WXXI news.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

Our connection this hour is made in the pages of the Gospels.

How familiar are you with the Gospels?

Do you find religious texts tedious or boring or hectoring?

Do you find them to be inspiring and literal?

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about the seminal texts of history and who wrote them and who translated them, and how we receive them today.

The reason I've been thinking about this is because the scholar Sarah Rudin took her translational skills to the Gospels, and what she has produced is remarkable.

A Jesus who was at times rather funny, a text that is much more accessible than any translation I had read.

And she finds the gospel special because of the story.

She makes a point of saying, this really is a story with Jesus at the center, not just a series of lectures or stray ideas or passages.

The result is the kind of book that someone might actually read cover to cover, instead of just quizzically skipping around from different passages.

And rudin is visiting Rochester as a guest of Suny Brockport for their scholars Day events.

Her book also had me thinking of another person.

I have wanted to bring on connections, but haven't gotten around to it.

Eight years ago, the classicist Emily Wilson was the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English.

When her translation came out.

It debuted to a firestorm of praise and some criticism.

New York Times Magazine called it radically contemporary.

Some other reviewers called it the first feminist translation of the epic poem.

Some readers couldn't get past her gender.

Rudin is a different person, but I wonder if she runs into critics who don't appreciate some of how she has translated classic work, or perhaps in this case, the Gospels.

And I should say there are many glowing reviews.

Here's a review from conversant Faith online about her translation of the Gospels.

Quote.

Rudin's work will be helpful both to those seeking a contemporary literary literary translation and those who keep slipping into autopilot with an overfamiliar text.

Readers will invariably come away with a richer sense of the gospel strangeness, verve and sheer delight awfulness.

We're going to talk about it this hour with our guest, who, by the way, is working on a book called Reproductive Wrongs A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women that's coming out next year.

But for now, let me welcome Sarah Rudin, author and translator.

Welcome.

Thank you for being on the program today.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

And we're going to talk about the Gospels.

We'll talk about what you're working on next.

Why don't you tell listeners a little bit about who you are and a little bit about your, your career, which is more than just this book that I'm holding in my hands right now.

You've done a lot of translating and a lot of writing of your own accord.

right.

Yes, I, I started my literary career as a poet, and, that was in the new South Africa.

I published a book of poetry there.

One.

What was there?

Major national award at the time.

and around the same time, I was also beginning to translate classic works, Petronius Homeric Hymns, the Aeneid.

Lissa Strada.

and but I by the time I came back to the United States, which was, almost a decade later, I, got interested in, in translating sacred literature.

So, I spent some time at Yale Divinity School learning, learning Hebrew.

I already knew Greek so I could address the Gospels, on that basis.

yes.

And and, so I wrote a book about, the apostle Paul and, and eventually this, this book on the, on the Gospels also, a new translation of, Augustine's Confessions from the Latin.

And can you give us, in brief, a little bit about what reproductive wrongs will be about your one of your next book?

She got a book coming out in September, and then Reproductive Wrongs next year.

You got a lot coming up.

What is reproductive wrongs about, reproductive wrongs?

traces propagandistic writings, about, family planning, about reproductive choice and, both negative and positive propaganda.

So women should have more children.

Women should have fewer children.

Women should, not have abortions, sort of the whole range of messaging.

And it goes from, the first century BC, clear up to now, you told me before the program something I certainly did not know.

Ovid wrote two anti-abortion poems.

He did, fascinating works, because in some points they really strongly resemble anti-abortion propaganda.

Right now.

So, in other words, there will never really be change or progress.

This is the hamster wheel or we are in forever.

Well, I don't really know.

In some respects this messaging has changed a great deal.

The sad part that is that, as the messaging becomes more persuasive, you know, it fits into a popular literature better.

the actual enforcement, you know, of a given regime's, program on fertility can become much harsher.

for Ovid, the poems were just, they look kind of like a little experiment, and they were probably attached to the emperor, Augustus's fertility program.

He had a family values program that he wanted more children born to Roman citizens.

And that was probably why he enlisted Arvid to write these two poems.

We don't really know the history of the poems, of course, but I think that's likely.

But neither Augustus's program nor of its poems seem to have made the slightest bit of difference in what people did.

But, you know, as history goes on, the state becomes a lot more effective.

in enforcing its, its policy in this area.

