>>546258
>here you go
Next comes a cluster of words springing up around a common root: the adjective "dikaios," which can be translated as "just," "right," "righteous"; the noun "dikaiosyne," which can be translated as "righteousness," "justice," "what is correct," "what is proper," "rectitude"; the verb "dikaioo," which can be translated as "make just," "make right," "rectify," "correct," or alternatively, as "prove just," "show to be right," "vindicate,"; and all other words related to the noun "dike", usually rendered as "justice," "rightness," "correct custom." Here I have had to betray my prejudice for formal consistency of translation. To begin with, in regard to the adjectives and nouns, it is not always easy to decide, when translating a particular passage or a particular author, whether it is better to use words like "just" and "justice" or words like "righteous" and "righteousness," given the connotations of each. The nearest we come to words that split the difference are "right," "correct" or "what is right," "uprightness," "rectitude," "correctness"; and I have employed some of these where it seemed wise to do so. In the world of the New Testament, religious and legal identity - or religious and legal obligation - were not distinct concepts, as they usually are for us. But in some instances it is clear that the context is more juridical than religious or moral, and in other constances that the opposite is true, and I have simply made as prudent a choice as I could in each case regarding which word to use. Moreover, there are two special problems of translation that have required firm decisions on my part precisely where I would have preferred indecisive vacillation. First, in most translations of the New Testament the word "dikaiosyne" is rendered as "righteousness"; but it often carries the specific connotation of "ritual propriety" or "what is legally correct," and in the Bible it carries the even more specific connotation of "what is correct according to the Law (of Moses)" - as in the Septuagint's version of Isaiah 26:2, or as in Matthew 3:15; where appropriate, I have attempted to make that clear. Second, the word "dikaioo" is usually translated as "justify" - or, in its passive construction, as "to be justified" - but this does not really capture either of the word's proper meanings exactly, at least not in modern English; and in fact, as a theological term, "justification" has over the centuries acquired so many questionable connotations that it is more likely to obscure the original authors' intentions than to reflect them. Again, "dikaioo" can mean either "rectify," "set right," "correct" or "vindicate," "prove right," "show to be just"; and it is not always clear, especially in Paul's letters, which of these senses should predominate, since arguments can often be made for either. In reality, I believe, he used the word in both senses, according to context. Of course, from the early fifth century onward, one stream of Western theology came to treat Paul's use of the verb (or of its Latin equivalent, "justifico") as meaning some sort of merely formal or forensic imputation of righteousness, rather than either a real corrective transformation or a real evidential vindication - an interpretation, arguably, that reached its most extreme expression in certain of Augustine's late writings and in the sixteenth-and-seventeeth-century theologies of figures like John Calvin and Cornelius Jansen. But nothing in the word's history allows for such a meaning intrinsically, and there is nothing in Paul's arguments that encourages such a reading (despite our habit of reading and translating Paul through the prism of Augustinian tradition). In the end, I found myself constrained to choose between "rectify" and "vindicate" (or similar locutions) in each particular instance of the word's use.