BT 2015 Prezi on Translation and Ancient Visual Art

Below you will find the transcript of the presentation given at BT 2015 in Duncanville, TX.

Extracted text from BT_2015_Translating_Epistles_Visual_Art.docx:

Even though the New Testament comes down to us in written form, it is not from a literate culture. Rather, the communicative means of the New Testament era was largely oral and visual ... in the Roman Empire representational art dominated in both the public and the domestic sphere of households in which the early church spread. Reading was an elite activity for the most part so that artistic representation of people with book scrolls indicated aspirations of elite status.

Some of the excellent bibliography may help provide orientation to the relationship between New Testament text and larger cultural issues including Graeco-Roman visual culture.

It is only natural to assume that the authors of the New Testament would relate their message to the visual messages that filled the cities of the Empire. One of my profs in school tells how he visited Pompeii, Herculaneum, the villas of Campania in Italy and Ostia looking at the floor plans of houses in order to understand the context of the house church. It was not until he had done this for several years that he began to look at the walls, that were covered in mural representational art that he began to wonder if the art had any bearing on the cultural background of the NT. Not until very recently did New Testament translators or scholars pay any attention to the context of visual culture in which the Word of God came into being.

Of course our primary methods of study and translation have always been and will remain textual. However, in this conference we seen in several presentations the importance of things that are not in the text. This is especially true for video translation and for sign language translation, which must rely on video and representational art for efficiency in communication. Even when we read, we imaginatively and visually attempt to reconstruct the culture in which these documents first made sense, if we limit ourselves only to the textual, we could remain in the dark about many things that might help us shed light on our task. Limiting ourselves to the textual, in some respects, will be like trying to peer into a room through a keyhole.

I want to issue a caveat here. I do not intend to say that reading the New Testament in the light of Graeco-Roman art in public and domestic spaces will deliver the original meaning of the text. Rather, it will help us uncover possibly enriching meaning of the text and liberate us, giving us some possibly alternate choices in exegesis as well as multimedia and dramatic translation in our various contexts. As we already know, because weve been translating without thinking about Graeco- Roman art, it is possible to translate without being aware of these other choices.

The art speaks to us of previously existing notions that our texts interact with. Like, for example, the notion of divine retribution and justice. The Laocon is a famous representation of the death of the Trojan priest of Poseidon and his children. The priest was the one who said, Beware of Greeks bearing gifts! He tried to convince the Trojans to burn the wooden horse given as a sacrificial gift before they set sail across the sea, rather than keep it overnight. The god Poseidon then sent a sea serpent to strangle him and his children. The explanation for his death, in various versions of the story, was that either Poseidon had taken the side of the Greeks or that Poseidon had been guilty of some indiscretion in the temple of Poseidon (which I will leave to your imagination). In other words, he was either killed for being right or for being wrong.

The suffering of Laocon and the sigh, if not the scream, on his face reminds us of some inexplicable Biblical presentations of divine Justice, like the rejection of Cains vegetarian offering or the divine murder of Uzzah, who transported the Ark of the Covenant on a cart instead of according to the instructions Uzzah should have read in his Bible. The take home lesson is, we must carefully read our Bibles! Whatever we may think of this, we can use the art of the period to understand the milieu of our texts to understand points of contact.

I am a fan of visiting the Holy Land and experiencing at first hand the Land of Israel and Palestine for the amazing reorientation and insight that such a pilgrimage can give us into our texts. At the same time, when we move into the later part of the Book of Acts and the Epistles we are in a very different world from the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible. And I believe it is important to appreciate the contextual change into the world of the Jewish diaspora and the non-Jewish, households on the fuzzy border between synagogue and polytheistic culture where churches were born and developed (and where the Gospels were composed, read and copied around).

In the public sphere, political messages dominate. The theological and mythological themes present are co-opted by Roman authorities to affirm the righteousness of Roman dominance in the world. [Go to next, coin image] So Octavian (Caesar Augustus) claimed to be the son of the divine Julius, or "the son of [a] god." This message affirmed his right as first citizen and emperor to proclaim the coming of a new golden age. [Coin showing Augustus as the son of the divine Julius].

