The Passion of
Saint Matt
For Christians, Palm Sunday is an important day, marking the entry of Christ into Jerusalem for the Passover, and the start of the holiest week of the liturgical year. Priest and congregation read aloud the Passion of Saint Matthew, beginning with the betrayal of Judas Iscariot and ending in the laying of Christ in the sepulcher. It is the most dramatic stretch of prose in the English language.
I consider myself a reasonably reconstructed, post-Vatican II Catholic, which is to say that while I suspect Latin is the language He prefers—an AT&T connection, if you will, to the scratchy MCI or Sprint of the new liturgy—my knees don’t jerk in the pews every Sunday when the priest tells me to shake hands with the person next to me.
Now, any Catholic who is not totally tone-deaf knows that the relevant ecclesiastical committees have been hard at work turning the beautiful sinewy prose of the Douai-Reims Bible into Formica-flat American. (The Douai and King James are for practical purposes identical.) Since 1965, we have become accustomed to this. But last Sunday’s rendition of the Passion, taken from the New American Bible, was so lifeless, so devoid of passion that one despairs over the harrowing of the language at the hands of the church’s liturgical bureaucrats.
Consider:
King James Version: “… the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
New American Bible: “… The spirit is willing but nature is weak.”
What—pray—is wrong with the classical metonymy, “flesh”? “Nature” here sounds like ersatz Emerson.
In the King James Version, Jesus begs his Father, “If this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, thy will be done.”
Last Sunday that was reduced to: “If this cannot pass me by without my drinking it, your will be done.”
Bad enough to eliminate one of Christianity’s great metaphors, the cup of sorrow, but to leave the sentence as they have offends basic English usage. “Drinking” what? “This”?
In King James, Peter “smote off the ear” of the high priest’s servant. In the New American Bible, he is “slashed,” making it sound as though he had been mugged.
Jesus rebukes Peter with a phrase that has survived the ages: “All they that take the sword, shall perish with the sword.” That is now: “Those who use the sword are sooner or later destroyed by it.”
“Art Thou the King of the Jews?” demanded Pontius Pilate. “And Jesus said unto him, ‘Thou sayest.’ ”
“As you say.” Jesus’ artful answer to his executioner is thus reduced to a shrug: Yeah, whatever.
King James’s scholars tell us that Golgotha, the site of the crucifixion, meant “the place of a skull.” The writers of the New American Bible make it sound like an Aaron Spelling TV show—“Skull Place.” Okay, okay. But why have they gone to such lengths as changing words that even the least sensitive parishioner could not possibly have mistaken in meaning? “Wine mixed with gall” becomes “wine flavored with gall,” as if the other choices were cherry and vanilla. It was the particular charity of a group of wealthy women of Jerusalem to see that the condemned were offered wine mixed with a grain of frankincense to dull the excruciating pain of crucifixion. When Jesus, in His death agony, cried out to his Father, a bystander soaked a sponge in “vinegar … and gave him to drink.” In the New American Bible, he is offered “cheap wine.” Chablis? Thunderbird?
At the moment of death, “Behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose.”
Whatever your religious belief, that is prose to raise the hairs on your arm. Does this do it for you?: “Suddenly the curtain of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked, boulders split, tombs opened. Many bodies of saints who had fallen asleep were raised.”
The chief priest and pharisees tell Pilate that Jesus was “a deceiver” and beg him to make “the sepulcher sure, sealing the stone and setting a watch.” Here the New American Bible sounds like an FBI report. They ask Pilate to put the tomb “under surveillance.”
All this is deplorable, but not contemptible. But what are we to make of the fact that the two thieves between whom Christ was nailed have suddenly been transformed into “insurgents”? Ronald Knox, the great translator of the New Testament, was satisfied with “thieves”; even the very contemporary Good News New Testament (Fourth Edition) only goes so far as to call them “bandits.” When the modern ear hears “insurgents,” the mind thinks of Vietcong, mujahedin, contras, Shining Path, Kurds, a half-dozen jumbled and bloody acronyms. What’s next? And they crucified Him between two freedom fighters.…
The new edition of the New American Bible will be out soon. In this version, all references to gender will be expunged. The Son of God will shed all that sexist baggage and emerge as the Child of God. The Sermon on the Mount will no longer offend the National Organization for Women, Greenpeace or the Physicians for Social Responsibility. We will have arrived at the scriptural equivalent of “You can call me Ishmael, if you’re comfortable with that”; of solar panels at the cathedral of Chartres; of Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion” performed by the Mantovani Strings. It will be accessible to all, and meaningful to no one. To use the old phrase, in the fullness of time they will have my Saviour sounding like a Valley Girl. I am wroth.
—The Washington Post, 1987