that changes the temperature of every line.

A note

Reading the non-canonical material alongside this shows how wide the shared vocabulary of the period really was. Looking only at what was eventually collected hides that width entirely.（テサロニケ人への第二の手紙 2:4）