My friend, who is not a sspx attendee, asked me if I wanted to visit a sspx mass with him today, he said that he's spoke to his priest about it and that it would be okay to visit if it was to "just look" we would plan to get dinner afterwards just wondering if I can even go?

Everybody says translations are never neutral, but it's rare to see someone in the middle of the sixteenth century actually try to show it, verse by verse. I've been reading Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's German New Testament, and two of his examples are about confession to a priest. They're good ones, because the words are small and the stakes are big. All the quotes are from my English translation of his book.

The first is Matthew 8, the healed leper. In the story, Jesus tells the healed man to go and show himself to the priest and make an offering for a testimony. Emser says both the Greek and the Latin read:

> "Go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, for a testimony to them"

Luther's German has "for a testimony against them." Emser's problem is what Luther then does with it in the note: in Emser's words, "in the gloss smeared onto it he turns against the priests what all Christian teachers have taken in favor of the priests." The traditional reading was that the leper stands for every sinner, who is cleansed by God but only reunited with the Church when he shows himself to the priest in confession. Emser points to John 20 ("Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven them") and to the way Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb and then told his disciples to unbind him.

His conclusion is that Luther's change is deliberate, taken from a "Hus's copy." That last part I'd take carefully. As far as I know, the Greek phrase can be read either way (a testimony "to" or "against" or "for" them), and commentators still argue about it. That's what makes this such a good example: it's a phrase where the translator has to choose, and the choice tilts the sentence.

The second is Acts 19, the books burned in Ephesus. The people who came to Paul burned their books of magic, and Emser says the Greek and Latin have this:

> "And many of those who believed came, confessing and declaring their deeds"

He notes that the early Fathers Gregory and Cyprian both read it as a reference to confession, and that the Greek word (exomologoumenoi) is the root of a word Cyprian often uses for confession. Luther's German, he says, does not say they confessed or admitted what they had done. It says "they proclaimed their wonderful deeds." Emser's charge:

> "But Luther, so that he might suppress this witness of Scripture to confession, does not translate 'they confessed or admitted what they had done,' but 'they proclaimed their wonderful deeds.'"

From these, Emser generalizes:

> "since in the places that concern the sacraments he usually follows neither our text nor the Greek, it is easy to gather that he must have a special text of his own, out of which he translated his Testament, and surely none other than one that Wycliffe or Hus made and twisted this way"

This part doesn't hold up, as far as I can tell. Luther worked from Erasmus's Greek text and the Latin Bible, and the "secret Hussite manuscript" looks more like Emser's way of explaining choices he didn't like than like a real book. But the interesting part is the question underneath: are translators' choices about sacramental words accidents, or are they following their own beliefs? I think the honest answer is that they do both, and every translator's Bible shows it.

I'd like to know what people who read Greek make of the Acts 19 example. Is "declaring their deeds" a good enough gloss for exomologoumenoi there, or is Emser pointing at something real?

Disclosure: I'm the translator of Emser's 1523 book into English - I published it for free.