I don't mean to be cheeky, but does the argument from Ovid sound somewhat like what we hear from perhaps Vice President JD Vance today?

I haven't heard what he said today, but this is not today.

But but lately, family planning, the importance of having more children, of creating policy that will that will allow for families to get larger of the problems with abortion of the the moral problem with abortion and the value of, family planning to create a larger state of American born children.

Right?

Yes.

There there are both general resemblances, in that vein.

So it tends to be a nationalistic argument.

You must do this.

This is the duty of women for the state, for the state, for their nation.

Yes.

for your ethnic group, for your religion.

You must you must perform.

And having more children.

and but there's also, a specific argument that's really startling, startlingly similar.

Arvid says, you know what?

If the women, of legend.

So, women hero heroines, the goddess in one case, what if they, you know, pregnant with the heroes that were going to found home, found Rome?

suppose they had had abortions.

You know, history would go to pieces.

Civilization would not have existed.

So the great people of history would never have been born.

Exactly similar to the argument today that, the child that you might have bought could cure cancer.

Exactly.

And and also the, the, looking backwards, suppose, Mary had aborted Jesus.

That's an argument that she would you hear among, evangelicals.

So.

Okay, a lot of echoes of history anyway, that the book is going to be called Reproductive Wrongs A Short History of Bad Ideas About Women comes out next year.

You can see why I don't feel like I'm going to have enough time with Sarah Rudin this hour.

An author and translator whose work is so interesting and, I'm really grateful for it.

listeners, if you want to meet Sarah tonight, Sarah will be presenting at the Suny Brockport Writers Forum.

That's the annual artifact reading tonight, Art of fact.

And it's tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the downtown campus at the Rochester Educational Opportunity Center on Chestnut Street.

So she'll be reading, talking about her work.

Take questions from the audiences, and you can pick up some copies of the books.

There, including the one that's in my hand right now.

It's the translation of the Gospels.

And, it's not your first translation, but it's an audacious piece of work to say.

I think I will do the Gospels next.

What convinced you that that was the project that you wanted to do?

Well, this might be my most political book so far.

I was going to ask you, if you consider it a political book.

Oh, yes.

yes.

I, I think that literalist, fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible have been extensively misused politically in this country.

so I was very concerned about that.

So I took skills that I had picked up in writing the Paul book and, and writing my classics translations, and, and I applied them to, to gospel translation and in the Gospels, in fact, the departures from demonstrable truth in, in the language that you're looking at, which is Koine Greek, of the late, first century, early second century AD are yeah, they're they're, more deliberate.

They're more outrageous.

They're they're, more manipulative, really, than anything that you would see in classics.

Because people in translating classics tend not to have, you know, a political agenda.

okay.

So you know, your own background as a Quaker is something that you have talked about in regards to how you approach a translation, and you write a little bit about that in the introduction to this translation.

Tell me a little bit about how your Quaker background informs this work.

Right.

Quakerism was, sort of a, revelation to me.

when I came to Quakers, at the age of 30. that was more than 30 years ago.

And, Quakerism was really influential in, in my work, in Quaker worship, you sit in silence and you take, a very critical view of anything you might want to say.

And you're supposed to be asking yourself, does it rise to the level of ministry that is, does the community need to hear it?

You know, so the opposite of social media?

Yes.

You you you do not express yourself, your every thought, every whim.

Right?

You choose very carefully.

And and in most meetings, you sit in silence all the way through and listen to, someone else who chooses to speak.

that's what you're supposed to be do.

And the value of that, again, my understanding is the value is not to say repress every thought that you have.

It's to say, be as thoughtful as you can be before you speak.

Consider everything that you can consider before popping off about something.

Exactly.

it's, makes you more critical about mere self-expression.

it makes you, more skeptical about truth claims, particularly your own truth claims.

and your received ideas, as an awfully useful attitude to have in retranslated because, of course, you have the original text perhaps imprinted deeply in your head.

I grew up a methodist, so, yeah, we read the Bible a lot.

We studied the Bible.

so it was something I thought I knew, but I had to back off it and ask, well, do I know this at all?

That humility is so interesting.

I just read a piece last week in the Atlantic with this headline, Quaker parents were Ahead of their time.

Gail Cornwall, a Quaker, writes this piece, about, she says the nearly 375 year old religion's principles line up surprisingly well with modern parenting research.

