 Hello, everyone. This presentation rests uneasily between two polls. On the one hand, it's part of a larger project which has a handbook for non-biblical academics as the intended readers. And then the other poll is this particular conference as a biblical studies event. And when I initially gave James my title, I had the former, that is non-BS academics in mind. And this has framed my presentation. So I realize that I'll be preaching to the choir and presenting you with problems and considerations which you most probably already are aware. So I hereby issue a blanket apology for each and every time you think, duh. Another problem is that my own interests are more along the lines of politics in the Bible. So I have chosen translation as an attempt at approaching Bible in politics and thus connecting the ancient context and contemporary appropriation in some fashion. But rest assured, I will be harping on about the same old, same old. So in her study on translation, history, and colonialism, Thayashwini Niranjana bemoans the lack of awareness of the quote, constructed nature of cultural translations in that translation is always producing, rather than merely reflecting or imitating an original end quote. Niranjana's discussions pertain primarily to translations of colonial literature into English, but we can use it to remind ourselves of the Bible as end product of multiple struggles, practices of mastery, and imperialist history, duh. So the first section and the largest of the paper deals with a cross-section of translations of two biblical texts from First Kings and one from John. The first text is First Kings 10, 14 to 15, which lists the amount of gold Solomon had. And the second text is First Kings 10, 26 to 29, which also boasts of Solomon's wealth in terms of silver, cedar, horses, and chariots. And so I've made a couple of slides with the text on. And so obviously that's the Hebrew text. And then that my very clumsy translation, which is not meant to flow in any way, but just to sort of give an idea of sort of what the words signify in some way. So the problem with this one is that the text of One Kings 10, 14 to 15, it seems that the Hebrew text poses a bit of difficulty because the English demands a word which connects the relationship between 14 and 15. And so I've just sort of juxtaposed them. And so they don't really connect, as you can see, in my translation. And the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 666 kikar, apart from seeking people and traffic of peddlers and all the kings of Arabia and the tributaries of the land. So I've come with a couple of examples from translations and how they solve this problem. And I begin with the least invasive. And they're the translations of the King James version and the American Standard version. And they both insert a that that I've put in bold. And then if we take the American Standard version, now the weight of gold that came to Solomon in one year was 603 score and six talents of gold, besides that, which the traders bought and the traffic of the merchants and all the kings and so on. And so if we then move on to the next one, which is, of course, an earlier translation, Wycliffe's translation. And I am not going to read that out loud. I don't know if anyone offers. But what I've highlighted, and I can see that doesn't come across quite well on the screen. But Wycliffe puts in rentice as that which connects, well, and that is as well. But he puts in a more specific term as that which connects the gold in verse 14 and 15. And then we turn to the good news translation and new international version. And we see that they have taken equal liberties in interpreting this that. So every year, this is the good news translation, every year King Solomon received over 25 tons of gold. In addition to the taxes paid by merchants, the profits from trade and tribute paid by the Arabian kings and the governors of the Israelite districts. And the new international version, the weight of the gold that Solomon received yearly was 666 talents, not including the revenues from merchants and traders and from all the Arabian kings and the governors of the land. So the crucial word which is being translated as rentice in Wycliffe, that in King James and American standard, taxing good news, and revenue in the new international version is not there in the Hebrew text. But verse 15 seems to refer back to the gold in verse 14 so that it reads the goal that came to Solomon apart from all these people was 666 kikar. So while the insertion of the pronoun that refers back to the gold in verse 14, Wycliffe, good news and NIV happily deploy nouns from their own socioeconomic context to fill this gap creating as it were an interpretation of the nature of the incoming gold. For Wycliffe, this is the feudal system which is also indicated by the dukes which was in the dukes of the earth. And then we'll see in the next example he refers to knights as well. And the context for good news and NIV is of course capitalism. All right, so if we then turn to translations of First Kings 1026 to 9, I'm particularly interested in the