Tag Archives: Translating

On Translation

On Translation – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how I take nuance and particularity into account in my efforts as a translator.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how I take nuance and particularity into account in my efforts as a translator.

When I chose to study André Thevet (1516–1590) and the three-toed sloth in August 2019 I did so because I already knew French and the need to learn a new language was less pressing than if I’d chosen to study another source in the history of natural history. I chose Thevet because it was practical, and I chose the sloth because the thought of being a sloth historian made me laugh. From the first day working on Thevet, I found that my understanding of his books was heightened when I took the time to type out my own translations of his text. Thevet wrote in Middle French that is native to the middle decades of the sixteenth century. I arrived at this project very familiar with Early Modern English, the contemporary form of this language to Thevet’s time, as my history master’s thesis delt with sources in that chronological variety of English from Thevet’s generation and the one just before. I’ve never had much trouble understanding the most prolific author of Early Modern English literature, Shakespeare, but I think I’ve had a tolerance for varieties in speech that’s allowed for me to try to think beyond my own millennial Midwestern metropolitan American English and be willing to understand the likes of Shakespeare from a young age.

So, when I began translating passages from Thevet’s Singularitez de la France Antarctique for my own professional use in my dissertation, I decided that as long as I was translating that book I might as well translate it with the intention of sharing Thevet’s words beyond the scholarly analysis and critique which lie at the heart of my work as a historian. This first draft is built around the 1558 French edition published by Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589) in Antwerp and contains footnotes drawn from the 1878 French edition by Paul Gaffarel published in Paris, two Brazilian Portuguese translations by Sergio Amado (1978) and Estêvão Pinto (1944, using the 2018 reprint), and the partial 1986 English translation by Arthur Stabler and Roger Schlesinger which contains only Thevet’s North American chapters.

I finished the first draft of this translation in Summer 2023 and am now looking ahead toward the second draft which is the next stage of the project, and I hope the last one before I feel confident in formally writing to the publishing editors whose press sales agents I’ve spoken with about this project at conferences over the last two years. The second draft will consist of two main stages. First, I will cross-reference my translation and the 1558 Antwerp edition on which it is primarily based with the 1557 first and 1558 second editions published in Paris by Maurice de la Porte, two Venetian editions translated into Italian by Giuseppe Horologgi and published by Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari (c. 1508–1578) in 1561 and 1584, and the 1568 full English translation by Thomas Hacket published in London by Henry Bynneman. Second, I will seek to make my translation more understandable for a 21st century English-speaking reader while endeavoring to preserve Thevet’s particular mannerisms and voice, a writing style with which I’ve become quite familiar in the last 6 years to the point that I can now confirm at least two French translated manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale’s collections in Paris are verifiably written by Thevet. He had a way of writing that’s unmistakable.

These two competing axes create a binary star system around which my translation revolves. On the one hand, I want to be true to the original text, to preserve the author’s voice and something of their spirit which remains in those words. On the other hand, I need to make my efforts readable for my own contemporaries. Thevet and his contemporaries are notorious for long run-on sentences that would make Hemingway shake his head in earnest frustration. Where do I break up a long sentence while preserving its overall integrity? Furthermore, at what point should I decided to remove the bracketed notations of page breaks in the original text? There the 1558 Antwerp edition is most fully evident as its pagination has several quirks that make it stand out from the 1557 & 1558 Paris editions. At this point, Plantin published books with folio numbers rather than page numbers, so the first two pages were in fact folios 1 recto (1r) and 1 verso (1v). These names refer to the custom that scribes traditionally started writing on the back side of the vellum (recto in Latin) and then flipped the skin over once ready to continue writing on the verso, or opposite side. In several instances the folio numbers actually decrease in the book, notably in Thevet’s chapter on the sloth, which makes the footnotes on that core element of my research particularly confusing if you’re paying close enough attention. So, in summation the inclusion of the page breaks with the folio numbers keeps my translation grounded in Plantin’s edition, however that may break up the text in an uncomfortable way for some readers.

