The Gospel Books in the New Testament have no shortage of Jesus’s teachings. To all Christ’s followers, they are the treasure troves of knowledge and guidance on how to be more like Him. Among them, certain sayings stand out like bundles of powerful and succinct sermons. Beatitudes [bee-A-ti-tyoodz] 天國八福 {tian1-guo2-ba1-fu2} from Matthew 5:3-12 is one of them.
The Chinese name makes intuitive sense. “八福” literally means “Eight Blessings”, as evident in the passage where the eight verses all begin with “Blessed are …” So where does the word “Beatitudes” come from? The answer turns out to be Latin, according to Wikipedia. “Blessed are” translates to “beati” in Latin, which later evolved into the “Beatitudes” in English. Interesting.
What’s more interesting is that from the get-go, the English and Chinese versions disagree quite a bit in meaning.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:3
虛 心 的 人 有 福 了 ！ 因 為 天 國 是 他 們 的 。
馬 太 福 音 5:3
As you can tell, “poor in spirit” is not “虛心” by a long stretch. What gives? Ideally, no matter what version of the Bible we use, we should receive an almost identical message almost all the time. However, given that we are reading translations instead of the original text, a tiny fraction of it is bound to disagree to a certain extent simply due to, well, the nature of language.
Let’s check with the Greek text to see who’s “right”. The portion in question is “πτωχοὶ τῷ πνεύματι“. The first word is quite literally “poor” or “lack”. The second is an article with no meaning. The third means “in spirit”. So you see, both English and Chinese are right. Yes, you heard me. Both.
There is no doubt that the English translation has it bang on, but what’s the deal with “虛心”? Well, the word “虛” means “lacking”, and “心” can mean “soul” or “spirit”. So the Chinese translation CUV simply put these two words together as “poor in spirit”, but ended up with a word that meant a completely different thing. If you ask any Chinese person, yes, even Christian believers who have this verse memorized front and back, they will tell you “虛心” means “modest” or “humble”, not “poor in spirit”.
So what do we make of it? Well, it certainly doesn’t hurt to be modest and humble. Jesus clearly taught that elsewhere. However, if you care about what Jesus said here exactly, then you know He meant “poor in spirit”, not “modest”.