Synthesis of new β-lactam analogs and evaluation of their histone deacetylase (HDAC) activity

Article abstract of DOI:10.1515/znb-2007-1116

A simple synthesis of the β-lactams 11-13 and 16-17 as novel histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors is described. The key synthetic strategies involved the O-alkylation of 6-APA and the coupling reactions of freshly prepared N-carbobenzyloxy-L-prolines 5 and 6 and 6-aminopenicillanates 8-10 and 15 in high yields. It was found that all compounds show potent growth inhibitory activity on human tumor cell lines, the most potent compound 16 exhibiting an IC₅₀ = 2.1 μM in vitro.

Full text of DOI:10.1515/znb-2007-1116

Open Theology 2016; 2: 653–667
Bible Translation
Open Access
David B. Frank*
Do We Translate the Original Author’s
Intended Meaning?
DOI 10.1515/opth-2016-0051
Received March 14, 2016; accepted April 25, 2016
Abstract: Translation of the Bible or any other text unavoidably involves a determination about its
meaning. There have been different views of meaning from ancient times up to the present, and a
particularly Enlightenment and Modernist view is that the meaning of a text amounts to whatever the
original author of the text intended it to be. This article analyzes the authorial-intent view of meaning in
comparison with other models of literary and legal interpretation. Texts are anchors to interpretation but
are subject to individualized interpretations. It is texts that are translated, not intentions. The challenge
to the translator is to negotiate the meaning of a text and try to choose the most salient and appropriate
interpretation as a basis for bringing the text to a new audience through translation.
Keywords: interpretation, textual meaning, authorial intent, philosophical hermeneutics, originalism
Introduction to the Problem
Among the deeper, philosophical questions surrounding language and translation, what could be deeper
than the concept of meaning? One either translates the meaning of a text or one is not translating. Not all
translations are equally good, of course, and translators may disagree on the meanings they are supposed
to translate. Where does one locate the meaning to translate? The topic at hand is the relationship between
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translation and hermeneutics, the study of how we attribute meaning to a text.
A common view among Bible translators is that the meaning to be translated is the original author’s
intended meaning. This paper examines that concept to see if it is the only correct way—and whether it is
the best way—of looking at meaning in relation to translation. The author-oriented emphasis on textual
meaning is examined in light of various ways of understanding the nature of textual meaning, past and
present. This analysis also considers views on textual meaning outside of the world of biblical interpretation
and Bible translation, including literary and legal interpretation.
Translation is an important but complex issue, and different scholars with great minds differ in how
they see it. It is not the aim of this essay to be progressive or provocative. This analysis insists on being very
common-sensible and transparent, focusing on observable behavior and on social and interpersonal factors
in translation. Translation has sociological, psychological, linguistic, historical, theological, literary, and
other facets. This approach to translation focuses on the whole person, and people’s observable interaction
with each other, and commonly-accepted concepts about people, such as that they are able to communicate
and understand; they are able to acquire and use language, and even sometimes more than one language,
1ꢀThis paper was originally presented on October 17, 2009, at the Bible Translation 2009 conference at the Graduate Institute
of Applied Linguistics in Dallas, Texas. The author thanks two reviewers of this paper for pointing out parts that needed
clarification or elimination, and the help of Lynn Frank in editing and rewording it. Any remaining problems are my own.
*Corresponding author: David B. Frank, SIL International, E-mail: david_frank@sil.org
© 2016 David B. Frank, published by De Gruyter Open.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
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and they are able to attribute meaning to language and form impressions about equivalences between
languages in terms of how things are communicated.
A conclusion of this analysis is that it is misguided to think that translation is—or should be—about
translating the original author’s intended meaning. The original author’s intended meaning is indeed
a factor in translation; nevertheless, it is not quite right to say that translation is about translating an
original author’s intended meaning. The body of this article explains this thesis and presents alternative
ways of thinking about the meaning of a text. While translation is inevitably and unavoidably based on an
interpretation of the meaning of a text, the meaning of a text to be translated is not located in a single place,
and the grounding and anchor of translation should be the text itself, and not in the thoughts or intentions
of the author of the text. The starting point is a common-sense analysis of linguistic meaning.
Where is Meaning Located?
Do words have meaning? Do texts have meaning? The common perception is that they do. If one wants
to know what a word means, one looks it up in a dictionary. However, those of us who have worked on
producing dictionaries know that they are just summaries of how words are used among members of a
language community. The real authority on meanings is not a reference book, but the speakers of the
language and their habits of interaction.
A more sophisticated view on linguistic meaning is that meanings are only in people’s heads. Words and
other components of language are only media. Language is a conventional system of signs that is learned
and shared by a community for the purpose of communication. Human language deserves a more complete
analysis than that, but for our purposes here, having to do with textual meaning and how it relates to
translation, it is enough to simply say that linguistic communication takes place through the medium of
texts that involve words used in grammatical constructions. The term “text” has a broad meaning here,
as a unit of communication, which could be either spoken or written, or signed. But in the writings on
hermeneutics that are surveyed in this paper, the focus has been on written texts, and particularly published
literary works or legal documents.
If meanings are all really only in people’s heads, then are they just in the head of the person who
initiated a text, i.e., the speaker or author, or are they in the audience’s head as well? Meanings that are
communicated through language would have to be in the heads of both speaker and hearer, author and
audience, or else communication would not be taking place. Besides the original author of a text and the
original audience, is there anyone else to take into consideration? It is possible for someone to overhear a
conversation who was not the addressee and get at least a partial understanding of what was being said. It is
possible for someone to get meaning out of a text that was written generations earlier, and even to translate
it. Meanings are in the heads of speaker/authors and hearer/readers and everyone else who encounters the
text who shares the same linguistic code. Meanings are distributed among many people, but they truly are
only in people and not in the code itself. The arbitrary but conventional code is just a way of communicating
and otherwise stimulating meaning among people.
