In preparation for a course I'll teach, together with a teaching assistant, in November, I'm re-reading (after about 35 years!) Fee and Stuart's "How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth."
I now find myself disagreeing almost entirely with this paragraph:
'In chapter 1 we also noted the difficulty in rendering Paul’s use of the word sarx (“flesh”). In most cases, almost anything is better than the literal “flesh.” The NIV handles this word especially well: “sinful nature” when Paul is contrasting “flesh” and “spirit”; “human nature” in Romans 1:3 where it refers to Jesus’ Davidic descent; “from a worldly point of view” in 2 Corinthians 5:16 noted above (cf. 1 Cor 1:26 “by human standards”); and “body” when it means that, as in Colossians 1:22.'
I believe that, in fact, almost no translation is better than the literal "flesh" where Paul wrote "flesh" ("sarks" or "sarx" in Greek).
Once upon a time the argument made much sense to me, that "flesh" was a metaphor for a kind of nature or inclination, a dimension of experience, certainly not (apart from a few "literal" instances) an overt reference to the physical body, the "meat" we're made of. I now think completely the opposite.
The argument that "almost anything is better" seemed based on two, perhaps three things:
A) a (misguided, in my opinion) urgent solicitousness to rescue believers from the error of dualism, some quasi-gnostic or "eastern" notion that everything material is evil and only the "spiritual" is holy and transcendent--or, if you will, a kind of "Puritanism" obsessed with "the sins of the flesh";
B) an urge, wholly bound up with the previous, to rescue the Scriptures themselves from mocking caricaturization as a Puritan primer consumed with supercilious control of everyone's physical instincts;
C) perhaps a secret fear that Paul (the primary NT user of this metaphor) either was insufficiently aware of the nuances suggested by his use of the word "flesh" or, worse, really did adhere to some obsessive kind of self-denying asceticism in the quest for nirvana-like enlightenment.
All in all, the sense one got was that there was a general embarrassment at the appearance of the word "flesh" in the NT texts, and a fear of its being exploited variously for misguided, self-harming asceticism, or conversely (and ironically) for quasi-gnostic antinomianism (since the "flesh" is of no significance, it doesn't matter what we do in the "flesh"), or for anti-Christian polemic.
And so, it was felt, "almost anything is better" than translating "flesh" as "flesh"--better to tweak Paul's use of the word with our interpretive "translation" (read, paraphrase) of it.
I now disagree entirely. It seems to me that the "almost anything is better" approach epitomizes the error of throwing the baby out with the bath water. In this case we have thrown out depth and nuance together with the sarx.
Paul wasn't an idiot. That seems to me the main thing lost in all this scurrying scramble to "fix" his unfortunate use of a word. As if the poor man couldn't possibly have imagined the embarrassment he was causing (us!) with his primitive, hamfisted employment of such an un-nuanced word so screamingly susceptible to misapprehension. The other side of that coin is, of course, the assumption that Paul's readers are idiots who, unless we cut them off at the pass, will take Paul's word "flesh" and run with it to all kinds of ghastly conclusions. In any case, the thinking seems to go, there is something dreadfully wrong there somewhere, whether on Paul's part, the readers' part, or some combination of the two. Whichever it may be, it requires fixing, and, thus, "almost anything is better" than the word Paul used.
And what do we lose in the unfolding of that miasma of assumptions (about what Paul meant) and fears (as to where it might lead)?
I am persuaded that we lose the profoundest understanding of Paul's entire theological horizon, both soteriologically and eschatologically, in which the flesh-metaphor, utilized across a wide range of contexts and considerations, continues to bring that horizon ever more crisply into view. This is disastrously lost when you insist on reconceptualizing the word in every context, so that the metaphor is not allowed to assert its broad meaning. Then, too, of course, there is the obvious danger, i.e., when you insist on replacing "flesh" with an interpretative paraphrase, to convey "what Paul really meant," you could simply be plain dead wrong, that the apostle wasn't talking about that. The likelihood is huge that, in fact, you are wrong. So what have you done to the text then? Not a service, to say the least.
