Perspectives in Translation

Question: How should a translation render Romans 1:17?

I am afraid that I don’t have time to go into the exegetical details of Rom. 1:17—there is a commentary on it that covers this ground, however inadequately! But I would like to take up briefly two points that my colleagues and friends make.

First, my former colleague (and, I hope, continuing friend!) Bob Yarbrough commends the WEB rendering “from faith to faith.” I am not necessarily arguing against that rendering, but I do wonder if we have adequately considered the receptor in all of this. Most of us live in academic environments, and a great deal of our discourse takes place within that environment. We have a predilection for more literal renderings because we know all the issues. But let’s take the situation of an average Bible reader: no training in Biblical studies, reads a dozen or so popular novels a year, watches TV for 15-20 hours a week, and—and this is a critical point, I think—either does not attend a church or attends one where there is no solid expositional preaching. What will “from faith to faith” communicate to that person? What will they learn from this passage about faith? “From faith from first to last” might be interpretive (although I think myself in the right direction), but it communicates.

Second, Michael Bird notes that dikaiosyne theou is, “literally,” “righteousness of God.” I want to question that word “literally.” The Greek genitive, in my view, has no “literal” equivalent in English (although, as M. Silva has argued, perhaps in this case something like “God righteousness” would be the closest). This is no mere quibble, because it vastly complicates the whole translation discussion. Beginning Greek students learn to render a genitive with the English “of” construction, and then go on to understand that this construction has, in fact, a lot of possible English equivalents. Our preposition “of” is simply not a “literal” rendering of the genitive case. The idea that there is some kind of “literal” English rendering for every Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek word and phrase bedevils this whole issue. We know that there are, in fact, no “literal” equivalents: Perhaps never do the semantic ranges of our Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic words exactly match the semantic range of English words. And the same pertains to syntactical features. Of course, some English renderings leave open interpretive possibilities more than others—a major reason why the updated NIV opts consistently for “righteousness of God” in all related texts. But laypeople, in particular, are badly misled by our language of “literal,” as if “literal” = accurate. It just ain’t so.

Douglas J. Moo is Blachard Professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and chair of the Committee on Bible Translation.

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