In what sense does the meaning reside in the text after all? While language as a system of signs is
arbitrary, it is conventional as well. It is shared, community property. Communication is possible when
people share a code. Even if words do not really “contain” meanings, people attribute meanings to words and
texts, in effect endowing them with meaning. Because communities treat words and linguistic constructions
as though they had meanings, they can use this linguistic code to interact. It is even possible for someone
who is removed from the original speaker-hearer situation to intercept a message and get meaning from it.
How much a person could understand about a text that was not intended for that person would depend on
various factors, including how explicit the author was in communicating his or her thoughts, and to what
extent the original communication was couched in a situational context that the extended interpreter does
not understand.
The point is that meanings are in people’s heads, and when a text is involved, the meaning attributed to
that text is in the heads of as many people who encounter that text who share the same linguistic code. But
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because language is community property and people share a conventional system of signs, there is a sense
in which meanings can revolve around a text.
The following is a survey of thought over time on the location of textual meaning. In this survey, it will
be demonstrated that the modern concept of the author as the controller of the meaning of a text is not
universal, but is situated in a certain worldview.
Theories of Interpretation
Traditional Jewish Hermeneutics
As “the people of the book,” Jews were and are concerned with scripture as text, and with its meaning. The
assumption was, of course, that whether the scriptures were narratives or psalms or wisdom or prophecies,
they have relevance to the contemporary context. The question would naturally arise, What do the scriptures
say to us today? And this “today” spans hundreds and thousands of years.
The traditional Jewish mode of understanding the meaning of scripture text was that it is the message
of God that speaks to all generations. There was not a preoccupation in traditional Jewish hermeneutics
with the original author and audience. Scriptures had to be interpreted in each generation and context
for the meaning to be complete. God is an active participant, and interpretation is the method by which
2
someone seeks to understand what God is saying to their situation through the scriptures.
Midrash is the term for the accepted interpretive method used by the Jews. To us with our modern
hermeneutic approach, it would seem as though midrash can involve improperly taking things out of
context, or reading meaning into a text. To the Jews, in biblical times and since then, midrash was a method
of interpreting, reasoning and arguing that was both acceptable and compelling. Midrashic argumentation
can be observed in the writings or reported speech of Matthew, Jesus and Paul. For example, when Jesus
quoted Exodus 3:6, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” to prove that life
continues after death (Matthew 22:31–32; Luke 20:37–38), his audience of Jewish leaders accepted the
validity of his argument (“Good answer, Teacher!”). They did not dare to ask him any more questions (Luke
20:39–40).
Similarly, Paul uses what might seem today like a strange reading of Psalm 68:18 to support his argument
in Ephesians 4:8 that God gives (spiritual) gifts. Or consider how in Galatians 3:16 Paul makes a point by
distinguishing between singular “seed” and plural “seed(s)” using Genesis 12:7 as a proof text in a way that
would not be obvious on the basis of a normal reading of the Hebrew. These are examples of midrashic
3
reasoning and argumentation.
The gospel writer Matthew (2:18) called the slaughter of the innocents at the time of Christ’s birth a
fulfillment of the prophecy of Jeremiah: “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel
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weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more” (Jeremiah 31:15 NIV).
Jeremiah’s prophecy apparently had a different referent at the time it was originally given, yet in a sense
it can be taken as a prophecy about Christ. This is in agreement with the acceptable method of reasoning
used by the Jews at that time. It is interesting to note what Edersheim has to say about the reasonableness
of Matthew’s use of Jeremiah 31:15, “To an inspired writer, nay, to a true Jewish reader of the Old Testament,
2ꢀSee Vanhoozer, Meaning in This Text, 115.
3ꢀSee Arichea and Nida, Handbook on Galatians, which says in reference to Galatians 3:16, “The real exegetical problem in
this verse is in Paul’s use of ‘descendant’ and ‘descendants’ (literally, ‘seed’ and ‘seeds’). Although he was certainly aware that
the Hebrew and Greek forms of the word ‘seed’ are singular in form but collective in meaning, yet he goes on to distinguish
between the singular and the plural in order to prove his point, namely, that the promises of God were given to Abraham
and one descendant, not many; and that one descendant is Christ. Some scholars have found rabbinical parallels to Paul’s
exegetical method in this verse, and other interpreters have used ingenious ways to justify Paul’s reasoning here. Fortunately,
the translator does not have to hold to a particular position regarding these verses in order to translate them accurately.”
4ꢀScripture quotations are taken from the New International Version, copyright 2011–2016, Biblica.
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the question in regard to any prophecy could not be: What did the prophet—but, What did the prophecy—
mean?” (1883:215). In other words, authorial intent was not the governing factor in scripture interpretation
(not “What does the prophet mean?”), but rather the text itself (“What does the prophecy itself mean?”),
including how these words might apply to a new situation.
Authorial Intent
Eventually in Western thought an enduring conception arose regarding the meaning of a text as being
controlled by the author of the text. That is, whatever the author intended a text to mean is what it properly
means. The words “author” and “authority” are related, etymologically-speaking, from the Latin augere
“to cause to grow, to increase.” The idea is that the author, as the one who created a text, is its owner. The
author has authority over his or her text, and an interpretation of a text that the author would not have
anticipated would be seen as inappropriate.
The emphasis on authorial intent as the governing factor in textual interpretation is associated with
the Age of Reason, Enlightenment and into the Modern era (as opposed to the Postmodern era), with their
emphasis on the mind, the power of pure reason, consciousness and the evolution toward objective truth.
To understand a text is to work toward understanding the mind of the author, and the author’s reasoning.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schleiermacher made this operating principle explicit
5
in his 1813 essay “On the Different Ways of Translation.” To understand a text is to understand what the
author was thinking when he created it. The focus turns from the text itself to the author. The idea that a
text could mean different things to different people was not considered, because the person who issued
the text was the one who could say what it meant, by right of creation. The original meaning of a text,
as it left the mouth or the pen of the originator, before even the original audience tried to make sense of
it, was seen as the true meaning. It would not matter whether the text is an imperfect expression of the
author’s thoughts, or whether the original audience might have misunderstood the author’s thoughts and
intentions, the author had the right to say what his or her text meant, and a text was seen as a pointer to
whatever the author wanted to express. If a reader gets something out of a text other than what the author
meant to express, then to that extent the reader has misunderstood the text. This is the Modern view of
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textual interpretation.
