Books/Harpsichord/Harpsichord-2026.06.03-1037.txt

Foreword
Part I: A Story
I was 16, driving home from a piano lesson. I turned the corner into our cul-de-sac.
Wait, why are there police and paramedics parked in front of our house?
I go to the front door. “I live here. What’s going on?”
“Looks like your little brother just offed himself with a rifle.”

After that, my recollection is chaotic.
I remember my mother coming to a screeching halt, leaving the car door open and the engine running as she ran into the house.
I remember police, and paramedics, and the coroner, and detectives taking photos.
I remember the gurney as they wheeled him out.

And then they all left, and there we were: my step-father Tony, my mother, and my other brother.

So Tony and I decided that we needed to clean up ‘the mess’ on the floor and wall in the master bedroom. It had to be done.
So we got buckets, and sponges, and got to work.
While my mother sobbed uncontrollably in the living room, with feral shrieking that sounded more animal than human.

Eric was 13 years old.




He didn’t stand a chance.

Dad was a lieutenant in the Navy, and the Navy doctors decided it had to be nine months.
Oops, off by a month.
In that last month is when your glands and lungs get polished off.
Consequently, every winter — like clockwork — Eric spent a week in the hospital in an oxygen tent.
Also, because his pituitary wasn’t working right, he was almost a foot shorter than his classmates — regularly ridiculed and picked on.
And then he was off the charts smart. Back then I.Q. tests were a big thing, taken very seriously. At the elementary school he attended, where he took the test, he scored higher than anyone ever. I don’t know what the score was, but it was so high that they had him take the test again, this time under the watchful eye of a proctor. Same result.
But he was terribly withdrawn. Terribly. He had no use for school, or playing outside, or anything, really.. All he wanted to do was sit in his darkened room and play with his hand puppets.
I’ve wondered if he wasn’t autistic. In a day when ‘autism’ wasn’t even a word in psychiatry yet.
Meanwhile, my step-father Tony was the hard-driving executive — a Vice President at RCA (a really huge international electronics company). He also had a serious alcohol problem. And he could get physically brutal. 
Tony just couldn’t understand why Eric wasn’t “living up to his potential.” He’d bellow at him. He’d ground him. Suspend TV privileges. Berate him up and down — no change.
Meanwhile, his pediatrician thought that some new drug might jump start his pituitary. No effect, so he discontinued it. “He might be ‘kinda blue for a little while’ he told my mother.”
Then, in January 1970, Eric spent his annual week in an oxygen tent. First day back in school a history test awaited him — for which he had missed all the material. He had to take the test anyway.
So, coming home with a D on his history test, knowing the reaming he’d get from Tony, he got the rifle down from the top shelf in my parents bedroom. And they didn’t keep it loaded, so he got down the ammunition too. And then, he was so short that he couldn’t reach the trigger, so he took off a shoe and sock and used his big toe.


I was in utter misery. As his older brother, I kept racking my brain if there was “something I could have done.”
Meanwhile, my folks took my other brother to a psychiatrist, who immediately put him on anti-depressants. Back in 1970, those were really crude — I took one look at my brother’s almost drooling affect and said to myself. “We’re not doing that.”
Instead, when the darkness descended, I’d sit and play Bach — sometimes for hours, sometimes the same piece over and over, until it passed. 
I never, however, ever remotely considered following Eric’s path. I knew this would pass — somehow. I just had to find the way.

Meanwhile, friends at high school attended a local Evangelical church. I had alreay been going with them.
After Eric, however, my search for ‘answers’ took on real urgency. I went to every service and Bible study I could. But I didn’t find their answers very satisfactory.
So I kept pressing.
Finally, one day, Pastor Bob said, “You know, if you learned Greek, you could read the New Testament for yourself in the original and answer your own questions.”
I! CAN! DO! THAT!
I didn’t act on it right away — Life was still too crazy for that.
And everyone had their hearts set on me going to music school — Cal Arts in particular.
So I went there for a year, in abject misery.
So at the end of that year, I looked around for the toughest Greek program I could find in the greater Los Angeles, and transferred to Biola University (originally “Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

Biola was awesome! I loved it there!
To be sure they had their quirks: you had to go to chapel every day (and submit your punchcard so they could verify it.) And you had to take one Bible class every semester. Whatever.
But their Greek exceeded my expectations. They were ruthless about it. 

