Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.09.1990, Page 203

Samanburður á Nýja testamentinu 1813 og 1827
categories of Nida and Louw in the Greek-English Lexicon of the New
Testament 1988. Various loci in the two Bible editions are compared with
respect to the way in which Greek words for the body have been
translated into Icelandic. Use is made of the concordance to the Icelandic
Bible translation of 1981, a joint project of several research institutes of
the University of Iceland and the first computerized concordance to the
Icelandic Bible.
The principle conclusion of the aforementioned comparison is that the
word body (líkami) is used less frequently in the 1827 revised edition than
in the edition of 1813. In place of expressions meaning "dead body", the
word corpse (lík), which is not found in the New Testament of 1813, is
employed. In the 1813 edition, the word carcass (hræ) was used for the
Greek sóma, ptóma and kólon. In other instances, where a word means
"living body", there is more variation; the 1827 uses man (maður), the
personal pronoun / (ég), or the proper name Jesus (Jesú) where the 1813
edition uses body (líkami), life (líf, in one case only) or flesh (hold).
Words with the meaning "the body of Christ" (líkami Krists) are
generally rendered as body (líkami) in the 1827 edition, where flesh
(hold) had been used in the 1813 edition. The translators of the 1827
edition evidently felt that the word flesh (hold) was too "meaty", so to
speak, to be used in this connection. In the 1827 edition, the word hovel
(hreysi) is abandoned as a translation for the Greek skenos, and tabernacle
(tjaldbúð) used instead. The word hreysi includes the meaning element "of
stone" in Old Icelandic, but not in Modem Icelandic. This illustrátes the
way in which the vocabulary of the 1827 edition showed more variety
than that of the 1813 edition, and increased conformity with
contemporary usage.
Uses of the words body (líkami) andflesh (hold) in ancient Icelandic
texts, the Icelandic Sagas and the Sagas of the Sturlungs, are likewise
compared with the 1813 Bible edition. In this connection, the new
concordances for the Icelandic Sagas and the Sagas of the Sturlungs,
produced at the University of Iceland, are employed. In these sagas, the
word body (líkami) is more often used for "dead body" than "living
body", and a bit more frequently for "the body of Christ" than the word
flesh (hold)—the latter only in the Sagas of the Sturlungs, however, which
describes Christian Iceland. The word flesh (hold) in the sagas is almost
always used to mean "meat" (kjöt), with perhaps a single exception.
In medieval Nordic translations of the Bible, the words body (líkami)
andflesh (hold) correspond rather consistently to the Latin corpus and
caro, and Latin usage may have largely determined the use of these terms
in the oldest translations and in the oldest Icelandic translation of the New
Testament from 1540. There, however, the word flesh (hold) is used for
corpus Christi, and this translation is incorporated with few changes into
the Bible edition of 1813. Thus, there is in many respects an unbroken
tradition in Bible translation reaching from 1540 all the way down to
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