Why Translation Matters

In the post-Conciliar Rite, yesterday was the 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and in the current year of the three-year cycle of Sunday readings (A), the Gospel was Matthew 21, 33-43, the parable of the vineyard owner. In the Roman Rite, a slightly longer version of this Gospel, going to verse 46, is read on the 2nd Friday of Lent. This is retained in the same place in the post-Conciliar Rite, but verse 44 is omitted, the words of Our Lord being deemed insufficiently irenic for the delicate ears of Modern Man™: “And whosoever shall fall on this stone, shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it shall grind him to powder.”

The Risen Christ and the Mystical Winepress, by Marco dal Pino, often called Marco da Siena, (1525-1588 ca.), an artistic expression of the very ancient exegetic tradition by which the wine-press is a symbol of Christ’s Passion.

The Old Testament reading, Isaiah 5, 1-7, is paired with this Gospel because the parable is unmistakably a citation of it; in both, the owner of the vineyard makes a hedge (or ‘fence’) around the vineyard, digs a wine-press, and builds a tower in it. In the prophecy, despite the care of the vineyard owner, it produces not “grapes”, but “wild grapes.” The latter is the term used in many English translations, including the Douay, the KJV, and the NAB, and does not sound very bad, but in Hebrew, the word is “be’ushim”, derived from a verb root that means “to stink.” The translators of the Septuagint made the contrast between good plant and bad plant more explicit by writing “thorns.”

For the Church, this passage refers to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah, which is why it is paired with this Gospel, in which the workers in the vineyard end up killing the owner’s son. St Jerome in his commentary on Isaiah connects the Septuagint reading with Our Lord’s crown of thorns, but rejects this as a breaking of the comparison in the original metaphor, and instead chooses for his own translation the rare Latin word “labrusca”, the name of a kind of wild grape vine.

This is something which probably no English translation can do justice to, but there is a much more serious error in this reading in the dreadful NAB, which the wise Dr Anthony Esolen rightly has described as a “colorless, odorless, gaseous paraphrase.” The first verse should read, “Let me sing of my well-beloved, a song of my beloved concerning his vineyard.” The Hebrew words for “my well-beloved” and “my beloved” derive from the same root from which comes the name of King David. Our readers will hardly need to be reminded that Christ’s claim to be the Messiah is derived in part from His descent from David, and that he is repeatedly acclaimed as the son of David in the Gospel. In the Septuagint version, they are both translated with forms of the Greek verb “agapao”, the same verb which is used in the Synoptic Gospels when God the Father speaks from heaven at Christ’s baptism and calls him “my beloved Son”. In Hebrew, however the two words are slightly different, “dīdī” and “dōdī”. (The suffix -ī at the end of these words is the “my”.) This seems to have inspired St Jerome (following the lead of a different Greek version of the Scriptures) to translate the latter with an alternate meaning, “patruelis mei - my cousin.” And he goes on to explain this as follows in the same commentary:

“The title of the 44th psalm, ‘A song for the beloved one’, teaches us ... that Christ is called ‘beloved’ and ‘most dear.’ Likewise the voice of God the Father in the Gospel, ‘This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.’ And in the 67th psalm we read, ‘The Lord will give the word to them that preach the glad tidings with great might: the king of hosts, of the beloved.’ ... Thus, it should certainly be understood to mean, ‘I will sing to the almighty God the Father the song of Christ, who is my cousin, that is, begotten of the same people as myself.’ ”

The Baptism of Christ, ca. 1387, by Lorenzo Monaco 

This is the very exegetical tradition which justifies pairing this reading with this Gospel, but the NAB, which can always be relied on to make the blandest choice among possible readings, stupidly eliminates it by rendering “dīdī” and “dōdī” as “my friend”.

The time is long past for the Church to insist on the truth of the most recent ecumenical council’s constitution Dei Verbum, which states that “by her authority and with maternal concern, (She) sees to it that suitable and correct translations (of the Scriptures) are made into different languages.” For the English-speaking world, this means permanently abolishing the New American Bible.