Translating Matthew 7, ‘And why do you look to the splinter [κάρφος] in the eye of your brother, yet the plank [δοκὸς] in your own eye you do not recognise?’, the King James Bible chooses ‘mote’ for κάρφος, and ‘beam’ for δοκὸς.
3 And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
4 Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
5 Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.
The ambiguity of English ‘mote’ and ‘beam’ creates an image that can be read in two ways. There is still the option to take it as a comparison of weight of sin, where the preponderance rests with the joist in my own eye; but now another reading emerges, in which there is a luminescent relationship between the beam, a shaft of light, and the mote, a glowing speck. The metaphorical image is no longer of a plank and a splinter, but a dustmote drifting past an illuminated window.
How the relation between the κάρφος (karthos) and the δοκός (dokos) is changed! The splinter depends on the plank since it must be a splinter from something, but even when separated from the plank it can continue to exist. This is not how things are with a mote and a beam, for the mote vanishes as soon as it drifts beyond the margins of the sun. The teaching now is this: the fault I see in my brother exists only because it is caught in the ray of my own judgement. And the implication is: in the absence of that ray, there is no fault at all.
In this way the King James translators transform the moral psychology of Matthew 7, and it becomes a breathtaking affirmation of compassion: my brother has no faults except that I project my own judgement upon his traits. Nor do I need to berate myself for being worse than he is. My task is to refrain from any judgement, and simply accept.
Matthew 7 now appears not as an absurd hyperbole, but as a perfect example of spiritual writing. It encodes two layers of meaning which are in dialogue with each other: the manifest interpretation, of the splinter and the plank, whose outcome and recommendations ought not to satisfy; and the inner interpretation, of the mote and the beam, whose humane wisdom strikes us all the more forcefully since, in the moment of seeing, there is a shock as the tension of the manifest interpretation is resolved.
In a way that seems perfectly consistent with this inner meaning for Matthew 7, David Edwards describes how meditative practice transformed his resentment after an unfortunate incident with his partner:
thanks to an hour of self-observation, the resentment had not merely been controlled by force of will, and it had not merely vanished. It had been alchemised into a loving, blissful energy. It wasn’t that I’d made a mental decision to forgive anyone; the angry energy had been transformed. It was astonishing to have somehow emerged into delight from a pit of despair.
As a result, not least because I knew and trusted my partner enough, I was able to see the whole thing as a misunderstanding, a kind of accident in which I had also played a part. Without the dark emotional baggage, I was able to see the event for what it really was – ugly, silly but not actually important. [MediaLens, ‘Resist not Evil’?]
Certainly, on this interpretation, the teaching Matthew 7 seems more like Buddhism than what I associate with Christianity.
But is this interpretation really to be found in the Greek of Matthew 7, or has it been imposed by the translators? Is there an ambiguity in Greek which matches the ambiguity exploited in King James? And if there is not, then perhaps I have only projected this second meaning onto King James, when really it was not intended at all? This is the subject of the third part.
Babel editing 
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