abigail.hunter wrote:Can I render this verse as follow,
"Therefore, as we were leaving the elementary doctrine of Christ towards perfection, let us be moved on (by the Spirit or natural spiritual development), which means we no longer laying a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God,"
Originally the question was: How do we understand Heb 6:1 -- or how do we understand in particular how φερώμεθα functions in the sentence? It now appears that this is an exercise in the traditional process of grammar-translation pedagogy. I’ve expressed elsewhere my concerns about the viability of that method, but now the question has become, “How could I put this in English?” or “Could I put it in English this way?” I doubt there’s a consensus on this question either, but I do think at least one alternative ought to be offered.
There are many different ways to go about translating a Greek text. One of them is to convey the individual sense of every word as a unit that will fit into a sequence with the individual sense of every other word of a statement. At best (or worst) that is the woodenly literal version. Some really do prefer that and conceive that the purpose of studying Greek is to produce just such translations.
My own preference has been to attempt to understand the thought as expressed in the syntactic relationship of phrases in the original text and then reproduce not the words, not the exact phrases of the Greek in English equivalents, but rather to convert the thought of the original text into an English formulation that expresses the thought as clearly and intelligibly as possible. I may not interpret the sense of the original text in the same manner as others, but I do believe it is obligatory to produce an English sentence that sounds more like English than Greek.
If I were attempting to convert Heb 6:1 into clear and intelligible English, I’d do it more like this:
Heb. 6:1 Διὸ ἀφέντες τὸν τῆς ἀρχῆς τοῦ Χριστοῦ λόγον ἐπὶ τὴν τελειότητα φερώμεθα, μὴ πάλιν θεμέλιον καταβαλλόμενοι μετανοίας ἀπὸ νεκρῶν ἔργων καὶ πίστεως ἐπὶ θεόν,
“So let’s stop rehashing the first principles of the gospel; let’s move on toward its consummation; let’s not keep laying the groundwork -- i.e. renunciation of futile acts and putting our faith in God.”
Some will see this as a paraphrase -- or a biased interpretation -- rather than a translation of the original text. But this is my notion of what bringing a Greek text into English involves.