Ultimately, I am not the author of this book, merely a herald relaying it on for our time. My voice is there in the handful of introductory chapters I’ve written to go along with this book. These chapters describe Thevet as a reader of travel literature and place his accounts of the Americas beyond what he himself saw in Brazil in the context of their French and Spanish sources. I see my efforts in this as a means of introducing the reader to Thevet, a man who today exists on the furthest margins of the popular imagination of the First Age of Exploration in the English-speaking world. Thevet remains present in academic circles, there were at least four papers presented at this weekend’s annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Boston which discussed Thevet, mine included. I hope this book will be useful to fellow academics and perhaps will entice curious readers to learn more about this man who I’ve spent the last 6 years of my life getting to know.I find myself drawn as much to the effort of a translator as I do to the work of a historian these days. We live in such a fractious time when reasoned debate and earnest discourse is riddled with dangers and seemingly improbable to undertake. I feel as though I’m constantly translating my thoughts and character for others to understand me. It’s why I enjoyed my time in Boston because that city has a large enough Irish American population that when I’d tell my name to a cashier to put on a carry-out order they’d actually spell it in the proper Irish manner; this never happens in Kansas City. That said, I felt that I had to translate my expectations and personal limits to be able to live even for just a few days in a city as expensive as Boston where I was often paying double what I’d normally pay at home in restaurants. In translating I recognize that each of us think in slightly different ways and see the world in which we all live in just as unfamiliar terms to one another. Difference enhances our common humanity and elevates our manner to something greater than ourselves.

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The Divine Essence

Art: Studio of El Greco, “Agony in the Garden,” (1590) oil on canvas, 102 x 131 cm, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA, ⁠National Gallery, London⁠.

The Divine Essence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a meditation on the Name of God.—Art: Studio of El Greco, "Agony in the Garden," (1590) oil on canvas, 102 x 131 cm, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA, National Gallery, London.Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a meditation on the Name of God.

At the start of Advent last November, I picked up a little blue book after Mass as an Advent lectio divina guide for the coming weeks. I’d done this several times before in Advent and Lent, the two holy seasons of preparation in Christianity, yet this time I actually read that little blue book and kept up with it each day through Christmas. By the end of it I was looking forward to being done with this one part of my nightly routine before bed, the time when I was able to sit and read the daily reflection. I wasn’t sure then if I would pick up the little black book when it appeared at my parish the weekend before Ash Wednesday, and yet when it was there, I took a copy home.

This year’s little black book offers reflections on St. John’s Gospel, the most spiritual in focus of the evangelists. Several aspects of the readings have caught my attention, usually out of a curiosity concerning the grammar or translation of the biblical text. On one early day, the reflection was on John’s recounting of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This recounting contradicts the three other Gospels in that Jesus asks the soldiers to let his disciples go, rather than the disciples taking flight in fear of the soldiers. It is more self-sacrificial, following the prophetic undertones of the Gospel overall. Not only does this vital moment of arrest in the Passion narrative take place in a Garden, akin to the Garden of Eden where humanity’s fall into sin occurred, but it is also here where Jesus revealed Himself as God the Son. Quoting here from the New American Bible:

[4] Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?”[5] They said to him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also there with them. [6] When he said to them, “I AM,” they turned away and fell to the ground. [7] So he again asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” [8] Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”

(John 18: 4–8)

In this passage the omniscience of God is first revealed, followed by the humility of God the Son as merely one among them, “the Nazorean.” Here though the omnipotence of God as the Divine Essence, existence in its purest form as “I AM,”[1] before showing such mercy toward the soldiers at making it clear he was in their power and would surrender to them yet asking for mercy from them for his friends, his disciples who not being omniscient were very much afraid as any of us would be. It is the third part of this passage, the identification of God that I wish to focus on here.

The Name of God is known as the Tetragrammaton after the four Hebrew letters which comprise that Name. These are the four holiest letter combinations out there. The Name of God is too sacred to write in Judaism, and considering Hebrew is an abjad lacking written vowels it’s not entirely certain how this Name was originally pronounced before that prohibition.[2] This prohibition extends in some traditions to not even writing the word God, as it is capitalized as the common Name of God in regular parlance. I grew up capitalizing this word in reference to the Abrahamic God, who I do believe is the Creator and One True God, I don’t just recite the Nicene Creed every week at Mass to do it; and yes, this capitalization is in line with the tradition of capitalizing proper nouns in all of the languages I speak and write. Yet I’ve never really thought of God as a name, rather it’s a title in the same way that Christ is a title and Jesus the name. I’ve had some students over the years who won’t write God out, instead writing “G-d” out of respect for this title, which I think is fair. For the sake of my readers, I won’t include the Hebrew Tetragrammaton here, you can look it up on your own.

