Divine Mercy: The Heart of the Gospel

Saint Luke: The Gospel of Divine Mercy 21 As an aside let me say this: we have just had the anniversary o f Roe versus Wade (January 22). The whole Right to Life and Right to Abortion issue can be summed up in the great difference between Semitic thinking (right brain) and Greek thinking (left brain). And I believe this nuance is not lost on Luke, the Physician! Our Semitic, Eastern or Oriental spiritual ancestors, the Jews, used the same root word for expressions of the gift o f life and compassion or mercy: rechem and rachanv, for them the gift o f life outweighs the pain of childbirth. However, our Occidental or Western philosophical and linguistic ancestors, the Greeks, viewed it not so much a gift as a bur­ den. Note that our English noun, hysteria and our English adjective, hys­ terical, come from the Latin word, hystericus , which is derived from hustera, the Greek word for the womb. The Oriental or Eastern mind looks at the womb as giving the gift o f life and mercy; the Occidental or Western mind looks at the womb and birth as a burden filled with screams and trauma. My vote is with the Jews! Let me return to my focus on the Gospel of Luke. There are some basic rules o f translation that merit reiteration at this point. No. 1 It is impossible to do a word for word translation o f a language that is accurate to the author’s original meaning. Nuances in meaning are unique to a particular language and preclude an accurate rendering o f the original meaning in the second language. That is why there are so many different translations of the Bible available. Father Lukefahr writes in his A Catholic Guide to the Bible: Some translations follow the original language quite closely, while freer translations, or ‘paraphrases’ (such as The Living Bible), reword and restate ideas. The first approach can pro­ vide a version that faithfully presents the thought o f the origi­ nal author, but the language maybe stilted. The second approach might have the advantage o f producing a more read­ able text, but it can also impose a translator’s biases on the content.16 No. 2 Translating from Hebrew to Greek (Old Testament to New Testament) presents even greater challenges to the translator. a. Hebrew is sometimes called a poverty language, meaning it has a very small vocabulary.