From faith to faith

A propósito das traduções de ek písteos eis pístin, da Carta aos Romanos (Rm 1,17b), nas edições da Bíblia em português

Abstract

The Letter to the Romans has been considered the culmination of Paul’s theological exposition. Right at the beginning, he makes a statement of the themes that he will deal with in the Letter, among which that of soteriology stands out (Rom 1:16-17). In the statement, appears the phrase ek písteos eis pístin, from faith to faith, taken here as object of study. It will be presented in its context in the Letter to the Romans, from the way it is interpreted by some important scholars of the Letter, and as it appears translated in some of the main editions of the Bible in circulation in Brazil. The objective is to show the difficulties of translators in the face of a difficult text and what procedures they adopt to help readers understand it. The methodology adopted was that of bibliographic research. It can be seen, as a result achieved, that the difficulty of translation is due to the syntactic construction used by Paul, but that it can also come from the understanding of what faith is in the Apostle’s writings. In other words, the difficulty would be not only in the syntactic structure of the syntagm (ek ... eis...), but also in understanding the meaning of the noun pístis, faith, in Paul, that is, in a semantic issue.