Despite just over three months having elapsed since my most recent post, I'm not dead; just suffering from writer's block. Here's something I had intended to post before the deadline:
There are several questions that arise when translating John 7:22, and two of them arise in the context of familial relationships: How does one translate πατερων, referring to Abraham and Isaac, who began the custom of circumcising their sons in accordance with God's covenant, and how does one translate ανθρωπον, referring to the typical recipient of that sign of the covenant, be it performed even on the Sabbath?
For
the first one, 19 of 62 English versions surveyed translated it
'patriarchs', and I believe this to be a commendable improvement over
'fathers' which prevailed in the earlier versions. If a language has
this sort of distinction between near and far ancestors, the latter
should be used. The essential meaning here is that these were the
founders of the Hebrew nation; their priority in time to Moses, not
their ancestry of him, is what is being emphasized. So any word which
contains the meaning of “the ancient elders of the people” or
“the founders” would capture that emphasis well, and may resonate
much better in people groups which revere the founders of their
customs.
English translators have faced a lot of difficulty in
translating ανθρωπον here, because the traditional
translation, 'man,' doesn't fit very well in describing a person
being circumcised on his eighth day. In Greek, ανθρωπον is
used primarily to distinguish a human being from other sorts of
living beings such as animals or angels, and to a lesser extent to
carry the connotation that one is referring to an adult human rather
than a younger one. It is not typically used to distinguish a male
from a female, but it's difficult do avoid doing so, both in English
generally, and in the context of its use here: only males were
circumcised, and only week-old males would ever have been circumcised
on the Sabbath. So, even though “a man” was long the default
translation of ανθρωπον, and still in many cases the one to
be preferred, it is a less acceptable translations here—yet it
prevailed in the earlier translations, and persists in 46 of the 62
versions surveyed. Others have used “a person” which is truer to
the core meaning of ανθρωπον, or “a boy” which is truer
to the specific context. The unspoken back story here, essential to
understanding the context in which Jesus spoke these words, was that
Moses had given two seemingly contradictory pieces of legislation:
Don't work on the Sabbath, and circumcise all boys on their eighth
day. Thus for a son who was born on the Sabbath (counting that day as
the first, and the succeeding Sabbath as the eighth days), both laws
could not be kept, and the very religious leaders accusing Jesus of
violating the Sabbath by doing the “work” of healing a man
(ανθρωπον) themselves had, on this question, come down on the
side of working on the Sabbath. So, if explanatory footnotes are used
at all, this is the place where one should be. Or, if the translator
is more given to paraphrase, a few words could be added to the verse
to explain this.
The
last question that I see arising in this verse is how to convey the
tense of the last verb. Περιτεμνετε
is
a second person plural active indicative verb with a habitual aspect.
This can be conveyed in English as “you often circumcise” or “you
will circumcise,” or simply as “you circumcise.”
Lastly, I
give examples of two fairly recent ways of resolving the translation
issues inherent in this verse; one a more strict translation, and the
other a looser one. I'm not entirely satisfied with where either one
ended up, but they are both improvements toward a better
understanding of the verse when expressed in English.
However, because Moses gave you the practice of circumcision (not that it came from Moses, but from the forefathers), you circumcise a male child on the Sabbath. -NET
But you work on the Sabbath, too, whenever you obey Moses’ law of circumcision (actually, however, this tradition of circumcision is older than the Mosaic law); for if the correct time for circumcising your children falls on the Sabbath, you go ahead and do it, as you should. -TLB
