What Translations Can Hide: Why The Original Language Is a Must
Translations are indispensable. Very few people have the time to become fluent in every ancient language they need, and without translations most Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic texts would remain inaccessible to almost everyone.
But a translation is not the original text. It is a series of decisions made by another person. Usually those decisions are sensible. Sometimes they are excellent. Sometimes a translator has to choose between two meanings because English cannot reproduce what the original language is doing. But there are also occasions when a translation smooths away something strange, replaces the original wording with what the translator thinks it means, or gives an English word that removes an important meaning from the ancient one.
That can change how history is read.
You do not always have to be fluent in Greek or Latin to spot the problem. Sometimes checking one word is enough. Sometimes putting two editions beside one another is enough. And sometimes the original wording reveals something that an English translation has completely removed from sight.
One passage in Josephus provides a particularly revealing example, and one that has been discussed in mainstream academia, but seems to have just been put aside...
“The Son Is Coming”
I have discussed this in a fuller analysis here, but this wording is directly relevant to what is being discussed in this article.
The Jewish War 5.268–79 (pages 86–9 Loeb) describes the Roman siege engines being used against Jerusalem. The Romans were launching huge white stones towards the defenders. Their colour created a problem, and the Jewish watchmen could see them coming.
War explains that the stones were visible because of their whiteness and could also be heard travelling through the air. The watchmen stationed on the towers therefore warned those below whenever one was coming. The defenders moved aside or threw themselves down and the stones passed harmlessly through. The Romans solved the problem by blackening the stones.
This becomes incredibly interesting when comparative analysis of primary texts comes into play. It is one of the oldest and most basic tools historians use, especially when working with Greek, Roman, and Jewish material. Historians do this routinely, and New Testament scholars do it as well, most notably in the study of the ‘Synoptic Problem’, which is built entirely on close comparison of wording, sequence, and shared scenes across the first three gospels.
The same approach has also been used to compare The Jewish War, gospel of ‘Luke’, and Acts of the Apostles. When scholars compare the gospels with one another, identifying repeated phrases and shared narrative structure is treated as careful and respectable historical work. In fact, very small overlaps – sometimes only a handful of shared phrases between ‘Matthew’ and ‘Luke’ – have been enough to support major theories and long academic careers. Yet when the same method is applied to The Jewish War, and the gospels are found to follow its narrative in extended sequence, the response often changes. What counts as sober textual criticism within the New Testament is suddenly dismissed as 'over interpretation' when it crosses the boundaries of accepted chronology.
In the case of "the Son is Coming", this is very important. When the War passage is read alongside what happens in Luke 19.39–44, we see a parallel narrative and wording in the same sequence when Jesus approaches Jerusalem and says that if those around him are silent:
“the stones will cry out”
He then speaks of Jerusalem's coming destruction and predicts that enemies will surround the city and destroy it:
“but now they are hid from thine eyes”
War describes stones whose coming can be heard and seen before the Romans blacken them so they can no longer be seen. Luke has stones crying out followed by something being hidden from the eyes. Both passages occur at the approach to Jerusalem and both lead directly into the Roman destruction of the city. War later describes the Romans physically encircling Jerusalem with their siege wall at War 5.493–501 (pages 353–55 Loeb).
But the most striking part of the War passage cannot be seen in most easily available popular translations, with the Loeb Classical Library version being an exception because of the Greek on one page and the English on the other.
The Greek text preserved in Brill's Flavius Josephus Online, using Benedictus Niese's edition, reads at War 5.272:
ΣΚΟΠΟΙ ΟΥΝ ΑΥΤΟΙΣ ΕΠΙ ΤΩΝ ΠΥΡΓΩΝ ΚΑΘΕΖΟΜΕΝΟΙ ΠΡΟΕΜΗΝΥΟΝ, ΟΠΟΤΕ ΣΧΑΣΘΕΙΗ ΤΟ ΟΡΓΑΝΟΝ ΚΑΙ Η ΠΕΤΡΑ ΦΕΡΟΙΤΟ, ΤΗ ΠΑΤΡΙΩ ΓΛΩΣΣΗ ΒΟΩΝΤΕΣ “Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ.” ΔΙΙΣΤΑΝΤΟ ΔΕ ΚΑΘʼ ΟΥΣ ΗΕΙ ΚΑΙ ΠΡΟΚΑΤΕΚΛΙΝΟΝΤΟ, ΚΑΙ ΣΥΝΕΒΑΙΝΕ ΦΥΛΑΤΤΟΜΕΝΩΝ ΑΠΡΑΚΤΟΝ ΔΙΕΚΠΙΠΤΕΙΝ ΤΗΝ ΠΕΤΡΑΝ.