But really, she goes on to share kind of a universal Quaker idea, which I think reflects what you're saying here.

Sarah.

She says, quote, we cannot know all there is to know, and we will always later realize that we were wrong.

The principle.

This principle has helped me cultivate humility and compassion for myself after missteps and quote, so that humility that you bring to a project like this, translating the Gospels, as you say, it's vital to to doing the work.

You think at a high level.

But I think people who might be predisposed to be your critics, those who have taken the fundamentalist interpretations that you've criticized might say, okay, you criticize my interpretation, but nobody is free of bias.

So you bring to this project your own baggage, and surely it must be a political project.

It must be a motivated project.

Well, you're certainly it is a motivated project.

I have my politics.

they are liberal.

so I don't approve of heavy handed, fundamentalist translation, which is informed by modern theology rather than anything in ancient language or culture that we can pin on the gospels.

yes.

That's true.

but I also think that that we should be pursuing, discovery and a build up of scholarly, philological facts.

we should we should be, you know, establishing generation by generation, you know, what the Gospels do, for example, do demonstrably say and, one favorite example of mine is a story that's told twice in the Gospels about Jesus encountering the Phoenician woman.

So she's a Canaanite woman.

She's not Jewish.

She's a pagan.

And, she approaches Jesus quite aggressively.

She wants her daughter healed and, Jesus.

in every standard Gospels translation, in fact, every Gospels translation that I've, that I've seen, calls her people dogs.

And he says, you know, you can't throw the bread, the children's bread to the dogs.

And so he, he seems to be calling, non-Jewish people dogs a horrible insult for the time.

But, the word is right in front of you in, in Greek.

It's in the text.

It's in the lexicons.

It is it it means little doggies.

It's it's not the word dog.

it's the word little doggies, which means what it means.

Well, you can do your research in, in, literature and in the lexicons.

You can trace this, word.

there are electronic facilities where you can actually see the word absolutely everywhere that it occurs.

It doesn't have many occurrences, but it seems to be a comic word.

it's it's a jokey word.

It's not puppies.

It's a little doggy poos little dog girls.

it's a funny word about, you know, the cute little lap dogs, which is a, very striking word for a pious due to be saying, but less striking.

But it's not a slur like the word dog.

It's absolutely not a slur that the dogs would be.

Is it a pejorative?

Is it playful?

It's playful.

It does seem to be playful.

I don't know whether we can really believe that this is what Jesus said, but this is what his, Greek speaking, what what Greek speakers who were writing about him considerably later, several generations later.

You know, this is what they claim.

He said.

Yeah, I'm in that point.

I'm we're talking to Sarah Rudin, who is the author of the Gospels.

It's a translated work of the Gospels.

And, so when you say that the authors, author, or authors of the Gospels, you know, late first century A.D., second century A.D., I remember first reading Bart Herman's work and thinking, you know, how do we know who wrote what and what does history say?

And I was surprised to learn that a lot of the text didn't.

You know, I grew up, going to church and thinking like, well, the text comes from probably one ad, right?

Like that.

That's they're all transcribing right as we go here.

This is like a play by play account, as opposed to a century later, two centuries later.

And it felt a little jarring for me.

But as best we know, that's when these gospels are from.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's not, disputed.

you know, Jesus was born in, in, you know, very close to the, millennium.

and then he died around the age of 30, after quite a short ministry.

so we're around 30, 30 odd, you know, A.D. at that point and then, you know, a couple generations well, not the first thing we get is the letters of Paul, you know, and Paul, died in the mid 60s, after having written a number of letters that were widely circulated, and then, after Paul, you know, less than a generation after Paul, you start getting gospel authors and, the Gospel of John, the latest one is probably, appearing, you know, some somewhere around 100 A.D., but they're in Greek.

And, and the consensus is that Jesus's language was Aramaic.

So that's kind of a, a lingua franca derived from Hebrew.

So it's a completely different language family.

The Gospels are translation.

Very much so.

Okay.

And so before I get into some other specifics, let me just also understand a little bit more about your perspective, about how the modern translations have sometimes been misused or, and maybe misused politically.

Is it part of your argument?

So you bring up the example of Jesus and the slur of dog versus the playful, otherwise?