First day: “Know chapter 1 for tomorrow, there will be a test.”
Second day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 2 for tomorrow.”
Third day: Take the test. Lecture. “Know chapter 3 for tomorrow.”

94% was an A, 88% was a B, 80% was a C — half point off for wrong or missing accent mark.

In the first semester they had two sections, 25 students each. By the end of week two, class size was cut in half. By the 4th semester, there was one session of 8 of us left.

I made vocabulary cards that I hung around my neck — we all did. Noses buried in our grammars every spare moment. On campus we were known as the “Greek Freaks.”

After that first year, they offered both semesters of second year in an 8 week summer session. Lecture for 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. The first day of class the instructor said, “Don’t even try to have a life outside of this class. No job. No nothing.” He was right.

Thus I was able to cover 2 years of Greek in a calendar year. With near perfect scores. (Missed a few accents marks.)

There were two other courses that I took that made a huge difference.
One was “Textual Criticism of the Greek New Testament.” The idea is that the Greek New Testament didn’t come down to us in nice leather bound volumes. It came down to us mostly in pieces — some fairly complete, much of it fragmentary. Half of Mark here. A few pages of I Corinthians there. And they aren’t all identical in their wording. Most of the time it’s pretty minor — different spellings of proper names, for example. But sometimes the differences are significant. 
At the time, the prevailing practice was “whichever version is oldest, use that.” Dr. Sturz — the Textual Criticism professor, disagreed with this, and was able to prove that this approach is too simplistic. 
He was fond of saying “A million Frenchmen can be wrong.” Meaning that just because ‘everyone’ thinks things are a certain way, doesn’t mean they are.

The other was a Survey of Philosophy. It was broken up into four semesters, and it worked out I was able to take two of them: Graeco-Roman philosophy, and “Modern Philosophy — Descartes through Kant.” 
Dr. Hansen was first rate. In his class you didn’t have to agree with anything — but you had better be able to articulate why not. 
In due time he had me over to dinner with his family, and he became just ‘Del.’ Dinner on Sunday became regular. They had a nice grand piano, so I made a point of “playing for my supper,” which they really enjoyed. His office was down in the basement: bookcase after bookcase packed with books on philosophy, history, etc. A couple times I grabbed a book at random, “Hey Del, what’s this one about?” And he’d launch into a detailed summary that made my eyes glaze over.
He also had a well-equipped shop in his garage — both woodworking and metal working (including welding). More than once I’d bring my beater car over, and we’d fix it together.


Although my Bioloa coursework was going really, everything else was going badly. 
I had stayed in the greater Los Angeles area so I could go home and “referee” my folks on weekends. I’d come home, and find a new hole that Tony had punched in the wall. One time I came home and found a note on the dining room table: “We’re at the hospital. You’re mother is having her stomach pumped because she O.D. on drugs.” Of course I flew to the emergency room. There Tony screamed at me at the top of his lungs at some length about how this was “all your fault” because — if I had only been home more… Tony was a big guy — think linebacker, so he was really imposing and intimidating. Mom, in despair, had deliberately overdosed, immediately realized her folly and had called 911, so there had never been any real danger. Nevertheless.
Meanwhile, I had a California State academic scholarship that covered part of my tuition,  but not all of it. And there were my living expenses. So I was working full time to cover that. I got a job as a night watchman graveyard shift at a giant food warehouse — I was expected to do rounds once an hour, but the rest of the time I could study. 
And there was no money from my folks.
Gradually the challenging course load, and working full time, and weekends of who-knows-what awaited at home took its toll. Del knew something of what was going on, but I guess I didn’t feel right telling him all of it. I went to the counseling center at Biola, and the counselor I was assigned (a retired pastor, not a real healthcare professional) told me “What you need is some sleep and a girl-friend.” Not helpful. 
And financially I just wasn’t making it. On a regular basis I would run out of money before I ran out of month. So I simply wouldn’t eat for a few days until my next paycheck.
I even stopped turning in my ‘chapel cards.’ Every day you had classes you were expected to attend chapel, and turn in a punch card proving that you did — or else you’d be having a conversation with the Dean of Men (or Women). I wanted that conversation — and it never happened.