Today, at a time when Relativism, Postmodern thought and Deconstruction threaten the idea of seeking
objective truth, E.D. Hirsch in writings such as his The Aims of Interpretation (1976) has been a modern
champion of authorial intent. Horrified by the idea that meaning could be indeterminate, and choosing his
words carefully, Hirsch defends the idea that a text has only one meaning, and that is the meaning that the
author of the text intended it to have. However, it is an unavoidable fact that different people might think a
text means different things. Hirsch tries to solve the problem by definition. He distinguishes the meaning of
a text, which is controlled by the author, from the significance of a text to its readers. So meaning is equated
with authorial intent. The significance of a text to a reader can go beyond—or even be at odds with—the
author’s intended meaning, and so it is not the same thing as the text’s meaning. Hirsch’s solution would
seem to be a form of manipulation. That is, it is a matter of definition that preserves the notion of the author-
intended meaning as being the meaning of a text, with other meanings attributed to the text being labeled
as something other than “meaning.” This neat approach could be satisfying to anyone who is inclined
toward the authorial-intent view of textual meaning, but it is unconvincing to anyone who sees a text as
potentially having different meanings, depending on the individual. But for Hirsch, his use of definitions
to narrow down the meaning of a text to whatever the author meant when creating the text satisfies his
5ꢀSchleiermacher, “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens,” later published in Das Problem des Übersetzens.
6ꢀ Arguing at least temporarily from this point of view, Vanhoozer, Meaning in This Text, explains, “The goal of interpretation
is to recover the original meaning of the text…. The original meaning alone is the authentic meaning, the author’s actual,
authoritative meaning” (46). “Precisely because they have authors, texts don’t mean just anything. The author’s will acts as a
control on interpretation. Thanks to an author’s willing this rather than that, we can say that there is a definite meaning in texts
prior to reading and interpretation” (47). He adds (66), “The Cartesian subject, the cogito, begat the autonomous author, one
who speaks clearly in his or her own voice. Meaning is stable because the author is a stable subject.”
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conviction that a text has a definite meaning and cannot mean all kinds of things; that there are valid
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interpretations, and invalid ones.
New Criticism, the Intentional Fallacy, the Death of the Author
Interestingly, it was the goal of further objectivizing textual meaning that led to the abandonment of
objective approaches and the embrace of subjective, relativistic approaches. An academic approach to
literary criticism arose in the middle of the twentieth century called the New Criticism. The idea was to
try to come to grips with a text as a self-contained, structural unit, and not in terms of the personal factors
surrounding the text, such as what someone intended the text to mean, or how different people might
interpret it. (Keep in mind a poem as being an example of the kind of text being considered.) A distinction
was made between a text, on the one hand, and the biography surrounding that text, on the other. Even
the cultural context of the text was not considered when analyzing a text. A text meant what it said, and
the meaning is not to be found outside the text. The meaning of a text is to be found within the text itself.
Out of this New Criticism school of thought, William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (1946) proposed
that it was an “intentional fallacy” to think that a text means just what the author intended it to mean.
A comparison was made between creating a literary piece and giving birth. Once a new thing has been
produced, it is appropriate to look at the new thing (baby or poem) as a thing in itself, and not as an extension
of whoever produced it. Considerations of what the author might have been thinking when composing the
poem or story were speculative and irrelevant. Even if an author wanted to clarify the intended meaning
of a literary object that this same author had produced, it is too late. The text stands on its own. Wimsatt
and Beardsley had equal disregard for various reactions that the text might produce in a reader, and wrote
about an “affective fallacy” as well, distinguishing between what a text is and what effect it has. A text has
a certain structure and says what it says. You don’t look outside the text to find out what it means. This was
a Structuralist approach to literary analysis.
Roland Barthes came out of and contributed to this Structuralist approach to literature, with its interest
in seeing texts as systems of signs. In his classic essay “The Death of the Author” (1967), Barthes suggests
that the notion of the author is a fiction—a modern invention—and suggests in its place the term “scriptor.”
Out of his contempt for bourgeoisie and his affinity toward Marxism—itself a Structuralist system—Barthes
saw an author’s (or “scriptor’s”) attempt to control the meaning of a text he created as being illegitimately
coercive. An author’s intended meaning of a text is no more authoritative than the meaning or use that
anyone else might make of it. A text is an instance of language, and meaning in language is not limited to
one person. Why should an “author” be able to limit meaning? To suggest that the creator of a text had any
control over it, to Barthes, was capitalistic. Rather, he saw a text as part of a system, and the creator of the
text was also part of that system. In fact, Barthes did not see an author/scriptor as being a creator, but rather
saw the text and the scriptor as being created simultaneously. A scriptor is just someone who rearranges the
elements of language, as they are constantly being rearranged.
While Barthes’s de-emphasis of the author of a text agreed with the New Criticism, by pushing
Structuralism to its limits, Barthes led into Poststructuralism. That is, not everything one needs to know
about a text is found within the text itself. A text is part of a larger socio-cultural-historical-political-
economic system that the New Critics declined to recognize. While the author of a text is irrelevant or
nonexistent to Barthes, in his view the users of the text were not. While Barthes attempted to debunk the
notion that “author” and “authority” should be related, he did not think that the meaning of a text was
limited.
7ꢀ Vanhoozer, Meaning in This Text, 47, notes (emphasis added), “E.D. Hirsch Jr., an outspoken advocate of the authority of the
author, argues that without the author as an anchor of meaning, there would be no adequate principle for judging the validity
of an interpretation…. For Hirsch, the author’s intention is the only practical norm, the sole criterion for genuine consensus, the
sole guarantor of the objectivity of meaning. Strictly speaking, a sequence of words means nothing in particular until somebody
means something by them. It is the author who determines verbal meaning.”
