In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 sci-fi triumph Arrival, protagonist Louise Banks concisely illustrates the challenge of translating a simple question into an unknown language:1
Translation is always, to some degree, interpretation. Concepts in some cultures have no precise equivalent in others, and languages that evolve from or within that culture reflect this reality. Imagine trying to translate the story of the Polar Express to an uncontacted tribe in a tropical climate that has never encountered trains or snow. Not only would you struggle to find words that accurately convey the picture of those objects, but even if you could, you’d have to find a local context to ground them in to help your recipients make any sense of it. English speakers in the 21st century face a similar alienation from the world(s) that produced our Bible.
Speaking in the broadest of generalities, scholars take two approaches to rendering ancient works like the Bible into modern English, classified as “dynamic equivalence” and “formal equivalence.” Formal equivalence is often referred to as a more “literal” rendering of the source text; the goal here is to translate the text with a “word for word” approach and try to give the reader the experience of how it reads in its original language, or as close as one can get. The upside of this approach is it leaves you with a more authentic impression of what the text actually says. The downside is it sometimes leaves you far more confused about what the text actually means, as cultural idioms rendered literally often read as nonsense to a different culture thousands of years removed.
For example, think of the English word “cool.” Cool, first and foremost, is an indication of temperature. If one were to translate the sentence “I think Barbara is a pretty cool person” with a strictly literal approach, a reader might get the impression that Barbara was mysteriously chilly. The translation would be correct in that it reads as close to English as possible, but with no context for the slang meaning of “cool,” the actual understanding of the passage would be obfuscated.
Dynamic equivalence, on the other hand, is sometimes called a “thought for thought” approach. The goal is less to convey what the text says and more to convey what the text means. The upside here is that a dynamically translated text makes perfect sense in the language you are reading. The downside is that it requires far more interpretive choices on the part of the translators and is therefore more subject, at least as it pertains to the Bible, to theological bias.2
Most Bible translations do a little bit of both. The NRSVue is the preferred translation of modern Bible scholars, and its translation philosophy is explicit: “as literal as possible, as free as necessary.” While I could digress endlessly on whether or not I think dynamic or formal equivalence is generally the better approach,3 what I would like to do today is offer an argument that applies to all schools of translation and suggest, humbly and with no qualifications to do so, that I believe there are certain words we should not translate.
How many lectures or sermons have you heard where the speaker dives deep into the meaning of a word in the original language? This is often necessary, as the Greek or Hebrew terms underlying familiar passages sometimes suggest a fuller picture than the incomplete English equivalent. But sometimes, a word conveys something so different, so unattained by the English word chosen to represent it, that I think it would actually be better, both formally and dynamically, to leave the word untranslated and instead transliterate it.
The reason for this is simple: a transliteration is an invitation. As Christians reading scripture, we often speak of diving deeper, of immersing ourselves in the words of the Bible, of seeking more and fuller understandings of this holy text. When a word is transliterated, it forces us to take that leap. It tells us, “What is being said here is so important that I don’t want to undersell it.” It compels us to take ourselves out of our comfortable English simplicities, to shake off anachronistic tendencies, and to try and wrap our minds around what was actually intended by this ancient author writing in an unfamiliar tongue.4
Let me give a few samples of words I would suggest should remain untranslated and why.
1. Cosmos (κόσμος)
This term, usually rendered in English as “the world,” is the one that triggered this article. There is a stark dichotomy between the full scope of what is meant by “the world” versus how it is utilized in popular Christian culture. As St. Isaac the Syrian explains:
“‘The world’ is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear. Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.”
This understanding of “the world” makes sense of Christ calling us to not live for the world, or James imploring us to keep ourselves “unstained by the world,” or any other exhortations against the world that, read in the wrong light, might seem to teach a kind of dualism or Gnosticism. But even this view does not convey the full first-century understanding. In many instances, the “cosmos” didn’t just represent material creation; it represented the created order. As David Bentley Hart explains in the postscript to his translation of the New Testament:5
“For us, the ‘world’ is either merely the physical reality of nature and society ‘out there,’ or it is the human sphere with all its attendant moral and historical contingencies. For the late antique cultures from which the New Testament came, the ‘cosmos’ was quite literally a magnificently and terribly elaborate order of reality that comprehended nature (understood as a rational integrity organized by metaphysical principles), the essential principles of the natural and animal human condition (flesh and soul, for instance, with all their miseries), the spiritual world (including the hierarchies of the ‘divine,’ the angelic, and the daemonic), the astral and planetary heavens (understood as a changeless realm at once physical and spiritual), as well as social, political, and religious structures of authority and power (including the governments of human beings, angels, celestial ‘daemons,’ gods, terrestrial demons, and whatever other mysterious forces might be hiding behind nature’s visible forms). It is a vision of the whole of things that is utterly unlike any with which most of us are today familiar, and that simply does not correspond to any meaning of ‘world’ intuitively obvious to us. For the author of 1 Peter or of 1 John, for instance, to tell his readers to have nothing to do with the ‘cosmos’ is to say something far more comprehensive, imponderable, and astonishing than that they should avoid vice and materialist longings, or that they should withdraw from society.”
