u/Terrible-Neck8391

While translating Hieronymus Emser's 1523 answer to Luther's New Testament, I came across a dispute about Acts 3:1. Emser, Luther's Catholic critic, reads "the ninth hour of prayer" through the canonical hours he knew.

He objects that Luther:

"does not translate it 'the prayer hour' or 'the hour of prayer,' but says simply, 'they went up at the ninth hour to pray.'" (Emser, tr. Tucker, p. 75)

Leaving his accusation about Luther's motives aside, the difference is interesting. "The hour of prayer" presents a time already set aside for communal worship. "At the ninth hour to pray" can sound more like a time when two people happened to go.

The NABRE reads "the three o'clock hour of prayer," with a note giving the literal wording as "at the ninth hour of prayer."

That doesn't establish that Peter and John were praying the later Christian Office in its developed form. But it does make Emser's way of reading the verse worth examining. How do histories of the Office distinguish continuity with fixed Jewish prayer times from the later development of the Christian hours? Are there particular stages where that distinction becomes especially important?

Disclosure: I've been working on an English translation of Hieronymus Emser's answer to Luther's New Testament. It is a polemical book, but some passages are worth reading apart from the fight.

In his discussion of the parable of the talents, Emser writes:

"For we cannot all be preachers; but, as Paul says and as was touched on above, God has given his Church some as preachers and teachers, some as shepherds and rulers, and to one this, to another that: to one strength to protect his fatherland, to another riches for the comfort and help of the poor, to a third prudence and wisdom to counsel the simple who are not of such high understanding."

Then:

"Therefore whatever talent, pound or grace each one has received from God, he is bound to use and share for the good of all Christendom and of his neighbor, so that he may attain the eternal joy of his Lord, as this parable plainly shows, and the lazy servant who had buried his pound was therefore condemned."

Both passages are on p. 46 of the translation. What interests me is the move from preaching to other kinds of help: money for someone in need, counsel, protection. He does not treat the gifts as belonging only to people whose work is visibly religious.

The opening and a separate quote collection are free to read on my Substack, under Eli Tucker. The full translation is included with a paid subscription, so I don't want to call the whole book free.

For readers of older Christian books: what passages have you found that make an ordinary ability or responsibility look different? I'd be interested in the book and the passage, rather than just a general recommendation.

Emser's preface uses this image:

"...our works, however good they may look and shine outwardly, are not pleasing to God nor of use to us for salvation unless the grace of God is with them and they also have within them the sap of Christian love and devotion..."

That's from p. 16 of the English translation I've been working on. The next part says the works should come from a good intention, rather than greed, pride or hypocrisy. The image of sap suggests that something can look alive from the outside while missing what gives it life within.

It raises a practical question about ordinary acts of service. The outward act might be exactly the same whether someone is helping out of love or hoping to be noticed. Yet endlessly checking our motives could itself become another way of turning our attention back toward ourselves.

What helps you keep an act of service directed toward the person who needs it, rather than toward how the act makes you look? Is there a prayer, habit, or piece of advice that helps without turning every good work into an anxious examination of motives?

This line from Hieronymus Emser's discussion of Philippians 2:13 caught my attention:

"That is: when we will something good, God works it in us; but when our will turns to evil, it is not from God but from ourselves."

That's from p. 143 of the English translation I've been working on. Emser is commenting on Paul's words about God working in us both the willing and the doing. His surrounding discussion is a dispute with Luther, but the sentence itself gives me something more useful to think about than the dispute.

It puts grace before the good act, even before the good intention. That seems different from picturing God as merely helping us carry out a good plan we've already made on our own. At the same time, Emser doesn't attribute our turning toward evil to God.

How do you hold those two points together when you read the passage? I would also be interested in how you connect it with the preceding instruction to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. What helps you understand our cooperation without treating grace as something we have earned?

In modern German, das Rüstzeug is the knowledge or skills you need for a job ("das nötige Rüstzeug"). DWDS dates the word to the 16th century and builds it from rüsten + Zeug. German Wiktionary adds: "Luther hat das Wort offenbar im übertragenen Sinne für 'Werkzeug' gebildet" (Luther apparently formed the word in the figurative sense of "tool"). I can't check that beyond the dictionary.

