翻译与基督教的兴起

翻译在基督教的兴起中发挥了至关重要的作用.可以说,没有翻译,就没有文化的融合,就没有<圣经>,就没有深刻影响了西方文明的基督教本身.因此,通过对基督教兴起的历史背景,基督教经典产生过程中从希伯来书面语到希腊语的笔头翻译以及从阿拉米口头语到希腊语的口头翻译,一些希伯来语和阿拉米语词汇乃至句子之音译为希腊语的情形等方面的深入了解,可以深化该领域的研究.同时,还可以了解到在这一翻译过程中不可避免地存在着价值理念的冲突和融通.

Translation and the Rise of Christianity

Translation played such an essential role in the rise of Christianity that it may be fairly said that without translation there would have been no full convergence of the Greek and Hebrew cultures and ultimately no Bible and Christianity itself.In the integration of the Hebrew and Greek cultures and the ultimate emergence of Christianity,translation occurred not only between different languages, but more importantly,between fundamentally different cultural values.The translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek means not only one language being translated into another,but also one culture transplanted into another,or in other words,Hebrew culture being integrated into Greek culture,which was a long process of Hellenism.The formation of the Biblical texts is essentially a Hebrewization of the Greek way of thinking.The result of the encounter of these two cultures is not only an incorporation of the cultural values of the source language into the culture of the target language,or an overall and profound integration into the culture of the target language,but also an overall and profound change on the part of the cultural values of the target language so as to be adapted to the cultural values of the heterogeneous source language,the result being a profoundly productive merge of the horizons of different cultures and a profoundly productive integration of different cultural values.In order for the emperors,soldiers,intellectuals and the general populace of the Roman Empire to recognize the legitimate status of Christianity in the empire,early Christian theologians tried by every means to find out from the inherent values of the Greeco-Roman cultures the sources or grounds of the Christian faiths,or in other words,to take advantage of certain notions of the Greeco-Roman philosophy for a deliberate wrong interpretation of the Hebrew monotheistic thinking in order for the latter to be fully accepted in a overwhelmingly Greeco-Roman cultural environment.The essay also explores the historical background of the rise of Christianity, the written translation from Hebrew texts into Greek in the emergence of Christian canons and the oral translation from oral Aramaic into Greek.It discusses the situations in which certain Hebrew and Aramaic words and sentences were transliterated into Greek and more importantly,the inevitable value conflicts and adaptation in the process of translation.