We so often take “the world” to mean something like “society” or “the culture” and thus reduce the cosmic grandeur of these teachings down to something as simple as not listening to music with swear words. Transliterating “cosmos” would not only distinguish the term from the present connotations we ascribe to “the world,” but would invite people to dig deeper into all the richness that is actually being conveyed by this conceptual framework.
2. Logos (λόγος)
Logos looms large behind the enigmatic prologue to the Gospel of John and is usually rendered in English as “Word.” Not only could I spend entire articles attempting to enumerate the expansive possibilities conveyed by this term, but entire books have been written to do so. I’ll suffice here to simply point out that our term “word” completely lacks so many of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of the Greek “Logos” in its first-century context and since no single English word can properly make up for this deficiency, transliteration is the appropriate choice.
3. All four words for Hell
I almost began this article with “There is no word for Hell in the Bible,” but I figured my title was clickbait enough. This topic could probably be a post unto itself, but the very, very abridged version is that four words in scripture sometimes get translated as “Hell,” and I don’t think any of them should be. This is not because I don’t believe in Hell, but because I believe it’s essential to recognize where our concept of Hell comes from and to emphasize that the Bible is not a systematic theology textbook, neatly cross-referencing later terms through obsequiously categorizable simplicities. Each word for “Hell” represents a distinct concept in its own right, and it is only when imagery from each of these concepts is combined with other imagery from throughout scripture (outer darkness and aionios fire and the like) that we arrive at something resembling any conventional pictures of Hell. What we usually think of Hell is a pastiche, and Scripture only gives us the building blocks to synthesize its image; it does not put the pieces together for us. And this would be so much more apparent and obvious if we simply transliterated the terms in question. Running through each of them with as much brevity as I can muster:
Hades/Sheol - these terms and concepts are more or less interchangeable. “Sheol” is the Hebrew underworld and “Hades” the Greek equivalent. These words are rarely translated “Hell” anymore, usually rendered instead as “the grave” or something similar, and this better conveys their contextual meaning. The Old Testament has little to no concept of an afterlife or of “going to heaven” in the terms we’re so used to speaking within, but says plenty about everyone, good and bad alike, going “down” to Sheol when their time has come. Sheol is usually just the abode of the dead in a personified manner, but in some places it appears to connote a vague, shadowy half-conscious existence, not quite an “afterlife” proper but more a gloomy stirring from slumber.
Hades, in the New Testament (and Greek translations of the Old), functions similarly, though in Second Temple literature, we do begin to see it take on more “afterlife” connotations, such as in Enoch where Hades contains valleys of rest for the righteous and valleys of punishment for the wicked (likely, the “great chasm” in Luke 16’s parable of Lazarus and the rich man is the divider between these sections of Hades). One final amusing detail of Hades occasionally being translated as Hell is that in Revelation, the Lake of Fire is often sourced as the fires of Hell, yet Hades is thrown into it.
Tartarus - This term shows up only once, in 2 Peter 2:4, where it describes the prison of the rebellious angels who mated with human women in Genesis 6 (again, greatly expanded in the Enochic literature). In Greek mythology, Tartarus is the lowest of the low regions, as far beneath Hades as Hades is beneath Earth, and was thought to be the pit where the great Titans were chained in darkness. Due to Peter’s description of Tartarus as an angelic holding cell, I found it curious that this was ever translated as Hell at all, but Greek mythology6 did, at times, associate it with punishments for the wicked alongside the angels, so it does make some sense. Regardless, this concept is specific enough to its culture that I think transliteration would be a stronger choice than simply conforming Tartarus to Hell.
Gehenna - Gehenna or the “Valley of Hinnom,” is, as the name suggests a valley. It’s a real place in Israel, just outside the old city, with a long and complex history of various associations. In the prophetic literature, we find it described as a cursed place where old kings of Judah performed child sacrifice.7 Throughout the following centuries, it continued to be associated with fires and burning bodies; King Josiah burned both the altars and priests of Molech there, and in both the Roman and Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, the valley was a dumping ground for the slain. Contrary to popular myth, it was not at any point a garbage dump where trash fires burned all night long (a seemingly groundless legend originating in the 12th or 13th century that continues to proliferate to this day).