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Reader Response
The New Criticism school of thought had a limited lifespan, and further developments in literary theory
ignored the proposal that one’s reaction to a literary work should be irrelevant. The emphasis came to be
on the variety of responses that a text can stimulate. This Reader Response school of thought contrasted
with preceding schools of thought that emphasized either the author’s intentions or the literary work as
something autonomous. The meaning of a text came to be seen as multivalent, with as many different
meanings as there are responses to it. The focus is now on the audience of a text, and not its origin. The
reader of a text completes its meaning.
Consider the analogy of a writer of a literary work compared to a composer of a symphony, with the
reader compared to a performer. The reading of a text brings out its potential, like the performing of a
symphony. But each “performance” of a text might be different, depending on the interpreter. In contrast
with the New Criticism, which emphasized that the meaning of a text is objective and consistent and totally
within the text itself, the Reader Response approach said that the meaning of a text is totally subjective and
outside the text, in the minds of the readers, and since there would be various readers, the meaning would
be variable.
Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida’s approach of Deconstruction attempted to call into question and unravel all of the
oppositions on which our understanding of texts is based. Structuralism is based on a system of oppositions
used to analyze. In his 1967 De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology], Derrida challenged the distinctions
between author and text and reader and context, between mind and body, between science and literature;
he challenged any distinction that could be made in order to show that nothing is on a solid foundation. His
conclusion was that everything is a text, and nothing stands outside the text. Everything is part of a system
of irreducible complexity and there are no firm foundations to use as a starting point. Any analysis only
raises more questions. Every text has multiple, contradictory interpretations.
While Modernism emphasized authorial intent, and New Criticism said that the meaning of a text is
solely within the text and not in either the author or reader, and Reader Response said that the reader
completes the meaning of a text in the reading, Deconstruction seems to say that the meaning is nowhere
and everywhere at the same time. The meaning, if anywhere, is in the overall system of which the author
and the text are a part, and on which nobody can get a good grasp because we are all part of that system.
There is no point in trying to determine “the” meaning of a text. Meaning is a matter of negotiation.
Philosophical Hermeneutics
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s most notable work, Truth and Method (1975), developed the concept of philosophical
hermeneutics. Gadamer took issue with the classical idea, associated with Schleiermacher, that
understanding a text involves recovering the author’s intended meaning, and at the same time took issue
with the idea that texts can be analyzed objectively, without reference to the author or interpreter. He used
the metaphor that the reading of a text is a fusion of horizons. Gadamer said that a text has its own horizon,
or vantage point and all that can be seen from that vantage point, and a reader brings his own horizon to the
text. Meaning is the result of the reader’s horizon being altered or widened by exposure to the horizon of the
text. Interpretation, or getting meaning out of a text, involves having one’s own view impacted through the
reading of that text. This, in turn, involves understanding how one’s own tradition relates to the tradition
in which the text was produced. The author of a text does not control its meaning. Meaning is only potential
in a text until the text is interpreted, and the interaction between author and reader brings the potential
meaning into reality. Different interpretations are possible and even inevitable, because different readers
bring different horizons of their own to the text. A horizon is the point beyond which a person cannot see,
but interaction with a text allows a person to extend his or her horizon.
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Paul Ricoeur is closely associated with Gadamer and continues to develop the concept of meaning as a
fusion of horizons. Once an author has created a text, the reader interacts with that text, and the author’s
8
thoughts or intentions become irrelevant. Another metaphor Ricoeur uses is that a text is like a musical
9
score that only provides for the potential for music—or meaning—until it is performed—or read. You can
either analyze a text (like analyzing a musical composition), or you can try to absorb what the text has to
say (like performing a musical piece). A reading of a text is a performance of it, and not all performances
will be the same. A musical conductor cannot interact with the composer except through the interpretation
of the music that the composer composed. Similarly, a reader cannot interact with an author except through
an interpretation of the text, or texts, that the author created. What the interpreter brings to the text will
determine what meaning can be gotten out of it. A text has a “surplus” of meaning, and in new contexts it
can be interpreted to mean things that are not limited by what the author intended. It is the reader of a text
that determines its meaning. The intention of the original author is behind the text, but the meaning of a
10
text is in front of it, and “interpretation actualizes the meaning of the text for the present reader.”
While Gadamer and Ricoeur, like Derrida and others, say that the original author’s intended meaning
is inaccessible and irrelevant to the interpretation of texts, they differ from Derrida in terms of seeing any
possibility that there is anything “out there” beyond the text. Derrida emphasizes that nothing is really
knowable outside a system that we are all trapped in, where signs only point to other signs. Ricoeur acts as
though there really is an objective reality, but we as humans with limited perspectives can only access that
reality indirectly. God is outside our human limitations. A text is something separate from the reader, and
the text and the reader each have their own horizons, and a reader can extend and modify his or her horizon
by interacting with the text.
Summary
The purpose of this survey has been to show that the emphasis on the author’s intended meaning as being
the unifying element of hermeneutics is not the oldest nor the most recent way of looking at meaning, but
rather is associated with a particular Western modern, or Modernist, worldview, in comparison with pre-
Modern and Postmodern and non-Western worldviews. A reason for focusing on authorial intent in the
Modern worldview has to do with the elevation of the human mind as being the thing we can be most sure
of and rely upon—thus Descartes’ rationalist argument for the existence of God based on “I think, therefore
I am” as a starting point. Another rationale for focusing on the meaning that an author intended for his
or her text has to do with the Modernist drive toward objectivity, including objective meaning, and the
concern that if a text does not have a meaning that is unified by whatever the author intended it to mean,
then its meaning is subjective and indeterminate. However, both the traditional Hebrew approach to textual
meaning and the Postmodern approach accept the fact that meanings are not objective and not fixed, and
that the unifying element of hermeneutics is not the author’s intention, but rather the text itself, as it is
interpreted in various contexts.
