This may seem rather unimportant, but it bothers me. A modern translation (NIV) of Luke 11:27-28 reads: “As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, ‘Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.’ He replied, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.’ Here is what Lewis writes about those verses in a letter of May 8, 1945: " [the Roman Church’s] theology about the B[lessed].V[irgin].M[ary] I reject because it seems utterly foreign to the New Testament: where indeed the words ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee’ receive a rejoinder pointing in exactly the opposite direction”. These seem to me very strange words: “exactly the opposite direction”. It’s almost as if Lewis is saying that Christ is saying that his mother is not “blessed”, which certainly would make no sense. But in any case, the word “rather” is taken to have a negative sense. But here is what a translator of Greek, Fr. Christopher Stade, writes about that word (translation of “The Explanation by Blessed Theophylact of the Holy Gospel According to St. Luke”, page 130) : “The Greek word menounge… rendered …in the KJV as ‘yea, rather’, is the same word which occurs in Phil. 3:8, where the KJV gives ‘yea, doubtless’ and in Rom. 10:18 where the KJV gives ‘Yes verily’. The force of menounge is that it corrects the previous statement not by negating it but by amplifying it.”
So it seems that the word “rather” in the King James Version also has the same positive meaning that it sometimes has in contemporary English, e.g. “I rather like it”, And so it seems that Lewis is wrong in his interpretation of Luke 11:28. That is strange, given his linguistic skills. But my feeling is that this was something that he just threw off in reply to one of many Catholic correspondents asking him why he wasn’t a Catholic, without seriously analyzing the Greek text.
So I have come to the conclusion that most (not all) modern English translations of Luke 11:28 are wrong, and that the verse should properly read, (as in the Godbey New Testament): “And He said, Truly blessed are those hearing the word of God, and keeping it” (giving HIs Mother as an example).
This is the same (positive) meaning that that verse has in the Russian translation. And Manuel, is that also true of the Spanish translation?
Dimitry
“Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever.” (1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)