Light On Dark Water

Issues

I'm not sure when the word "issue" became a synonym for "problem." I know I first heard it when I worked for a high-tech company. In meetings with technical support, we would have a list of "issues" to be addressed. I think it was later that I heard it used to describe personal problems, as in "He has some anger issues." And maybe it originated in psychology, I don't know.

Over the years it's gotten on my nerves, because it seems a sort of euphemism: we don't actually have problems that need to be solved, we just have issues that need to be worked out. And if it's not a euphemism it's a pointless substitute for a perfectly good word.

But one place I never expected to hear it is in the Bible. I was shocked to find this in the reading from Acts for Friday May 21: the Roman official Festus says that the Jewish leaders "had some issues with [Paul] about their own religion." This was in Magnificat (the magazine). I'm not sure which translation it is. Surely it hasn't been there for very long?!–I think I would have noticed it before. Anyway, I have issues with it. 

Maclin Horton

17 responses to “Issues”

  1. Tom L

    Magnificat uses the NAB.
    http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/acts/acts25.htm#v19

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  2. Mac

    Thanks. I saw the NAB credit in Magnificat but there are a lot of other credits, too, and I wasn’t sure exactly which might be used where. It didn’t occur to me to look online.
    What I want to know is how long this has been there. If it’s been there all along, since 1970 or whenever, I’m surprised I haven’t noticed it before.

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  3. Paul

    To be fair, that translates “questions” (issues to be discussed) rather than “problems” (issues to be “worked through”)!

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  4. Janet

    I have that same question about the “tree of the knowledge of good and bad.” Bah! What happened to evil? And when did they change it.
    AMDG

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  5. Mac

    Bah indeed! Surely they’re tinkering with these translations continually–it’s hard to believe we’ve missed that.
    So, Paul (rhetorically): why not just “questions” instead of “issues”? Why the resort to this near-slang formula? KJV has “certain questions against him of their own superstition.” I wouldn’t be surprised if “superstition” were closer to what the Roman really thought.

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  6. Paul

    “Superstition” is spot-on. The word for “questions” literally means “things to be sought out”, which leaves a certain leeway in finding a way of putting it in English. I’m not saying “issues” is the best translation, just that it needn’t be read in the psychobabble sense.

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  7. Mac

    Now I really want to know whether it was “issues” in the ca. 1970 or so NAB. I really didn’t think the use of “issues” in this sort of context went that far back, but maybe I’m wrong. I think it’s impossible at least for most Americans not to hear it in the psychobabbly way, although I don’t know that most people would be conscious of it. It’s only a step or two away from, say, “they’re griping about some religious deal”. So is it the case that the translation was recently revised in this tone-deaf way, or did the language change around the original translation?

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  8. Ryan C

    The psychological use of the word issue, according to the OED, is an 80’s not a 70’s phenomenon (and U.S. thing):
    issue, n.
    In pl. orig. and chiefly U.S. Emotional or psychological difficulties (freq. with modifying word); points of emotional conflict.
    1982 N.Y. Times 8 Dec. C10/6 The more difficult aspect can come after alcohol is removed. Then it becomes how do you deal with the emotions and intimacy issues that were largely dealt with previously through alcohol? 1991 Longevity Jan. 70/1 At the root of anniversary syndrome..are unresolved issues about the loved one stemming from the past. 1998 Community Care 20 Aug. 46/5 (advt.) Educational programme and 24-hour placement support for emotionally damaged children and young people. Reparative work with attachment issues.
    But I think the NAB is a modification of the sense “to take issue with,” which first arises in the Renaissance. Interestingly, in the Middle Ages an “issue” was most often something that went out of something else.

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  9. Ryan C

    Regarding “bad”–in the Middle Ages this had a stronger connotation of “evil” than it does today. The weird thing is, no one’s sure where the word came from. The best guess is that it comes from the OE baeddel: “hermaphrodite, effeminate or homosexual man.” Or it is perhaps ultimately taken from Old English baedan: “to force, constrain, impel, to require, demand, exact, to urge, incite.” The word Bad first shows up in the surnames of people as a suffix in the 12th century. Interestingly, “badder” and “baddest” are older to English than “worse” and “worst.”
    “Evil” though has a much longer and clearer heritage, going back to an Old Teutonic word for “up, over”: “on this view the primary sense would be either ‘exceeding due measure’ or ‘overstepping proper limits’.”
    I’m going to look at some medieval Bibles and see what they term the tree.

