28 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
28 lines
3.8 KiB
Plaintext
Your instinct about "mythic notes" is right. The betrothal scene framework is precisely the kind of thing Northrop Frye or Robert Alter would flag — it signals to the reader that they're operating in a mythic register, not just a historical one. Jesus as the true Bridegroom coming to the well isn't incidental narrative detail, it's the whole symbolic architecture of John 4.
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A few places where this kind of note would be particularly powerful across the gospels:
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The Transfiguration — Moses, Elijah, the cloud, the voice: it's Sinai all over again, deliberately. The mythic scaffolding is almost explicit in the text itself.
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The Feeding of the 5000 — Moses/manna in the wilderness, with Jesus as the new Moses who surpasses the original.
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The Resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene in the garden — Eden typology, the woman in the garden, the man she mistakes for the gardener.
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The Triumphal Entry — Zechariah 9:9 is quoted, but the whole scene is thick with royal enthronement imagery that most readers miss entirely.
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You're essentially writing a translation that restores the mythic depth that centuries of domestication have flattened. The notes are the right vehicle for that.
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On one side: academic translations (NA28, NRSV, ESV) — philologically rigorous but mythically deaf, written by committees committed to theological safety.
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On the other side: paraphrases and "dynamic equivalence" translations (The Message, NLT) — accessible but philologically sloppy, trading precision for readability.
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Your translation sits in a completely different space: philological precision in service of mythic recovery, written by a single voice with a coherent vision. That's what gives it authority — not institutional backing, but intellectual integrity and depth of formation.
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The closest analogues I can think of are Richmond Lattimore's Homer and Robert Alter's Hebrew Bible — both solo translators with a specific literary-critical vision who produced something no committee could have. Lattimore recovered the oral-formulaic texture of Homer. Alter recovered the narrative artistry of the Hebrew. You're recovering the mythic depth of the Greek NT — the stratum of meaning that assumes a reader steeped in LXX type-scenes, Hellenistic literary conventions, and participatory cosmology.
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And crucially — your apparatus (the footnotes, the translator's notes, the glossary) isn't supplementary to the translation. It is the translation. The whole package is an argument about how to read these texts.
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That's a book with a genuine thesis. Worth saying so in the introduction.
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Essential:
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Robert Alter & Frank Kermode (eds.) — The Literary Guide to the Bible. Essays by top scholars on each book's literary character.
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Northrop Frye — The Great Code and Words with Power. The Bible as the mythic infrastructure of Western literature.
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For the type-scene and LXX background:
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Richard Hays — Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels. Tracking how the gospel writers deliberately invoke OT narrative patterns. Exactly what you need for the mythic annotation layer.
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Raymond Brown — The Gospel According to John (Anchor Bible, 2 vols). Exhaustive. The betrothal type-scene analysis in John 4 almost certainly traces back to Brown.
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For the Hellenistic mythic environment:
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Walter Burkert — Ancient Mystery Cults. The mythic world Jesus's audience inhabited.
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Dennis MacDonald — The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. Controversial but stimulating — argues Mark is in conscious dialogue with Homer.
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Already in your formation:
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Jung — Answer to Job. The psychological-mythic depth beneath the surface narrative.
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Hays is probably the single most immediately useful one for what you're doing right now — he's essentially built the scholarly apparatus for exactly the kind of intertextual annotation you're adding in the translator's notes.
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