How do you prepare for Colossians? Well, you read it! And, how do you prepare yourself if you are preparing to preach from it? By reading it, re-reading it, and translating it from the original.
As you may have noticed, if you are part of Venture Church or follow us in any way, we love to preach through at least one book of the Bible every year; and as I was praying last year and asking the Lord which book he wanted us to dive into this year (2021), it was a short prayer journey to realise that Colossians was where he wanted us to be.
Part of this process of hearing the Lord’s voice to focus on Colossians was to ask the question about how—or indeed whether—it would speak to the situations that we find ourselves in, in 2021; and also whether it would align with the vision that God gave us for the year, even before we had heard the Lord call us to “Believe to Dare”.
Why Colossians?
If you pick up a commentary and read about Paul’s letter to the Colossians it is often described has having a High Christology. That is, that the picture which it portrays of Jesus is one where he is repeatedly shown to be higher (in the sense of superior) to anyone, anything, and (actually) every-thing.
You can see this, for instance, in Colossians 1:13-20, where Paul expounds the wonders of Jesus as the perfect reflection of God (v15), the co-creator with the Father of the universe (v16), the origin and source of all authority (v16), the conceiver and establisher of the Church (v17), and all of this culminating in the work of the cross (v20).
This is exactly what we all need, a fresh revelation of just who Jesus is.
The Preparation Journey
So, as I spent time preparing to meet with the core preaching team—and after I had prayed through the text and read several commentaries and articles about it—i realised that I needed to immerse myself one step further in the text itself by doing my own translation. That is not because I thought any of the six or seven translations that I had already read were defective or inferior in any way, but simply to force myself to look at the text afresh and to ask it the same questions that those other translators had done about how best to present its meaning.
“The translator is a traitor“, so says an Italian proverb1 about the translator and their task of translation. The sentiment of the proverb refers to the fact that one can only translate something that they understand; but that, in our understanding, we cannot avoid an element of interpretation. This interpretation slews the original meaning in the direction of the translator’s understanding. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that words in one language often have only overlapping meanings with words in other languages (semantic range2), leading to further possible misunderstanding by a hearer or reader.
All of this simply means that every translation is imperfect. However, the value of translating a passage afresh is in identifying where the words and phrases are, that have these translational challenges. And so, in the process of working through the text slowly, seeing how it fits together, and the flow of one thought leads to the next though (and sometimes, with Paul, how digression leads to digression). Thus, there are several important passages where I chose to use an alternative word or a dynamically equivalent3 phrase to highlight the possible ambiguity that occurs when translating the Koine Greek into English.
In Conclusion
I plan to write some follow-up blog posts to highlight some of these translation choices and how they impact our understanding of Colossians. In the meanwhile, here is a sample of my translation of Colossians chapter one:
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through God’s will, and the brother Timothy; to those in Colossae, holy and faithful brothers in Christ; grace to you and peace from God our father.
We give thanks to God, the father of our lord Jesus Christ, always concerning you while we are praying. Having heard about your faith in Christ Jesus and the love which you have for all the saints, because of the hope stored away for you in the heavens. The hope which you heard beforehand in the message of the truth from the Gospel, which is present among you just as it also is in the whole world—bearing fruit and increasing just as it also has among you from the first day you heard about it and truly recognized the grace of God. You learned it in this way from Epaphras, our beloved fellow-slave, a faithful servant on our behalf of Christ, who made clear our love for you in the Spirit.
That is why we, too, since the day we heard, have not paused [in] praying for you and asking that you might be filled with the knowledge and ability to recognize His will; [and] with all wisdom and spiritual intelligence to walk worthy of the Lord desiring to please him in everything: [by] bearing fruit in every good work and growing in the knowledge of God; empowered with all power according to the might of His glory for all endurance and patience. With joy, we give thanks to the Father who qualifies you for the portion of the saints’ inheritance in the light. He rescued us from the authority of the darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of the Son who He loves. In which we already have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him, everything was created, in the heavens and on the earth—things visible and invisible, whether thrones or lordships or rulers or authorities—He created everything through Him, and He created everything for Him; 17and, He was before all things, and by Him everything holds together, He is also the head of the body, the Church. He is the beginning, the firstborn out of the dead so that He Himself might be the first in everything. Because, in Him He was pleased for all the fullness to dwell and through Him to reconcile all things into Him—having made peace through the blood of His cross—both things on the earth and things in heaven.
(Colossians 1:1-20)
(Square brackets in the above text denote words in the translation that have no direct equivalent in the Greek text; they are included to bring out the meaning and make the text more readable. Likewise, italics represent words or phrases that have been translated with a somewhat dynamic equivalent.)
[1] https://blog.oup.com/2012/09/traduttore-traditore-translator-traitor-translation/
[2] https://www.billmounce.com/category/10
[3] https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_and_formal_equivalence