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  10. Ryan C

    From the 1970 New English Bible (Festus speaking):
    Acts 25:
    “But when his accusers rose to speak, they brought none of the charges I was expecting; they merely had certain points of disagreement with him about their peculiar religion, and about someone called Jesus, a dead man whom Paul alleged to be alive. Finding myself out of my depth in such discussions, I asked if he was willing to go to Jerusalem and stand his trial there on these issues.”
    It seems that what’s happened is the NAB translator has translated “points of disagreement” as issues, which is what the NEB translator does with the next verse. I don’t know if the NAB repeats the word.
    Actually, now that I think about it, in the context of the passage, Festus’s use of the word “issues” fits his smarmy and obtuse character well. He really doesn’t comprehend the “points of disagreement at all”–it’s just “issues” to him.
    In other words, the tone deafness goes back to Festus himself.

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  11. Ryan C

    In Latin the verse is:
    Quæstiones vero quasdam de sua superstitione habebant adversus eum, et de quodam Jesu defuncto, quem affirmabat Paulus vivere.
    The word in the original Greek meant “superstition” too “δεισιδαιμονίας”–literally “fear of the gods,” which suggests it originally had a positive meaning in Greek (indeed it does in Xenocrates), but not in the cynical days of 1st century Rome. So Festus is being condescending in the original text.

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  12. Ryan C

    Janet can correct me on this, but I think the English spelling of that Greek word is “deisidaimonia.”

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  13. Ryan C

    Well, it’s not a Bible, but the Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis has tree of knowledge of “god and yfel.” Okay, it’s back to the 16th century for me.

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  14. Mac

    The fuller NAB context: “His accusers stood around him, but did not charge him with any of the crimes I suspected.
    Instead they had some issues with him about their own religion and about a certain Jesus who had died but who Paul claimed was alive. Since I was at a loss how to investigate this controversy, I asked if he were willing to go to Jerusalem and there stand trial on these charges.”
    So it’s “charges” instead of “issues”. In this case the NAB seems better, or at least more straightforward, unless there’s an English sense of “issues” a bit different from ours–I mean, we would not use the word in ref to actual legal proceedings, as opposed to some kind of debate.
    I forgot to mention that the tech support use of “issues” for “problems” that I was describing also took place in the ’80s–at any rate that’s when I first heard it.
    That’s fascinating about “bad.” Thanks for looking all this up.
    It’s not just the use of “issues” to describe something that needs to be discussed or even a problem to be solved that struck me originally about the NAB usage. It’s the specific way it’s used: something like “I have issues with your request that I work on Saturday” is, as far as I know, a pretty recent development, and it’s that precise sort of formulation that seems to be put in the mouths of the Jewish leaders here: “…they had some issues….”

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  15. Ryan C

    The Latin in that last part is actually “be judged/to declare of these things.” So in translating that last part translators often substitute whatever preceding word they want–though most early translations I’ve looked at just have “these things.” Here’s another case where earlier translators are more literal than modern ones! We have to amplify everything.
    As for the NEB, there is a longstanding use of the word issue in a Law context, as “the point in question, at the conclusion of the pleadings between contending parties in an action, when one side affirms and the other denies.”
    e.g., 1891 Law Times XCII. 107/1 Other points were raised, and finally the master directed an issue to be tried.
    But I don’t see any modern uses of the word in this way, so I don’t know if the NEB passage is meant to evoke this. But it’s possible “issue” does have a more formal or legal meaning in England, since it’s our country that mostly uses the word in a psych sense. I think the phrase “make an issue out something” was once dependent on more formal meanings of the word, but as time passed the sense of frivolousness indicated by that phrase swallowed up the word.
    IMHO, speaking to problems with the NAB, I think we should have in the Church a New Douay Rheims like Protestants have a New King James. The DR is an important part of our heritage as English speaking Catholics, being first translated in the 16th century by Catholic exiles from England. And the style is often quite as fine as the KJ, which agrees with it more than once as I’ve started to find. But again, I live in the sixteenth century now lol.

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  16. Ryan C

    A question to consider is how old was the translator who translated that verse in 1970 or 1960 or whatever. A meaning of a word that’s preeminent when the text is translated may not have been preeminent in the mind of an older translator, who used the word in an older sense. It might not apply to this case, but it does come up every so often when I compare translations. I just find the issue interesting haha.

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  17. Paul

    ” it’s our country that mostly uses the word in a psych sense”
    That may have been true in the 1980s, but not any more. People with “abandonment issues”, “anger issues”, “inner child issues” and “commitment issues” now abound.

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