And is it your feeling that too often the misinterpretations are misused politically to, quote unquote, prove that Jesus was actually more vindictive, vengeful versus more thoughtful, playful, interesting?

Sometimes funny?

Is it that the texts are, translated in almost misogynistic ways or misguided ways in that way?

Or is it something else?

Well, you know, it's very tough to say what exactly it is.

And probably the translation dogs instead of doggies, comes from an era, when, you know, scholars had it very hard.

So, honest mistakes.

Well, they didn't have the resources we have to know what they were looking at.

they didn't have dictionaries, let alone online dictionaries.

You're not ascribing motive.

Even if you think they might have gotten it wrong.

I don't think you can necessarily, you know, ascribe motive.

If you look at, say, early manuscripts of, of the Gospels, and especially later manuscripts of the Gospels, your hand copying it, you know, from one exemplar to another, endlessly, endlessly.

And you're doing this in mostly in monasteries where you just don't have reference works.

You can't learn about the language, what you need to know.

so and then the mistakes accumulate massively.

And then in, in modern scholarship, you sort them out as best you can.

and you get the most, most accurate, text that you can of the Greek.

so I would, I would say the, the political element, that's damaging comes in more in the treatment of, of an English translation, a treatment that's, super reverent, that looks back to the King James version as some kind of, you know, holy creation.

you know, the King James Version is like early, 17th century.

It's way, way after the fact.

Okay.

but the text us receptors, receptors, theory says that there is something magical about the King James Version.

So whatever we find in it, whatever we happen to get in the single English text is untouchable, you know?

And how dare you look back at the Greek.

You know what a very credible version of of the Greek text that is much, better edited, you know, than anything that the the King James scholars had available, to work on the on the King James translation.

you know, you can't actually, rethink the English translation because it's untouchable.

It's holy.

Okay.

And, and I really appreciate as a reader your glossary at the beginning.

maybe more than any guest I've ever had, you might appreciate this little story from about ten years ago, when my brothers and I found out through my stepmother that she had found an old diary in the attic that my father, in 1966, at the age of 21, had kept with him in it during an entire summers trip to Europe, five different countries, two friends and him went.

He and his parents said, we'll help fund this if you write in your diary every single night, so we know what you've done.

And we read this and we thought, boy, we need of Sarah Rudin to translate some of this.

Some of the terminology was just of a different time.

So when we recreated it for him as a holiday gift, we, we created a glossary that indicated terms and phrases that his grandchildren would never understand, that he might have to explain.

And it took a lot of work for us to figure out, even in 1966, what he meant when he said no.

So, you know, there's a number, which, by the way, is just no dice.

Not happening.

I mean, like phrases that are not used.

And that was, what, a couple generations past, when you're looking at text that's not 2000 years old, but close.

you know, going back to, to ancient Greek here you create this glossary.

And just as an example for listeners, can I ask you just to kind of can I pick a few words and you tell us why it may be challenging at times to take our modern version of that word.

evil is an example.

You know, what does evil mean?

yeah.

for us, it's it's pretty much an abstract word.

so, but, you know, to the to the ancients, evil is embodied, and it's embodied in the evil one.

That's that is, one common way that they describe the devil.

And, so there is no kind of abstract, ambient evil in the world.

the evil is evil.

Things are what the evil one does.

And so, evil is, natural force.

they talk about demons, you know, invading the body the way we might talk about parasites or, bacteria, evil as a disease.

So.

So the devil will sort of invade you and, cause epilepsy, for example.

so, they were just very concrete and very specific about what evil was.

and they didn't throw around, you know, very general ideas of evil the way we do.

even the word kiss.

You're right.

This was the normal greeting between friends and relatives, including between men.

It had no necessary erotic meaning.

And the word love, you say?

it kind of depends.

In Greek, eros means sexual passion.

Agape, affection or benevolence of several kinds, and philia friendship.

So if we see the word love today, we may have an idea, but it doesn't always perfectly translate to the texts of the past.

Yes, right.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's a, a very tricky, dialog, a sort of joking dialog in the Gospels and a Jesus's is having it with Peter, who's the kind of buffoon of the couple's.

he doesn't certainly have the status that Saint Peter acquires.

in, in Catholic tradition, and, the Peter is, you know, wanting to establish, you know, the vocabulary for his relationship with, with Jesus.

