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BIBLE TRANSLATIONS AND CULTURE

“For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:21).

One of the many areas that brings controversies among brothers and sisters in Christ is translations. Translating the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into other languages has been going on since before Christ. The Septuagint (LXX) was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures sometime around 200 B.C. From the early second century A.D., the New Testament was translated into a variety of Semitic and European languages. The manuscript evidence for the New Testament is overwhelming with some twenty thousand plus manuscripts of the New Testament from the second century and beyond (1). The Hebrew Bible has fewer manuscripts available because of the method of copying them. The Jewish scribes had a very detailed method of copying that when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947 to 1956, it was found that over a thousand year period from the then known oldest manuscript, looking at one chapter in the Isaiah Scroll, only three words were different, and that was spelling.

Translators have much material to go through in order to bring the Bible to the common people like you and me. Since the invention of the printing press, there has been a desire to translate the Bible into the common language so that people in the pew could read and understand scripture. The most famous translation for about three hundred years was the King James Version (KJV). Released in 1611, it was not well received for several decades but finally became the standard translation used in numerous churches. The edition that most use today comes from the middle of the 1700s when the language was updated for that period of time. Reading the original 1611 edition is difficult because of spelling differences and word meanings.

The KJV had become the standard for so long that many think one should compare any new translations with the KJV. But between the KJV and the next translation some three hundred years later were discoveries of many manuscripts that would enhance our understanding of words. Many who defend the KJV as the only reliable translation often fail to understand a number of things. One is that while there are manuscript families, it does not mean that the family with the most is the best. Two, words change use and meaning over the years to the point that a word can mean the exact opposite today that it meant two hundred years ago. Three, a better understanding on both English and Greek can help to realize that a word translated in 1750s might really mean something different. Genealogists have discovered that the word “nephew” found in the KJV really meant “grandson,” which makes for a very different reading.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there has been a host of translations in three different categories according to Gordon Fee and Mark Strauss (2). No one translation fits into each of these categories perfectly. For instance, a literal translation makes use of paraphrases just as a paraphrase makes use of a literal translation.

The three categories of translation are the formal equivalent which attempts to translate the word from Greek or Hebrew into an equivalent English word. This is not as easy as it sounds because of various tenses that are found in one language and not another. Functional equivalent translations translate phrases into the meaning of the English language. Mediating translations use both as determined by the translators.

In the category of the formal equivalent are the KJV, the New King James (NKJV), the American Standard Version (ASV) and New American Standard Version and Bible (NASV and NASU), the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), the English Standard Version (ESV), and the Jewish Bible the Tanakh. The mediating translations include the New International Version (NIV) and Today’s New International Version (TNIV), the Jerusalem Bible (JB) and the New Jerusalem Bible (NJB), and the New and Revised English Bible (NEB and REB). The functional equivalent include The Message, the Living Bible (LB), the New Living Translation (NLT), Good News for Modern Man in several editions, and the Contemporary English Version (CEV). Each has its strengths and weaknesses and it helps to read what experts say about them.

Translators must determine who their audience is going to be and what type of translation they want to produce. Those who work as groups across denominational lines in translating usually have checks and balances that iron out difficulties. Words, phrases, idioms, and sentences all have to be considered when translating. In Exodus 32:19, we read in the NASU that “Moses anger burned” and in the New English Translation (NET), “Moses became extremely angry.” Which would be more common and understandable today? Think about the idea of stoning in the Bible, which meant throwing stones at people as a form of capital punishment. So we read that Paul was “stoned” in Asia Minor. But that idea takes on a different meaning in today’s culture where the word “stoned” means high on drugs. Metaphors are notoriously difficult to translate because they mean different things or the original meaning is lost altogether. For instance, we use the metaphor “a dead ringer” for someone who looks like someone else. It originally was used for a person who was buried but still alive. A person would have a string tied to his hand that was attached to a bell outside the grave and when wrung, would alert the caretaker to a live person who had been buried.

Today some complain that the latest translations have “caved” into a politically correct idea of gender equality. The debate has centered on the NRSV and TNIV. Fee and Strauss have ably answered that, and for the record, they worked on the TNIV. While both Greek and Hebrew recognize that the word “man” can mean humankind, the English equivalent recognizes man as male. To say men and women or brothers and sisters or male and female is recognizing that today’s culture understands this better and leads to less controversy to those who are just beginning to study scripture.

The purpose of scripture is to communicate God’s word to people as clearly as possible. Both Hebrew and Greek used in scripture was the language of the market place or street, that is, the common language. Today we would say that we have the language of Shakespeare verses our common language we hear everyday. Or it could be the language of science verses the common language.

People who are use to one translation often have difficulty with another because the words are not always the same and there is a fear that something has been added to or deleted from their favorite translation. One could say that maybe it is that favorite translation that has does that, such as the KJV. Understanding some of this background material to translations can avoid much anguish when someone uses another in a service. We have often found that different translations open up or challenge us to look at the text in different ways, attempting to understand what the author was attempting to get across. Bible study should be exciting and different translations help in study.

George B. Mearns

(1) A manuscript might include a fragment with a verse or two such as five verses from the Gospel of John now in the John Rylands Library in England and considered the oldest known New Testament verses dated around 120 A.D.

(2) Gordon D. Fee and Mark L. Strauss, How To Choose A Translation For All Its Worth, Zondervan, 2007.