There is an Italian saying, to translate is to betray. (It sounds better in Italian.) The saying reminds us that when moving between languages you lose some nuance, some understanding that lay in the original. Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic, a Hebrew dialect. His words were remembered by Aramaic speakers (since there was no stenographer writing them all down. Later when his words were written they were not recorded in Aramaic but translated into Greek, the common language of the ancient world. Since most of us do not read Greek we have translated the words of Jesus from Greek into English. We trust that the Holy Spirit guided the process of remembering the words of Jesus accurately as they were recalled by the early Church and later as they were translated into Greek. When St. Luke records Jesus saying, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” we believe it to be the revealed Word of God that we are to follow.