Luther's 1522 New Testament uses it in Acts 9:15: "diser ist myr eyn außerwelet rusttzeug." The Vulgate there has "vas electionis," a chosen vessel.

Hieronymus Emser, a Catholic opponent, went through Luther's New Testament in 1523 and objected to this choice: "our text does not have 'a chosen instrument' but 'a chosen vessel,' which also agrees with the Greek, where one reads not organum ('instrument') but skeuos, that is, 'vessel'; from which comes skeuarion, 'a little vessel.'" (Emser, 1523, English translation)

Whether the word existed before 1522 and whether Luther started its figurative use are separate questions, and the dictionaries I checked only speak to the second one.

Is there any evidence of Rüstzeug before 1522, in any sense?

Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's German New Testament says: "Luther perverts the daily prayer, the Our Father, in three or four places." His list:

"First, he turns the first two words right round, and does not translate them as they stand in the Gospel and as we Germans have prayed for more than a thousand years, 'Vater unser' (Father our), but 'unser Vater' (our Father)."

"Second, he leaves out the words 'who art' altogether, which the Greek and Latin texts both contain alike."

"Third, he changes the word panem supersubstantialem ('supersubstantial bread') into quotidianum ('daily')."

"Fourth, he adds a clause at the end that our text does not have and that has never been in use among us, namely 'for thine is the kingdom, the power and the holiness, for ever, amen.'" (Emser, 1523)

Luther's 1522 New Testament does read "Vnser vater ynn dem hymel" and ends "denn, deyn ist das reych, vnd die krafft, vnnd die herlickeyt in ewickeyt. Amen." The German word there is herlickeyt, usually glory, which Emser's translated quote renders "holiness." On the last point, the ending is in the Byzantine Greek manuscript tradition and not in the Latin Vulgate that Emser was reading, so he is comparing Luther's Greek-based German to a Latin text, not catching an invention.

Which of the four changes does your own church's wording still show?

In his 1523 book against Luther's New Testament, Hieronymus Emser quotes this line: "The unity of tongues that the pride of Babylon had scattered, the humility of the Church gathered again."

He brings Pentecost into a dispute about translation. His preferred model is to "follow the ancients and have a text that reads the same in all churches." The concern is what happens as a text passes through different hands. One proverb he quotes puts it neatly: "many things fall between the mouth and the cup."

I read this as a problem that extends beyond the Reformation: how do you let a text travel without letting its meaning drift?

Does a shared text hold a church together, or does translation help more people belong to it?

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English.

I've spent a long time with Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament. It's a serious work of controversy, and it's also full of lines that stand on their own. Here are twelve, in the order they appear. All are from my English translation.

1. On someone who changes his mind constantly: "So he rests on any one opinion only as long as a pea can stand or lie on an egg."
2. On reading the same idea into everything: "Luther reminds me of the painter Horace writes about in the Art of Poetry, who could paint nothing but a tree, and in every piece he was hired to do, he always painted that same tree into it."
3. On overexplaining: "Luther in his preface alone sets forty paragraphs or sections over it, so that together with the attached glosses the commentary becomes much longer than the text itself, and there is more soup than meat."
4. On careless reading: "But Luther looked at this chapter in a drunken fashion and did not put his spectacles on properly."
5. On the summaries that outgrow the thing summarized: "Luther summarizes the seventh chapter with so many paragraphs that the subtotal becomes almost bigger than the grand total, or the chapter itself; and the longer he babbles, the further he gets off the road."
6. On quietly changing a source: "yet the tavern-keeper Luther does not let St. Paul's words stand as they read in themselves, but mixes water into the wine."
7. On a person who always wants a fight: "But perhaps Luther thinks everyone is as fond of fighting, quarreling and wrangling, and as glad to be in a brawl, as he is, who not only quarrels with people but also with goats and snails..."
8. On overconfidence: "...it is still great presumption that this poor man wants to send the Holy Spirit to school and set him a measure or limit of how much he should reveal to this one or that one."
9. On the dangers of reading only the letter: "This is also the reason why Luther everywhere rejects the spiritual sense of Scripture and lies only on the letter like a raven on carrion."
10. On a translation choice he thought was a bit much: "Luther translates, 'who was clothed with a smock,' as if he had just been at the bathhouse."
11. On how readers choose: "Yet sadly some are so blind that they condemn it beforehand, before they have read it, and would rather buy the books of lies at double the price than get this one at half price."
12. On the last word: "And with God's help I will defend what I have written well and soundly before Luther or Lucifer."