The propaganda of this empire was the gospel. A calendar inscription dedicated to Augustus in Priene reads [text on screen]. Thus, Justin, for example represents the glorification of Caesar as son of Jupiter as a pale imitation of the events associated with Christs glorification through the crucifixion. (Apol. 1.21 2..)

Bouletrion [hall for the meeting of the ekklsia or bouletrion of the city]. Such a hall might remind us of a modern day church more than the spaces in which ancient churches met, which were mostly, at first, domestic spaces.

Of primary importance is the imaginative space in which we read and experience our texts. [Alar of peace]. In the imaginative space of the NT, the Roman world was considered a system of households under the umbrella of the imperial household of the emperor, who was the father of his nation. The Altar of Peace in Rome tells and important story that has serious impact on my understanding of New Testament texts. First, as is commonly known among archaeologists, the white washed ruins we see today were colorfully decorated with polychrome decoration. The vegetative frieze ... The representation of creation, the mother earth, the oceans, the fertile countryside and fresh waters and winds with two children representing Rome through Romulus and Remus is idyllic. The message is clear: Augustus and Rome have brought the golden age and all is at peace.

The term son of god was a contested term. [Real son of God project] Upon HIS death Augustus ascended to heaven and became a god.

This imagery was used right through the history of the empire.

Romans 1:1-3

The gospel challenged this message on various levels. Who is the son of God? Is the world currently in a Golden Age? Is the system of slavery acceptable for human beings made in the image of God? Romans 8:14-19

Romans 8:20-22

Preliminary notions from art that impact translation.

Lets move from the public sphere of art to the domestic sphere. What we mean by household and domestic today is quite different from what these spheres were in New Testament times. Some things that today are completely outside the domestic sphere [Pompeii prisoner] were normal in elite and slave owning non elite homes. For example, in a slave owning society a home had to have a place to punish and keep under custody slaves who might want to escape or disobey the master. So houses might have a room called the ergastulum. Picture of a prisoner in Pompeii who died in the eruption of 79 A.C.

What does Pompeii have to do with the New Testament?

1. Domestic spaces at many levels from lower non-elite to elite were decorated with murals and mosaics. This was all the rage from at least the 1st century B.C. right on through the third century AD.
2. The elite and non-elite lived in close proximity. That is in part what Jesus meant when he said, The poor you will always have with you.
3. Various levels of non-elite lived in close proximity.
4. The domestic spaces we see in in the insulae of Pompeii, Ostia, Ephesus and Rome give us a clearer picture of the spaces in which the church flourished. Peter Oakes, Reading Romans in Pompeii.

David L. Balch, Roman Domestic Art in Early House Churches. CD ROM with over 400 images with attributions and exciting articles.

Themes in Domestic Space representations  The discovery of Ariadne by Dionysus The triumphal return of Dionysus (with Ariadne) from the conquest of India bringing captives.

Iphigenia at Aulis (Euripides play)

Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon became a propitiatory sacrifice that secured safe passage of the Greeks across the Ionian Sea previous to the Trojan war.

In the version of Euripides, Iphigenia gave herself up as a sacrifice for the salvation of the Greeks.

Pauls message of the cross, therefore, had some pre-existing points of contact with the culture.

Ixion was born without the blessing of the Graces (Pindar, Pythian Odes 2.46) is one of the few who is still being punished in Hades for murdering his father in law, bound by Zeus to a wheel on which he is whirled through the air.

Elsewhere Justin argues that the image of the tropaeum, or Roman trophy, resembles the shape of the cross and is thus an unwitting proclamation of Christs triumph. 26 Similarly Tertullian, commenting on the casting out of Legion from the Gerasene demoniac into swine (Mk. 5.9) acclaims, through the trophy of the cross, he [Christ] triumphed.

Maier, Harry O. (2013-10-24). Picturing Paul in Empire: Imperial Image, Text and Persuasion in Colossians, Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles (Kindle Locations 601- 606). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.