An implication of this overview is that the hermeneutic approach that emphasizes authorial intent
cannot be taken for granted unless it can be defended. There are two main defenses for the emphasis on
authorial intent. One argument is that it is just so obviously the truth that the author “owns” the meaning
of a text that it is ridiculous to think otherwise—an attitude that goes along with Modernism. The other
argument is that the loss of authorial intent as being the unifying factor and the objective meaning of a text
leads to chaos. However, if meaning is something that is inherently subjective, then a search for objective
meaning is inappropriate. If it can be valid to have different perspectives on the same subject or object, then
the Modernist emphasis on finding the single correct meaning of a text is inappropriate.
8ꢀ Vanhoozer, Meaning in This Text, 108: “As interpreters, Ricoeur believes, we do not meet a mind behind the text; rather
we encounter a possible way of looking at things, a possible world, in front of the text…. The fusion of horizons is a matter of
decoding the sense of the text and of unfolding its referent.”
9ꢀRicoeur, Interpretation Theory, 75.
10ꢀIbid., 92.
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Most of the hermeneutic debate over the ages has focused on a literary text, such as a poem, where the
author’s intentions really are inaccessible, other than by exegeting the text itself. But why does a poem have
to have a singular meaning, which is the meaning that the author intended it to have? This is a philosophical
debate. In biblical hermeneutics, again the original author’s intentions are not available to us today, other
than through what he wrote. But more is at stake, in that the scriptures are taken as authoritative, and so
the authority/authorship of the text is a matter of concern.
In continuing to try to sort out how to translate scripture meaningfully on the basis of whether the
meaning resides in the author’s intent or elsewhere, we will turn our attention to the field of law, where, as
in biblical studies, the question of how a text came to be has a bearing on important, practical outcomes.
Biblical Interpretation Compared with Legal Interpretation
The questions that have been raised about where to find the meaning of a text in connection with biblical
exegesis and Bible translation have a special connection with Constitutional law and what is known in legal
circles as statutory construction. Our special interest here is in the translation of scriptures, but in order
to translate something like the scriptures, one has to have some understanding—even if incomplete—as to
what the text means. For this to be anything more than an academic exercise, there has to be something
at stake. Scripture translation and Constitutional law have in common the fact that theological and legal
implications provide a motivation for finding the truest meaning and significance of the texts in question.
Though Constitutional law does not necessarily have any connection with translation, scripture translation
and Constitutional law have in common that fact that the starting point for further action—whether
translation and then scripture use, in the case of Bible translation, or legal judgments and action in the
case of Constitutional law—is the determination of the meaning of the text in question. Some interesting
parallels will be drawn between scripture translation and legal interpretation, with the conclusion in both
cases that the grounding for either scripture translation or a legal judgment is in the words of the text, and
not in the heads of any single participant associated with that text, including the intentions of the original
author.
Asinliteraryandphilosophicalhermeneutics, soalsoinlegalinterpretationthereareseveralidentifiable
schools of thought as to where the meaning of the text resides. Even within a singular hermeneutic
school, there are various canons that a judge may have to sort through to help interpret the law in cases
of ambiguity. The following is a survey of the different schools of thought in legal hermeneutics, paying
attention to the reasoning behind them and its applicability to biblical hermeneutics and its applicability
to Bible translation. A technical distinction that is relevant to the practice of law is made between statutes,
on the one hand, and the Constitution, the highest rule of law in the United States, on the other. The use
of the Constitution and the statutes in legal judgments is called construction. The first rule of statutory
construction is to go by the plain meaning of the text.
Statutory Construction
Legal interpretation, as practiced particularly by the judiciary, involves statutes that are subject to
interpretation, and a judge’s responsibility is to apply the law in a way that is considered to be faithful
to the spirit and/or the letter of the law. There are standard rules for statutory construction, which is a
technical term for the interpretation that a judge must make of legal statutes in order to make a ruling. The
most basic rule of statutory construction is that the plain sense of the words of the legal text is paramount.
To the extent that the meaning of the statute is clear, then no further deliberation is necessary. As the U.S.
Supreme Court stated in one of its rulings, “Courts must presume that a legislature says in a statute what it
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means and means in a statute what it says there.”
11ꢀConnecticut Nat’l Bank v. Germain, 112 S. Ct. 1146, 1149 (1992).
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However, human language can be imprecise, and laws often have relevance to situations that go beyond
the language of the statutes themselves, and there is inevitably some room for interpretation. In instances
of any ambiguity, the rules of statutory construction must be used. The rules of statutory construction
have less to do with legal philosophy and legislative intent, and more to do with disambiguating unclear
language. Where the plain sense of the statute is not clear, a judge may have to sort through the different
rules of statutory construction in order to be able to make a judgment.
In traditional Talmudic hermeneutics, there are various rules for interpreting the scriptures, including
Kal va-Chomer (Simple and complex), Gezerah Shavah (Similar laws, similar verdicts), Binyan ab mi-katuv
echad (A standard from a passage of scripture), Binyan ab mi-shene ketubim (A standard from two passages
of scripture), Kelal u-perat (General and particular), Perat u-kelal (Particular and general), Ka-yotze bo
mi-makom acher (Like that in another place), and Davar ha-lamed me-inyano (Something proved by the
context). Similarly, in American statutory construction (interpretation), there are some standard rules for
interpretation, which after “plain meaning” include Ejusdem generis (Of the same kind or nature), Expressio
unius est exclusio alterius (The explicit mention of one thing implicitly excludes other things of the same
class that are not mentioned), In pari materia (Upon the same subject), Noscitur a sociis (It is known by its
associates), Reddendo singula singulis (Referring each to each) and Specialibus non derogant (The general
does not detract from the specific). In addition to these rules of statutory construction are considerations of
legal precedent and legislative intent.
Competing Philosophies in Legal Interpretation
Beyond the standard rules of statutory construction, there are competing philosophies as to where the
meaning of a legal document such as the U.S. Constitution can be found. This is related to the issue of
legislative intent. The term Strict Constructionism dates back to the early nineteenth century and refers to a
very conservative view of the Constitution, such that it is not interpreted to say anything other than what it
clearly says. Advocates for Strict Constructionism sought to keep the powers of the government limited, and
objected to the federal government taking on more power and responsibility than what is clearly spelled
out in the Constitution. The legal question, from this perspective, is what does the law clearly say, without
inferences. Strict Constructionism implies judicial restraint and the avoidance of making inferences from
the Constitution, or any other law. In more recent decades, the term has been used more loosely to refer to
any conservative view among Supreme Court Justices, or candidates for that position, including some who
reject that label.