Later lowercase:
σκοποὶ οὖν αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τῶν πύργων καθεζόμενοι προεμήνυον, ὁπότε σχασθείη τὸ ὄργανον καὶ ἡ πέτρα φέροιτο, τῇ πατρίῳ γλώσσῃ βοῶντες “ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται.” διίσταντο δὲ καθʼ οὓς ᾔει καὶ προκατεκλίνοντο, καὶ συνέβαινε φυλαττομένων ἄπρακτον διεκπίπτειν τὴν πέτραν.
The important sequence is:
Η ΠΕΤΡΑ/ἡ πέτρα — the stone
Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ /ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται — the son is coming
ΤΗΝ ΠΕΤΡΑΝ/τὴν πέτραν — the stone
War uses the ordinary Greek word for stone, ΠΕΤΡΑ/πέτρα, immediately before the warning and immediately after it. But when the author gives the words shouted by the Jewish watchmen, he does not write ΠΕΤΡΑ. He writes:
Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ /ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται
“The son is coming.”
That is what the Greek says, and those important words disappear surprisingly easily once translators decide what they think the author really meant. G. A. Williamson's Penguin Classics translation gives the warning in a way that really doesn’t make sense given the context of the situation:
“Baby on the way!”
His accompanying note gives what had already been proposed in the past as a possible solution to the strange wording:
“Probably ha-eben, ‘the stone’, was pronounced habben, ‘the son’.”
The note is trying to explain how the strange wording arose. The problem is that Williamson has taken that explanation and put it into the translation itself, because “Baby on the way!” is not what the Greek says. The Greek says “the son is coming.”
A reader who uses Williamson alone is never shown the actual textual oddity. The word that should make the reader stop has already been replaced by the translator's solution to it. The Loeb Classical Library edition handles the problem differently by writing “Sonny's coming”, and places the proposed explanation in a note. Adriaan Reland, a Dutch Orientalist scholar, cartographer and philologist, had argued that Hebrew ha-eben, “the stone”, became habben, “the son”.
Later discussion by Randall Buth and Chad Pierce also concentrates on the wordplay between “stone” and “son”. Their study makes an important distinction between Hebrew and Aramaic, and the fact the Aramaic word for ‘son’ cannot be confused for the Aramaic words for ‘stone’. They argue that the intention of the watchmen was to shout ‘a stone is coming’, but it would have sounded more like ‘the son is coming’. Buth and Pierce say that these words were spoken in a life and death situation, which, given the context of the narrative, is correct. We do not know if there was an earlier version of The Jewish War written in Aramaic, although the author claims that an earlier version was written for people in the eastern regions before the Greek work circulated.
Professor Steve Mason has discussed the possibility that this earlier material consisted of Aramaic letters or reports rather than a finished version of the work. But if the ‘stone’/‘son’ wordplay argument is seriously considered, Hebrew seems logical, and would lead to the word ‘son’ also being written in the Greek version which Buth and Pierce, among others, argue was a complete re-working and not merely a translation.
But it is also difficult to consider the ‘son’ word a scribal error, because surely a scribe would notice the ‘son’ word error and correct it to match the context. And it is important to note that the brief commentaries on this oddity have focussed on what the Jewish watchmen may have said, instead of focussing on what actually appears intentionally written and preserved in the manuscripts.
None of the Aramaic or Hebrew wordplay hypotheses change the Greek. Whatever explanation is offered for how the phrase originated, the surviving Greek text says Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ /ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται, “the son is coming”
English classical scholar Martin Hammond, writing much later than Williamson, went another way again and translated it:
“Sonny-boy coming”
Again the translator is trying to reproduce the presumed wordplay. But the underlying problem remains the same. Explaining the oddity is one thing, removing it is quite another.
It is also difficult to dismiss ΥΙΟΣ/υἱός as a simple mistake when the author writes ΠΕΤΡΑ/ πέτρα on both sides of it. The sentence knows perfectly well how to say “stone”. The fact is the quoted warning contains a different word.
But the sequence does not stop there. Jesus is himself described through stone imagery elsewhere in the New Testament. For example, Matthew 21.42 applies the rejected stone imagery to him and he is repeatedly called the “Son of Man”, drawing on Daniel 7.13–14. Matthew 5.14–16 and John 8.12 use the imagery of light, while the author of The Jewish War draws attention to the brilliant visibility of the white stones.
To be clear though, the passages are not identical, and they are not supposed to be. The point is the shared placement, wording and concepts:
Stones announce themselves.
Something is hidden from the eyes.
