Paul Helm on The Title on the Cross and Bible Translation

Here is a thought provoking post by Paul Helm on translations of Scripture and Pilate’s inscription over the cross of Christ. Helm concludes the post with this summary:

But how if ‘The King of the Jews’ is a title, or a description, of the one hanging there, can it express a proposition? Maybe, without distorting things, we could form a proposition from it, as presumably Pilate intended. The chief priests certainly thought that it was a proposition, or at least could easily be made into one, one that is equivalent to ‘I am the King of the Jews’, or ‘The one hanging below is the King of the Jews’, for they wanted to neuter the force of the original inscription by enclosing it within the safety of inverted commas, to be understood for a few days as nothing but the personal opinion of a troublesome, failed rabbi. Mercifully, for whatever reason, Pilate pulled rank. What he had written he had written, and what he wrote is true, true forever, in Greek, in Aramaic, in Latin, in English, in every natural language rich enough in nouns, pronouns and verbs to construct its truth-equivalent.

One thing that this shows to us is that the prevalent Post-Conservative obsession with context, part of its anti-Enlightenment animus, is gross exaggeration. Of course there are such things as differences in context, but in the mercy of God they may not matter very much, and they most certainly don’t matter as much as the post-Conservatives reckon. At the last, men and women out of every nation will cry ‘Worthy is the Lamb’.

There are several lessons for us here. But for the present this one will suffice: Is awareness of context important for the understanding and communication of the Christian faith? Yes and no. Of course it matters. ‘To the Jews became I as a Jew’. Does it matter supremely? No, it does not. Here, on the very Cross itself, is a truth expressed by a context-transcending statement, one expressed in different languages. From it we see that truth is translatable. It conveys the same cognitive meaning in these other languages, and these cultures, and these contexts. The knowledge that Jesus is the king of the Jews may become saving knowledge for souls in every nation, and people, and tribe and tongue.