All of these are Emser talking about Luther. For balance, Luther gave as good as he got. My favorite of his replies to Emser: "I have this advantage over him, that I need not show what kind of bird he is; everyone knows him by his song and his feathers."

Which of these would you put on a mug?

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English and published it for free.

Edit: a few people asked where to read it - it's linked in my profile.

I've been thinking about this since finishing an English translation of a 1523 German pamphlet, Hieronymus Emser's book against Luther's New Testament. It's a name that comes up in studies of Luther's translation, and as far as I could find, nobody had translated the whole thing into English. It turns out that very famous events and figures can leave a lot of untranslated text behind them.

How it became possible

Two things made this project doable. One is that the German text had already been carefully transcribed and put online by Taylor Editions at Oxford, under an open license (CC BY-SA 4.0). The other is that the license lets you build on the transcription and share the result, as long as you pass on the same terms. That is why the English version is free for anyone to read. I'm grateful to that project, and I think it's a good model. Open transcriptions are what make translations like this possible.

The bigger pattern

I don't have exact numbers, and I'd distrust anyone who says they do. But the pattern is easy to see once you start looking. People writing on famous historical fights, whether it's the Reformation or the Enlightenment or medieval law, quote the winners in English and the losers in summaries. A book might be cited a hundred times and read by five people who can read the language.

So, the question

If you could have any old work translated into English, one that you know exists, that scholars cite, and that isn't available, what would it be? It can be any language and any century. It can be a treatise, a set of letters, a chronicle, a sermon collection, a manual.

I'm curious about a few things:

What made you want to read it? How did you find out it exists? Do you know if a partial translation, or an old one, is out there?

I'll read every answer. Some of these seem like they'd be worth making.

Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English and published it for free.

I recently finished an English translation of Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament, which had never (as far as I could find) been translated in full. Here are the biggest headaches. I'd love to compare notes with anyone who translates older texts.

1. It's three languages in one book Emser doesn't just write in German. He quotes Luther's German, then the Latin Bible he calls "our text," and then the Greek, side by side. His whole point usually lies in the difference between them. So a translator has to keep those three layers visible in English without making the page unreadable.
2. The stiffness is sometimes the point A typical example: Emser complains that Luther put a word into German as “and our fathers found no fodder,” “as if they had been horses or oxen and not men.” To make that complaint make sense in English, I had to translate Luther's German quite literally, which is not how Luther's German would sound if you just wrote natural English. In the translator's note I say his quotations are translated closely, “even where the English then reads a little stiffly.”
3. The margin notes The 1523 printer set short notes in the margins: Bible references, legal references, and brief headings of Emser's own. I made them into numbered footnotes at the point where they stood. Where a margin only repeated a name already in the text, I left it out.
4. Scripture numbering Emser's chapter numbers follow the Latin Bible, including its numbering of the Psalms and of the books of Samuel and Kings ("1 Kings" for what we call 1 Samuel). When his number is plainly wrong, or a word is a plain misprint, I gave the correct reading in square brackets. Words in square brackets that aren't corrections are mine.
5. Slang that doesn't travel Emser is fond of slang. My favorite is a word, “finantzer,” which he calls part of a “thieves' cant”: “Nor did I know before, in this thieves’ cant, that a ‘finantzer’ meant someone who invented something new; but I have indeed heard that a man is called a ‘finantzer’ who can so bargain and deal in a matter that he also gets a share of it for himself.” I kept the word and let him explain it. Some other lines are easier: “more soup than meat,” “a pea can stand or lie on an egg,” “mixes water into the wine.” Those make sense in English

almost as they are. 6. A few words I'm still not sure of I'm upfront in the note about this: a few rare words and idioms remain uncertain, and I rendered them by their most likely sense. If you work on Early New High German and see something I've got wrong, please tell me. 7. Someone else's transcription I worked from the transcription published by Taylor Editions at the Taylor Institution Library at Oxford, which follows thirty sections. It's an excellent resource, and it's licensed openly (CC BY-SA 4.0), which is why I can share the translation freely. That also means I inherit whatever the transcription has, including the fact that for most of the book I had to identify the margin notes from the online version because the source files weren't available. A few may be missing. One last thing Emser is, as it happens, quite good company, and the jokes are a big part of why. Other translators: what's the oddest thing you've had to carry over from an older text? Disclosure: I translated Emser's 1523 book into English and published it for free.

