MAP — Modular Aggregation of Principles for Bible Translation

Extracted text from SBL_2015.docx:

Intersemiotic Translation Yancy Smith, Society of Biblical Literature 2015 The Bible is, as Holly Hearon has suggested, simultaneously a Book and at the same time not a fixed text, between covers, that can be privately owned. If Bible is, instead, also a process of ongoing intersemiotic selection, driven by sharing, and constrained by cultural genres and practices. As a cultural icon, it also becomes, in its concrete materiality, a categorical conceptual tool by which many people organize their perceptions of the world and themselves in the world. One of my constant preoccupations is how space, time and image interact in communities to shape the interpretation of both text and image within their spaces in and out of marked, ritual time. In the third century Hippolytus, in his World Chronicle, refers to his biblical ordering of time in human history as a , a rationalized gathering of historical time-lines. But, the Chronicle unites space and time in the known world and scripturizes everything in the authors horizon. Hippolytus states the purpose: In as much as it is necessary, according to all things, to become a ready servant of the truth, I considered it necessary, my beloved brother, to make, in brief, a discourse from the holy scriptures for the purpose of the training of the love of learning in you, that through the abridged demonstrations, which we have striven over without idleness, let us, in short, seize the precise knowledge of what we research in truth out of need, in order to root out the former strife, which arises through ignorance, darkens the mind, and will instruct a person with too little learning. We then, while both eagerly loving learning and wishing to investigate these matters, will know completely, in exactness, both the division of the nations and the genealogy of the patriarchs How was the lineage of the seed of Israel fulfilled from the patriarchs to Christ? And what and how Intersemiotic Translation 1

Intersemiotic Translation Yancy Smith, Society of Biblical Literature 2015 many years of times are counted from the creation of the world until the present days? It seemed good to us, having begun from the beginning to show in brief, just as it deserves, the account not according to our own testimony, <but starting from the proved holy writings>. Therefore, taking the occasion from there, we endeavor to produce the orderly account from the Generation of Men. (Chron. 1921). For Hippolytus as well as Derrida, nothing exists outside the text.

Of course Hippolytus effort was the first spectacular Christian failures in a long line of

Intersemiotic Translation Yancy Smith, Society of Biblical Literature 2015 failures attempting to rationalize space-time and Scripture according to whatever sense contemporary science/and or historigraphy could rationalize them. In my work on Hippolytus Commentary on the Song of Songs. (Shamless plug). A corollary of his mystical (often called typological) reading of Scripture is his program of reading the Bible as the metanarrative structure of universal human history, a scripturization of all time past, present and future. When Hippolytus comments upon Scripture in the context of Christian liturgy, he is doing more than investigating texts; he claims access to the true structure of reality: of time, space, and universal human history. So he shoe-horns Roman history into a 6000 year schema as the culmination of Biblical history where the death of Christ comes about during the Passover approximately 5500 years after the Creation of the World, which means the events of the eschaton, the appearance of the Antichrist and the beginning, perhaps, of a millennial reign lies a little less than two centuries in the future. (This was a modification of some previous schemes that put the eschaton in the waning years of the 2nd century). The precise calculation and celebration of Passovers was important in this scheme because through the celebration of fasting and feasting around the complex of initiatory rites like baptism and anointing the community enacted its participation in cosmic events that marked the approach of a new world of human flourishing under divine blessing, while delaying it long enough to allow peaceful coexistence within the Roman Empire.

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