In fact, students had read the gospel of Loukas, in the Hebraizing translation of Willis Barnstone. A student gave a presentation about Yohanan, the dipper, preparing the way for Yeshua from Natzeret in the Galil. When she reminded us that Yohanan said he was dipping people only in the water
of the river Yarden while Yeshua would dip them in fire, I couldn't resist asking: "can we call them the Little Dipper and Big Dipper?"Barnstone's translation was an interesting attempt to rid the New Testament of ecclesiastical clichés and hellenisms (like "testament" for "covenant") and so restore Christianity to its semitic roots. (A review.) I can't judge it as a translation, except to say that it succeeds admirably as "defamiliarizing translation," and could be very useful for someone who still hasn't heard that Jesus was a Jew.
But what's it doing in a course designed to familiarize students with the sources of literary traditions? Does it help students see the aftereffects of the Bible in western literature or won't it rather conceal them? Forget the Yarden, and the unpronounceable word (starting with Shom-) which Barnstone puts in the place of the good "Samaritan." What happens to all the poetry in which bread has eucharistic overtones if all you know is that at Pesach in Yerushalayim the rabbi Yeshua broke matzoh with his students - even though it's surely what happened (if anything happened at all)? It is important for all sorts of reasons to know how classic texts, especially perhaps religious ones, have been mistranslated. But in this setting, the students need to learn the mistranslations if they are even to recognize the allusions and influences. By all means tell them there are problems of translation, but don't render the whole history of New Testament-inspired western literature invisible!
Analogously (and not in the new covenant) wouldn't it be a disservice to students to give them a translation of Genesis which has Eve giving Adam a piece of fruit - without identifying it as an apple (as all later tradition does, but the original doesn't)? Apples in literature is in large part the aftereffects of the Genesis story, but a Barnstone-like translation would pull the rug out from understanding it at all. Unless some balance of historical accuracy and fidelity to the texts the creators of literary tradition knew and used is found, the use - without comment - of a translation like Barnstone's defamiliarizes sources to the point of denying their role in history and culture.