In hindsight I realize I could have done a better job of reaching out for help. But I was in such a dark place I just didn’t know how. Finally, one day I walked into the accounting office and withdrew from Biola. 
I still have nothing but respect for Biola and my time there. In my opinion, the coursework dramatically over-delivered. To me the counseling not working, the ‘chapel-card’ not working — really what that boiled down to was: I had gotten out of Biola what I needed — five semesters of Greek in a calendar year, and two really great philosophy courses that gave me both a theoretical and historical framing. Providence saw that and shepherded me out the door and on my way. Of course couldn’t understand that at the time.
That last afternoon was surreal — on a normally busy afternoon, there was no one in the halls when I walked out of their doors for the last time.




When I was five years old, my folks bought a piano. When it materialized in our house one wondrous day, I was immediately transfixed. I can still remember the piano bench being chest high, so I had to jump up and scramble onto it for yet another session exploring its magic.
It didn’t take long for Mom to get me lessons — as much for her own sanity as anything else. That lasted a few months — Dad was in the Navy, and he got transfered again. No lessons after that, but I kept working at it on my own.
Finally, when I was about 8, Dad was posted to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey — we’d be there for a couple years while Dad got a degree in Electrical Engineering. So mom decided this was the perfect opportunity for lessons again.
Monterey was a small town then — still not large. When she asked around, the common recommendation was a fellow named Jack Reynolds. But he didn’t take child students. Mom prevailed on him to interview me, and he made an exception.
In the two years with him I progressed from really rudimentary playing, to one of the easy piano sonatas Beethoven wrote for his niece. He introduced me to music theory: how key signatures work, how to build scales and chords. And I wrote my first music — really short, simple pieces, but that’s where you start. And as part of my ‘general grounding’ he taught me basic guitar and recorder.
Then Dad finished his degree, and he was transferred again — this time to Norfolk, VA. I had other teachers after him — off and on as circumstances permitted, but no one like Jack.


Fast forward to my senior year. I’m in Southern California. Eric has just left us. I was in a dark place.
One of my circle of friends — the ones that invited me to Reseda Baptist — had an uncle who was a world-class bass/baritone. She knew I was a ‘Bach nut’ — learning to play as much of his music as I could, so she told her uncle about me.
“I’m singing in the Carmel Bach Festival this coming summer,” he said. “I can’t get you into the concerts, but I can get you in to all the dress rehearsals you want. My wife and I will only have a small cabin — the best I can offer is a floor for your sleeping bag.”
Of course! Bach was my hero!
It is still a deeply vivid memory of hearing the orchestra and chorus launch into Bach’s Magnificat — “My soul magnifies the Lord” — the boundless joy and magnificence of it. And I just sobbed at the bone-aching beauty of it. It was a blinding light blazing into my darkness.

Sigh.

Meanwhile, “while I’m here in the Carmel/Monterey area, why don’t I look up my old music teacher, Jack Reynold?”

Jack absolutely remembered me. I played a little for him, so he could see how I had progressed. And I told him something of what was going on. Not really much to tell yet — the full impact of everything hadn’t really landed yet.
So that year, and through my sojourns at Cal-Arts and Biola, we corresponded. 

Over time, I pieced together something of his story. He had been an Army Commander in World War II. His unit liberated a concentration camp. I once asked him about that — this was living history right in front of me. He got very quiet, then got up, grabbed a bottle of vodka, and for days I only saw him go from bedroom to the bathroom to his office.
After the Army, he was a reporter with his own byline with API. That’s no small thing: back then there were news syndicates like API (American Press International?) that gathered news and sold it to local newspapers. To have your own byline meant that you were a regular reporter.
Then he became interested in hotel management for some reason. So he completely fabricated a resume, got the job, and ran it better than anyone before him.
By the time I knew him, he had settled in Monterey because of it’s beauty. With the GI Bill he had gone to piano tuning/repair school. So when I visited him, he owned a few rental properties, owned a few stocks, had some piano students, and tuned and repaired pianos.
In his house there were no blank walls — all had bookcases filled with books on every topic imaginable. Next to his philosophy section might be gardening. I asked him about his eclectic tastes. He said “I want to be able to converse intelligently on any topic that the other person finds interesting.”
Although he had piano students, he could barely play himself. One of his students was learning Beethoven’s Appassionata (a difficult piece). So he bought every recording he could find, learning as many different approaches as he could, and was a very effective coach.
When Saigon fell, there was a major influx of Vietnamese, all who needed to learn English. So he hosted classes in his living room, conducting them with a baton so they could learn the cadence of the language.
One time he took me to a Mensa meeting (a society for ‘smart people’). He said he liked to go maybe once a year to see if there was anyone there he could ‘rescue’.

