Bible translations that avoid the phrase “Son of God” are helping to convert Muslims to Christianity. But the translation has some missionaries and scholars dismayed:
These and many other Muslims live in places where Bible translations have been available in their languages for decades, even for more than a century. So why the sudden surge of interest in Scripture? Some translators attribute the response to the new Bible versions that use religious vocabulary familiar to Muslims. And that’s precisely the problem, according to other translators and missionaries who work among Muslims.
They charge their colleagues with compromise that undermines belief in Jesus Christ as the pre-existent, only begotten Son of God. Both sides eagerly long to take the Good News to the nations and make it discernable to Muslims in their heart languages. Both respect Muslims; neither wants to alter Jesus’ message. Yet a dispute over the most faithful and effective way to render the common biblical phrase “Son of God” is dividing missionary from missionary, scholar from scholar, in a time of evident mistrust between Western Christians and Muslims.It also underscores how few Christians in the West themselves understand this common biblical title for Jesus.
[. . .]
Muslims so commonly misunderstand the phrase “Son of God” that many evangelists and missionaries refrain from using it. Bible translators, however, cannot avoid it. They must make a decision about how to render the phrase in a way that faithfully reflects the original Greek or Hebrew text and also makes sense to readers. And this phrase is anything but clear to Muslim readers. The Qur’an explicitly states that God could not have a son. In Arabic, the word ibn (“son of”) carries biological connotations. Muslims reject the possibility that God could have produced a son through sexual relations with Mary. Christians confess that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. But this distinction is lost on many Muslims who lack the theological context for understanding nuanced Christian teaching on the Trinity.
The problem, however, far surpasses a theological argument between Muslims and Christians. In fact, the Qur’an (At-Tawba 9:30) says God curses anyone who would utter the ridiculous blasphemy that Jesus could be ibnullâh (“a son of God”). Not only do Muslims disagree with Christians about the identity and nature of Jesus, they also incur a curse for even mentioning the phrase “Son of God.”
Is this a legitimate linguistic compromise to avoid a missional stumbling block?
(Via: Justin Taylor)
February 9th, 2011 | 11:10 am
It’s a fair question. I’ve no expertise in Arabic, but it’s entirely credible that some languages’ word for “son” has overtones that blur–or outright pervert–the intended Christian concept of “God the Son.” Languages never map perfectly word for word, and a word-by-word translation can end up LESS faithful than a paraphrase.
Still, I’d be interested to hear what native Arabic-speakers have to say on the subject. I wouldn’t put it past the involved parties to willfully misunderstand a Christian locution whose meaning isn’t actually hard to infer at all.
There’s also the issue of whether the target language even has available an alternate phrasing that communicates the meaning accurately. Anyone?
February 9th, 2011 | 11:16 am
No, this is not “a legitimate linguistic compromise.” What do the Lebanese, Syrian, Egyptian, and Ethiopian Christians do? Ask Christians with experience dealing with Muslims.
February 9th, 2011 | 11:45 am
The gospel has always had this kind of opprobrium to it though. The Jews found proof that Jesus was not the Messiah because he was crucified, and the Law says he who hangs on a tree is accursed of God (Deut. 21:22-23), so He obviously could not be the blessed Messiah. This was a stumbling block to them. So did the apostles avoid mentioning the cross? On the contrary:
“But we preach Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. – 1 Corinthians 1:23-24 NASB”
If we do not preach Christ as the Son of God, how will we preach the adoption of believers as sons of God? How will Christ have His rightful pre-eminence as “the firstborn among many brothers”?
February 9th, 2011 | 12:41 pm
The idea that there’s something unique about Arabic that makes people assume that there’s a biological connotation to “son” and therefore get confused in some special way makes no sense.
Until recently in Western culture, when adoption of children became widespread and began to be treated as the relational equal of biological descent, people who spoke Western languages would also assume that a son was a biologically descended product of sexual relations, at least until informed otherwise. How can this be a problem unique to Arabic speakers?
And, how you can win people “to the gospel” by leaving part of it out? If they can’t accept it as given in inspired form, that means there’s a problem with their acceptance of it as it is, not with the inspired communication.
February 9th, 2011 | 12:53 pm
This sort of linguistic challenge is an everyday occurrence for all translators, and especially Bible translators. Words and expressions that seem perfect substitutes from one language to another turn out to carry cultural connotations that distort the meaning, forcing Bible translators to choose less literal but more meaning-faithful expressions. The only controversy here is that we are dealing with a key name for Christ, Son of God, and all that it says about the relationship between God and Jesus.
Son of God is already a metaphor, since we Christians believe Jesus is fully God, not merely the offspring of God. As with many such expressions (kingdom of God, Son of man, light of the world), the Scriptures attempt through the inexactness of language to faithfully describe a being who is not at all like us by using comparisons and metaphors. God has only been revealed to us in part, as through a glass darkly (1 Cor 13:12). So we stumble along as best we can, trying to be faithful to the revelation we’ve been given while grappling with the limitations of our understanding and our languages.
It appears that a special compromise is necessary so as not to offend Muslims. If we really want this group to examine Jesus with their own eyes, we need to remove the stumbling blocks that are keeping them from the Scriptures.
February 9th, 2011 | 1:23 pm
Historically speaking this is a pretty tame example cultural accommodation.