translation of the verb Asaf in verse 26 and then sort of tangentially interested in the translation of the other verbs, matzah, lakach, ala, and yatsah in 28 and 29. So again, my own translation intends to show the problems of the text and very clumsy. But the text is very ambiguous and what is interesting is how the various translations resolve the ambiguity and sharpen the focus of the text. So Asaf, the verb in verse 26, will, as you will see, is translated as gathering together in the older translations. So Wycliffe gathered together in verse 26 and King James as well gathered together. And then the good news, Bible and NIV, they have built up and accumulated, respectively. And of course, in particular, accumulate is a word that we should carefully note in that this is one of the basic principles of the circulation of capital in Marx's analysis in capital. So this circulation of commodities and capital, essential to capitalism, is undoubtedly what goes on in the NIV translation of verses 28 and 29. If you look at what's going on there, Solomon's horses were imported from Egypt and from, and I'm tempted to say Kuwee, but that's probably not how you pronounce it. But the royal merchants purchased them from, how would you pronounce that, someone? Q, QE, whatever. The royal merchants purchased them from at the current price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for 600 shekels of silver and a horse for 150. They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans. And so I'll just pop back to my sort of whatever. And so the horses were taken out of Egypt and gathered from this place. A king took them and gathered them or from this place at a price. Carriage came up and went out from Egypt and you get the picture, right? I mean, there's not a lot of export, import and profit margin here, but that's what we then get in the NIV. So and the good news translation, though initially occupied with Solomon's militarization of his empire through this building up of a force of 1,400 chariots and 12,000 cavalry horses goes into total overdrive when it comes to the circulation of the horses and the chariots. The king's agent control the export of horses from Masri and Kilikia and the export of chariots from Egypt. They supply the Hittite and Syrian kings with horses and chariots, selling chariots for 600 pieces of silver each and horses for 150 each. And so here Egypt is included in Solomon's sphere of economic, Solomon's sphere of economic influence in that Solomon is in control of the Egyptian export and is the one making the profits as a crucial element of the supply chain. So these examples were merely to show the extent of contemporary socioeconomics on the translation of the Bible and to pose the question how people with no access to the Hebrew text can come to grasp the inescapably ideological translations of the Bible or to use one of Hugh's phrases, come to terms with the socioeconomic meme pool which constitutes its host. Another example whose taming is of a more sort of at surface level at least is of a more theological nature is from John. And so in my recent work on the body of Jesus in John it eventually became clear to me that basically the whole interpretation of John rested on two words, and humane or among us in 114. So the word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory and so on. Now every single interpretation of Jesus in John authorizes itself on these two words ultimately. That's what it comes back to in the end. And there's only one commentator who considers the alternative and let's face it much more likely translation of in us. C.K. Barrett notes in his commentary that en humane does not mean that the word, he says, en humane does not mean that the word dwelt in our human nature is in a tent. Though the old Syriac rendering ban in us may be held to suggest this, end quote. Barrett of course does not argue the point but merely states it to be so. While Bufmann does not consider this interpretation, he does provide an interesting parallel in his discussion of Menin in 538 where he notes that the evangelist speaks of the word abiding in the hearer or rather to be very precise the verse reads and this is taken from the new revised standard version. You have never heard his voice or seen his form and you do not have his word abiding in you because you do not believe him whom he has sent. And finally, the Nag Hammadi treatise Trimorphic Protenoia which is the self revelation of the first thought refers to the manifestation of quote, myself to them in their tents, end quote and that's an interpretation which Jan Helderman notes is a conscious reinterpretation and reinterpretation of John 1.14. The point of the translation in us is of course a sharpening of Anne's Casemann's work on John which showed how that which is uniquely Johanine had been repressed or domesticated within New Testament exegesis of his day. Casemann noted that the statement in John 1.14a, the word became flesh, had been overly emphasized by historical critical exegesis in order to force the text to follow a more traditional line of interpretation namely