Jerusalem is approached, surrounded, and destroyed.
And War preserves the extraordinary warning: “the son is coming.”
Understanding how the author of War presents the Roman victory and the Flavian emperors, the wording is surely not an accident. The author presents Vespasian's rise as the fulfilment of Jewish prophecy and writes in Life 424–30 Loeb that his own fortune came through God's care. He also states that The Jewish War was presented to Vespasian and Titus and circulated with their approval. This was not a hostile history secretly smuggled past the emperors it celebrated. The author knew the political environment in which he was writing. Again, see my sequential parallel analysis here.
The old observation of Adriaan Reland and William Whiston in his English translation called The Wars of the Jews is therefore worth remembering. Whiston noted that readers would see a mystery in “the son” coming at precisely this point in the Roman assault and connect it with divine vengeance upon Jerusalem. But Whiston rejected that as the intention of the Jewish watchmen, and that is exactly the point.
The question is not what terrified watchmen under artillery fire intended to communicate, but what was written, and that deserves just as much, if not more, attention as modern ideas about what the watchmen really shouted.
And there is a strange gap in the modern commentary here. Dr. Honora Chapman's dedicated War 5 volume for Brill's Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary was scheduled for 2023. It still has not appeared. The major modern commentary series therefore still has no published commentary on Book 5 and this passage. Of course that does not explain the delay, but it does mean that one of the strangest phrases in The Jewish War still lacks the treatment it should have received from the major modern English commentary on the work.
This entire problem demonstrates why the original language is so important. If I had read only Williamson's Penguin Classics translation, I would have only seen “Baby on the way!”, which does not really make sense at all in the context and perhaps should make a reader think, hang on a minute. I would not have seen Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ/ ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται. “the son is coming”. And I would have been denied the very wording that led me to examine the passage more closely.
Punished or Pruned?
This example requires a bit of background context explanation, so let's start with that. Hebrew Zechariah 3:8 introduces the Branch. Joshua is told by the Lord of Hosts that he will bring “my servant the Sprout.” The Greek Zechariah uses the word “Branch”, and root and branch were Judean messianic metaphors, used to point to the messianic lineage. For example, the Genesis Florilegium reads:
“…until the Messiah of righteousness, the branch of David comes, because to him and his seed was given the Covenant of the kingdom of his people…”
The root and branch messianic imagery found in the Dead Sea Scrolls continues the language of Isaiah, especially the image of the shoot from the root of Jesse. Another scroll fragment links Isaiah’s language directly with the branch of David:
“…Isaiah the prophet…the thickets of the forest will be felled with an ax and Lebanon shall fall by a mighty one. A staff shall rise from the root of Jesse, and a planting from his roots will bear fruit…the branch of David…”
In the New Testament, just before the created genealogy of Jesus, the Gospel of ‘Luke’ reads:
“The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire” (Luke 3:9).
Romans 11 also uses root and branch language, with branches broken off and a wild olive shoot grafted into the tree:
“… But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, although a wild olive shoot, were grafted in among the others and now share in the nourishing root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches. If you are, remember it is not you who support the root, but the root that supports you …”
The New Testament keeps the root and branch metaphor, but with a different direction. The older Judean image pointed to messianic lineage, but in the New Testament the image becomes about entering the line of the new Messiah. The branches are described as being “pruned” or “grafted in”, and Jesus predicts, echoing the Book of Malachi, that those branches that do not abide in the new Judaism he brings will be burned:
“If anyone does not abide in me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire.” (John 15:6)
In The Jewish War and, later, Jewish Antiquities, the same root and branch system continued, but again, a reader cannot see it in translation. A man called Eleazar is the key figure, a name that matters because Lazarus is the Greek form of Eleazar/Elazar. This means the Lazarus material in the New Testament and the Eleazar material in War and Antiquities can be read together.
Romans 11:21–25 uses the image of an olive tree whose branches are cut off and grafted in. John 20:15–16 then has Mary Magdalene mistake Jesus for a gardener. She says to him:
“Sir, if thou didst carry off him, tell me where him didst lay, and I him will take away.”
The scene is strange because Mary does not recognise Jesus, and Jesus asks her whom she is seeking. A reasonable question to ask here is why Mary did not recognise Jesus’s voice, and why Jesus, it seems, did not recognise Mary?
But the gardener image belongs to the root and branch system, where a gardener tends, cuts, prunes, and carries away. This creates a mirror image with the narrative of The Jewish War. In the gospel scene, Mary thinks Jesus is the gardener and asks whether he has carried Jesus away. But in the War parallel, Rome becomes the gardener. The Roman side carries away Eleazar/Lazarus, the Judean messianic root, from the Mount of Olives.