Mateo Ricci’s Chinese bible depicted Jesus as a Confucian scholar and omitted the crucifixion altogether because the Chinese of the time found the idea of executing a scholar to be ludicrous (He first tried to depict Jesus as a quasi-buddhist monk but soon learned that most contemporary Chinese found buddhist monks to be sort of annoying)
February 9th, 2011 | 1:31 pm
Yeah, this is a tough one. There’s all kind of cultural issues all over translation, particularly translations of metaphors (how does one teach about a shepherd to inner-city kids, or “whiter than snow” to somebody who lives on the equator, or “a prophet in his own hometown” to an Army brat who’s been shuttled from base to base his entire life?)
Charlie’s right in identifying that what makes this an even bigger problem is that “Son of God” is not just a metaphor or cultural descriptor, it’s an actual theological statement. We can translate around “Son of God” in the Bible, perhaps, but what about the Creeds? What about all of the other writings that have gone to great lengths to defend this very doctrine? What happens when we evangelize Muslims on the basis of a “culturally sensitive Bible translation” only for them to find out later that they weren’t actually taught what everybody else in the world understands to be Christian doctrine. It’s either sinfully evasive/teaching false doctrine on our part, or it’s paternalistic – we know “you can’t handle the truth,” so we’ll water it down for you.
I don’t know what the right answer is, but I would like to hear thoughts from Muslim converts to Christianity – they exist, and presumably they have found a way to become “comfortable” with the doctrine.
February 9th, 2011 | 4:43 pm
I don’t know Arabic, but my understanding is that the problem is not only with the translation, but that Muslims are specifically taught that what we mean when we say ‘Son of God’ is that God had sexual relations with a woman – obviously that meaning has to be dealt with, hopefully by knowledgeable missionaries.
February 9th, 2011 | 5:13 pm
I must echo Mr. Deeny on this. There are many, many Arabic-speaking Christians, and there have been such for a very long time. It is true that orthodox Muslims find the idea that God might have a son to be both ridiculous and repugnant. So did the orthodox Jews of antiquity, and so do their descendants today. One may win converts to orthodox Christianity, or one may found a heretical version and win converts to that, but one should not pretend to be choosing the former while practicing the latter.
February 9th, 2011 | 6:25 pm
The problem I see with this is what the (unintended) long-term effects will be. If a Christian “knows” that Jesus isn’t the Son of God because his Bible tells him so, what happens if he runs into Christians from other countries that don’t have this notion? Isn’t this a sort of bait-and-switch?
February 9th, 2011 | 11:52 pm
This is where the Church Fathers come into play and can be very helpful.
Saint Irenaeus would speak of the One reading of Scripture according to the “Rule of Faith” which for all practical purposes is the Creed. That ancient Rule of Faith was considered to be both a ‘summary’ of the Scriptures and an interpretive key.
In the fourth century, as the Empire and the Classical Culture was opening to Christianity and as some following the Alexandrian priest, Arius taught that the Word Who became flesh was ‘created’, the bishops at Nicaea recognized that they had to interpret the Scriptural faith and proclamation and put it into language that would be understood by the culture at the times as well as combat the heresy of Arius
They proclaimed that Jesus, the Son of God ‘is eternally begotten of the Father….begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father.
This was not just some ‘abstract teaching’ but the Church’s interpretation of what She meant when She said, “Jesus is the Son of God”
Scripture should be as accurately translated as possible, then interpreted according to ‘the Rule of Faith” There cannot be ‘another Gospel’ [Galatians1] for anyone.
February 10th, 2011 | 2:15 pm
Did the concept of God-the-Father baffle ancient Greeks and Romans, whose father-god used to fly down and fornicate with women (who were then turned into animals by the father-god’s angry wife)?
I was also confused by calling God the Father, when it seems to be emphasized that Jesus was conceived by the God the 3rd person and not God-the-Father (even though all are God). Does this mean the 23 chromosomes to be added to the egg came from the spirit, or were they from the father and inserted into the egg via the spirit. The whole process baffles me. Saying Mary was conceived by the spirit does eliminate some of the father-god-as-ravisher imagery that an ancient Greek or Roman might think.
I think if you absolutely have to, you can replace Son of God with “God-in-the-flesh” or “the human manifestation of God”? But then you still have the language of God as father – would you then say “God the creator”?
February 10th, 2011 | 3:48 pm
So your asking, should we distort Christian doctrine to make Christianity more appealing to followers of Mohamet? Rephrased in this manner, the answer is obvious. If Christ is not the son of God, then he cannot be the savior, and we come off, as indeed we should, as vile hypocrites.
If it needs to be clarified, make a footnote; these are liberally inserted into all English study bibles.
February 12th, 2011 | 12:28 pm
There is a heretic named Monica Dennington who may answer some of these hard questions about the “Son’s” begotten nature.
Jesus is begotten from God the Father AND God the Holy Spirit. As it were, unless God is a homosexual, the Holy Spirit must be female, and, accordingly, She is.
This is no joke. And Rev. Dennington uses Sola Scriptura to justify her claim. And btw, God is not Triune but has seven persons, as is noted in Rev 1:4, Rev 3:1, Rev 4:5, and Rev 5:6.
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