Eggcorn Forum

The Reformation, as the story goes, began with the 1517 publication of Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. In some versions of the story, the flyer with the theses was posted on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, Germany.

The first of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses says “Dominus et magister noster Iesus Christus dicendo ‘Penitentiam agite etc’ omnem vitam fidelium penitentiam esse voluit.” This means “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when he said ‘Penitentiam agite,’ wanted the entire life of believers to be one of penance.” In highlighting the Latin phrase “penitentiam agite” in the first of his theses, Luther was calling attention to a core disagreement between his crew of young German clerics and the magisterium of Church of Rome. The church’s teaching about the meting out of penances, which included the remission of assigned penance through indulgences, was thought at the time to have been founded in the message of Jesus. A direct line was drawn connecting Matthew 4:17, which says that Jesus began his preaching ministry with the message “Penitentiam agite,” and the complex system of moral accounting that medieval thinkers had woven around the idea of penance.

The Renaissance emphasis on “ad fontes” (a return to sources), however, had made sixteenth century theologians more aware of the Greek originals behind the Jerome’s Vulgate, the church’s Latin translation of the Bible. The Greek word that Jerome had translated as “penitentiam agite” was “μετανοεῖτε,” a command that means “change your mind/heart.” To render the term, Jerome started off with a Latin word, “paenitere,” that meant “to cause regret.” It was a verb that almost always occurred in an impersonal, third-person format: Romans would say “it causes regret to me” rather than “I regret.”¹ Third-person impersonal verbs are difficult to transform into second person commands, so Jerome took a noun, “paenitentiam,” that was built from the verb and joined it to the general verb for “set in motion” (“agere”), giving us the Latin “paenitentiam agite.”

Jerome’s construction was a reasonable translation of the Greek “μετανοεῖτε.” Why, then, did Luther feel that he had to put a protestant spin on the term? Part of the reason may be a Latin eggcorn. Luther and the other reformers cited the Vulgate phrase as “penitentiam agite” or, more commonly, the fully spelled “poenitentiam agite.” What Jerome wrote, however, was “paenitentiam agite.” Early editions of the Vulgate use Jerome’s spelling. Within a few hundred years, Vulgate copyists had begun to spell it “poenitentiam agite,” inserting into “paenitentiam” the word “poena,” a Latin term for “punishment.” (It’s the word from which English derives “penal,” “pain,” and “subpoena.”) The development of the theology of penance in the medieval period took a direction that favored the interpretation of penance as a form of judicial penalty. Hearing “poena” in the word reinforced this development. Rather than indicating an inner attitude, as “paenitentiam” does, “poenitentiam” pointed toward an outer process. So when Luther and Melancthon, translating the Greek New Testament with an eye on the Vulgate, rendered “poenitentiam agite” as “tut Buße,” and Wycliffe, working directly from the Vulgate, rendered it “do penance,” their hearers associated this command with the machinery of penances and indulgences that had become a focus of the medieval church. This worried the reformers, who feared that the phrase provided ammunition to their enemies, and they felt the need, as Luther did in his initial theses, to slant the meaning of the term toward the Greek originals.

The centrality of Latin in theological discourse prevented the early reformers from taking the more direct step of divorcing themselves from Jerome’s term and its eggcorn. Eventually, however, translators achieved enough distance from the Latin matrix to translate directly from the Greek “μετανοεῖτε” into current languages. William Tyndale and the team behind the 1611 King James Bible had at hand the word “repent,” a term built from “paenitere” that had entered English with Norman French. Modern German translations resort to “kehrt um,” a phrase calqued from the Latinate “conversion.”

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¹ We have these impersonal verbs in modern languages. A common way to say that we don’t like something in French is to say “ça ne me plaît pas,” “it doesn’t please me.” In German we can indicate that we are sorry by saying “es tut mir leid,” “it does hurt to me.”

Last edited by kem (2016-05-30 13:28:55)