The Jewish War gives the first part of the pattern by describing the capture of a certain unnamed youth on the Mount of Olives by the Roman trooper Pedanius. The name Pedanius is worth noting in this wider plant-and-root setting because the contemporary physician Pedanius Dioscorides wrote extensively about medical plants and roots. Later, in War, the dangerous Baaras root is described as something that had to be handled in a very particular way. The New Testament parallel identifies the figure as Lazarus, but in War the youth is then ordered to be pruned:
“Among other incidents, a trooper from one of the cohorts, named Pedanius – when the Jews were at last repulsed and being driven down into the ravine – urging his horse at top speed along their flank, snatched up one of the flying foe, a youth of sturdy frame and in full armour, grasping him by the ankle; so far did he stoop from his horse, when at the gallop, and such muscular strength of arm and body, along with consummate horsemanship, did he display. Carrying off his captive like some precious treasure, he came with his prize to Caesar. Titus expressed his admiration of the captor's strength, ordered his captive to punishment for his assault on the wall, and then devoted his attention to the struggle for the temple and the acceleration of the earthworks.” (The Jewish War, Volume 3 (III), Book 6 (VI), pages 420–3, Loeb.)
In another passage, War names a man that is whipped and punished and escapes crucifixion as Eleazar. The passages tell the same story of a certain youth Eleazar, the root, being captured and carried away. In one passage, above, he is captured by Pedanius, another later passage by a soldier called Rufus:
“Among the besieged was a youth of daring enterprise and strenuous energy named Eleazar... Thereupon, spying his opportunity, a soldier in the Roman ranks named Rufus, a native of Egypt, made a sudden dash upon him, such as none could have expected, lifted him up, armour and all, while the spectators on the wall were paralysed with astonishment, and succeeded in transporting the fellow to the Roman camp...The general having ordered him to be stripped and carried to the spot most exposed to the view of the onlookers in the city and there severely scourged, the Jews were profoundly affected by the lad's fate, and the whole town burst into such wailing and lamentation as the misfortune of a mere individual seemed to hardly to justify."
"Observing this, Bassus proceeded to practise a ruse upon the enemy, desiring so to intensify their distress as to compel them to purchase the man’s life by the surrender of the fort; and in this hope he was not disappointed. For he ordered a cross to be erected, as though intending to have Eleazar instantly suspended ; at which sight those in the fortress were seized with deeper dismay and with piercing shrieks exclaimed that the tragedy was intolerable. At this juncture, moreover, Eleazar besought them not to leave him to undergo the most pitiable of deaths, but to consult their own safety by yielding to the might and fortune of the Romans, now that all others had been subdued.” (War, Volume 3 (III), Book 7 (VII), pages 560 – 5, Loeb.)
The passages are deliberately split up. In the core capture scene, the only differences are the location and the name of the captor. War, Volume 2, Book 3, pages 642–3 (Loeb), gives Eleazar/Lazarus ‘Jesus-like’ details: he is a native of Saba in Galilee and receives blows on his naked body before being pierced by five arrows. Other parts of the Eleazar/Lazarus pattern include the power to expel demons (Jewish Antiquities, Volume 5, Book 8, pages 594–7 Loeb), being scourged and threatened with crucifixion, and surviving (War, Volume 3, Book 7, pp. 561–5 Loeb), return-from-death imagery, and parallel tomb locations.
The next part of the story appears in Life, pages 154–5 (Loeb) where a crucifixion scene is described at Tekoa. Three men are crucified; two die and one survives after treatment by a physician. In the story, this takes place after the Mount of Olives capture and gives a parallel to the crucifixion of Jesus. Then, when Titus returns to Rome (War Book 7, pages 556–7 Loeb), two plants are described. One is a plant of rue, used by Pedanius, as described in De Materia Medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, page 423, see the translation edited by Tess Anne Osbaldeston. The other is the dangerous root called Baaras, which can expel “the spirits of wicked men” and can only be carried off by being “suspended from the hand”. That is the precise method by which Eleazar is captured: a dangerous root, handled by a specialist, carried away by Rome.
Immediately after the Baaras description is the passage that describes the Eleazar captured by Rufus and surviving the threat of crucifixion at Machaerus. And we are given yet another Eleazar in Antiquities, Volume 5, Book 8, pages 594–7 Loeb, who is connected with expelling demons. These are not random repeated names, they belong to the same Eleazar/Lazarus pattern.
