MetaCatholic

Richard Rhodes has an interesting post about false friends over on Better Bibles. His particular target is the tendency of English translations to prefer “mystery” to secret” in the translation of μυστήριον. He makes a good case that in modern English this is misleading. Mysteries are puzzling, secrets are to be shared. I’ll come to a caveat about this argument in a bit, but he does have a point, and the whole post is worth reading.

However, in his look at various translations, he overlooks the Revised English Bible. At the end of his post he lists all the instances of μυστήριον in the New Testament. (In fact his list has two errors: the mysterious Ephesians 8:10 – followed by the text of Luke 8:10 – should be Ephesians 6:19, and the reference to 1 Thessalonians 2: 7, should be 2 Thessalonians 2:7.) In only one case does the REB use “mystery” in its translation, and that is 1 Corinthians 15:51. Particularly felicitous, I thought, was Romans 11:25:

There is a divine secret here, my friends, which I want to share with you, to keep you from thinking yourselves wise: this partial hardening has come on Israel only until the Gentiles have been admitted in full strength;

Another stimulating translation is Colossians 2:2:

My aim is to keep them in good heart and united in love, so that they may come to the full wealth of conviction which understanding brings, and grasp God’s secret, which is Christ himself.

It is, here as in many instances, a strength of the REB that (building and improving on its predecessor the NEB) it sees itself as a kind of anti-KJV and steers clear as much as possible of Bible English. Unlike the more commonly used dynamic equivalent translations, however, it draws on a wide literary vocabulary, and is often textually and theologically more daring than translations done in other circles. I find it worth consulting regularly for “is that what the text really means?” stimulation.

Now to my caveats about the use of secret for mystery. There has grown up a vocabulary of “mystery” in the spiritual tradition, partly based on the Greek, and partly on its traditional English translation. A “mystery” in this sense is not a puzzle to be solved, or a difficulty to be baffled by, but something amazing to be pondered and lived with. In that sense, it is not at all inappropriate for many of the secrets of God to be called mysteries. It may be partly because of that, partly because of a sense that Paul’s understanding of the resurrection is developing, and partly because the translators believe it to have a more poetic register, that the REB makes its one exception to not translating μυστήριον by mystery (1 Corinthians 15:51):

Listen! I shall unfold a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed.

That’s the kind of secret that won’t be understood simply by hearing it. Who is wise enough for these things?