Reading The Bible Better - Lesson 7

Dr. George Guthrie
Reading The Bible Better
th102-07
Bible Translations
Lesson Transcript

Dr. George Guthrie
Reading The Bible Better
th102-07
Bible Translations
Lesson Transcript

Speaker 1 [00:00:00] A little over 200 years ago, there was a young woman named Mary Jones, who lived in a small valley in Wales. She was a little girl of about eight years of age at the beginning of our story. She was industrious, who kept very busy for her family. She loved going to her church and she loved hearing the Bible read and quoted. Now she lived in an area where there weren't many Bibles, and there especially were not Bibles in the Welsh language. But there was a neighbor of hers named Mrs. Evans, who had a Bible. And Mrs. Evans told Mary one day, You know, you are so passionate about the Bible, if you want if you learn to read, you can come to my house any time you want to and read my Bible for yourself. Not long after that, a man named Mr. Charles built a school in Mary's area. And over the next two years, she learned to read. At the end of that time, she went to Mrs. Evans and she said, You promised that I could come read the Bible at your house once I learned to read. I can read now. And Mrs. Evans welcomed her in and celebrated Mary's ability to read the Bible for herself.

[00:01:18] But about that time, she also started saving money so that she could buy her own copy of the Bible. And over the next six years, Little Mary Jones went and did odd jobs for all the neighbors, in addition to her chores at home and finally saved up enough money to buy a Bible. Well, the nearest place she could get a Bible was from Mr. Charles, who lived in Bala 25 miles away. Mr. Charles was the same guy who had built a school in her area but he was a man who was also passionate about the Bible and got copies of the Welsh Bible from London. And he would sell those to people in the area so they could have copies of the Bible for themselves. So one day, right at the beginning of the 1800s, little Mary Jones set out barefooted and walked 25 miles to this town of Bala to get a Bible. She met with Mr. Charles and brokenhearted, he said, You know, I've already given out all of the Welsh Bibles and the people in London are not planning on really producing any more. And at that point, little Mary Jones sat down and she wept because she had been looking forward to having her own copy of the Bible. Mr. Charles decided that he had to get her a copy, so he found her a copy of the Bible. In fact, the picture on the screen is a picture of Mary Jones' Bible, which I've held in my hands in the university library at Cambridge University. This little girl was so passionate, she finally got a copy of the Bible for herself, and she lived a very faithful life, reading the Bible for herself and teaching it to other people.

[00:03:07] But that's not the end of her story, because Mr. Charles, not long after his meeting with Mary, went to London and met with a group of businessmen in London, shared her story, and they founded the British Bible Societies. The British Bible societies over the next couple of centuries would pay for the production of the Bible in many, many languages around the world.

[00:03:33] Now, let me put this in a little bit bigger context in terms of Bible translation in the world. In the 15th century, 1400s, there were about 33 languages in the world that had some part of the Bible translated into that language. The 19th century, the same century in which Mary Jones lived, there were about 400 languages that were added to the total number of languages that had been translated. The Wycliffe Bible translators tell us that as of September 2020, the full Bible had been translated into 704 languages. The New Testament had been translated into an additional 1551 languages, and the Bible portions or stories had been translated into another 760 languages. The total of those languages that have some portion of the Bible now equals about 3500 languages. And when we think about world history and what God has done through Bible translators, it's been a very, very important ministry in the history of the church.

[00:04:51] Well, why do we need Bible translation? It is because God chose human language as the medium through which he would. Feel truth to us. Just think about that for a minute. God chose to reveal truth to us as human beings, not by simply implanting images in our mind, but by using human communication and the process of human communication to reveal his truth in the world, in particular context. And that's a really important point. John Calvin said that it is like God speaks, baby, talk to us. God has condescended to get down on our level and communicate as we do in order to communicate his truth. And so you have a passage like second Peter 1:21, No prophecy ever came by the will of man. Instead, men spoke from God as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. But they were speaking in their language, their human language of their time. The reality is, as God has spoken His word into particular cultural context in the world, then, as the Gospel has gone out into the world across different cultural boundaries, whether we see that in the Old Testament, where you have God's Word being translated into other cultural context or in the New Testament where the church goes on mission. From the very beginning, translation was a part of what God was doing in the world because people needed to hear the words of God in their own language.

