Monday, November 29, 2004
(1:54 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
St. Paul Week(end), with comments on nose-picking
I am officially suspending The Weblog's Official St. Paul Week until further notice, because I don't know how I'm going to write four more posts on Paul this week. I could go the "biblical studies" route and venture an opinion on various Pauline puzzles (such as the thorn in his flesh), but I'd probably get shot down for the following reasons:- I am temprementally predisposed to prefer novel solutions for novelty's sake, thus making me disrespectful of the scholarly tradition.
- I don't know Greek -- and I'd just like to say to all you Bible people out there: Why is it that all the translations suck so much in your opinion? Why is it that no one can come to any firm conclusions based on a translation? It's not like you're all native Greek speakers writing your articles in Greek -- you're perfectly capable of coming up with what you believe to be an adequate translation in particular cases, or at least coming up with something that a footnote could take care of, but apparently you don't deign to share your wisdom with the commoners until some young non-Greek-reading upstart comes up with a way of reading the Bible, at which point you shoot them down -- because they don't know Greek. But part of the job of a biblical scholar is to translate, surely -- so whose fault is it that the translation gives them nothing to work with? How do you say "transparent power play" in Greek?
Another topic of discussion is the removal of nasal hairs. I sometimes have trouble with this -- but there's no better feeling (literally no better feeling) than the post-nose-hair-removal sneeze.
So what do you say? Nose-picking week?