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The Bible For Normal People

Episode 116: Sarah Ruden - Getting Inside the Head of Paul & Jesus

The Bible For Normal People

The Bible for Normal People

Religion & Spirituality, Christianity

4.73.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2020

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Translating the Bible is more than just about being woodenly accurate. We’re humans after all. In this episode, Pete and Jared talk to Sarah Ruden, who talks about using our imaginations to put ourselves in the place of the biblical writers, emotions and aesthetics and all. With a background in translating classical literature, she helps us read the Bible within a fuller context, both humanly and literarily. Show Notes → Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're listening to the Bible for Normal People, the only God ordained podcast on the internet.

0:04.8

I'm Pete Ends. And I'm Jared Byas.

0:08.6

Welcome normal people to this episode of the Bible for Normal People.

0:12.4

And our topic today is getting inside the head of Paul and Jesus. And our guest is Sarah Rudin.

0:21.2

Yeah, we have an interesting conversation with Sarah who is a PhD from Harvard University in

0:26.4

Classical Filmology. And she was at the University of Cape Town as a lecturer in classics.

0:34.4

She's written a few books and just a fascinating conversation. She's clearly very bright and

0:40.0

it really appreciated her ability to maybe kind of cut through the noise sometimes I think of

0:45.5

academia and just kind of come to some really creative and interesting insights.

0:49.6

Yeah, I mean, namely about translating the Bible and that may sound

0:54.4

boring but that's mainly because a lot of translations are boring and that's sort of her part.

0:58.9

She doesn't really say that she's too nice but instead of just trying to be like mechanically

1:04.0

accurate and that's one thing that a lot of translations have in common. They say things a

1:09.3

little bit differently but they're very similar in terms of this mechanical attention.

1:14.4

She tries to enter into the head of the ancient person and you know that sounds a little

1:21.2

esoteric but it's really not. It is an act of imagination but it's an informed.

1:26.3

Yeah, it's very practical too. It seems like as she was talking I just kept thinking it will

1:30.4

duh. I mean, that's exactly it makes sense. Right. Because these were real people trying to move

1:35.8

other people with their words and that's the thing that a lot of translations miss.

1:41.5

One thing I was thinking about Jared is that you know like how can we get into that just with

1:47.4

our own English Bibles and stuff was sometimes I tell students like just stand up and read it out

1:54.4

loud as if we're reading this to people and actually trying to convince them of something.

...

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