He also wrote poetry. Here’s an example:

I am a stranger here.
For many years I did not know
Why the words sound strange to my ear.
Or knew what I looked and waited for
When the moon shown living and clear
Or the rain spoke strangely among the stones
Or the wind in the trees was near

The ones who placed me within this frame
In the land beneath the Sun
Forgot to connect a pair of nerves
And left other things undone
And though we are bound by a common need
My body and I are not one.

Who are my people? Where is my land?
I don’t know, I cannot say.
But this I know: the ones I love
Live in a land far away
A land that this one reminds me of
Sometimes, on an odd-cast day.



So when I walked out of Biola, there was only one place to go. Certainly not to my folks house. I had to thrown myself onto Jack’s front door.
I called, “Come on up!”
He didn’t have a spare room, but he had a basement, with a room already partitioned off in the back. It had a bed in it, we cleared out the other stuff, and generally fixed it up into something quite serviceable. It’s not like I was picky, under the circumstances.
While I was there, we talked about just about everything — except Eric and the aftermath. 
At one point I expressed despair about what I would do, how I would survive. He became almost angry at me:
“You have the smarts, the imagination and the drive to make your own solutions. Trust that, and you’ll be OK.”

Or once we talked about ‘security’ in life. “What is it?” he asked me. “Money in the bank?” “No,” he said. “Banks fail.” I proposed a couple other things, which he shot down. “I give up. What?”
“The courage to face the day.”

In our correspondence, he wrote: “Remember, that while the talented man may produce a Taj Mahal, where the plodder was able only to build a church, it still takes a million times as much plain old work to produce the Taj.”

During my stay is when I learned much of his story. But it’s not so much that he told me things (although there was that too). Clearly I was marked for a life of taking the Road Less Traveled. But I had never known anyone blessed/cursed with that same Life Path. Until Jack. A living, compassionate, passionate traveler on the Road Less Traveled.

And that has made all the difference.


I stayed with Jack for a few weeks — that was enough. I certainly didn’t have ‘the answers’, but I had the beginnings of a plan. Step one was to finish my degree.

I stayed with my folks just long enough to find my own place, and re-enrolled at Cal-Arts. 

Also, I realized that doing the conventional employment plan to pay tuition and living expenses was not going to work. When I was in high school I had bought a harpsichord kit and built it (so I could play Bach on it, of course). It wasn’t a huge step to working on pianos.

But tuning a piano is a lot harder than tuning a harpsichord. So I bought some basic piano tuning tools, and called up churches: “Hi. I need to practice tuning pianos. I’ll bet you have a bunch of them in your Sunday School rooms that haven’t been tuned in decades. I’ll tune them for free — for practice. And if they need any repairs (basically notes not working), just reimburse me for my cost for the parts.”
I had no trouble finding takers, and after about 30 pianos I was passably decent. Certainly good enough for your typical home piano.

So I got a church organ/director job close to Cal-Arts. This gave me quite a stable of students and piano-tuning customers. Funny how I’d time tunings so that I’d be finishing up around dinner time. “Would you like to stay for dinner?” Yum, a free home cooked meal! And when I was done tuning I made it a practice to play for 15-20 minutes — they always liked that.

And I had a simple shop. I’d have a big piano job, or build a harpsichord in there, timing its completion to coincide with a tuition payment.

This was a much better plan.

So now I had a modicum of stability in my life. And steady meals. I could play the harpsichord really well — best in the school — so Cal-Arts was under control too. For my senior recital I played Bach’s Goldberg Variations — one of the pinnacles of the harpsichrod literature.

So now I could return to my quest for ‘answers’. The urgency hadn’t diminished, but now it wasn’t crowded out by too many life necessities.

I had been reading my New Testament in Greek. But that wasn’t really doing anything for me: I found it almost impossible to not lapse into the usual ways of understanding it. The usual English translations would echo in my mind, and that was that.

Yet, even with just basic reading, I was coming across problems. Right away, in the first verse of the Sermon on the Mount, we have:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of the HEAVENS. [PLURAL!]

No translation conveys the plural. Why not? Of course there’s no big doctrinal controversy hanging on this. To me, all the more reason “Why NOT translate it as plural?” In first semester Greek we learned the plural forms in like week TWO.