What I’m more interested in is how the Tetragrammaton was translated from Biblical Hebrew into the other languages in which I’ve read the Bible. There are really four such languages: English, Latin, Koine Greek, and Irish. 

I was first introduced to the Bible and to my Catholic faith through English, I was born in the second generation after the vernacular Mass was allowed largely replacing the older Tridentine Mass said in Latin. The New American Bible (NAB) which I read from a few paragraphs back is the translation that I grew up with, and the one which I use in all aspects of my life. It was also developed during Vatican II as the approved English biblical translation for the United States. In Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand the Jerusalem Bible (JB) is the translation used, while in Great Britain the English Standard Version – Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) is used. 

I was introduced to the Latin Vulgate and Greek New Testament and Septuagint in high school and college and today I own a copy of the Greek New Testament published by the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft). Both are key sources for the English translations that I grew up with, alongside the Hebrew Tanakh itself. I chose St. James Academy for my high school years largely because they offered Latin, and while the fact that Latin remains the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, I was more interested in reading classical Roman literature. Likewise, the first of the two Ancient Greek classes I’ve taken was at St. James under the direction of our Latin teacher Bob Weinstein. That class was focused on Classical Attic Greek from democratic Athens of the 5th century BCE. In college at Rockhurst I made the 5 century leap forward to the Koine Greek of the 1st century CE when I studied Biblical Greek under Professor Daniel Stramara. I wasn’t the best student, yet I was fascinated by that class and would love someday to study Latin and Greek more fully. It would certainly be a benefit to my research.

Finally, while I’ve known of the Bíobla Naofa, the approved Irish translation of the Bible, for a long while, I only bought one in the last year. Irish is an odd language for me that feels untouched by the embrace of vernacular piety for me as by the time the Vatican II Council occurred between 1962 and 1965 my family largely spoke English, though the last generation of native Irish speakers were still around. For me then the Bíobla Naofa is as much a study tool as it is an aspiration of piety. I keep mine on my desk the easier to reference when I’m curious how a particular word or phrase is translated into Irish. The Bible is a good source if you want to see how common biblical names are translated from one language to another. It’s how I know that the Irish biblical tradition predates the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 because St. John is called Naomh Eoin, not Naomh Seán. My name is an Irish rendering of the French name Jean, while Eoin is an older rendering of the Latin and Greek name Ioannes, which is also the parent of the French Jean. The Evangelist is thus known by the same name today as the Celtic monks knew him in the early medieval period when the Irish cultural influence on Europe was at its peak.

Returning then to the Tetragrammaton, when I read this passage from St. John’s Gospel that evening, I was curious to see how it was translated from the original Koine Greek into Latin and Irish. Translation is a funny business, it’s not ever as simple as going word-by-word and replacing the original language’s text with the target language’s equivalent. There’s far more nuance to each language and its dialects to allow for this. I’ve learned this in my efforts to translate André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique from Middle French into Modern English. The last English translation was written in 1568 and is thus in Early Modern English from the generation just before William Shakespeare. Thanks to the bard Early Modern English is still fairly familiar to many of us, myself included, yet it is still different from how this language sounds and is written today. To make the first draft of my translation I brought together a composite of the 1558 Antwerp French edition, the 1568 London translation, the 1878 Paris French edition, and the 1944 and 1978 Brazilian Portuguese translations to create an accurate and modern English translation fitting for the 21stcentury.[3] All this is to say that translation is far more complicated than just taking the original text and interpreting each word on its own. The words work together within the ecosystem of the phrase.

I was curious then to see if the English “I AM THAT AM” was perhaps clunkier than the Greek. This full phrase is familiar to me especially from the Burning Bush story in the Book of Exodus (Ch. 3), in which Moses meets God in a burning bush. This scene is beautifully retold in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt which is a classic from my childhood. The four words we have mirror the four letters of the Tetragrammaton in the original Hebrew, yet these four words are reduced to two in Greek. In John’s telling Jesus’s response “I AM,” is written in the original Koine Greek as “ἐγώ εἰμι,” (John 18:5) with the full phrase in the Septuagint’s retelling of the burning bush story written as “ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν,” (Exodus 3:14) or I am the Being. I feel this final word ὤν is essential here. It is the present active participle of the Greek copular verb εἰμι. In a sense, it is saying that God is existence itself, the essence behind the Cosmos and all Reality itself. One translation of ὤν in the Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) is the English word fact.

