Lost in Translation.

By Elon

This originally appeared in the Moriel Bulletin of August 2014.

In addition to working with Moriel, I have a number of part-time responsibilities. For example, I 'consult' on a number of translation projects, where certain specialist knowledge is required. This is necessitated by some of the problems that translators of any material into another language may encounter for example:

1. Strange idioms.
2. Odd or archaic words and constructions.
3. Specialist vocabulary.

Most people that learn another language acquire a general day-to-day vocabulary, which even if they are very fluent is an altogether different animal from translating a theological work from several centuries ago, which requires awareness of all three of the above in addition to good biblical and theological literacy and in many cases a knowledge of Old English bible translations, history, military and maritime terminology and even obscure legal terms from the 18th Century. One of the things I do here is to provide support on some translation projects that need this kind of specialist knowledge so that things don't get 'lost in translation'. A recent example of this would be a translator who had rendered 'fetch a compass' quite literally into Hebrew without being aware it was actually an allusion to the Authorised Version rendering of Acts 28:13. The problem was the mistranslation almost fit the context and would have gone unnoticed unless someone had the historical and old English bible background to recognise the error. The LORD never wastes anything so I am grateful for the childhood fascination with obscure words and their meanings, historical subjects, military and naval technology and weaponry that was a feature of my younger days and made it possible for me to assist in this work. All those hours of reading C.S. Forrester were not wasted.

1. A Response to PWMI

Only a few days ago I came across this on the website for Prophetic Witness Ministries in regard to the reprint of Dr. Paul Wilkinson's book For Zion's Sake.

This new edition comes at a time when belief in the any-moment, pretribulation Rapture of the Church is under sustained attack, and the reputation of John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), the principal founder of the Plymouth Brethren and a man to whom we owe an enormous debt for recovering the truth of the Rapture, has been scurrilously maligned by members of the pro-Israel Church. We recommend this new edition to all who have not read the original.

The rather dramatic phrases 'sustained attack' and 'scurrilously maligned' are almost certainly connected with previous comments made here, and with Moriel's stance concerning John Nelson Darby and the Pre-tribulational Rapture Theory. Jacob may well be addressing some of these issues in his eagerly awaited upcoming book Harpazo, but at this point I would like to make a few comments from my own perspective, on the PWMI statement. Please note, that I have no issue with Dr. Wilkinson personally and hold only the greatest respect for him as a godly man of sterling character, whose work in addressing the demonic deceptions behind Christ at the Checkpoint and Christianised Palestinianism has been of the highest quality. Long may he continue to serve God in the faithful way he has done. My concerns here are purely doctrinal.

Firstly John Nelson Darby did not 'recover the truth of the Rapture'. He redefined it. This word recovery is one of the those instances where a 'compass has been fetched'; the Rapture has never been lost. It has only been lost in translation as the terminology has been hijacked to apply to something other than the biblical concept. It has been always part and parcel of the Second Coming of Christ. Historically speaking, anyone who had an orthodox, scriptural belief in the Second Coming, and held to a literal hermeneutic would have understood that the Rapture would occur when Jesus returned in manifest glory such that every eye should see Him, that He would gather His elect unto Himself and that said return was preceded by certain events clearly foretold in numerous places throughout Scripture. The problem that existed before the revival of interest in prophetic matters (to which Darby connected himself) in the early part of the 19th Century, was that the doctrine of the Second Coming had become shrouded in the gross darkness arising from the hermeneutical deficiencies of the Reformers (namely Augustinian a-millennialism) and the bewitching fog of Post-Millennialism. These two errors rode on the back of rampant Replacementism. At the great swelling of evangelistic endeavour that opened that Century, when attention began to be turned towards the lost sheep of the house of Israel, then light began to burst forth from the Scriptures, and the doctrines regarding the Return of Christ began to reassume their true importance.