[00:06:35] You think of a wonderful passage like Nehemiah Chapter eight, and this is a time when the Israelites had come back from exile. They had been punished by God. They had been sent away from Jerusalem into exile, out of the nation of Israel. But they come back. They're allowed to come back once the Persians take over. And when they get back, they're rebuilding the nation, starting to think about rebuilding the temple. And they come to a place where the law of God is found. But what happened was they had changed languages. Most of the people no longer spoke Hebrew. Now they spoke a language called Aramaic. And so if you go back and you read Nehemiah Chapter eight, you find that the people stand for a good portion of the day in order to hear the words of the Law. In fact, Nehemiah says in that passage that they bent their ears toward the teaching of the Law. They were leaning into trying to understand what was being said, and the leaders around them were translating the text into their language and explaining the text to them. So you have translation and interpretation going on at that point.

[00:07:58] If you move to the early church, the followers of Jesus who wrote the New Testament, many of them we know were using a translation of the Hebrew Old Testament called the Septuagint, and they were basically dealing with the Bible in Greek, in a Greek translation, because they were Greek speakers, many of them. So you have the early church using that, in part. They also used Aramaic paraphrases. They used the Hebrew text at times. But the dominant translation of the early church seems to be the Greek text.

[00:08:37] Even when Jesus gives the Great Commission, I want to suggest that it assumes that Bible translation is going to be a very important part of what God is doing in the world. Jesus said to His disciples at the end of His ministry right before he was going back to heaven to be with the Father, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you and remember I'm with you always, even to the end of the age. Now think about what that passage presupposes. It presupposes that the Gospel and the church is going to move across all the cultures of the world, transcend all of those cultural boundaries. And it was going to do that all the way to the end of the age, all the way to the end of time, when Christ will return and transition us to the new heavens and the new Earth. What Jesus words presuppose is, as the Gospel goes out into the world, then God's Word would be translated for people so that they could hear and understand and be taught the words of God in their particular cultural context and situation.

[00:10:03] When we look at church history, we find many people in church history who have paid a tremendous price to translate the Bible into the language of common people. I'm just going to give you one example because of our limited time that we have, but William Tyndale is one of the great heroes of the faith. He was the first person in the early 1500s to translate the Bible from Hebrew, in the Old Testament, in Greek, in the New Testament into English. John Wycliffe had translated the Bible back in the mid 1300s, but he had done it from the Latin translation of the Bible into English. Tyndale really wanted to go back to the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament and translate the Bible into the language of common people, because he saw that the Bible was locked away from the common person who could not read Latin. And so he wanted them to be able to read the Bible and read an accurate translation. And he did that. He produced the New Testament and then was in jail for the last part of his life. Tyndale was hunted down. He ended up being strangled to death and burned at the stake because he translated the Bible into English so that people could read it. He said this, I defy the Pope and all of his laws. And he added that if God spared his life ere many years, he would cause a boy that drives the plow to know more of Scripture than he did. He said, My vision, my goal in life is to translate the Bible into the language of common people so that the little rural boy, the farm boy who drives the plow, could really know the scriptures for himself. And Tyndale's translation put all kinds of things in motion in England at the time that brought reform in culture and society and in the church itself.

[00:12:05] Well, let me ask the question what are good translations seeking to accomplish? I mean, when people set out to translate the Bible today, how do they go about doing Bible translation? And let me just give you a few points to understand kind of how things work today. First of all, most of the major English Bible translations today are done by committees of scholars who get together to work through the text of the Bible themselves. If you're dealing with the NIV translation or the ESV or the CSB, any of these very good solid translations, they are working with a group of scholars normally to bring the Hebrew Old Testament or the Greek New Testament over into English so that it is understandable to people in modern cultural context. For those of you who are in other parts of the world, Bible translation has normally been done by societies like the Wycliffe Bible translators and others, missionaries who maybe came to your part of the world and spent years of their lives rendering the Bible into your particular language. But this has been a vitally important ministry of the Church. Think about the fact that we would not be able to read the Bible for ourselves. We couldn't hold the Bible in our hands if people had not spent hundreds and hundreds of hours working through these original texts and bringing them into our heart language.