A theory of jurisprudence that contrasts with Strict Constructionism has come to be called the Living
Constitution. The idea here is that the Constitution cannot be limited to only the exact words of the text, or the
situations envisioned at the time it was ratified. Rather, the Constitution should be seen as something living
and dynamic, and adaptable to new situations. It must be allowed to grow and evolve, and the meaning of
the Constitution cannot be limited to whatever it might have meant at the time it was drafted and ratified.
A rationale for the Living Constitution theory of legal interpretation is that the framers of the Constitution
obviously meant to make it a living document, open-ended, not fixed or limited, and deliberately imprecise
in such a way that it could endure indefinitely without being outdated. If they had wanted to, they could
have stipulated how the Constitution was to be interpreted. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled in an
early twentieth century Supreme Court decision, “The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical
formulas having their essence in their form. They are organic, living institutions, transplanted from English
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soil. Their significance is vital, not formal.”
Virtually all Constitutional scholars agree that the U.S. Constitution must be interpreted and applied to
new situations. The concern among some, however, is that a Living Constitution theory promotes judicial
activism and allows judges to read meanings into the law that do not appropriately fit. The concern is that
judges can make the Constitution say whatever they think it should say, thus placing themselves as a higher
authority than the lawmakers. In effect, then, the nation would be ruled by opinion rather than law.
12ꢀIn Gompers v. United States, 233 U. S. 604 (1914).
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The term Originalism came to be used in the late twentieth century to denote a theory of legal
interpretation that disagreed with the notion of the Constitution as being a living document. Referring to
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Forbes columnist Peter Robinson observes,
Against the theory of ‘the living Constitution,’ Scalia advances the theory of ‘originalism.’ Although it has now become
associated with him, the Justice insists originalism proved the dominant interpretive theory in American courts throughout
most of our history. Simply put, originalism holds that the Constitution means what it meant when it was ratified. No more,
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no less. The document doesn’t morph. It stays put.
Originalism is not exactly the same thing as Strict Constructionism, and it obviously conflicts with the Living
Constitution view. But there are at least two sub-types of Originalism, to be explained below. The main idea
of Originalism is that the meaning of the Constitution was established generally at the time of its framing
and ratification and is not subject to change. However, there is still room for disagreement as to whether the
meaning is in the intentions of the original authors or in the wording of the text itself. Originalism can be
compatible with Textualism, which will also be explained below.
Original Intent is one of the subtypes of Originalism. The idea of Original Intent is that the meaning of a
legal document such as the Constitution is equated with whatever the framers were thinking when they worded
it, and what their intentions were in creating their document. This is basically the same as the Authorial Intent
position, discussed above in connection with literary interpretation. According to the principle of Original
Intent, in making a legal ruling a judge should try to determine what the framers, or original authors, intended
the Constitution to mean, and accept that as the authoritative meaning. Anything beyond what the framers
might have intended is irrelevant. It would be inappropriate to think of the Constitution as having an open-
ended meaning that can shift over time. The way for the Constitution to “grow” would be for it to be amended.
Thus, the significance of the Constitution and other laws is determined by lawmakers, and the job of a judge
is simply to determine what the lawmakers consciously wanted to accomplish when they fashioned the law.
This philosophy is reflected in the words of present U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas,
Let me put it this way; there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution—try to discern as best we can what the
framers intended or make it up. No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are
tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure,
even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodo-
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logies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.
A way of determining Original Intent would be to study other writings of the framers of the Constitution, such
as the Federalist Papers.
There is a subtle but significant difference between Original Intent and Original Meaning. The problem
with Original Intent is the word “intent.” The idea of Original Meaning is that it does not matter what the
framers of the Constitution were thinking or intending when they wrote it; what matters is what they actually
wrote. Original Meaning refers to a specific variety of Originalism whereby the focus is not on whatever was in
the heads of the framers of the Constitution at the time they wrote it, but rather on what normal meaning the
words of the text would have had at the time it was ratified. Here, text creation is not seen just as a psychological
act, but more of a social, public, communicative act—and in the case of the Constitution, of course, a legal act.
The idea of Original Meaning is that a legal text has a conventional meaning that is shared among a group
of people, including the group of legislators involved in its drafting, and those who were involved in ratifying
the document. The meaning is not located in one particular person, especially since legal documents are
typically composed as a group project, and each member of the team might not have the same intentions, but
they would have to agree on the wording. And then the wording of the text would not become law until it has
been understood and voted on by others. The wording has to be precise in order to be acceptable by a group
13ꢀSee www.forbes.com/2009/03/12/constitution-originalism-supreme-court-opinions-columnists-justice-scalia.html.
14ꢀ In a lecture to the Manhattan Institute in 2008, reported in the Wall Street Journal. See www.wsj.com/articles/
SB122445985683948619.
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of people. According to the philosophy of Original Meaning, in interpreting the Constitution, the appropriate
meaning to attribute to it would be whatever could be determined to be the common understanding of that
legal language at the time of its framing and ratification. Thus Original Meaning contrasts with both Original
Intent, because the emphasis is on common understanding rather than private thoughts of a single individual,
and with the Living Constitution, because judgments today based on legal texts should be made in light of the
original meanings surrounding those texts.
According to the principle of Original Meaning in connection with the U.S. Constitution, the intent of the
lawmakers is difficult or impossible to determine, and is probably also not singular. It was the ratifiers who
turned the draft Constitution into law, and so their understanding of what the document meant was even
more significant than the private thoughts and intentions of those who crafted it. It may also be difficult to
know for sure what the ratifiers understood by the document, but what one can do is try to determine how
the wording of the document might have been generally understood at that time in the history of the United
States and its form of language. In his book The Tempting of America (1990), Constitutional Scholar Robert
Bork used the term Original Understanding to label the same philosophy, explaining, “Law is a public act.
