Earlier this year, I worked my way through Fr. Frank Matera’s commentary Praying the Psalms in the Voice of Christ as I prayed the four-week psalter in the Liturgy of the Hours. (I reviewed Matera’s book here for anyone interested.) Following Matera’s lead, I grew in understanding how to read the Psalms Christologically. In many cases, they can be read in the voice of Christ, the Word of God, praying on behalf of the Church or teaching his Church to pray and walk in the right path.
Armed with a better understanding of how to read and pray the Psalms in light of Christ, my thoughts turned to the debates over the use of the NRSV in the liturgy. One of the concerns that led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to reject the NRSV lectionary in the mid-1990s was its use of plural, gender-neutral language in the Psalms and elsewhere where the original Hebrew or Greek text is singular. The use of the plural words “they” and “those” instead of “he” and “the man” can make it more difficult to immediately perceive how a Psalm refers to Christ.
This concern is reflected in the following norms from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that were provided to the US bishops in 1995 and eventually published in 1997:
5. Grammatical number and person of the original texts ordinarily should be maintained.
6/1. Translation should strive to preserve the connotations as well as the denotations of words or expressions in the original and thus not preclude possible layers of meaning.
6/2. For example, where the New Testament or the Church’s tradition have interpreted certain texts of the Old Testament in a Christological fashion, special care should be observed in the translation of these texts so that a Christological meaning is not precluded.
6/3. Thus, the word “man” in English should as a rule translate ‘adam and anthropos (ανθρωποσ), since there is no one synonym which effectively conveys the play between the individual, the collectivity and the unity of the human family so important, for example, to expression of Christian doctrine and anthropology.
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), “Norms for the Translation of Biblical Texts for Use in the Liturgy” 1995. Published in 1997 by Adoremus Bulletin with extensive editorial commentary and available in concise form at EWTN’s website.
This makes intuitive sense to me, and I’ve sensed the different effect of plural versus singular language when reading individual psalms in the NRSV versus the NABRE (which uses singular forms more often). But I had never undertaken a systematic reading of the Psalms to understand how significant this is.
I decided to read through the four-week cycle of Psalms again, including Psalms for all the main hours of the day (Office of Readings, Morning Prayer, Daytime Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Night Prayer). As a purely private personal practice (not in community or as part of the Church’s liturgy), I read the Psalms from the NRSV and read Fr. Matera’s commentary for the Psalms each day. I still maintained a posture of prayer. I was not scrutinizing each Psalm line-by-line, as I’ve done with other translation comparisons, but when I noticed any language that seemed strongly relevant to a Christological reading of the Psalm, I made a note of it and in some cases researched the underlying language to try to understand the translation.
It should be noted that the four-week cycle of Psalms in the Liturgy of the Hours does not include all 150 Psalms, but it covers a large majority of them. Also, due to solemnities and feast days, the cycle can be interrupted with proper Psalms used for the solemnity or feast. So, the notes I made do not cover every single Psalm, but they certainly give a flavor for how well the NRSV Psalms preserve or permit a Christological reading.
In the next post, I’ll summarize the overall patterns I noticed and walk through the complete list of Psalms where I noted language in the NRSV that seemed to have Christological implications — whether positive, negative, or neutral.
Great idea! Looking forward to it.
This will be a fascinating read. Thanks for putting in the work.
Looking forward!
Ditto. Can’t wait to read it!
I look forward to reading it. I go back and forth on these issues all the time. There are days when I think we should go back to translating from the Septuagint and the Vulgate. Most of my reading is lectio with the NJB with the Knox at my elbow, so I have not gone completely to the traditional text route. I have, though, come firmly to believe that faith must be the only source of exegesis, but how does this apply to translation? It is an open question.