quote, the possibility of writing the earthly story of Jesus end quote. Casemann on the other hand preferred to emphasize the confession which follows this statement namely we beheld his glory and that led him to his famous assessment of John as pre or naively dacetic. So the word became flesh and lived among us is in Johanine scholarship regarded as an untranscendable non-negotiable guarantee for Jesus having flesh, hence a body, hence being human, hence having lived and so on. And so firmly lodged is this translation and interpretation that contesting it amounts to borderline madness in the eyes of John scholars which in itself should cause heightened awareness. The translation of in us actually supports the general contempt or even revulsion which this particular book shows towards the realm of everyday labor, life, bread and its flesh. Okay, so why should we then stop at translation? We could go back a step further and consider the composite nature of the biblical text. In criticism of heaven, Roland Bohr shows how Ernst Bloch examines the imposition of ruling class ideologies on the biblical text as well as the strategies of subversive slave talk. Bloch is interested in masked or underground texts which are subversive texts that have subsequently been redacted or rendered subversive through later usage. The function of these texts is to appease and criticize rulers at one at the same time. And an example which Bloch gives is the text of Korra's Rebellion in Numbers 16 which tells of a priestly rebellion. Are you checking Facebook? I'm tweeting you. Oh, okay. Number 16 which tells of a priestly rebellion on the issue of ritual and incense which is crushed through divine intervention. Bloch is interested in the divine intervention and how God opens the ground which swallows up Korra and his conspirators as an example to anyone else who would rebel. This is according to Bloch, a God of white guard terror who emerges from the redactors pen. And this rebellion is the echo of political rebellion which reverberates through the texts. This is not only indicated by the punishment but also the perpetual recurrence of the Israelites grumbling throughout the chapter. For Bloch this indicates a rebellious anti-Yahweh voice that has been turned into something else. The sign of disobedience, sorry, the quote began with a rebellious anti-Yahweh voice that has been turned into something else. The sign of disobedience and recalcitrance on the part of the people themselves, end quote. Now I know this sounds totally old school and that the idea of tracing redactional seams in the text has become an abhorrence to many. But I think the idea of domesticating the politically radical nature of the text before we even begin to translate it, a fruitful one. Especially given the efforts of translations to smooth the rough edges and make the text easily digestible. And nowhere is this more clear than in the meaning-based translations spreading like tongues of fire in every language under the sun in attempts to resurrect a dormant Christianity. These Bibles, the good news translation which are included in the examples here and the Good Nachricht Bible in German and the new Autele in Danish, along with the international translations or sorry, intermedial translations such as the Bible Illuminated and the Manga Bible, all attempt to erase the distance between the ancient cultural context and our later one. Thereby enculturating the Bible to a particular context, excuse me, and more importantly, neutralizing its challenges to contemporary society. As Marx noted in a different but not entirely unrelated context, quote, with so complete a difference between the material economic conditions of the ancient and the modern class struggles, the political figure is produced by them can likewise have no more in common with one another than the archbishop of Canterbury has with the high priest Samuel, end quote. So to conclude, I want to cite a number of questions and I'm sure you're all familiar with these questions in one way or another. Where is the manuscript of the Bible? There are two sections. There are four different gospels, canon. There are more gospels outside the Bible and last but not least, what do you mean fragments? Now these questions and more just like them have arisen in conversations with people obviously not as well versed in the intricacies of Bible basics as we are. I'm not only repeating these snippets of conversation to poke fun at people but also to remind us of how much or in this case how little people actually know about the Bible as an ideological product. Also this lack of knowledge at knee jerk level not to mention the surprise when corrected or informed shows the position of the Bible as a saintly relic rather than as a collection of texts. So I want to close with these sort of ponderings or considerations. To what extent do we participate in perpetuating this mystification and would we consider it a necessity to inform people of what goes on in the theological engine room before the book even hits the streets in all its rapidly increasing configurations. Thank you.