But the Mount of Olives is also a key location. The gospel arrest takes place in Gethsemane, the place of the oil press. The War passage about the Mount of Olives is linked to the New Testament Mount of Olives capture story by the statement “pressed by famine” (War, Book 6, pages 420–421 Loeb). The garden Jesus enters is called Gethsemane, Aramaic for an olive or oil press, or language related to pressing. The oil is used in cooking, while Jesus’s passion in the garden reflects his comparison of his blood to wine.
In essence, the two parallel capture passages in War are the only ones that share the following elements:
Besieged Jews are encircled by a wall.
The Jews attack the siege wall.
The Romans foresee the attack.
A Jew is carried away by a single Roman in an extraordinary feat of strength.
And the man carried away is wearing his armour.
These shared details connect the Mount of Olives capture material with the wider Eleazar/Lazarus pattern. But the strongest link is the pruning language. In War, Volume 3, Book 6, p. 422 in the Loeb translation, the captured youth on the Mount of Olives is ordered to be punished. But the Greek wording, ΚΟΛΑΣΑΙ ΚΕΛΕΥΣΑΣ/κολάσαι κελεύσας (kolasai keleusas), originally meant something different. ΚΕΛΕΥΣΑΣ (keleusas) means “having ordered”, but ΚΟΛΑΣΑΙ (kolasai) comes from ΚΟΛΑΖΩ (kolazō): to cut back, lop, or prune; then, by extension, to chastise or punish. The Greek puts ΚΟΛΑΣΑΙ first, but Greek word order does not have to follow English word order. ΚΟΛΑΣΑΙ is the action being ordered, and ΚΕΛΕΥΣΑΣ is the ordering word.
In English, the phrase comes out as “having ordered him to be pruned” or “having ordered him to punishment.” The Loeb translator, Henry St. John Thackeray, chose the smoother “punishment”, but in this root and branch setting, “pruned” exposes the point of the Greek.
In a passage built around roots, branches, plants, a gardener, and the Mount of Olives, War is not merely saying the captive was punished. It is saying the Judean messianic root was pruned by Rome.
Eleazar/Lazarus is the only figure who is given the same Jesus-like details in the War, the New Testament, and Antiquities: Galilee, expelling demons, capture, punishment, surviving crucifixion, tomb imagery, and return-from-death language. The combined passages present a satire in which Eleazar, the Jewish messianic ‘root’, was pruned by the Romans. He is cut back, carried away, and tamed, so that the wickedness can be taken out of the Judeans. Jesus then becomes the new root and branch. Through these parallels, Rome creates its answer to Malachi 4:1: the old root and branch are cut down, and the new one is put in its place.
Sometimes the Translator Gets It Exactly Right
This article is not an argument against translations. A good translation can preserve precisely the distinction that needs to be preserved. Pliny the Younger provides an excellent example. In his famous letter to Emperor Trajan talking about the people being accused before him as Christians, Pliny writes:
CARMENQUE CHRISTO QUASI DEO DICERE SECUM INVICEM
Later lowercase:
carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere secum invicem
and then:
SEQUE SACRAMENTO NON IN SCELUS ALIQUOD OBSTRINGERE
Later lowercase:
seque sacramento non in scelus aliquod obstringere
Two Latin expressions deserve attention “CHRISTO QUASI DEO”/“Christo quasi deo” and “SEQUE SACRAMENTO ... OBSTRINGERE”/“seque sacramento ... obstringere”.
Let’s look at “CHRISTO QUASI DEO”/“Christo quasi deo” first:
The important word here is “quasi”, meaning “as if”, “as though”, or “as” in a comparison sense. So Pliny does not simply write that they sang to Christ “as God”. He says they sang to Christ “as if to a god”, and both the Penguin Classics and Loeb translations keep that wording clear.
The old Loeb translation reads:
“they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god”
and the Penguin Classics translation is even clearer:
“to chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honour of Christ as if to a god”
That is good translating because the translator has not decided that the theology is obvious and removed Pliny's wording. The word quasi, and what it means, is still clear in English.
The second phrase is just as important:
“SEQUE SACRAMENTO ... OBSTRINGERE”/“seque sacramento ... obstringere”
The later history of the word sacramentum makes it dangerous for an English translator simply to write “sacrament”. To a modern reader, ‘sacrament’ carries centuries of Christian theological meaning, but Pliny is talking about an oath, and the context proves it. He immediately explains what those accused had bound themselves to do. They swore not to commit theft, robbery or adultery, not to break their word and not to deny a deposit when called upon to return it.
So the Loeb translator gives:
“bound themselves by a solemn oath”
and Penguin gives:
“to bind themselves by oath”
Again, that is good translation. The translator has not carried the Latin word mechanically into English and allowed later Christian meaning to affect the original Roman sentence. This makes an excellent comparison with Williamson's Penguin Josephus. Both are Penguin Classics, but in The Letters of the Younger Pliny the translator preserves quasi and translates sacramentum according to what the Latin means in context.