The story of Hieronymus Emser's 1523 book against Luther's New Testament has a twist at the end that I don't think gets enough attention. The book is a long attack on the translation. Four years later its author published a German New Testament of his own, and it leaned heavily on Luther's.

That looks like hypocrisy. But if you read the last pages of the 1523 book, it starts to look more like the natural next step.

Emser tells us that in the preface to Luther's Old Testament, Luther had already tried to head off critics. He says Luther was

> "saying he knows well that the muck will cling to the wheels, since it is easier to criticize someone's books than to do as well"

In other words: anyone can throw mud at a translation, and it's much harder to make a better one.

Emser takes that as a dare. He says he wants nothing to do with Luther's way of translating:

> "for my own part I have no wish to imitate his heretical translating. Nor have I carried the muck onto the wheels of this New Testament of his; I found it already there, and knocked it off again with the hoe of Christian teaching and truth."

And he predicts that Luther's Old Testament will need the same treatment: "his Old Testament will likewise need an Emser more than a Virgil, that is, someone to knock the muck off his wheels rather than someone who could find a great deal of gold on them."

Then comes the concession that makes the twist inevitable. Emser writes that Luther's team has rendered the Bible "somewhat more elegantly and sweetly" than the older German version, in the places where they followed the text straight. That is why, he says, the common people have more pleasure in reading it.

If you believe that, and you also believe the Bible in the hands of the people should be the Church's Bible, you have one obvious option: keep the good German and fix the parts you object to. That is more or less what his 1527 New Testament was: as I understand it, it stayed close to Luther's wording but pulled the disputed passages back toward the Latin Bible. He died the same year.

We tend to tell the story of the Reformation in terms of two clear camps. But the most human moment in Emser's whole book is the one where he admits that his enemy writes well. The 1523 Emser wants a bonfire of Luther's testaments. The 1527 Emser is doing what every reviser does: using the best draft available.

Is there a modern parallel? A critic who spends years attacking a translation or a text and then ends up producing something built on it? I can think of a few in the history of Bible translation, but I'd like to hear other examples, in any field.

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

Luther's German New Testament of 1522 was translated from the Greek, using the text that Erasmus had published a few years earlier. Older German Bibles had been made from the Latin, so this was a different kind of book. In 1523 Hieronymus Emser answered it, and what surprised me on reading him closely is how much of his case rests on the Greek too, not just on Latin tradition.

His method, as he describes it, is a three-way comparison: Luther's German, "our text" (the Latin Bible the Church used), and the Greek, with Erasmus's Latin translation as a fourth witness. His point almost always lies in the gap between them. Here are four examples. All the quotes are from my English translation of his book.

The first is Acts 20:28, "feed" or "rule". Where Luther has Paul telling church leaders "to feed the congregation of God," Emser says the Latin has "to rule the church of God," "and so too the Greek text, for the Greek has poimainein. Erasmus also translated it this way." (I haven't checked what Erasmus's own Latin says at that verse, so take that part as Emser's claim.) Then he goes further, to John 21, where Jesus tells Peter to care for his sheep:

> "That Christ gave the bishops power not only to feed his sheep but also to rule them appears from this, that in the last chapter of John he says not only boske, that is, 'feed,' but the second time poimaine, that is, 'rule my sheep,' although this Greek word signifies a gentler kind of ruling"

And his verdict on why Luther chose "feed": "But Luther cannot stand the rule of bishops, and so he would not translate 'to rule' but 'to feed.'"

The second is Matthew 11, "infants" or "little ones". Christ thanks the Father for hiding things from the wise and revealing them to "the little ones." Emser reports that Luther's German says "infants." Emser: "For although the word nepios in the Greek text means a young or small child, whether able to speak or not, Christ is not speaking here (in the spiritual sense) of infants." The words "to the little ones" would have served "far better." This one is easy to read as a matter of taste, but you can see what Emser wants: a word that means small in spirit, not small in age.

The third is Matthew 2, Rachel weeping for her children. Emser says the Latin has, in plain English, "because they are not," and Erasmus's Latin says the same. Luther has "for it was all over with them." Emser's objection is that the German closes the door on the spiritual meaning, that the children are with God.

