I have a weird appreciation for Naomi Wolf, the feminist author and activist who achieved breakthrough notoriety as an advisor to Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign. I don’t appreciate her for making the then-Veep wear power ties, however, but for her later dissent from certain core feminist dogmas.
When abortion enthusiasts were holding the rhetorical line on “my body, my choice” and “terminating the product of conception,” Wolf had the thoughtfulness and audacity to warn against dehumanization of the unborn—even to suggest “mourning” rituals that acknowledged that someone was in fact being killed. And while the left was tolerating pornography as a necessary corollary of sexual freedom (or lauding it as “sex work” that empowered women), she presciently saw—as a liberal Jew without any religious moral doctrine forming her—that porn was a threat to true feminism and to society.
If those transgressions weren’t enough to make Wolf a pariah, she would complete her disaffection from her erstwhile tribe during the Covid years, when her outspoken vaccine skepticism left her branded, whatever else she might have been, as a kook.
But I have kept my soft spot for her. Which is why I noted with interest her series of tweets Tuesday in which she detailed her recent experience studying an English translation of the New Testament alongside a “literal” Greek translation, sharing what she seemed to think was the groundbreaking discovery that “so much of the NT has been mistranslated.”
As an example, she says that at the Sermon on the Mount, “Jesus was not approached by his ‘disciples’” but by his “learners.” And the Beatitudes, she says, should be “happy are they,” not “blessed are they.”
What follows in the replies is, unsurprisingly, a lot of commentary to the effect that Ms. Wolf should just stay in her lane and leave the Bible to the Bible experts. And although I think it would be a mistake to gatekeep biblical truth, denying people the right to their own insights unless they have a Ph.D., these commenters do have a point.
The word disciple, for example, comes from the Latin discipulus, which just means “student” or . . . “learner.” And the Greek word in question from the Beatitudes (or from the Greek translation of Old Testament passages such as Psalm 1:1) can equally mean “blessed” or “happy,” just as the Latin word beatus, from which we get “beatitude,” does.
Those aren’t “mistranslations,” then, but good examples of the translator’s art. Words in any language have different meanings and senses, and translators must choose which sense serves the meaning best according to context.
In our first case, the English word disciple, referring to Jesus’s close listeners, has a shade of meaning that goes beyond mere student, touching something like “devoted follower.” (On the flip side, the Jewish word rabbi can mean “teacher” but also “master.”)
And doesn’t the condition of those who experience Beatitude according to Jesus’ words surpass the comparatively weak sentiment of the English word happy? We wish for birthdays and holidays to be “happy”; we say that we’re “happy” to hear a bit of good news or do a favor for a stranger. But to be “blessed” indicates a more profoundly satisfied state, and moreover a state of giftedness and favor from God.
And so in these instances at least, and others she hints at, maybe Wolf hasn’t actually stumbled upon a new Da Vinci Code of hidden biblical truths that will upend Christianity as we know it. And she would be assured of this, rather than relying on her homespun readings and crowdsourcing exegesis on social media, if she were a Catholic.
The Church doesn’t definitively endorse a single translation of any given Greek or Hebrew phrase, of course. But it is the authoritative interpreter and steward of the Bible’s truths and meaning. And in its members, through the centuries, it has a record of pondering the biblical texts and working out their seeming kinks, always in ways consistent with its truths and meaning as guarded by the Church.
Yes, even Catholic biblical scholars can disagree about fine points sometimes. But generally, Catholicism frees us from the doubts and confusions that—as Naomi Wolf is discovering—inevitably go along with personal Bible study disconnected from tradition and authority.