My wife and I sometimes say, jokingly, "They've changed the Bible again!" when we come across a passage that looks new to us even though we've been reading the Bible for decades.
Not long ago I read a familiar passage in Luke's Gospel:
And the Lord said to him, “Now you Pharisees cleanse the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You fools! Did not he who made the outside make the inside also? But give as alms those things that are within, and behold, everything is clean for you. (Lk 11:39-41, English Standard Version)
"Give as alms those things that are within"! This was surprising enough that I checked out some other translations (using biblegateway.com), then dusted off my rarely-used Greek materials to look at the original text.
The Greek for "But give as alms those things that are within" reads:
πλὴν τὰ ἐνόντα δότε ἐλεημοσύνην. (τὰ ἐνόντα is "the things within".)
As best I can tell, the ESV translation is sensible and hard to contest.
A few other widely-used translations are surprisingly different:
But rather give alms of such things as ye have (King James Version)
But rather give alms of such things as you have (New King James Version)
But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor (New International Version)
But as to what is within, give alms (New American Bible, Revised Edition)
None of these seems to me to follow the most obvious meaning of the Greek text. (The NKJV, typically, just modernizes the KJV language, so maybe shouldn't be counted as a separate translation). They all seem to say that giving alms, outwardly, is a solution to the problem of what is within. I have a suspicion that the translators found the text as perplexing as I did, and just chose a rendering that avoided the challenge. I even looked at the Erasmus-Stephanus Greek text that the King James translators used, on the chance that other scholars were using a different Greek rendering. No, same text.
Some versions that agree substantially with the ESV:
But give for alms those things which are within (Revised Standard Version)
But give that which is within as a charitable gift (New American Standard Version)
I had an enjoyable time with these explorations. But none of this really brings me closer to understanding the meaning of this mysterious (to me) saying of Christ. As always, handing it over to prayer and letting it work within, without preconceptions, is the best interpretive approach.
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image: Saint Jerome (Hieronymos) translating the Bible, with help from a lion