The fourth is Acts 14, "elder" or "priest". Here Emser says Luther knew better, because he had read Erasmus on the word. He says Luther "has read well enough in Erasmus" that the word for elder is "not always a name of age, but sometimes also of honor, dignity and office," and yet Luther puts it into German as "elder" everywhere, and the word for church as "congregation" everywhere.

That last one is a better complaint than it sounds. His point isn't that "elder" is wrong. It's that Luther is consistent about it, and consistency in one direction, everywhere, looks like a policy.

The fair part: Emser is right that Luther's choices often line up with his theology, and that a word-for-word approach would sometimes have kept meanings that the German loses. The unfair part is the conclusion. He says that where Luther departs from both the Latin and the Greek, he must have had a special Hussite copy. He also says Luther "has not consistently followed either our trustworthy text or the translation of the most learned Erasmus of Rotterdam, but has mixed the one with the other." The mixing might just be what a translator does, using the Greek where it reads best and the Latin where it doesn't.

Would anyone with more Greek than I have care to weigh in on the poimaine argument in particular? Emser calls it "a gentler kind of ruling" and uses it to say that "rule" fits better than "feed." Is that a stretch, or a fair reading of the verb?

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

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.

Luther's remark that James is "a right strawy epistle" is one of the best known lines of the Reformation. What almost nobody has read in English is how it was answered at the time. In 1523 the priest Hieronymus Emser devoted a long section of his book against Luther's New Testament to defending James, and it's a good example of how the fight over the Bible's contents actually worked. All the Emser quotes below are from my English translation of his book.

The set-up: Luther's German New Testament of 1522 treated four books differently from the rest - Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. He put them at the back and left them out of the numbered table of contents. Emser summarizes this as Luther "rejecting and thrusting out" those four, and argues the Church had accepted them a thousand years before:

> "and the Church is more to be believed than a thousand Luthers."

Then he takes James in detail. Luther's remarks about James are in two places, a short comment in the general preface and a longer preface to the epistle itself, so Emser goes after both.

His first move is to say Luther contradicts himself:

> "For above, in the first preface to this testament, he said that this epistle of St. James is a real epistle of straw, which has nothing of the Evangelical kind about it at all. Here at the beginning of this preface he says that although it was rejected by the ancients, he still praises it and holds it in high esteem as good, because it strongly urges God's law and there are many good sayings in it. Soon afterward he begins to scold it again, and after much fault-finding he finally concludes and says, 'Therefore I will not have it in my Bible, among the number of the true chief books,' and so on."

And then his sharpest line:

> "But who would not laugh at such foolish talk? For if this oft-mentioned epistle is good, as Luther himself admits, why then will he not have it in his Bible? So I hear well enough that what is good is worth nothing at all to Luther. But what if St. James, for his part, did not want to stand in the heretics' Bible either, and was content to be included in the Bible approved by the Christian Church?"

His second move is history. Luther had said the ancients rejected the epistle. Emser wants names:

> "he ought by rights to have named who they were. For this epistle was never rejected by the Christian Church, but has been read in all churches"

He cites Eusebius, who says some don't accept it but that it's received by almost all churches, and Jerome, who says it was authorized by the Church even though some doubted it in the past. He also argues Luther got the wrong James. Luther's point, in Emser's summary, is that James was killed early, before Peter and Paul wrote, so he couldn't have quoted them. Emser answers that the epistle is by James the Just, bishop of Jerusalem, not James the Greater, who was beheaded by Herod.

Third move is the actual theology. He says Luther misreads what James says about Abraham and works. His own position:

> "From all of this it appears that the true apostolic manner and teaching assigns justification neither to faith alone nor to works alone, but to both together, above all when the works flow from love and the grace of God."

And that James isn't fighting Paul, but a misuse of Paul: some people had taken Paul's teaching on Abraham to mean that faith alone without works saves, and "these St. James rebukes here in the second chapter with gentle words, in the true apostolic manner."

The parting shot:

> "Of all this he speaks so masterfully and powerfully that Luther, with all his spirits, understanding and words, cannot overturn this epistle for him."

I can't tell whether it's deliberate, but Emser also has this line about the rich and the poor in the James section: "it goes with us poor fellows as with the plow horses, who grow the oats and have to eat straw for it." He wrote it about favoring the rich (James 2), but I can't read it without hearing the straw joke.