And Jesus keeps switching on him, which you can which you can do in the Greek.

So you see Jesus kind of cruelly teasing this poor man, you know, with different vocabulary for love.

And, and until Peter just kind of loses his temper.

But in a, in a standard translation, you can't see the joke because, the the only word translated is love.

You don't have love and friendship, which is one way that you can translate this.

And even the word perfect.

Perfect is pretty clear to us today, but it does not mean flawless in the ancient text.

It means appropriately developed or finished.

So, you know, again, it's easy to think, well, I can just pick up texts and, you know, I know what they mean.

Well, without the context, it can get very difficult.

And you really hold, I think, some opprobrium for soul and spirit, which you say are so abstract.

And you imagine now a child reading the gospel, seeing the words soul and spirit and thinking, I don't really know, like, what's the utility here?

Well, we have tended to, impose on, you know, what we might imagine as, you know, the ministry of of a pious Jew in Judea, in the, the early, first century AD we impose on that, all kinds of ideas that, you know, would have puzzled him, that he would have disagreed with.

And, yeah, that's just, I think it's kind of kind of sad.

Our dualism, for example, we have this modern idea, I mean, ultimately derived from Plato, that you have you have this kind of, lower, cruder physical being.

And then, you have the higher disembodied spiritual being, the world, the universe is divided into these two pieces.

but you can look at, both Koine Greek, you know, and Hebrew and Aramaic.

And you don't see that idea.

borne out in the language you see, you know, Uranus or I'm-I'm-I'm, the Greek and the, the Hebrew word for, for sky is not different from the word for heaven.

yes.

This is the heaven.

You look up and see.

You see, natural phenomenon up there, heavenly bodies, weather and so on.

But but, this is not different.

you know, from the place, God lives and it's not different from, you know, the things that God is doing up there, like leading the stars across the sky as the heavenly host or the army of the sky is, I think, a much better translation.

talking to Sarah Rudan, the translator of the Gospels, and I, we have to take her on the break.

If you're on the phone, you've got a lot of interest from our listeners.

You mind taking a little feedback?

We'll take some phone calls and emails with Sarah Rudin, who is, her translation of the Gospels is, driving a lot of the conversation this hour, but her work is, spans a lot wider range.

And it's really, really interesting.

She is in town today as a guest of Suny Brockport, and she's going to be presenting at the Suny Brockport Writers Forum tonight at 730 at their downtown campus on Chestnut Street.

We'll come right back with your questions on connections.

Coming up in our second hour, my colleague Gina Fanelli joins us to talk about his recent reporting and what could be coming, I should say, to the Inner Loop North when it gets filled in, namely, maybe the state's largest geothermal field.

Geothermal might be a challenge for you wherever you live or in existing properties, but with the blank canvas, this could be the time, and we're going to talk about it next hour.

Support for your public radio station comes from our members and from teen empowerment.

Presenting its annual Community luncheon marking over 20 years of youth leadership making an impact in Rochester Wednesday, May 7th at the Riverside Convention Center.

Tickets online at Teen empowerment.org/rochester on the hit medical drama The Pitt, actress Taylor Dearden is being celebrated for her portrayal of a talented young emergency room doctor who, like Dearden, is neurodivergent, recognizing that something is hard for anyone and then being able to overcome it.

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I'm Ailsa Chang how the Pitt portrays neurodivergent and gets it right on All Things Considered.

From NPR news.

This afternoon at four.

This is connections.

I'm Evan Dawson.

All right.

Rich in Rochester.

First up on the phone.

Hello, Rich.

Go ahead.

Hey, Evan.

How have you been?

Very good.

Good to hear from you, Rich.

Hey, first, I, I do a lot.

I do a lot of looking at the Bible in the, gospels and stuff, but I just just edit just to be fully, you know, transparent.

I'm atheist, humanist.

And one of the things that I.

That actually got me away from religion was so many of the points that your guest is making now, and, and how do you, how do you square that circle with people as they talk to you from the perspective of a religious person?

what do you mean?

What's an example?

Yeah.

Rich, what's an example of something that you've heard in this discussion that says, that's why I moved away from it?

Just the fact that so, so much of the language like example of who God was, who Jesus was, how the definition of him changed, or the image of him in God changed, from the Old Testament and from the new.

