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MEMO

To: His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI

From: Laura Jones - http://www.mamaleh-larisa.com

Date: September 22, 2008

Subject: What’s behind this mistranslation, I wonder …….

Your Holiness: I wish to comment further on a statement from the Instrumentum Laboris drafted by the XI Ordinary Council of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, which I examined in my previous memo.

“Like us in everything except sin (cf. Heb 2:17; 4:15), the Word of God had to express himself in a human way, through words and deeds, which are recorded in the New Testament, especially in the Gospels. The language employed is human in every way, except for error.”

In my preceding memo I pointed out that language cannot be said to be true or in error since it is but the outward expression of our mental formations, so that it is these mental constructs which are faithful or unfaithful to the realities they are express, accurately or erroneously.

And I offer an example of how language can be used for the distortion of truth, and this within the Church, irregardless of the claims of infallibility so rife within the Roman Catholic Communion. In line with the famous quote from Abraham Lincoln which was so misunderstood and garbled by our Republican vice presidential contender, Orthodox believe that what is most vitally important is not to be in ourselves always infallibly right, but rather to live our every moment in God, who is Himself Truth. It is, in fact, my own ongoing experience in these memos I churn out in such number that when I make a mistake, God always manages things in such wise that my mistakes never do any harm – rather, they serve as a most salutary ongoing check to my pride. I’m sure that everyone who deals honestly with the word of God in Scripture, including those throughout the ages whose writings the Church has included in the sacred canons, have this same experience. If they so desired, even the USCCB bishops could have this experience of genuine human “infallibility”.

I think I have more or less always felt uncomfortable with allusions in the biblical texts to our being the “adopted” children/sons of God. The term “adopted” in our culture signifies, or at least is basically always taken to imply, that the adopted person has acquired parents other than those who biologically conceived him or her. And God has not “adopted” us – or anyone else – in this wise; we are, rather, re-generated, re-born, into participation in God’s own Triune Divine Life. This is the burden of Christ’s discourse to Nicodemus Jn 3:1-21. My grandfather went over and over and over that passage with me, until it is engraved somewhere in the depths of my very soul (and this although, because my grandmother who was a missionary in China used to try to bribe me to memorize biblical passages, I most studiously and of very set purpose avoided doing so.) And so every time I would read or hear about our “adoption” as God’s children, something jarred within the very inner recesses of my being.

Recently I was reading Paul’s very impassioned concern for his people: “I am speaking the truth in Christ - I am not lying, my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit – I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption …….” I was like, hey, the Jews are not God’s “adopted” people, they are HIS CHOSEN PEOPLE! You can read this very forceful passage yourself, your Holiness, which concludes, “… and from them ACCORDING TO THE FLESH, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.” (Rm 9:1-5) I mean, we, the Gentiles, are the ones who are “the wild olive shoot, grafted in their place to share the rich root of the olive tree” – which is the Jews, whom, moreover, God has not forsaken because of their infidelity to him, rather, Paul tells us most emphatically, “a hardening has come upon part [Nota bene: not the whole of Israel] - hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved.” (Rm 11:17ff)

I began my effort to track down this misleading term, “adoption”, with the Jerusalem Bible, this being viewed as the most authoritative Catholic translation, and sure enough, they repeatedly in this regard used the term “adopted” and this even as they referred the reader, for background, to – well, dear readers, for starters, the Jerusalem Bible points us to God’s own explicit – thus presumably the phraseology coming from God Himself - command to Moses: “Then you will say to Pharaoh: ‘This is what Yahweh says: “Israel is my first-born son. I ordered you to let my son go to offer me worship. You refuse to let him go. So be it! I shall put your first-born [not the adopted slaves to be found in such courts, beloved as they often were, Joseph probably was such] to death.’” (Ex 4:22f)

Russian and Greek are both agglutinating languages, which have retained certain basic root terms with fixed meanings, which can be modified by agglutinative prefixes, suffixes, infixes, etc. – so that these roots can readily be identified, in fact, Russians can spend hours in a kind of game of tracing back the meanings of names in this manner. So when I come across misleading translations I begin tracking them down from the Russian – although, in this case I could have started with my huge Websters Unabridged, because adoption breaks down into the Latin ad-optare, the root meaning “choose”, Webster gives the example of “option” being derived from it. Yes, the CHOSEN People.

The Greek which is translated “adoption” is “huyu-thesia” the first syllable meaning “son”, we see this in the first letters of Jesus’ name and title which spell the Greek word for “fish”, ixthus: Jesus - Christ - of God - the Son - Savior – the early Christian symbol we often see today. The second syllable has in Greek temple usage the meaning “to devote, to dedicate”, so why my Interlinear Greek-English New Testament insists upon going along with “adoption” – don’t ask me.

Of course, I have no English translation made from the Russian to despoil it (although in our OCA services, there are several English translations either from Slavonic or Greek that are really outlandish, as outlandish, in fact, as the positions the USCCB adopts and tries to foist on everybody else, since they, clearly, to judge from their actions, regard themselves as THE VOICE OF INFALLIBLE ROMAN CATHOLICISM – and a goodly chunk of American Orthodoxy is sold out to this mentality, there is even a current post on OrthodoxNews.com asking “What do Converts Want?” Apparently they think we are so hot to get “converts” that we are anxious to tailor our practices to their specific whims. I mean, I had sort of had the curious notion that “converts” embraced Orthodoxy because that is where they found what they had been looking for all along, that’s why I came to Orthodoxy, although, I stress and underline NOT as a “convert”) so these translations, some of which we have to listen to, and several times, even, in virtually every OCA service, are a constant spur to me to – well, write all these memos in the hope that you, your Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, will soon do something about this apostasy, because that’s what it is.

So the Slavonic term which absolutely every English language Bible available to me transfers “adoption” is not this at all. Rather, it is u-cynovlenie, which would work out to: “to be-son”. You know, as in the story of Gideon, the Incarnation is foreshadowed in type by the fleece being silently, mystically, be-dewed in the morning, you could also construct a verbal noun meaning to become the son – not just the adopted son, but, as God said to Moses: “Israel is my first-born son.”

I sighed with relief and breathed: Ah! Thanks be to God that there is one place on the face of the earth that the election of the Jews is recognized and preached, and understood in relation to ourselves as Gentiles. Card. Lustiger of Paris, may his memory be eternal, noted at some length that there is considerable difference between Russian and European anti-Semitism, the latter being positively, even very aggressively, atheistic, denying the very notion of any people at all being God’s chosen, His elect - as we see in all that I have written above. Russians, by contrast, accept St. Paul’s explanation, that a hardening has come upon part of Israel until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. We are surely coming to the completion of this time at present, because one Christmas, not long, I believe, before his repose, Card. Lustiger sent me a Christmas card, with the Mother of God as described in Revelation 12. And inside the card he had copied out, in French, “… while we wait for the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. Titus 2:13” I framed the card and kept it in my ikon corner until I recently wrote to Pres. Sarkozy, because in the news reports of how he addressed with honor the Russian response to the Georgian destruction - clearly inspired by the US – of the capital city of South Ossetia (without sparing even churches and an ancient synagogue – with such contempt for the worship of God’s People, is any of the other Godless stuff going on around here any surprise?) – so from these news reports I also learned that President Sarkozy is by blood Jewish and Christian both – maybe that’s why he and Obama got along so well on Obama’s recent visit – and that Sarkozy was very close to Card. Lustiger, so I sent him that ikon of the great portent that appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars, and she was with child ….