The consistent association is that of fire and death, so naturally, Gehenna eventually took on more eschatological connotations, everything from a place of temporal destruction on the Day of the Lord to a place of purification after death in Rabbinic tradition. Thanks to these affiliations, Gehenna is probably the closest we have to a word for Hell in the New Testament, which is why translations that no longer translate Hades or Tartarus as Hell continue to do so for Gehenna. Even so, adjusting to transliteration for this term would be a bulwark against anachronism and would encourage readers to go find this valley in its Old Testament usage to see what kind of imagery it was meant to evoke.
4. Aiōnios (αἰώνιος)
This may be the trickiest word on this list as it is conceptually the farthest from the term(s) used to translate it. Aionios is most commonly rendered “eternal” in English but this is not its most literal meaning.8 Most simply, the word refers to something pertaining to an “Age,” often with an eschatological or transcendent connotation rather than merely indicating indefinite duration. It chiefly relates to the concept of time as divided into different aiōns (from which we derive the English 'eon')." One might be familiar with language of “the Age to come,” when speaking of the future kingdom, the thoroughly Christian “already but not yet.”
“Eternal Life,” then, in the more literal sense, refers not (singularly) to life of unending perpetuation but life characterized by this future “Age.” Among other things, this helps make sense of how the “eternal life” Christ speaks of can be both a future promise (“inheriting” eternal life in the Age to come like in Matthew 19:29) and a present reality (John 3:36 speaks in the present tense of believers already possessing eternal life), held even by those who still have yet to die, something that seems contradictory in our English translations.
Translating this sense of “Ages,” though, reads quite strangely in English. As Young’s Literal Translation9 demonstrates in its rendering of Luke 18:18—
“And a certain ruler questioned him, saying, `Good teacher, what having done -- shall I inherit life age-during?'“
I’ve seen other translators go with “Age-abiding” or “Age-enduring” or simply just “of the Age,” all of which work fine if one is acquainted with the concepts in question, but a simple transliteration of “aiōnios life” would prompt the same inquiries with a more direct term to google.
It should be noted that at the end of all this exploration, one might actually still wind up with “eternal” as the proper rendering of aiōnios in some instances, but you would be better for the journey. Understanding how the first-century authors conceived of “ages” will better inform our interpretation of what they were trying to say.
I’d like to reiterate that I’ve barely scratched the surface of the case to be made for a more nuanced understanding of these terms. To belabor a point I already raised, entire books can and have been written on each of these subjects; what I have provided here is barely the outline of an introduction to any of these words. But I do hope these brief examples help illustrate the challenge of translation, the importance of word choice, and how the terms we are used to actually shape our conceptual frameworks for understanding scripture.
If nothing else, I hope this exploration sparks a deeper curiosity—one that takes us beyond the comfort of the familiar and into the richness of the biblical text as it was first received. It is a world so unlike our own that even familiar concepts and figures may feel like strangers when understood in their older context. But what a gift it is to encounter them afresh—as if for the first time—a transcendent echo of Christ’s promise to make all things new.
See also this scene for another illustration.
If anyone is interested in an article exploring different Bible translations and how this manifests in them, let me know.
Balance is necessary but I lean towards formal in most cases.
The irony here is that many of these terms' implications come from their English Biblical usage. The KJV or Douay-Rheims translators may have made the best translation choice possible at the time, but a few centuries of preaching, cultural development, and if I may be self-critical, excessive Protestant reframing, has so carried the colloquially Christian connotation of these words away from even the original meaning in translation that transliteration provides a “return” both to their original meaning in their original language and perhaps to their original meaning in ours.
Hart’s translation is probably the most sublime example of a formal equivalence approach to the New Testament in English. He takes what has been described as a “piteously literal” approach to the text which, while at times challenging, at other times feels like encountering these familiar words anew (it’s also how I discovered Hart, funnily enough).
To be clear, I keep speaking of “Greek Mythology” like it’s a monolith, which it is not. Like almost every story in the mythos, Tartarus has gone through many iterations and my speaking in these broad generalities should not be taken as comprehensive.
Jeremiah 19 contains the story of Jeremiah enacting said curse.
In contrast to the Greek aïdios, which does strictly mean “eternal.”
An 1898 translation so thoroughly literal as to be almost unreadable in places.
Folks interested in Aion in particular might want to see what's been written about it over on Aidan Kimel's blog (by a variety of authors), which argues for universalist salvation: https://afkimel.wordpress.com/?s=Aion&submit=Search