In Josephus, however, Williamson turns Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ/“ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται”, “the son is coming”, into “Baby on the way!” So even though both translations are published by Penguin Classics, they handle the original wording very differently. That is why checking the original remains necessary even when the translation appears to be good.
Chrestus Is Not the Same Word as Christus
Tacitus and Suetonius give us another problem, and this time the issue involves both translation and the history of the transmitted Latin text. Tacitus's famous passage about Nero and the Great Fire appears in Annals 15.44 – XV.44 in the Oxford Classical Texts series, p. 365 in the 1974 edition of the Penguin Classics The Annals of Imperial Rome, and p. 282 in the Loeb Latin text. The surviving manuscript for this part of the Annals, the second Medicean manuscript (M2), Codex Mediceus 68.II, reads Chrestianos, see here.
The 1998 publication of the Teubner Kenneth Wellesley edited text, Libri Qui Supersunt, tom. I, pars 2: Ab Excessu Divi Augusti (Annales Libri XI-XVI) (Bibliotheca scriptorum Graecorum et Romanorum Teubneriana) , also prints this reading. On p. 115 the text reads:
“… QUOS PER FLAGITIA INVISOS VULGUS CHRESTIANOS APPELLABAT ...”/“... quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Chrestianos appellabat ...”
The Loeb translator translates it as:
“Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.”
But the surviving manuscript reading is important. It is Chrestianos. Not Christianos.
Classics professor Brent Shaw drew direct attention to this in his 2015 Journal of Roman Studies article ‘The Myth of the Neronian Persecution’. On p. 80 he writes that:
"Chrestianos is the correct reading of M2 reported by the Teubner text, rather than the frequently ‘corrected’ reading of Christianos as found, e.g., in the Oxford Classical Text.”
Shaw also notes that one hand had already attempted to change Chrestiani to Christiani. Just as interesting is Shaw's argument that the Christus found later in the same Medicean manuscript passage may itself have been corrected from Chrestus. He writes on p. 81 that "it makes the most logical sense for Tacitus to say that Chrestianus would come from Chrestus", although he keeps Christus in his text because that is what is found in the Medicean manuscript. When I submitted my comparative analysis of The Jewish War and the gospels to the Journal of Roman Studies, the editor specifically advised me to use either the Oxford Classical Texts or the Teubner series for the original-language texts. I was already checking the original Greek where particular words or phrases were central to the comparison, while using translations for the surrounding passages. I may talk more about my experience with the Journal of Roman Studies concerning the parallel analysis at a later date. But for now, what makes the advice especially interesting here is that the two standard editions do not agree.
The Oxford Classical Text gives Christianos, while Teubner gives the manuscript reading Chrestianos. In this case, Teubner is the more accurate of the two because it prints the reading actually found in the second Medicean manuscript, Chrestianos. The Oxford Classical Text changes that manuscript reading to the more familiar Christianos.
That difference changes what the reader thinks Tacitus actually wrote. If an English translation simply gives “Christians”, the reader has no idea that the manuscript actually says "Chrestiani". The translator has already decided that Chrestiani means “Christians” before the reader gets to see what the manuscript actually says. Shaw also draws attention to the same problem in The Lives of the Caesars by the man known to us as Suetonius.
At Claudius 25.4 (p. 52 in the Loeb Latin text) it reads:
“IUDAEOS IMPULSORE CHRESTO ASSIDUE TUMULTUANTIS ROMA EXPULIT.”/“Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit.”
“Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome”
The text says: Chresto. It does not say: Christo. Shaw cites Jöb Boman's detailed study of the manuscript tradition. On p. 84, note 52 of 'The Myth of the Neronian Persecution', he writes that Boman:
“demonstrates that the best ‘original’ reading that we have is indeed ‘Chresto’.”
Shaw also points out on pages 80–81 that from Orosius in the fifth century to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth, the reading Chrestus in Suetonius was “corrected” to Christus.
So the question is not how difficult Chresto is to translate, it is why so many editors and translators have changed it to Christo in the first place.
Tom Holland, on p. 281 in his translation of The Lives of the Caesars (Ebook), at least leaves Chrestus in the text:
“The Judaeans, who had been whipped up by Chrestus into a
chronic state of disorder, he banished from Rome.”