And with all this change, how do you say that this God is unchanging, yet there's always this constant change in this constant rewriting, and this is a constant, reimagining of this, this these figures.

Yeah.

Rich.

Really good, fair questions.

And by the way, part and parcel to Rich's question, I think Sarah is, the discussion over the years and what the word Messiah means, what it meant at the time, and whether to the historical data that we have, whether Jesus's disciples actually thought of him as divine in his lifetime.

So, you know, Rich is saying there's so many terms that we could look at and feel like they're ambiguous.

How do we have any certainty that we actually know anything here?

yeah.

the, the, question of terminology for divinity is really complicated.

And, I mean, one one basic difference is that, in the Hebrew Bible, you have, all kinds of terms for God.

You have, you know, I don't know, I which is my lord, you have l, which is God.

You know, you have actually, terms for God from from different.

They derive from different, pagan religious traditions and it's very, poetic, very colorful kind of way of, of understanding the, the divinity.

but when you get to the, the Greek translation, I would say of, of, Jesus's ministry, you're talking about half chaos.

The God, which, really, if you've read classics, that brings you, that brings, pagan philosophy to, to mind, you know, the God as sort of a kind of abstract, moralistic, God.

who's, maybe you can associate him with Zeus.

but he kind of stands for, an abstract of divinity.

so you go to two different, you know, sets of imagery, two different concepts, of God, which are, I would say, clashing in the, in the rendering of the Gospels that we have, and then you have terms like, son of man, which if you look at, the Hebrew and, Jewish sacred literature, this doesn't necessarily have to mean more than human being.

but it's associated with Jewish apocalyptic literature.

You know, somebody who looks like a human being.

we associate that with the Messiah.

So, from this idea, seems to flow, the idea of, of, the Messiah being incarnated, and he, he represents, you know, a kingly being, descendant of King David, or, you know, something far more, you know, and you can just take up, what you might call straight mistranslation and, of another term, son of God, which doesn't have to be more than an honorific, you know, very good person, very pious person is a son of God.

but then you can take that literally and say, you know, this is a genetic son of God which fits right into, you know, Greek mythological thinking.

So you get this really complicated, you know, set of cards, sets that are kind of mixed together.

Better you than me doing this work.

So really remarkable.

Very difficult work.

And rich.

I appreciate the point.

I mean, I can understand why at times you feel like it is so far removed and abstract, and there's such a game of telephone over the ages that can we sit here in 2025 and feel certain that we know what happened to what was said and what it meant?

It's difficult.

You can at least empathize with that, I think.

Sarah, but I want to say, Rich, if you pick up the book, the Gospels, this particular book, it reads like you can read it cover to cover.

It's the first time I picked up the Gospels and felt that way.

What were you.

What did you want to accomplish with it?

Before I go back to phone call.

So Hal and Jack, I'll take your calls in a second.

What did you want to accomplish with this particular translation?

Well, I did want to, promote the idea of of a book or a four books, you know, that can be read straight through as a story, because that's not the way they're they're used, in, in worship, certainly you get them in little fragments, right?

You don't get context.

And so that helps, I think, in misunderstanding them.

you get this little piece this week and then you get another little piece for sure.

Sure.

but it's a story, a cohesive one.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

And it reads that way, by the way.

I mean, I think you have definitely succeeded in that way.

It is very readable, although I wish you would have chosen more modern names.

That was my only complaint for a challenge.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, I just wanted to emphasize the strangeness of of, the cultures, you know, going going backwards.

So we're talking about, cosmopolitan Greek culture.

That's culture, in which the Gospels are written more or less, you know, and then, Judaic Jewish culture, then you can go back further, talk about the culture in which the Jewish scriptures are written.

And, so, I wanted to emphasize the strangeness, you know, the distance and, not make us not, not perpetuate the illusion that, yeah, we are this is familiar.

You know, this is Sunday school.

We know all about this.

you know, we can.

And that means we can interpret it any way we feel like ideologically.

And I think that's a very dangerous notion, because people often do that.

Yes.

Yeah.

okay, back to your phone calls, Hal in Monroe County.

Hey, hey, I'll go ahead.

Thank you.

I just wanted to thank you, Evan Duff.

And for having this guest is, I haven't heard these subjects talked about since I was an undergraduate in the mid 60s.

Well, Sarah is right there.

Yeah, so?