Secret reservations or intentions count for nothing. All that counts is how the words used in the Constitution
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would have been understood at the time.”
Closely related to Original Meaning in Constitutional law is Textualism. The idea of Textualism is that a
legal document such as the Constitution has an ordinary meaning, apart from what it meant to the author(s),
or to a new audience, and especially apart from anyone’s intentions. One should pay attention to the text itself,
rather than any individual associated with the text. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., described this position
before he became a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only
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what the statutes mean.”
However, meanings of words and expressions do change over time, so it is possible to be a Textualist
and an Originalist both. That is, the proper meaning of a legal document such as the Constitution would be
whatever could be determined to be its ordinary meaning at the time of its ratification. The original meaning
takes precedence over contemporary meanings. This is not the same as the intended meaning however. As
present U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia contends, “It is the law that governs, not the intent of the
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lawgiver.”
Scalia is a prominent spokesman for a Textualist and Originalist approach to Constitutional law, that
being the topic of a number of lectures and his 1997 book A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the
Law. He would argue for looking at the wording and meaning of the legal document itself, in light of the
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conventions of language at the time it was made into law. He explains,
The theory of originalism treats a constitution like a statute, and gives it the meaning that its words were understood to bear
at the time they were promulgated. You will sometimes hear it described as the theory of original intent. You will never hear
me refer to original intent, because as I say I am first of all a textualist, and secondly an originalist. If you are a textualist,
you don’t care about the intent, and I don’t care if the framers of the Constitution had some secret meaning in mind when
they adopted its words. I take the words as they were promulgated to the people of the United States, and what is the fairly
understood meaning of those words.
Constitutional Law and Bible Translation Compared
There are a number of parallels between the practices of Constitutional law and Bible translation. In
contrast with literary interpretation, law practice and Bible translation both involve a text that has to be
interpreted because it must be acted upon. In the case of Constitutional law, judgments must be made that
have a legal effect upon how people live. The study of the scriptures should also affect people’s lives, but
15ꢀBork, Tempting, 144.
16ꢀOliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Harvard Law Review 12:417 (1899).
17ꢀScalia, 1997 Tanner Lecture.
18ꢀIn a speech at the Catholic University of America titled “A Theory of Constitution Interpretation,” given October 18, 1996.
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especially in translation in particular, the work cannot be done without a determination being made about
the meaning of the text. Both disciplines force the responsible party to decide where the meaning of the text
resides, in order to be able to act on it.
The U.S. Constitution and the Judeo-Christian scriptures each have multiple authors. The Constitution
was ratified by a body of legislators to become the law of the land. This implies that in this process, what the
text was understood to mean is of equal or greater weight than what it was intended to mean, since it was
the ratifiers who made it into law. The Constitution is treated as the highest authority in our government as
to what is acceptable behavior, and as a guide as how to treat unacceptable behavior. Similarly, the Bible
was judged to be authoritative and was canonized by early church fathers and councils, so what those
individuals and councils understood the writings to be saying is of great significance. In human terms, one
would say that these individuals passed on certain writings to us as scripture, and did not pass on other
ancient writings, because of their determination of the content of those writings. For the most part, the
scriptures have been disseminated in the form of translation, as Christianity has been called a translated
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religion.
The Human Condition
An inescapable fact about humanity is that people have a limited perspective. Our knowledge about
the truth is subjective and indirect, and even good people are capable of being wrong or seeing things
differently. That is not to say that there is no absolute truth, but only that our understanding of it is limited.
An inescapable fact about translation is that it depends on interpretation. To translate an original text,
one has to know what the original means. Translating without knowing the meaning is transliteration. A
translator must be able to make sense of the source text and re-express the same concepts and ideas in the
forms of another language. Even if the translator has mastered both the source language and the language
being translated into, the translator will admit two main problems. One is that no translator probably would
claim to understand the full depth of meaning of the source text. Secondly, it is absolutely impossible to
express the full depth of meaning of a complex text in one language in the forms of another language. So
translation is about judgments, priorities, intelligent choices, focusing on what the translator determines to
be the most central, important, basic and sure meanings to try to express in another language.
Translation depends on meaning, and meaning is personal. Words and other linguistic forms are media
used for the purpose of communication, and meaning takes place in the individual when that person
interacts with the text. Yet at the same time, language is corporate and conventional. That fact makes it
possible for communication to take place. The Bible itself is shared property.
There are disagreements on where to locate the meaning of the scriptures and how to translate it. Is the
truest meaning of the scriptures in the heads and in the intentions of the original authors? If so, that might
support the Authorial Intent school of thought. Or were the original authors perhaps not in control of the
meanings of the texts that are associated with them? Note what the Apostle Peter wrote in his second letter
(2 Peter 1:20–21 NIV), “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the
prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets,
though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
In human terms, apostles and prophets were the authors of the writings that have been canonized
as Holy Scripture. Whenever the phrase “original author’s intended meaning” is used in connection with
Bible translation, the “original author” being referred to is Moses or Isaiah or John or Paul, and so forth. It is
possible, and even likely, that the human authors did not fully understand themselves the full significance
of what they were led to say. As Peter wrote in his First Letter,
19ꢀ See, for example, Sanneh, Whose Religion, 97: “Christianity is a translated religion…. Without translation there would be
no Christianity or Christians. Translation is the church’s birthmark as well as its missionary benchmark: the church would be
unrecognizable or unsustainable without it.” See also Walls, “Translation Principle,” 28: “Bible translation as a process is thus
both a reflection of the central act on which the Christian faith depends and a concretization of the commission which Christ
gave his disciples. Perhaps no other specific activity more clearly represents the mission of the Church.”
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Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the
greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he
predicted the sufferings of the Messiah and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving
themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to
you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. (1 Peter 1:10–12 NIV)
Peter describes the prophets as looking for the meaning of their own prophecies. If the term “original
authors” refers to prophets and apostles, their writings have significance that goes beyond what they
themselves understood. In the translation of the scriptures, the important thing is not necessarily what the
human authors might have intended or were thinking. What matters to us today is what they wrote. In fact,
what these human authors meant is irretrievable to us today except through what they wrote, studied in
light of any information available about the context in which it was written.
