My rewrite of 1 Corinthians 2 in the Bible:
- And I, when I came to you, brothers, came not with better words or better wisdom, telling you about the mystery of God.
- For I thought it best not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
- And I in weakness and in fear and in much trembling was with you.
- And my speech and my message was not in the persuading words of wisdom, but in showing the Spirit and the power,
- so that your faith be not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
- We speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who come to nothing:
- But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, a hidden wisdom, which God foresaw before the ages in glory for us,
- which none of the rulers of this world knew: for if they knew, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
- But as it has been written, “What the eye did not see and the ear did not hear and into the heart of man did not enter, these things God prepared for those who love him.”
- But God showed them to us through his Spirit: for the Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God.
- For who among men knows the things of a man except for the spirit in the man himself? In the same way too the things of God no one knows except for the Spirit of God.
- Now we received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which comes from God, so that we might know the things that are freely given to us by God.
- Which things also we speak, not in the words which human wisdom teaches, but which the Spirit teaches; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
- A man in his soul does not accept the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are to be judged spiritually.
- But in his spirit he judges all things, yet is judged by no one.
- For “who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may teach him?” But we have the mind of Christ.
I took the the Authorized (King James) Version and changed it as little as possible while remaining as true to the Greek and as clear in current English as I could.
The main differences between me and the Authorized Version:
- aion = age, not world
- psykhikos = in his soul, not natural
- pneuma = Spirit, not Holy Ghost
- peithois = persuading, not enticing
- kerygma = message, not preaching
- arkhontes = rulers, not princes
- mysterion = mystery, not testimony
- pro-orisen = foresaw, not ordained
- apodeixei = showing, not demonstration
In addition I changed some of the prepositions to make their meaning clearer.
During my rewrite I also looked at the Vulgate (Latin) and the New Jerusalem Bible (Grey English).
See also:
Ahhhhum. A post about the subtlties and vagaries of language and translation, where the interation really meets the road, and the modiocrities get sifted from the thinkers. Notice no comments on this post! Yet some of Abagond’s posts get hundreds of comments. I believe people (meaning Americans) are ten miles wide and only three inches deep, and though they like to argue and assert pet superstitions they don’t like to think. Thinking about language is the hardest thinking one ever does, besides thinking about induction and deduction and how to tell the difference between the two.
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1 Corinthians 13:11–
When I was a boy, I spoke like a boy, I understood ,things as a boy might, I thought as a boy might think: but when I became a man, I put aside all the things a boy thinks about.
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