So, three kind of interrelated, questions I have.

one is, it sounds the way this extraordinary guest is speaking, she's, a student of philology and might be called a philologist, too.

it's based upon a notion of cultural and historical imposition that is, the truth is, in the eyes of the seer, not necessarily in the doer.

And the third point, which really goes back to the professor at the University of Indiana, Georg Cantor in the 20th century, he was obsessed with the, translations in the 1800s of Greek, where the word was translated as Saul, that in Greek it would have meant psyche or a functional self.

so would your guest speak about either, or three of those?

Yeah.

Thank you.

How first, are you a philologist?

I don't think so.

They tried to train me as one, and I have a I have a Harvard PhD in classical philology.

is that right?

Yes.

so way to go.

Well, that's the branch of knowledge dealing with the structure, historical development and relationships of language or languages.

Yeah.

All right.

So, the most important thing that a philologist does, you know, as I learned in graduate school, is edit texts.

So, this is a person who is, you know, deeply knowledgeable about linguistics, about history and who can take, you know, a messed up manuscript, from late antiquity or from the Middle Ages and, compare it to lots of other manuscripts and say, well, I think the text really read, this way in this passage, it's this word and not that word.

so I've never done anything like that.

Okay, that's the hard stuff.

But when we talk about Jesus, whether he's referring to pagans as dogs, which would have been a really low slur or dog is a playful term that's not nearly meant in the same way.

Hal.

Second point, they're about you know, truth may be in the eyes of some of the receiver of of the words as opposed to what is intended.

And I you know, certainly people will interpret many different things differently poetry different ways, songs different ways.

But I think there is value here, and I suspect Hal feels the same way of of really understanding as, as best we can the roots and the intention.

Because if if you are a follower of Jesus in 2025 and you are using this particular passage where he calls the pagans dogs as some kind of template for how you are going to behave when in reality, the translation that Sarah Rudin finds, is, it turns out, a lot more humorous and playful and not nearly as dark that matters.

Yes, it matters.

And I would call translation both an art and a science.

so, you were doing a couple of things, you know, and I am not a philologist, but I'm perfectly capable of of using a lexicon, in, in Latin, Greek or Hebrew and, tracing, all the uses, extant uses of, of a particular word, in, in, in literature.

And in that case, in that sense, I'm practicing the science because it, it obviously has certain meanings, possible, you know, according to its context, you know, and according to the linguists, you know, who have studied it, and that's not arguable.

It's a diminutive, it means a little doggies.

It does not mean dogs.

That's a different word.

And so it's easy to say that.

But, you know, it's an art in a, I think, a matter in matters of presentation.

So when you get a, when you get a pun, for example, you can't translate it little literally because it's not funny.

You have to find an analogy.

Yeah.

You have to be, creative writer and find, you know, how do you communicate the essence of it so that your present audience will laugh?

Yeah.

Puns have to stay in their own language, unfortunately.

Jack and Grace.

Hey, Jack.

Go ahead.

Did I miss it?

Jack?

Let's try it again.

Hey, Jack.

That was my fault.

Go ahead, Jack, I have it.

I got disconnected somehow, so.

But somebody hit the wrong button.

I guess that was me.

Go ahead.

Yeah.

Oh, sure.

Hey, thank you so much, Sarah.

It's, What a great topic.

Especially, as we're approaching Easter season.

You know, I'm a lifelong Catholic.

just to share.

And, you know, it's, I guess.

Well, my my overall question, I have so many thoughts, but my overall question is, you know, how has your study influenced your view of the Gospels and maybe of God in a broader sense, but but before I get to that, you know, the the, the one thing I'll share is that it's, you know, it's, to talk about the gospels and, and and we, you know, one thought is that we get the meaning of a particular word is so important in how we interpreted the gospels and the culture of the time.

It for me as a novice, it's such a challenge.

Took time to see what was, what was really meant and the different audiences that the gospel writers wrote to.

But but, you know, and the interesting thing is, as you, I'm curious if you probably will at a time, but, you know, some of the people that we went into like to talk about the fundamentalists in the Catholic Church, we have fundamentalists, too, that gets so hung up on what that's what the gospel says.

Kind of ignoring the overall message, which I've tried to accept, is basically the gospel is about love.

It's about God's love, not about, you know, demonizing and separating, but it's about love.