In an endnote, however, Holland argues that Chrestus should be identified with Christ, concluding that “the balance of probability” is that Chrestus is indeed to be identified with Jesus. But the balance of probability is not strongly supported by the sources. Steve Mason gives a very different reading of the evidence in 'Sources that Mention Jesus from Outside the Circles of Christ-Followers, the English original prepared for translation for the Jesus-Handbuch. His reasoning on p. 7 is worth quoting at length:
“The phrase impulsore Chresto has greatly complicated matters, and beguiled historians. They largely agree, on other grounds, that Roman Christianity began in the city’s synagogues under Claudius. The name Chrestus is tantalisingly close to Christus, especially since we know that the two were frequently confused. In speech, moreover, the Greek i in Christos could be indistinguishable from ē in Chrēstus. One cannot help but wonder, then, whether Suetonius’ Chrestus was not a garbled reference to Christian emissaries active in synagogues of Claudius’ time."
“But historians are rightly wary of such neat solutions, if they require homogenising evidence by trimming the inconvenient parts. If we did not have the other references, we would understand the passage to speak, unproblematically, of some agitator in Rome named Chrēstus. This Greek name was common (‘useful, reliable’), especially among slaves and freedmen—the status of much of the city’s Jewish population. And Dio (above) saw the disturbances connected with Jews under Claudius as continuous with those of 19 CE, under Tiberius (57.18.5). He says nothing of a Christian connection. Even Acts 18 mentions only an expulsion of Jews, not in connection with Christ-followers. There is no strong reason to doubt that a man named Chrestus was active in Rome’s Jewish community under Claudius. Chrestus does not appear among the hundreds of names on surviving Jewish funerary inscriptions, but those date from the second to fifth centuries. And even if we supposed that the text should read Christus—a link made already in the fifth century by Paulus Orosius (C. Pag. 7.6)—delicate manoeuvres would be needed to make a Christ in Rome’s synagogues (not Christ-followers) historically intelligible.”
Mason's point is important because it demonstrates that identifying Suetonius's Chrestus with Jesus is not something demanded by the text. It is an interpretation. Holland at least leaves Chrestus in his translation rather than changing it to Christ, but his endnote then makes the identification that Mason warns against. Something else I will note is that Mason also says that scholars “largely agree, on other grounds, that Roman Christianity began in the city’s synagogues under Claudius”. But that picture itself needs to be tested. What independent evidence do we actually have for the first-century Christian communities usually assumed to have produced, copied and preserved the early Christian texts? I discuss that problem here.
Again, if a reader only saw:
“... whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name ...”
Or:
“notoriously depraved Christians ... Their originator, Christ, ...”
they may never learn that Tacitus’s surviving manuscript says Chrestiani, not Christiani, or that Suetonius says Chresto, not Christo. Those identifications are interpretations. They are not simply translations of the words in the manuscripts. Shaw also criticised Ronald Syme on precisely this point. Syme said that Tacitus registered the name “Christiani” with “documentary precision”. On p. 74, note 4, Shaw responds:
“Syme, oddly enough, seems to give the problem a wide berth. For what it is worth, he states that Tacitus ‘registers the name “Christiani” with documentary precision’, but this is about the limit of his interest. Failing even to note that the mss. spelling is Chrestiani, it does not betoken much real engagement with the problem. From the few remarks that he does make ... it is manifest that Syme regarded the statements in Tacitus as being historically reliable, i.e. that there was indeed a persecution of Christians by Nero in 64 C.E.”
That is a perfect example of how familiar English terminology and a habit and tradition seemingly passed down can take over the discussion, and everyone forgets to stop and ask what the manuscript actually says.
Flagitia Does Not Mean Formal Crimes
There is another word in the same Tacitus passage where translation causes a different kind of problem. Tacitus says the people he calls Chrestiani were hated:
“... PER FLAGITIA ...”/ “... per flagitia ...”
The word flagitia is regularly translated as “crimes”, but Shaw directly objects to that translation. In 2018 Shaw had another article published, this time in the journal New Testament Studies. The article was called ‘Response to Christopher Jones: The Historicity of the Neronian Persecution’. Shaw states that flagitia were not formal criminal charges. They belonged to popular moral judgements about behaviour regarded as shameful or disgusting. He explicitly says that the word is frequently mistranslated as “crimes”. That difference is enormous.
If we read a translation that a group were:
“hated for their crimes”
the sentence tells you that these people were hated for criminal acts.
But if we read:
“hated for their shameful acts”
then the sentence tells you about social disgust and accusation. Those are not the same historical claim. Shaw points out that flagitia could be the reason someone attracted suspicion and prosecution, but the flagitia themselves were not formal charges. He also notes the word's association with accusations of disgraceful sexual behaviour. As an example, he points to Titus Livius’s account of the Bacchanalian affair of 186 BCE. In Livius's account, the Roman authorities acted against followers of Bacchus after accusations that secret night-time meetings included sexual misconduct, violence, forgery, poisoning and murder. The Senate then brought the cult under tight control.