This is adopted into Latin somewhat, as the Vulgate is drawn so much from the Greek Bible, where the Name of God is rendered as “Ego sum qui sum,” whence we received the English “I AM THAT AM.” Yet because Latin doesn’t have a similar present active participle for the copular verb sum, the reuse of the indicative present active form sum is necessary. The English present participle of be is being, yet replacing the second am in the name with being doesn’t work grammatically in this language.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Irish translation of this phrase for how simple it is. The Greek ἐγώ εἰμιwas translated as “Is mise é,” a phrase which I’d usually translate back into English as “I am he.” On an immediate level this is profound in its everyday character. This is something I’d say when someone asks “An bhfuil tú Seán?” Yet on a deeper level it speaks to Irish’s ability to express emphasis in a manner unfamiliar to English. The first person pronoun in Irish is mé, this is the translation of both the English I and me. Yet the -seending tacked onto it expresses extra emphasis on the pronoun. The closest we can get in English, or at least in my American English, to this is saying “me too,” or perhaps capitalizing ME and adding an exclamation mark behind it (or several if you’re one of those people who are overly fond of exclamatory sentences). So, God’s existence is expressed in Irish in the emphatic, as something to be shouted from the rooftops in wonder all while reflecting the priority Irish gives to all of us to be worthy of emphasizing no matter how mighty or small we may be. The Irish translation of the full Name from Exodus is “Is mé an te atá ann,” which is closer in meaning to the Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, translating into English as “I am the one who is.” Again, this speaks to the ability of Irish to interpret the existence of God as the essence of reality.

In my undergraduate years when I started to think deeply about the Tetragrammaton & the Name of God, I settled on the idea that the best way to describe God without limiting God in human terms was to focus on God as the essence of life. In this way, I began to refer to God in my theological studies as the Divine Essence, in an attempt to better reflect this truth that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Divine Essence rises above any limitations of human terminology or senses of gender that weigh down even the word God, which is traditionally masculine in English and its fellow Indo-European languages. I’d rather see God in God’s fullness existing beyond gender, the better “to see the Face of God,” to quote Jean Valjean’s last words in the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.I’ve had trouble with this thinking in the last few years, because how should I begin to approach God in these terms in prayer? How can I seek any sort of personal connection to God when I’ve devoted such effort to seek to understand God in such abstract terms by stretching language as far as it will go without breaking? This Lent that is where I stand, and where I am uncertain. Looking at the story of the Garden of Gethsemane told in John’s Gospel in this year’s little black book, I noticed that while Jesus revealed His true Nature, he also identified himself as mere “Jesus the Nazorean,” a human and God all the same. That human nature is approachable, personable. I remember how in the Ignatian Examen one is called to think of one sitting with Jesus while one reflects on their day. This is a starting point, and a good point of departure for reflection this Lent.

[1] In my Catholic tradition we capitalize this phrase as the name of God.

[2] See Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters, (New York: HarperOne, 2017) for more on this. I really enjoyed reading this book a year ago.

[3] NB: I used a 2018 reprint of the 1944 Brazilian Portuguese translation.

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Human or Man?

Human or Man? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

In English should we say that Jesus "became human" or "became man"? Join me as I work through the history of the Nicene Creed and how this most pivotal of beliefs was interpreted first by the Greek speaking Church Fathers who wrote the Creed, later by the Latin speaking Catholic Church, and today by us English speakers. You can read a transcript of the full episode here. Written, read, and produced by Seán Thomas Kane. © Seán Thomas Kane, 2021.

On Saturday I took the opportunity to go to 4:00 pm Mass at my home parish here in Kansas City, MO while I was in town for Thanksgiving. It was wonderful getting to see the place again, and even though it’s only been 3 months since I left town for the semester a part of me doubted I’d actually see these places that are so dear to me anytime soon.