Or better still, the Lord’s Prayer:

Our father, in the HEAVENS [PLURAL!]
Hallowed be your name,
Your kingdom come, 
your will be done
On earth as it is in HEAVEN [SINGULAR].

What’s the significance of switching from plural to singular? I don’t know. (I have some thoughts on that now, but those came later.) Yet — who am I, as the translator, to decide that those details are unimportant? This is “God’s Word,” the Evangelicals would say. “Every single word is ‘God-breathed.’” Then why are they flattening it, altering it really, with no good reason I could think of?

Gradually the idea formed to do my own translation. Virtually all translations take it as given that the target is about 7th grade, Miss Grundy approved, don’t rock the boat English. And, honestly, for most people, most of the time, that’s fine. That has it’s place. 

But I wondered: English is my native language. What if I used English more creatively to try convey more of the subtlety of the Original? It would be harder to read, sure. But for some folks (like me) — so what?

After all, I was still looking for MY ‘answers,’ and I knew I wasn’t going to find them by following the well-worn tracks of most everyone else. Plus, when just reading, it’s too easy to let your eyes glaze over the hard passages. To read the Greek, and then express that in a way designed to challenge the habitual rendering would FORCE me to really think about it.

 So I resolved to do my own translation, 



Later I realized I had stumbled on my own version of an ancient practice: Lectio Divina: “Divine Reading.” The idea is to read a passage super slowly, meditating on every word. A spiritual practice going back to the Christian hermit mystics in the 4th century Egyptian desert.

Now, the resources for undertaking a project like this are plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Not so back in the early 1970s. No internet. No Amazon. The closest suitable library was hours away.

My starting library consisted of:

Nestle and Aland, eds., Novum Testamentum Graece, 25th edition
Rahlfs, ed., Septuaginta (LXX)
Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (BDAG)
Liddell, Scott, and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ)
Moulton and Geden, A Concordance to the Greek Testament
Hatch and Redpath, A Concordance to the Septuagint
Kittel and Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT)
Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament
Dana and Mantey, A Manual Grammar of the Greek New Testament

Also, no home computers yet. So I translated the whole N.T. with a manual typewriter and white out for corrections (white paint you’d apply over your mistake and type again).



So, I started at the very beginning. A very good place to start — Matthew 1. The first few chapters are about Jesus birth — the Three Wise Men and all of that. By the way, it doesn’t say they were men — it’s plural so it could include mixed genders. And it’s MAGOI — mages “from the East”? Mesopotamia? That might make them astrologers. For whom it would make perfect sense to follow a star in the sky.

That was all fine, nothing earth-shaking.

And then I got to the Sermon on the Mount, and the earth moved. The first verse:

Blessed are the poor in spirit…

Except that the word invariably translated ‘poor’ doesn’t mean ‘poor’ like we would assume. Someone who is poor can still have enough to eat, and a warm place to sleep. They’re just on the low end of the socio-economic spectrum.

No, the word here for poor means: someone with NOTHING. A BEGGAR, who has to rely on the generosity of others for the necessities of life — just to have something to eat. Destitute.

Blessed are the beggars in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of the Heavens.
Blessed are the destitute in spirit…

“Homeless” is an interesting idea:

Blessed are the homeless in spirit…

But PTWXOI isn’t about not having a home. It’s about having nothing at all.

So I settled on ‘beggars’ because they’re actively trying to take care of themselves using the only option available — begging. Someone who is destitute might just crawl under a rock and die. Based on Jesus’ teaching as a whole, in which He expects us to DO something, I opted for ‘beggar.’

To me, “poor in spirit” is an an unnecessary flattening, neutering a saying with real teeth into something with toothless gums. Why? Why does practically everyone translate this ‘poor in spirit’? (Mostly inertia, frankly. More later.)

"This has to be an anomaly," I thought. But it wasn't. 



My plan was working: seriously trying to unflatten the Text forced me to really think about it.

And there were wonders to be found.

Just a few examples.

(FOOTNOTE: for readers who know Greek, of necessity I have to resort to ‘pedagogical simplifications.” We have to start somewhere.)

The New Testament famously has two words for love: AGAPE (“ah-GAH-pay”) and PHILIA, where virtually all the translations flatten them to the one English word love. AGAPE and PHILIA mean quite different things, so this flattening results in quite a bit of confusion for the English reader.

So to communicate the difference, I settled on ‘agape-love’ and ‘philia-love’.