The takeaway: this is the same argument people are still having, only earlier and with fewer footnotes. Does a book get into the Bible because the Church received it, or does it earn its place by whether it teaches Christ? Luther's test was that "whatever does not teach Christ is not apostolic." Emser's test was that the Church's long acceptance outweighs the doubts of a few individuals. Most Protestant Bibles today include James without fuss, which is a kind of answer.

Curious how people here see the James question now. Is Emser's "received by the Church" test the one Catholic theology still uses for the canon?

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

Working through a translation of Hieronymus Emser's 1523 critique of Luther's New Testament. Emser goes after Luther's rendering choices line by line, and this complaint about tenses stood out:

'For in more than a thousand places he has translated the present for the past or future and the other way round, and put one for another...'

Leaving aside the polemic, it raises a real question for translators of older texts: how much tense-shifting is legitimate smoothing, and when does it distort? Curious how people here handle source texts whose tense usage does not map cleanly onto the target language.

(Emser, On Luther's New Testament, 1523)

Recently I’ve been exploring the metaphysics of hell. And could an angel of such high intellect and no sin or ignorance reject God? Perhaps they had less grace/less abundant assistance as St. Augustine ponders in chapter 9 book 12 on the city of God. But this would make them non-fully culpable. If it was merely God’s grace which no angel could merit then it would not have been there choice to go to hell, but God’s for withholding a grace necessary to freely choose God.
And if so, could eternal torment be just? Seems no.
Scotus’ answer seems to bottom out and make the creature lose its rationale faculties for the sake of freedom. And so we are left the conundrum. What could a mind of un darkened intellect have reasoned could be a reason to choose sin? If it was something like pride/self-rule-autonomy/willfully choosing to lack consideration (As St. Thomas Aquinas says), then it could not have come for its own sake, but for sake of the perceived good. And any perceived good would have its fulfillment in the author of all goodness God, making it go like it.

Aquinas framework:

Me: Why did you sin
Demon: I desired my own excellence
Me: why
Demon: I perceived a good in it
Me: which one
Demon: my own excellence
Me: so you were motivated by your own excellence
Demon: yes
Me: and you knew you would be more excellent in God
Demon: yes
Me: so why not choose God instead
Demon: because I was motivated by my pride
Me: why
Demon: because I perceived a good in it
Me: which one
Demon: my excellence
Me; did you know your excellence would be higher in God
Demon; yes
Me: so why’d you pick it
Demon: because I lacked consideration
Me; why were you, were you imputably ignorant?
Demon: No
Me: so why
Demon: because I chose to be ignorant
Me: why
Demon: I perceived a good
Me: which good
Demon: my own excellence

Scotus ;

Me: why’d you sin
Demon: because I chose
Me; why
Demon: because I chose
Me: why
Demon: I don’t need a reason
Me; so it was arbitrary and reasonless
Demon: no, I did have a reason
Me: what
Demon: I wanted to
Me: why?
Demon: I don’t need a reason
Me; so it was arbitrary and reasonless?
Demon: no I did have a reason
Me: did it follow logically
Demon: not necessarily
Me: so was it a reasonable reason
Demon: not necessarily
Me: so if it wasn’t necessarily a reasonable reason then it wasn’t a reason
Demon: well it was a reason just not necessarily an intelligent reason
Me: aren’t you an intellectual being?
Demon: and I have the choice to use it or not
Me: how do you make that choice without intellect
Demon; I just do
Me: so it’s an unintelligible reason
Demon: perhaps
Me; so it’s random and arbitrary
Demon: no, it’s just is not necessarily intelligible/reasonable/logically following
Me: sounds arbitrary
Demon: sounds be sounding
Me: I mean that’s the definition of arbitrary
Demon: well I had a reason to choose to make it an arbitrary reason
Me; why

Augustine;

Me; why’d you choose God
Angel: God gave me extra grace and abundant assistance
Me: why’d God do that
Angel: God wills what God wills
Me: what happened to the other angels who God didn’t do it for?
Angel: they were not given the grace or abundant assistance
Me: why?
Angel: because God wills what God wills

Edit: I definitely messed up on their doctrines, however it seems like any answer eventually just bottoms out, but am open to it, feel free to lmk