During the Nicene Creed as I recited the words I’ve known at least since freshman year of high school, the proclamation of the Faith, kind of a Pledge of Allegiance that we Catholics still have mostly in common with our Orthodox and Protestant cousins, I noticed something that made perfectly good sense but I hadn’t thought of yet. A friend who was standing near me said that Jesus “became human” instead of “became man.” It caught me off guard for a number of reasons. Firstly, the official English translation that we use in the US does use the older word “man” rather than the newer “human” but secondly, I had a feeling from what I could remember of the Latin translation that our English one is more closely based on that “human”, “homō” in Latin, might actually be the noun used.

That evening I made a point of going to the source. I looked up the Creed in Latin and sure enough the line there is “et homō factus est,” which I’d translate in my schoolroom Latin as “and he was made human.”1

The one catch here is that the Creed wasn’t originally written in Latin but in Greek. So, in order to get to the original meaning and intent of the Church Fathers at the Council of Nicaea (325) that wrote the Creed we still say nearly 17 centuries later, I’d need to call up my admittedly elementary and rusty knowledge of Greek. Unlike Latin, which I studied all through my high school years, have picked up again twice since, and use professionally on a regular basis as a historian of Renaissance natural history, I haven’t been lucky enough to use much of my Greek. I took Classical Greek in my senior year of high school after finishing my last required math credit the summer before, and then took a semester of Koine Greek (aka New Testament Greek) in my sophomore year of undergrad at Rockhurst. So yeah, my Greek is rusty. I can still read the alphabet pretty well and I know enough about etymologies that I can get by, but I never really got it the way I got Latin or French.

Still, I was determined to spend at least a few minutes of my Saturday evening at home working through this question: what was the original Greek line that the Latin translator rendered as “et homō factus est“?2 I went to a pretty reliable source that has both the Latin and Greek versions and started scouring the Greek, figuring I was either looking for one of two words: ἄνθρωπος (anthropos) meaning human or ᾰ̓νήρ (anḗr) meaning man.3

One of the big tricks that I’ve learned after now a few years of working with sixteenth-century printed books that are often not in English is the quickest way to find a particular word you’re looking for is basically to just focus on finding that word, don’t pay too much attention to the rest of the text. Once you’ve found the word you’re looking for then go and read the rest of it to put that word into context.

One example of a 16th century printed book that I’ve worked with.

Anyway, back to the story.

So, I scanned through the Greek original version of the Nicene Creed and was left stumped. I couldn’t find either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ anywhere. I began to wonder if there was some third Greek word for human or man that I didn’t know about, and knowing what I do know about Greek there being three words for the same concept isn’t at all out of the question. Looking for clues, I turned then to the previous line, “and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary”. In the Latin this appears as “Et incarnātus est, ex Spirītū Sānctō ex Marīā Virgine“. A great trick for any researcher working in a second or third language, or better yet one that they have a passing familiarity with is to always keep an eye out for personal names or other proper nouns: those will usually be more prominent, and when it comes to the BVM (Māter Deī, Θεοτόκος [Theotókos]) you can bet her name will be prominent. Sure enough, I quickly found mention of a Μαρίας τῆς Παρθένου (Marias tés Parthenou) meaning the Virgin Mary and kept looking along that line for something that resembled either ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ. Two words over came my answer: a fittingly long Greek verb ἐνανθρωπήσαντα (enanthrōpōpésanta).

I quickly returned to my favorite English-Greek dictionary and found the root form of the verb in question, ἐνᾰνθρωπέω (enanthrōpéō), meaning “to put on human/man’s nature,” or more essentially “to become human/man.” The only job left to do was to take out that clunky slash and acknowledge which noun, ἄνθρωπος or ᾰ̓νήρ was at the heart of that verb. As it turned out, and as you can see, it’s ἄνθρωπος.

Thus, to the best of my efforts as a scholar and translator, and as you can see, I’d argue that in English saying that Jesus “became human” works, perhaps even better than “became man”. Why? Well, remember that English has changed a lot as a language in the past century. We have so many more people and ideas using this language than ever before, and to be honest while the English noun man began as both a word meaning males in both gender and sex (ever a complicated series of terms) and our entire species in general, it has steadily come to lose that second, neuter meaning in favor of solely being a masculine noun. Neil Armstrong’s first words when he stepped onto the Moon’s surface in 1969 were “it’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” For a guy in 1969 that worked. But for the astronauts that will be setting foot on the lunar surface again in the next few years with the Artemis program, I firmly believe that man won’t cut it anymore.