AGAPE is more like commitment. PHILIA is more like feeling. The analogy I like is that on your wedding day, PHILIA runs high. But it’s AGAPE that keeps the marriage together over the years.

John famously says “God is AGAPE,” and I can’t tell you how many sermons and articles I’ve encountered that say something like “AGAPE is the highest form of love. It’s Divine love.”

So imagine my surprise translating John 3. We have the famous verse 16: “For God thus agape-loved the world, that he gave his uniquely-begotten son…”. 

But wait, what’s this, three verses later in vs. 19: “For people agape-loved the darkness rather than the light…” Wait! AGAPE can’t be “God’s wonderful love” after all. Something else is going on with AGAPE. (And there are other places where people AGAPE something other than The Good.)

Which is how I came around to AGAPE is more like commitment. Then it makes sense that people could agape-love the darkness. So then, what does John mean by “God is AGAPE”? That’s a question for elsewhere.

Making clear the distinction between AGAPE and PHILIA also opens up passages like this in John 21. This takes place after the resurrection:

Jesus says 3 to Simon Peter: Simon [son] of John, do you agape-love me more than these?
He says to them: Yes, Lord, you know that I philia-love you. 
He says to him: Be tending my lambs. 
16 He says to him again [a] second time: Simon [son] of John, do you agape-love me? 
He says to him: Yes Lord, you know that I philia-love you. 
He says to him: Be shepherding my sheep. 
17 He says to him the third time: Simon [son] of John, do you philia-love me? 
Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time: Do you philia-love me? 
And he said to him: You know everything, you know that I philia-love you.
Jesus says to him: Be tending my sheep.  

First of all, Jesus’ three questions echo Peter’s three denials just a couple chapters ealier. Peter, knowing he has denied Jesus, can’t bring himself to say “I AGAPE you.” Which helps clarify his exasperation in Jesus’ third question: do you PHILIA-love me?

SO many lovely things like this. No big doctrines overturned, but it was as if I had watched Star Wars on a 3-inch black-and-white screen with a tinny speaker for my whole life, and for the first time saw it on a big iMax screen in Technicolor with Dolby 7.1 Surround Sound. Sure, the same story. But an entirely different experience.



Two more examples.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you 

Except: Greek imperatives make the distinction between a one time action, versus an ongoing continual one:

* Take out the trash. (This once.) The so-called “aorist imperative.”
Vs.
* Be taking out the trash. (It’s your ongoing job. Keep taking it out whenever it needs it.) The so-called “present imperative.” 

Almost always the verbs in this passage are translated as aorist imperatives: “Ask…, seek…, knock… (once)”. When all of them are present imperatives: “Keep asking, keep seeking…, keep knocking… (over and over):

Be asking , and it will be given to you; be seeking, and you will find; be knocking, and it will be opened to you.

I get why this passage isn’t translated this way — it’s non-standard English. But flattening it is downright misleading.

And finally:

Greek has the word ANTHROPOS for ‘a human being’, and ANER for an adult male/husband (whether it’s ‘husband’ or just ‘adult male’ is determined from context.)

So in the Gospels especially, Jesus has the title “Son of Man”. Except that the word ‘Man” here is ANTHROPOS. Better would be 

“Son of Humanity”.

The King James used ‘man’ for both ANTHROPOS and ANER — that was standard English usage back in 1711. And countless translations since then have followed that precedent. Some modern translations have made a point of fixing this — English usage has changed, after all. So we now have; 

“People do not live by bread alone, but by every word proceeding from the mouth of god.”

Instead of 

“Man does not live by bread alone.”

Some modern translations make a fuss about being ‘gender accurate’, yet they STILL translate “Son of ANTHROPOS” as “Son of Man.” Why?

Especially since, to me, “Son of Humanity” has it’s own kind of poetic grandeur.

To me it’s not about being ‘gender neutral’, it’s about being “gender accurate” — reflect what’s in the original as best I can, and let the chips fall where they may

In general, that’s what translators are supposed to do, right? If you’re a translator for the U.N., your job is to reflect the meaning of the speaker as accurately as possible in the listener’s native language. What you think or feel about what the speaker is saying is supposed to be completely irrelevant, and should in no way influence or color your translation. It’s all about faithfulness. Interpretation wears a different hat.




My translation enterprise was vastly more than an intellectual exercise. This was how I was going to find the ‘answers’ I was looking for. I didn’t have any better ideas, and it seemed promising, so I was ALL IN.

