Apparently the Anglican Bible obscures the connection to debt and in the Lord's Prayer talks about "trespasses". That's interesting.
The Swedish Bible, in all official translations from 1526 to 2000, has something that translates to "forgive us our debt, like we forgive those indebted to us" with minor spelling and grammar changes over the centuries.
The first Swedish translation commissioned by Gustav I was a straight translation of Martin Luther's German Bible. The ones before 1917 were minor spelling and grammar updates from previous versions, direct translations from older Swedish.
The last two translations by the government's Bible Commission, The Swedish Church Bible of 1917 and Bibel 2000, were based on original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts, but also made effort to minimize changes in style from previous versions, so now I'm curious how Bibel 2000 would have looked in some timeline where an intermediate Swedish Bible would have been based on King James.
Would they have gone back to the phrasing in the original text or would they have said something like "debt and sin are the same word in the original, but in this passage it's clearly more about sin"?
The 1917 version was more cautious, but Bibel 2000 did make some controversial changes in accordance with the originals and updated theological, historical and literary understanding, so maybe they'd have rephrased it to debt. We'll never know. =)
@bkhl So we've carried that duality into Swedish, but "som står i skuld till oss" / "oss skyldiga äro" is difficult for me to read as someone having wronged us in some way other than owing us something, at the very least owing us compensation for something they did.
@mjjzf@clacke I guess that's "skuldenär" in Swedish. Had they used that word in Swedish I'd also been associating it with financial debt, rather than moral debt.
@clacke Interesting. I had heard both and was never too sure what was going on there. Trespassing may have been more acceptable to the ruling classes than forgiving debts?
@clacke we have a new one in the works here in Denmark, and it has been discussed. Interestingly, the people most into the Bible already find the most recent translation too modern - so it is not entirely clear who lobbied for it. "A more modern bible" does seem a bit of a paradox
> "A more modern bible" does seem a bit of a paradox Heh, I see what you mean, but we have learned a lot about the times the Bible was written and the people who wrote it since the first translations to Latin and other languages. And the translations we made since those first translations accumulated a lot of cruft that didn't come from the original sources.
That's why the Swedish Bibel 2000 was written based on proper scholarly understanding of the material and a critical eye to where texts were coming from and what they really meant.
That combined with updated language that is better understandable to an audience of today is reasonable to call a "modern Bible".
I guess with "people most into the Bible" you don't mean nerds of ancient literature, culture and languages, but rather fundamentalist Christians with a literal interpretation of the Bible translation they grew up with.
Those people will of course be devastated to be told that maybe some lines text they have used to justify some part of their doctrine were based on a misunderstanding of the original message.
@clacke There's a widely sung version of the Lord's Prayer that uses 'debts'. I don't think most English speakers understand 'debts' in a purely financial sense, but rather as offenses against someone else.
NIV is the one most sold in the US and it has "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors".
The Common English Bible is published by an alliance of denominations like Methodists, Episcopalians and US Presbyterians. The American Bible Society publishes the Good News Translation and the Common English Version, unclear who reads them and how widespread they are. These three talk about doing wrongs or wronging someone.
Graeber: "Actually the Lord's Prayer, which we always remember through the Anglican translation, which is 'forgive us our trespasses just as we forgive those who trespass against us', sort of translated into these odd private property terms".
The only version that has "trespasses" is the New Matthew Bible, which is so obscure that Wikipedia doesn't know about it. Anglicans use the KJV.
So that's weird, but his main point is that Aramaic and, as we've discovered, most English translations and many other translations, see some level of equivalence or connection between sin and debt, as they are used as homonyms.
Also Matthew 18 ( libranet.de/display/0b6b25a8-1… ) confirms in explicit reference that not paying what you owe is an important form of wrongdoing. So even if Graeber is off on his reference, his point seems to hold.
> The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches tend to use the rendering "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors". Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Methodists are more likely to say "trespasses… those who trespass against us".
Oh! Apparently the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_… somehow comes from a different tradition (different Greek text even, dating back to the 4th century) than the Bible text, and the BCP uses "trespasses" while the KJV uses "debts".
English-speaking Anglicans, Catholics and various independent denomination like Methodists all use the prayer from the BCP.
I didn't realize this could be the case, as in Sweden when the Bible was updated the prayer would be updated with it.
> As early as the third century, Origen of Alexandria used the word trespasses (παραπτώματα) in the prayer. Although the Latin form that was traditionally used in Western Europe has debita (debts), most English-speaking Christians (except Scottish Presbyterians and some others of the Dutch Reformed tradition) use trespasses. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord%27s…
I should add that whatever translation the Catholic Church used when I was a kid did have 'trespasses', so when we memorized it, that's what we memorized.
@clacke When I went to Catholic church services as a kid, the verbage was "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." I believe this was updated to debt/debtors sometime within the last decade to better reflect the accurate translation.