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that was a predecessor to this now weekly Wednesday Blog about why I prefer to say “you guys” rather than “y’all”. Long story short: I’m not a Southerner, and I’ll fully admit when I hear “y’all” I don’t tend to think of much besides the people who drug our country into a Civil War 160 years ago because they couldn’t accept the fact that it was morally corrupt to own other human beings. The fact that their heirs are still fighting against racial equity in this country makes my case for me. In that same blog post I also argued that we should move away from the word mankind, and towards something that more closely reflects a more gender neutral word for our species: humanity. On a small side note here (in a paragraph begun with a side note) I don’t like humankind because it combines the very Germanic -kind with the very Latin human. Instead, Latin gives us the word humanity, derived from the Latin hūmānitās. Let’s use that instead. It works, and frankly as we do become far more globally interconnected (which, guys, really isn’t a bad thing at all), it translates far better than humankind ever will.

All this said, getting back to the main point after a brief stop in the politics and history of American English, I think it’s actually a lot better and more profound to refer to Jesus as God becoming human instead of God becoming man. It means that Jesus came to be among all of us, to be one of all of us. I’ve written before in an academic setting about why I believe it’s flawed to refer to God in gendered terms: gender is cultural, it’s fundamentally human, and it keeps the blinders on us to the extent that we can’t make a true effort at seeing, and by seeing hopefully we can get closer to understanding the fullness of God. From there, I’ll leave the writing about how to understand the fullness of God to the theologians and clergy.

Footnotes

  1. Why the difference between the official “became” and “was made” in my translation of the Latin passive verb factus est? Factus est is the passive perfect 3rd person singular form of the verb faciō, which my old stalwart dictionary William Whitaker’s Words translates into the English verbs “do, make, create; acquire; cause, bring about, fashion; compose; accomplish.” So, while “became” is more poetic, “was made” is more accurate to the verb in question. But, theologically was Jesus the passive recipient of the blessing of being made human? After a significant amount of time for what I thought would be a short search I found an entry in the Liddell, Scott, and Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) on the Perseus database that listed the original Greek verb that was translated into Latin as factus est, namely ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, as an aorist participle singular active masculine verb in the accusative case. So basically, while the Latin factus est is in the perfect passive voice (meaning it’s describing an event that fully happened to the subject in the past), the Greek verb is an event that happened in the past without any time specified as to when it happened (kinda like a French passé simple?) This alone shows the complexity of trying to translate from Greek into Latin and then by extension into English. One final note here: while the Greek verb grammatically has a masculine gender (see above in this oversized footnote) I’d stress that that gender designation is referring to Jesus who it’s generally accepted was biologically male. In the process of trying to figure out how the Greek verb in question (ἐνανθρωπήσαντα, in case you forgot) was conjugated, I found an interesting article from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University discussing how best to translate this very verb in the Nicene Creed from the Greek original into English. So, to return to the original question that led me to write this footnote that would outrun the Gettysburg Address in length: the fact that Jesus in the Latin was apparently the passive recipient of his humanity, given to Him by the Holy Spirit is more or less a “it’s the best we can do” translation from the original Greek where Jesus actively “became human”. So, in English while the best translation from the Latin is “was made” human, when taking the Greek into account the official Catholic “became” human works a lot better, because it recognizes that at the end of the day Jesus and the Holy Spirit are consubstantial with the Father, meaning they all share the same Substance, i.e. they are all One. “Three Persons in One God” as my notes from my undergrad freshman Honors Christianity I notes say.
  2. For my fellow grammar constables out there, yes I put the quotation mark outside the quotes. There’s a reason for that, it’s not a part of the quote so I don’t see why it should be included in the quotes. I’m going to write another blog post about this eventually.
  3. For my Greek friends and all Greek scholars out there: to my understanding ᾰ̓νήρ is the Ancient Greek word for “man.” To my understanding the more familiar and modern word άνδρας is descended from the accusative singular (direct object form) of ᾰ̓νήρ.