I was barely into the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5ff) when I started feeling a Presence as I was translating. It felt more feminine than masculine, although the distinction is subtle. She never said who She was, or anything like that. If I could put words into Her mouth at all, it would be something like “Keep going. You’ll be OK.”
It wasn’t just once. I had the usual life tasks — making a living, doing the laundry — so I could only work on it in the evenings, or in odd snatches of time. All told, the entire N.T. took me a couple years.
Yet, every time I sat down to work on it, and got into it, Presence was there. Day after day, for the entirety of the Gospels. 

When I got to Acts, Paul, and the apostolic letters, no Presence. I don’t know why.

Most readers won’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure I know what to make of it. But there it is, anyway. That recurring, ongoing experience was as real to me as remembering hearing the Magnificat at Carmel. 

“Keep going. You’ll be OK.” 

I did. And I was.


One chapter at a time, I finally got to the last chapter of the last book: The Apocalypse of John. Appropriately, as I was translating that last chapter, it was night, and thunder and rain raged outside. It was great!

My translation project didn’t answer my questions in the way I had hoped. Instead, it gave me a much better set of new questions.

In order to better understand the context of the New Testament, I had been doing more and more research on its cultural context.

The New Testament is an odd mix of Judaism and Hellenistic (Greek) thinking. Jesus was operating in a more Judaic world (he was a rabbi, after all). As Christianity spread beyond Judea, it bumped up against Hellenistic thinking more and more. This is especially true with Paul. Christianity is an odd marriage of Athens and Jerusalem — with all the ongoing joys and tensions that go with any marriage.
And I wonder if we don’t sufficiently appreciate what the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. did to Christianity. Its Judaic branch was dealt a severe — perhaps mortal blow, and the Hellenistic branch was left standing. (And, if there had been government records of Jesus’ crucifixion, they would have been in Jerusalem and destroyed in the conflagration.)

At any rate, one thread led to another. It was as if I were pulling the thread on a sweater, that turns out to be one for an octopus with 8 arms, and then for a centipede with a hundred.

And somewhere I tripped over Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. Which for the first time gave me a road map of my sojourn through the Underworld. And the knowledge that countless others had made this sojourn, and survived.

Indeed, once I recovered my emotional equilibrium, I realized that I had been sensitized to recognizing others in the same boat. As the roar of my own suffering quieted, I could see that untold numbers of people around me were making their own Sojourns through the Underworld.

So here I am, over 40 years later, having wandered in the wilderness lo these many decades, and ‘answers’ have cohered about as well as they’re ever likely to. Following those threads turned out to cover a lot of ground, and it has taken me a lifetime to weave them together into a semi-coherent whole.

And I have NEVER forgotten Presence. “Keep going. You’ll be OK.” She was right. She hasn’t shown up since. Hasn’t needed to, methinks. 

As for the New Testament in particular, I can’t do better than to quote Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). He started out as a German theologian, Bach scholar and concert organist. Then he wrote a book: The Quest for the Historical Jesus:
In the 19th and 20th centuries in particular, New Testament scholars were obsessed with finding “the historical Jesus”  the ‘real’ Jesus behind the Gospel narratives. Schweitzer considered them one by one, and demonstrated that in every case the proposed ‘historical Jesus’ was the one the researcher wanted to find. Schweitzer argued that the whole enterprise was impossible. His book became a landmark in New Testament scholarship.
Then Schweitzer gave up his theological and music careers, went back to medical school, became a physician, and founded a hospital in the backwoods of Africa.
For which he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1952.
Schweitzer ended his Quest for the Historical Jesus with this paragraph, which I learned by heart decades ago. And I’m sure I don’t have it exactly right, but I share it from my heart to yours:

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He comes to us, he speaks the same word: Follow Thou Me! And sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands! And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal himself - in the toils, the hardships, the sufferings, which they shall pass through in His fellowship. And as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, Who He Is.