Yeah.

Let me just jump in there, Jack.

I appreciate that phone call.

So two things there.

first of all, how has it affected you?

We got to keep this brief.

We could go for another hour with you, Sarah.

And time is running short.

How has it affected your faith doing this work?

well, I think it has, you know, certainly undermined my theology, because, you know, when you translate a work like the Gospels, you have a powerful, sense that, you know, theology is an imposition.

You know, this is a lot of this stuff is an invention of of late antiquity.

You know, when they were writing creeds, you know, when they were, divvying up exactly what they believed, and, you know, then, later on, you know, you have, theologians like Thomas Thomas Aquinas, you know, who are who are bringing together these concepts, that, you know, try to, square the circle of a lot of things that are that are left ambiguous or, variant in the Gospels, and in Scripture generally, there's there's no concern to be consistent.

And we can see this in the Gospels.

You know, we've got we've got four quite different stories.

John, especially is quite different.

so, you know, you've got in Genesis, you have two creation stories.

and Judaism is, quite tolerant of, of, of this idea that that, knowledge is plural and it can be communal and yet plural.

So we're listening to a lot of different voices and, and we're having, we're enjoying a lot of different interpretations.

So if you think of the Passover celebration, yeah, we're delighting in the different interpretations.

and, theology, can try to mash this together.

So, certainly, you know, any belief in theology that I used to have is undermined by my work as a translator.

Angela wants to know, if you sent this book to the white House and if you think the president has a favorite biblical book, we.

And Sarah said there's nothing out of bounds question wise.

I'm going to let her answer.

But first, we actually have the sound.

When Donald Trump declared for the presidency in 2015, he held a big rally in Alabama.

He held up the Bible, and then he sat down the next day with John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, and they asked him about his faith that he had been talking about on the campaign trail.

Let's listen.

You mentioned the Bible.

You've been talking about how it's your favorite book.

And you said, I think last night in Iowa, some people are surprised that you say that.

I'm wondering what 1 or 2 of your most favored Bible verses are.

I wouldn't want to get into it, because to me, that's very personal.

You know, when I talk about the Bible, it's very personal.

So I don't want to get into the I don't want to get into there's no I means a lot to you that you think about or cite.

The Bible means a lot to me, but I don't want to get into specifics, even to cite a verse, you know, like, I don't want to do that.

Every Old Testament guy or New Testament, probably equal.

I think it's just an incredible.

The whole Bible is an incredible joke.

very much so.

They always hold up the art of the day.

I say my second favorite book of all time, but, I just think the Bible is just something very special.

Sarah.

Well, you know, we're used to, Trumpian rhetoric.

By the by this time.

And, you know, when he speaks in those terms, he means he has absolutely no familiarity with the subject.

I mean, we've all been there.

Maybe Sarah hasn't, but we've most of us have been there where we go, oh, my gosh, that paper was due today.

And you're showing up in class and you're trying to scribble it at the last second and you're going, yeah, I'm sure I read this book.

teacher sure I did.

and the teacher can see right through it.

yeah.

So that was the energy there.

So, but but let me close with this on a serious side, Angela is asking you.

Well, did you send this to the white House?

I'm.

I am curious to know if you think that there is a way to bridge some of the gap here.

We've only got about 40s left.

You said this is a political book, and you're not feeling good about the way a lot of, modern religion sort of weaponizes certain translations.

So what's the best case scenario going forward?

gosh, I don't know.

You know, I have done a lot of visiting, you know, I have done a lot of lecturing and, participated in a lot of discussions across religious and, and, political lines, you know, and I have I've got a great respect for, the way many people at the grassroots, engage with the Bible and are, you know, open to, you know, a growing and living understanding of the Bible.

And this includes many quite conservative people.

Oh, sure.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, when it comes to our political present, political leadership.

yeah, I'm, I'm just revolted because they would they would push any interpretation that served their own power.

This is my impression.

The book by Sarah Root and the translation of the Gospels is available now.

Sarah will be speaking tonight at the Suny Brockport Writers Forum, at the Downtown campus at 730 on Chestnut Street.

They would love to see you there.

Her book coming out next year is about, I was going to say about reproductive, history around the world.

I don't how the title is Reproductive Wrongs that is coming out next year.

Sarah Rudin, you're very generous.

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

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