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I'm listening to Graeber talk about "Debt: The First 5000 Years" (Google Talks).
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.
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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. =)
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Hang on, even KJV has "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors". Which version is Graeber talking about that doesn't?
www.biblegateway.com/passage/?β¦
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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.
He is not referring to any of these.
www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/β¦
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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.
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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/0b6b25a8-1β¦ ) 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.
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Oh! Apparently the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_β¦ 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.
Thanks @makeworld for finding this!
merveilles.town/@makeworld/110β¦
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> As early as the third century, Origen of Alexandria used the word trespasses (ΟΞ±ΟΞ±ΟΟΟΞΌΞ±ΟΞ±) 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%27sβ¦
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@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.
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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.
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That was certainly a several-hours detour (with a cinema visit and a dinner in the middle, heh) over a single line twelve minutes into a presentation.
Let's see how long I take to hear the whole talk! π
clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy πΈπͺππ°ππ
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