It was not the Pretribulational Rapture that was recovered at the beginning of the 19th Century, but the pre-Millennial truth of the Second (and eminently visible) Coming of Christ at which event the saints would be caught up (raptured) to meet the Lord in the air. What men like Darby, (and also Trotter and Kelly) etc. promulgated was something altogether different. They introduced another 'secret' coming of Jesus unpreceded by any signs; so when the author of the PWMI article above talks of 'the Rapture being under attack', we must understand that it is the re-defined Rapture of the 19th Century Darbyite distortions that is referred to, and not the biblical event of which the Scriptures speak. One is a doctrine that can be exegetically and inductively acquired from the plain and unambiguous statements of Scripture; the other an erroneous innovation enjoying no clear contextual support and bereft of foundation in sound hermeneutical method; existing only (as even its foremost proponents admit) by virtue of allegorisation and inference, and I might add, redefinition, perversion and distortion of Scripture and scriptural terminology to boot.

One particularly worrying example of redefinition, which is actually contained within For Zion's Sake¹ (and I assume within the reprint, if as is advertised, the wording remains unchanged) is the claim;--currently being promoted by the Pretrib Research Centre of Thomas Ice;--that the Greek word apostasia in 2 Thess.2:3 actually means a departure not from the faith, but to heaven in the Rapture. This extremely serious error first appeared in the late 1890's and gained little credence on the whole; sadly it seems to be enjoying a revival through the aiding and abetting of Thomas Ice, Wayne House and others, from where I assume Dr Wilkinson has acquired and it, and surely by some oversight failed to examine it thoroughly, or he would never have allowed it into print. I was disturbed to see this dangerous error uncritically inserted in For Zion's Sake, and grieved that his name should be associated with such nonsense. Space does not permit a full refutation here, but we have material revealing its utterly baseless character, both on lexical and exegetical grounds; and on how apostasia was understood in Early English translations of the Bible. Anyone who wishes to obtain it please e-mail Moriel.

As to Darby's character, godly men of the 19th Century that had the misfortune to have dealings with him were far less inclined to canonise or hagiographise him. What I and others have stated is far less stinging than Darby's contemporaries, who were closer to the problem and the saw the fallout of his 'ministry'. Authors of the period were also deeply concerned about the doctrines of 'the Darbyites', and indeed eschatological error was not the only disquieting issue at the time; concerns were expressed about the Darbyite view of Jesus's humanity, the Atonement, Socinian teachings within the movement and its anti-nomianism to name but a few. It is interesting to note that a godly man like Charles Spurgeon held little quarrel with the Open Brethren on the whole², but reserved very strong censure indeed for Darby and his adherents. They were referred to by him and others in terms such as 'sanctimonious', 'hypocrisy', 'subtlety never equalled', 'duplicitous', 'Jesuitical'; and Spurgeon went so far as to call Darbyism a 'malignant power'. Such expressions are not used lightly or causelessly. Whatever the Brethren movement is today, the fact is that in the 19th Century (as even members of it have attested) it was fraught with internal strife and bitter feuding, and was deeply problematic, and this woeful state of affairs was in no small measure due to Darby's influence.

However ultimately the real problem we have with Darby is false doctrine. Non-Darbyite Brethren leaders like George Muller and Benjamin Wills-Newton, and foremost biblical scholar Samuel Tregelles, in their time expressed their grave reservations over the serious errors of Darby's eschatology and his hermeneutical methodology and it's consequences. These concerns have not gone away. For those who want to understand the concerns expressed, and on what biblical grounds they based those concerns, there is great profit in perusing their writings. Many of B.W. Newton's works are freely available on the Internet from archive.org (which has a treasure trove of useful theological works) freely available in PDF format or as plain text. There are some problems with the OCR'd texts because of inaccuracies in the character recognition so it is best to download the PDF's as well as the plain text formats. As a side project I am presently in the process of re-typesetting some of Newton's more important eschatological works into more accurate and useful searchable digital texts to be made freely available to whoever asks. Please e-mail Moriel if you are interested.

Footnotes

1. Page. 31 in my edition.

2. “This party differs as much from the Darbyites as the day from the night. We do not admire their peculiarities, but they are usually a fraternal, evangelistic race, with whom communion is not difficult, for their spirit is far removed from the ferocity of Darbyism.”