Part 2: A Bigger Story
Someone cuts me off on the freeway. He slides into my lane without warning and I touch the brakes. That is the full extent of what has actually happened to me.
And yet something in me wants to rage at him.
Yet: I don't know why he's in a hurry. His wife may be delivering their first child at a hospital three exits ahead. His father may have just had a stroke. He may simply be late for work and frightened about it.  There is no end of reasons I would find completely understandable if I knew them. Or he could just be a jerk. The point is: I don't know. I know only that I had to touch my brakes.
Ancient tradition says: judges must recuse themselves from any case in which they have personal involvement. Not because personal involvement makes them evil — but because it makes them unable to see clearly. Involvement and judgment are incompatible. The judge's disqualification isn't a moral failing — it's a pragmatic one.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says: “Don't judge. We assume he means don't judge people — but notably — he doesn't say that. What if he means don't judge anything you're not personally embedded in? Don't render verdicts on situations where you don't have the full context, where your involvement is — if you're honest — negligible at most? 
Of course we have to make decisions, ‘judgments’ when we are involved, when we personally are affected.
But this is different. What if he’s saying: Don’t pass judgment when you have no skin in the game?
Someone cuts me off. My actual loss is virtually zero — I touch my brake. Everything beyond that is a story I'm telling myself at my own expense.

There have been seasons when I was carrying as much weight as I could carry. The Underworld had its grip on me and I couldn't escape. (Yet.) It was not a time when I had attention or energy to spare.
What I discovered, under that kind of load, was that allowing myself to get upset about things that hadn't actually harmed me added optional misery on top of inescapable misery. That the slings and arrows I was absorbing from strangers on freeways, from minor slights, from the news, from the thousand irritations of daily life — none of them had actually touched me. I was volunteering for pointless new wounds.
When you're already at capacity, you can't afford that. The cost becomes visible with a clarity that comfort normally hides.
So I’m still learning — slowly, imperfectly, but really learning — to let the non-essential float past. Not as a spiritual achievement. Not as a performance of sainthood. More like a survival technique. As simple parsimony with the only currency I had left.
Attention is finite. What you spend on the freeway driver you cannot spend on what actually matters. The question isn't whether to be a good person. The question is whether to be an effective person. By asking myself if what just happened actually warrants the emotional energy I’m about to spend on it.
Usually it doesn't.
“Judge not” what you're not inside of. And notice — as a quiet corollary — how little you are actually inside of. How much of what feels like your life is in fact just weather passing through. 
The driver is long gone. 
I hope he made it in time.

I'm sitting in a movie theater watching Luke Skywalker face the Empire. I’ve never seen this movie before, so I don't know what he's going to do. He has impossible choices to make. He makes them — badly at first, then better — and in the making of them becomes someone he wasn't at the beginning. I'm leaning forward slightly. I'm invested.
And yet the film was finished long before I sat down. Every choice Luke makes, every moment of growth, every triumph and failure — already fixed, already determined, sitting on a reel waiting to unspool. The filmmakers decided all of it years ago.
Intellectually I know this. It doesn't diminish the experience by one degree.
I think about my own choices. At any decision, everything I am arrives at that moment simultaneously — my genetics, my wounds, my formation, everyone who shaped me, everything I've learned and failed to learn, every person I've loved and lost. All of it bearing on this instant. And once I make my decision, in hindsight — if I'm honest — whatever I chose feels inevitable. Not random. Not arbitrary. Like the next step in a journey that has its own logic, its own grain. MY logic. MY grain.
Was it a free choice? Or was it more like — self-discovery? Less self-determination than self-revelation?
Some will say this is just Determinism — the philosophical position that the cosmos is a vast machine and everything including us is completely predetermined. Just turn the cosmic crank. Maybe. But here's the thing about Determinism: even if it's true, it tells me nothing useful. Such a machine would be so incomprehensibly complex that knowing everything is predetermined helps me exactly zero. So, Determinism — so what.
Where I find these reflections more useful is somewhere else entirely.
I used to panic at major decisions. The pressure was crushing — I had to produce the right answer ex nihilo, out of nothing, by sheer force of will. Get it wrong and the consequences could be dire.
But what if it's not like that?
What if a decision is less like manufacturing an answer and more like allowing everything I am to find its next step? What if the wrestling and the anxiety and the sleepless nights are less like failure to produce the correct answer and more like — labor pains? Not pleasant. But not random either. The pain has a direction. Something is being born. My next self being born.
If that's true — even partially true — maybe I can relax my grip slightly on the process. White knuckle it a little less. Trust that what emerges from genuine wrestling with a hard choice is just more — ME.
I'm still in the audience. But I'm also on the screen.
And my movie, it turns out, is darn interesting — if I put down my phone and really pay attention.
Where’s the popcorn?