Picking on Tyndale again (No room at the Inn)

OK, I've haven't beaten up on William Tyndale in a while, and, although he doesn't deserve it, here it goes.

The nativity story as portrayed on stage and screen has Joseph and Mary going from Inn to Inn, being turned away because there is no vacancy. The census has turned Bethlehem, as it were, into the ancient equivalent of a medium sized city with a huge convention. The problem is, Bethlehem at that time was not large enough even to have an Inn. So where did this idea come from?

In Luke 2:7, the Greek text says that Mary put the newborn Jesus in a feeding trough because there was no place for them in the kataluma. Kataluma is a guest room. Having come to the ancestral hometown for the census, Joseph's family was staying with relatives and the guest room was already full. In the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:34, the Samaritan takes the wounded man to a pandokion, an inn. It is lodging place, completely different from the kataluma in a private house.

So how did the guest room become an inn, and the lack of space in the inn the basis for lots of background detail in dramatizations? In Wycliffe's translation of Luke 2:7 it's

for ther was no place to hym in no chaumbir.

Tyndale took Wycliffe's chamber and it became

because ther was no roume for them within in the ynne.

And until the 20th century, Bible translations had inn, and inns led to innkeepers, and all the other unbiblical details which populate the modern nativity stories.

Wages

This is a case where the beauty and simplicity of a rendering win out and dominate, even though the rendering itself is inferior, or at least lacking some important details. What am I talking about? Romans 6:23. Virtually every translation since Wycliff renders the word "opsonia" as wages, which, though it flows and makes a beautiful word picture, is not the meaning of the word. I guess I'm making a really petty point. "Opsonia" means daily food allowance, like what a soldier or a slave would get, and not wages, which carries a connotation of cash that could be saved and accumulated. The Message avoids wages and implies an accumulation of cash; the CEV uses "pays off;" and the Worldwide English Version uses "reward." The idea is that sin pumps death into us day by day, not that we are hoarding up death for the end of our lives.

Yeah, pretty petty point, I know, but it's petty stuff like this that results in splits within churches or denominations.

Been a while...

...man, I've been meaning to post, but...OK, I'm the Lord Emperor of procrastinators.
Actually, I was on a roll, then my laptop died, and it's so much easier to blog when you can just sit up in bed, instead of having to get up and log onto a desktop. Did I mention that I'm also the Vice-Regent of laziness? Around Christmas, I got really riled up about the whole "no room at the inn" thing and had a rant about the difference between "kataluma" and "pandoche," and first century domestic architecture in Palestine bubbling up, but Christmas with six kids kinda crowded that out before it got beyond the thinking-out stage.
Oh well, the stream of rants is coming. I can feel it.