As Promised, here is my wordle text-cloud for my translation of Colossians:

I have finished translating through Colossians. It’s been a lot of fun (and work), and I’ve really enjoyed everyone’s input and critiques and comments! Here are the chapters:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4

So what’s next? Both O’Brien and Wright’s commentaries cover Philemon as well, so I will try and translate it. Then, I will revisit 1, 2, and 3 John and re-translate them (readers may remember those being up at the old site). We’ll see how it goes! Thanks again for all of your help and encouragement throughout the summer.

As I commented in my last post, I was absolutely clueless when I came across “Scythians” in Colossians 3:11.  I went straight to a few commentaries to find out what relevance the Scythians had to Paul’s discussion, and decided to translate it as a paraphrase.  In this post, I want to take a look at the verse as it really is and give an explanation for what it means.  Here it is with the two preceding verses:

“Do not lie to one another, since you have stripped off the old man with his practices and have clothed yourselves with the new man which is being renewed into a knowledge according to the image of the one who created it, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and in all.”
Colossians 3:9-11, verse 11 bold.

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I am officially two-thirds of the way through Colossians!

I did not put up a post when I finished chapter 2, but it is finished. I would especially like some thoughts on chapter 2 because I’m not quite happy with my translation yet- but at the same time I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly I’m not satisfied with.

Also, I have translated chapter 3 through verse 11.  If you are reading through my translation, I want some feedback particularly on verse 11 which says “where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free…” To be honest, I had absolutely no idea what a Scythian was so I went to O’Brien, Wright, and Robertson’s Word Pictures.  I figured that most people would also be clueless as to what Paul’s point is by including “barbarian, Scythian…” which was actually a very strong, and clear, point to the original audience.   In order to get  Paul’s point across I decided to go with a paraphrase here: “cultural barriers” (I will have an upcoming post that will be an exposition of Col 3:11, where I hope to bring this idea out more fully). In order to make the rest of the verse flow, I paraphrased it as: “where there are no racial distinctions, cultural barriers, or class distinctions” with a footnote that quotes the actual translation.  Let me know what you think.

I was tagged by TC for this meme. Here are the rules:

” 1. Be contemporary

2. Be idiomatic and free as possible.

3. Parsing is optional. “

Here is my stab at it:

“Since you have shared in Christ’s resurrection, you should seek out the heavenly things because that is where Christ is- ruling over his kingdom with power and authority. Always keep your focus on the things of Christ, and not worldly things, because you have died to those things and your new life has been hidden with Christ in God. When Christ is gloriously revealed, so too will your identity as Christ’s be revealed along with him.”

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After seeing the tag clouds created for the ESV using Wordle (a web application that creates a tag cloud for any user-supplied text), I decided to make one for my translation of Colossians thus far. Just click the thumbnail below to see the full-sized cloud (requires Java, soon I will make a picture of a screen-capture and host it here so everyone can see I made a screen-capture. Clicking on the image below will give you the full-sized image.).
At least so far, we can accurately say that Colossians is Christo-centric!

When I finish the book, I will do one on the complete text.