The Word They Translated Wrong

There is a Greek word standing at the front door of the Gospels, and for most of two thousand years the English-speaking world has been handed the wrong key for it.

The word is metanoia. It is the first thing John the Baptist is given to say, and the first thing Jesus is given to say after him, and everything downstream turns on it. In almost every English Bible it arrives as repent. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Hold the English word up to the light and see what it is made of. Repentance is sorrow. It is the ache under the sternum, the reviewing of the ledger, the wish that you had not. It is a feeling, and it faces backward. It asks you to be accurately sad about something you have already done.

Now hold up the Greek. Meta — beyond, across, after, change. Nous — mind. Not heart. Not conscience. Mind: the whole apparatus by which you take in a situation and decide what it is. Metanoia is not sorrow about the past. It is a different mind going forward. Maurice Nicoll, who spent thirty years on this and did not say things loosely, wrote that metanoia means "transformation of the mind" and "contains in it no idea of pain or sorrow, of regret or repentance". He was blunter still: it refers to "a new mind, not a new heart", and you cannot have the second without first having the first.

How did we get from the one to the other? Through Latin, mostly, and through an institution that had a use for the difference. Jerome's Vulgate rendered the imperative as paenitentiam agite - do penance. Not change your mind; perform an act of contrition. And then watch the timing, because the timing is the whole argument. In 1516 Erasmus printed the Greek beside his own Latin, and his Latin still read poeniteat vos, be penitent - he had not yet reached for the other word. In 1517 Luther nailed up a first thesis that quotes the old rendering exactly as he found it, Penitentiam agite, and built the sentence that split the Church on top of it. Only in 1519, in his second edition, did Erasmus change his own translation to resipiscite, come to your senses. Somewhere in the annotations he kept expanding across five editions he put it even more plainly - ad mentem redite, come back to your mind - and I cannot tell you which edition, only that he got there. The correction arrived after the fight had started. By then the wrong word had had eleven hundred years to build architecture around itself. Confessionals. Indulgences. Penitential seasons. An entire civilization's spiritual vocabulary organized around feeling bad, well, on schedule.

It would be cheap to call this an accident, so I won't. Consider what each of the two words can be made to do. Sorrow can be administered. It can be scheduled, measured, assigned, absolved, and — this is the part that matters — it can be sold. A change of mind cannot. Nobody can issue you a new mind on a Thursday for a fee. Nobody can verify from outside that you have one. Of the two available translations, one was governable and one was not, and the governable one won.

The cost of that is enormous and it is still being paid. You can repent for forty years without changing your mind once. Remorse is in fact among the most reliable ways not to change your mind, because it keeps you staring at the thing you did instead of at the way you think. The man who is sorry every Sunday for the same act every Saturday has a perfectly functioning conscience and an entirely untouched nous. He got the feeling. He never found the door.

So where is the door?

This is where Nicoll becomes unexpectedly practical, and where I stopped reading and sat back in the chair. He does not put metanoia on a mountaintop, or in a crisis, or at the end of a decade of practice. He puts it in a gap about half a second wide. He calls the exercise inner stop: the small refusal to let an impression become a reaction on arrival. Something comes at you — a tone in a voice, a piece of news, one sentence in an email — and ordinarily the impression and the response are welded so tightly together that you experience them as a single event. Inner stop is the wedge. If no consciousness intervenes between the reception of an impression and the effect it has on us, Nicoll says, we are technically asleep.

That is the whole of it. Metanoia is not one enormous turning. It is a very small turning, continuously available, that mostly does not happen. And it dies easily; the newborn thing goes back to sleep almost at once, and the work is simply to do it again.

The other place the word surfaces is the prodigal son, and the phrasing there rewards stopping over. The turning point of that parable is not the boy's speech about being unworthy. It comes four words earlier: he came to himself. Not to sorrow. To himself — the sudden, unsentimental recognition that the person he had been living as was not the person he was. And the verb behind turning again, when Nicoll follows it into the Greek, is a military term. About turn. Not weeping in the mud. Facing the other way, and walking.

I drew a card before I started writing this, as I do, and I will tell you honestly that it did not flatter me. Eight of Swords, in the shadow position: a figure bound and blindfolded inside a fence of blades she could step out of if she looked down. The reading called it premature knowing — the conviction that you have already understood a thing, which is itself the last sword in the fence. It was pointed straight at me. I had come to this essay intending to explain metanoia, elegantly, at length, with citations, and the card's suggestion was that a good explanation of a change of mind is the most sophisticated substitute yet devised for having one.

I have not entirely escaped that. This is, after all, an essay. But I can decline the ending it wants. I am not going to hand you the meaning of the word and let you leave holding it, because possessing the meaning is precisely the thing the word is against. Nicoll's own formulation of the difference is that a man has to bridge the gap between what he knew and what he was: in place of merely knowing, he has to understand.

So take the smallest possible version instead, which is also the only version anyone has ever actually performed. Sometime today something will arrive that you did not choose — a remark, a delay, a face — and there will be a gap, very brief, before you become the person who answers it. That gap is not a metaphor. It is the entire doorway. You are not being asked to be sorry. Sorrow was the wrong currency from the beginning. You are being asked to be, for one half-second, somewhere else in your mind.

The trumpet in the Judgement card does not ask the dead to apologize. It asks them to get up.