How Shall We Then Translate?
Determining the meaning of a text is essential for translating it. Recognizing that meaning is not all located
in one place, the question is where to look for it. Can the translator try to determine the original author’s
intended meaning and call that the true meaning of a text? In the case of living authors, that idea might
at least be feasible, where one could dialogue with the author to find out what he or she meant. But in the
case of distant authors, to the extent that a distinction can be made between an author’s thoughts and
intentions, on the one hand, and the author’s expression, on the other, the translator only has access to
the latter. We have to assume that the author’s intentions and thoughts were coterminous with what he
expressed. We have the text, and that is what we translate. It would be inappropriate to translate thoughts
and intentions, even if we had access to them apart from their expression.
It is texts that are the object of translation. Yet a judgment must be made about the meaning of a text in
order to be able to translate it. Where does the meaning reside? In the text itself? A text is only a medium of
communication, and strictly speaking, meanings are only in people’s heads—God included, if it is allowable
to be so anthropomorphic. But in another sense, a text is full of meaning, in that a text is a manifestation
of human language, and language is a shared social system of conventional uses and structures. Texts have
meanings to the social group that shares the language in which the text is written.
The meaning of a text—and especially of a text of any complexity—is not univalent. A text can have
meanings on different levels, in that the meaning of a sentence is more than the sum of the words that make
it up, and the meaning of a text is more than the sum of the sentences that make it up, yet each of the parts
has meaning, as well as the whole. Since it is absolutely impossible for the total meaning of a complex text
to be translated simultaneously, the translator has to decide which meanings are most important to focus
on, e.g., on concordance and word-level meanings, or on higher-level thematic meanings.
Another way in which meaning is not univalent is that different people can attribute different meanings
to a text, from their different perspectives. The text can remain consistent, while people disagree on what
it means. They may or may not be able to reconcile their different views of the text through dialogue. Since
meanings are ultimately only in people’s heads, a text could potentially have as many meanings as there are
people interpreting it. It is unlikely that there will be so many significantly different interpretations among
honest interpreters, but the point is that there is some room for disagreement.
Not all translations are alike, because different translators focus on different meanings in the text to
translate, such as, for example, word-level meanings as opposed to propositional meanings, and because
they have different interpretations of the text being translated. Added to this is the fact that language allows
for some variation in how the same idea can be expressed. A translator has decisions to make about the
meaning, and about which meanings to focus on, and about how to express meanings through vocabulary,
syntax and discourse.
If meaning is subjective, and yet translation unavoidably involves making a determination about the
meaning of the text, then where and how is the meaning to be found? It is proposed here that the anchor
for translation is the text to be translated. That is the constant. Translation changes the text into a different
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form, but at the same time, in some important sense, the text remains the same after being translated.
Supposedly the meaning of the translation is the same as the meaning of the original text, now couched in
different form. This sameness, which is hard to pin down scientifically, is what qualifies the translation as
a different instance of the same text.
Two quotes from the preceding survey of hermeneutical stances stand out for their similarity. Edersheim
pointed out that in traditional Jewish hermeneutics, as used by biblical writers such as Matthew and Paul,
“To an inspired writer, nay, to a true Jewish reader of the Old Testament, the question in regard to any
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prophecy could not be: What did the prophet—but, What did the prophecy—mean?” The focus was on
the text and not on the intentions of the originator of the text. And writing close to the same time, Holmes
wrote in connection with the practice of law, “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only
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what the statutes mean.” These statements agree with the Textualist approach advanced by Scalia, to
the effect that what someone was privately thinking is not as significant for law—or, arguably, for Bible
translation—as what that person actually expressed through language in writing, and what was accepted
as an authoritative document.
Since a number of different meanings could be attributed to a text, the translator’s job is to sort through
those interpretations to make a decision on the meaning to translate. A starting point might be to try to
figure what the text likely meant its original context, according to information available to us today about
that context and about the normal uses of words, grammatical constructions, and figures of speech at the
time the text was written.
But as Ricoeur points out, the writing of a spoken text unmoors it from the original speaker-hearer
context and there is a “disjunction of the verbal meaning of the text from the mental intention of the
22
author,” making a written text somewhat different in kind from a spoken text. The writing of a text and its
removal from its original context results in what Ricoeur calls a surplus of meaning, and “we have to guess
23
the meaning of a text because the author’s intention is beyond reach.” Following Ricouer, a written text
takes on a new life of its own.
In the case of translation, the translator has to consider not just what the text meant in its original
context, but also its potential for meaning in a new context. The translator must make a determination
about the meaning of the text and its potential meaning, and determine how to convey meaning to a new
audience in light of their needs. This is an awesome responsibility. It depends on interpretation, but it goes
beyond interpretation in that the translator must decide, among potential meanings and interpretations,
which ones to try to communicate to a new audience through translation.
References
Arichea, Daniel C. and Eugene A. Nida. A Handbook on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians. New York: UBS, 1976.
Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen, 5–6 (1967).
Bork, Robert H. The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law. New York: Free Press, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967.
Edersheim, Alfred. The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1883.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Seabury, 1975.
Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Ricoeur, Paul. Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976.
Sanneh, Lamin. Whose Religion is Christianity? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
Scalia, Antonin. A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens.” In Das Problem des Übersetzens, edited
by Hans Joachim Störig, 38-70. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963[1813].
Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Is There Meaning in This Text? Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
20ꢀEdersheim, Life and Times, 215.
21ꢀHarvard Law Review 12:417 (1899).
22ꢀRicoeur, Interpretation Theory, 75.
23ꢀIbid.
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Walls, Andrew F. “The Translation Principle in Christian History.” In The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in
the Transmission of Faith, edited by Andrew F. Walls, 26–42. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.
Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Intentional Fallacy.” Sewanee Review 54 (1946), 468–488.
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