On the worst translation in the New Testament

Sep 26, 2022

Metanoia, from the Greek μετάνοια, from meta (“after”) + noein (“to think”).

In Classical Greek, metanoia referred to changing one’s mind. Metanoia was personified as a cloaked and sorrowful goddess, an embodiment of regret for the missed moment, who accompanied Kairos, the god of opportune moments.
There Kairos suddenly appears: in the fleetingness of a sigh, in the quivering of a breeze, in the unexpected movement of a lock of hair. The Greeks put it so beautifully: in the erèmia, the “pregnant pause.”
Such as between two notes of music.

Barbara Baert, “Kairos: The Right Moment or Occasion”
In later centuries kairos was replaced with the concepts occasio and fortuna and was often depicted as a woman on a flying orb.

Metanoia in Christian theology

There are multiple references to metanoia in the New Testament. King James and Modern English versions usually translate it as repentance.
According to J. Glentworth Butler, however, the original text carries none of the sorrow or regret associated with repentance. To him, this is a case of “utter mistranslation” — partly due to the fact that no English word fully conveys the Greek term’s meaning.
The result?
It is a linguistic and theological tragedy that we have to go on using “repentance” for [metanoia].

A. T. Robertson, Word Pictures in the New Testament - 2 Corinthians
For Robertson, translating John the Baptist’s call metanoeite as “repent” was “the worst translation in the New Testament”.
Repent is related to guilt and has a negative connotation. But metanoia carries a positive, life-affirming sense. The call was not to a confession of sins but to a change of mind and conduct.
Properly understood, metanoia is “a transformative change of heart and mind”, a fundamental reorientation of outlook, of our vision of the world and of ourselves, of our way of life — “a transmutation of consciousness” that opens new possibilities and a new future.