Shaw’s point is that flagitia could mean the sort of disgraceful behaviour that made people objects of suspicion and could lead to prosecution. Once “crimes” is put into the English sentence, that distinction disappears, and this is exactly the sort of translation that looks harmless because the English is familiar and forceful. But it changes the evidence. The original Latin gives us moral accusation, but “crimes” turns that into criminal wrongdoing. That is not a small difference in a passage used to reconstruct a Roman persecution.
The Chrestiani, Chresto and flagitia examples therefore show three layers of the same problem:
A manuscript reading can be normalised.
A personal name can be identified for the reader before the argument has been made.
A term of public disgrace can be turned into a formal criminal category.
By the time most English readers read the passage, several historical questions have already been given a questionable answer on their behalf.
When “Family Portraits” Means Much More
Than Family Portraits
We now have a completely Roman example from Suetonius's opening description of Emperor Vespasian's family. He writes:
“GENS FLAVIA, OBSCURA ILLA QUIDEM AC SINE ULLIS MAIORUM IMAGINIBUS ...”/“...
gens Flavia, obscura illa quidem ac sine ullis maiorum imaginibus ...”
The Loeb translation gives the Flavian family as obscure and:
“without any family portraits”
That sounds harmless and it is not exactly wrong. But an English reader can easily imagine that the Flavians simply lacked paintings or portraits of their ancestors, but that is not what IMAGINES MAIORUM /imagines maiorum meant in Roman aristocratic culture.
The imagines were ancestral images, especially the wax masks associated with distinguished ancestors. They were displayed by elite Roman families and famously appeared in aristocratic funerals, where living representatives could wear the masks of dead ancestors. So they were public claims about ancestry, office and social standing.
To possess a line of imagines maiorum was to display a visible connection with generations of men who had held recognised places within Roman public life. So when Suetonius says that the Flavians had no imagines maiorum, he is not saying they were too poor to own portraits. He is telling us that they lacked the ancestral display of an old office-holding Roman house.
That distinction is important for Vespasian because he is frequently presented as a man of modest origins who rose from obscurity through ability. But the Latin is more precise. The Flavians apparently lacked the ancestral prestige markers of the oldest governing families. However, that does not mean they lacked wealth, status, education or powerful connections. Nor would ancestry from a prestigious non-Roman dynasty, such as the Herodians, see my article on Vespasian here, have supplied them with the specifically Roman imagines maiorum of an old office-holding family.
“Without family portraits” gives the reader an image of a household. “... SINE ULLIS MAIORUM IMAGINIBUS ...”/“... Sine ullis maiorum imaginibus ...” gives the Roman reader information about social rank and ancestry, and so this is a different kind of translation loss again.
What we have then is:
Williamson's “Baby on the way!” replacing the wording.
“Punishment” removes the pruning meaning behind the word ΚΟΛΑΖΩ (kolazō)
“Crimes” turns social disgrace into legal wrongdoing.
“Family portraits” is defensible English but removes an important Roman institution context from the sentence.
All four demonstrate the same basic problem – an English word can be perfectly understandable and still tell you less than the ancient one.
Translation Is Not the Enemy
There is an easy way to turn all of this into an argument that translations are unreliable and everyone should spend ten years learning Greek and Latin before opening an ancient history book. But that would be ridiculous. The Penguin Pliny demonstrates the opposite. Its translator handles QUASI DEO/quasi deo and SACRAMENTO/sacramentum properly. The English reader is given the distinctions required to understand Pliny's Latin, and a good translation is enormously valuable. But no translation can remove the need to check the original when an argument turns on an individual word. And sometimes the need to check becomes obvious only after different translations are placed beside one another and the wording just doesn’t make sense:
Josephus gives us:
Ο ΥΙΟΣ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ (ho huios erchetai) “The son is coming”
Henry St. John Thackeray tries to preserve the “son” wording by writing “Sonny’s coming”.
Hammond gives “Sonny-boy”.
Williamson gives:
“Baby on the way!”
The original Greek settles what The Jewish War actually says. The explanation of why he wrote it is a separate argument...again, see here and here. As explained here, ancient texts survive through copying, editing and translation. Every stage involves human decisions and that is how texts reach us. But those decisions need to remain visible. A translation should help us understand the actual words of the ancient author, not quietly stand between us and them.
That is why translations are good, but the original language is a must.
Comments