[00:13:39] As they do that, translators are trying to achieve at least three main things accuracy, clarity and naturalness. And what I want to do is talk through each of those points for a few minutes so we can understand really how challenging Bible translation is, but also what translations are really trying to achieve as they are doing their work in the world.

[00:14:03] So let's talk about accuracy for a minute. When we talk about accuracy, translators are trying to bring the Hebrew and the Greek texts over in a way that is accurate. It's in line with what the original author was intending to communicate. It asks the question, does the text capture the sense and point to the intended response from the target audience? So is it capturing the sense of what the original author wrote, and is it doing it in a way that with the people who are being addressed by the translation, that they not only understand it, but they understand the intent, what the person was trying to communicate? So different kinds of things will address, and scholars will study things like word meanings to make sure that they are being accurate. And sometimes as scholarship studies the text of scripture, you'll have translations, work insights from that scholarship into a particular translation.

[00:15:08] Let me give you just a couple of examples of what I'm talking about there. There's a passage in Hebrews 5:14, and there's a little word there that often has been translated as practice that solid food is for the mature for those who who practice, in a sense, the idea of righteousness. And yet that passage, if you go and you look at that, if you studied the particular Greek word that is there, it really is not referring to practice at all. It's referring to kind of a state of being. Specifically in context, it's referring to the state of being a mature person. So the translation probably for that passage should go something like, that solid food, speaking about solid Christian teaching, is for the mature who, by virtue of their maturity, have senses that are trained to discern the difference between good and evil. It's not saying go out and practice to discern the difference. It's saying this is what a mature person looks like. And so what scholars will do is they'll work with that kind of information and say, okay, how do we put this in translation in a way that is understandable?

[00:16:23] A second kind of thing is when you're dealing with different cultural contexts, what are those cultural contexts communicating? So here's another example of it. At times you'll find modern translations will translate the word that in Greek straightforwardly means brothers. They will translate it at points as brothers and sisters. Well, why is that? Well, it's because this Greek word, the word adelphoi, which is the word for brothers, is in ancient cultural context, where there is a religious group. That word often is used to refer to both the men and women in the room. It's not specifically in that religious context, referring just to the men. It's referring to both men and women. So they would address the brothers, speaking about all the believers in the room. So you have this in first, John, chapter three, verse 14. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brothers and sisters. That was just the word, adelphoi there, but I think John, in that context is referring to everybody in the room who has a brother and sister in Christ. So it's more accurate in that case not to just give kind of the straightforward translation of the word brothers, but actually to translate it as what John would have had in his thinking as he used that term. He would have envisioned all the believers, both men and women in the room. So you have cultural dynamics like that that also come into play as translation is being done.

[00:18:04] So the first thing translations are trying to do is to be accurate. Second thing is translations are trying to be clear. So when you think about a translation being put into your language, what the translator is wanting to do is to be accurate in terms of what the text really is speaking about, but also to be clear as it's communicated into your language. So the question there would be does the translation clearly communicate the sense of the text to the target audience, to the people who are being addressed by that translation? There are different kinds of things that translators grapple with. So, for instance, word choices, you take a passage like Romans 3:23. In English that often is translated as for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Now, the word that we translate there as fall short is a word that could mean a variety of things that word in Greek could mean to miss, to fail, to reach, to lack something. And what a translator will do is they'll say, okay, how do we communicate? Romans 3:23 accurately? How do we communicate it clearly? And it may be that another possible way of translating that verse would be all have sinned and lack the glory of God. At times in the Bible, the glory of God refers to the presence of God. It may be that what Paul is communicating there is that all have sinned in by virtue of that state of being sinful people. We lack the presence of God in our lives. Well, that's just a possibility that translators will grapple with as they try to say what most clearly communicates this passage.

[00:19:56] Another thing they grapple with is grammar at. Times you have a Greek sentence and it can be translated as either as a statement or a question. So grammar is another thing.

[00:20:08] And then I love the topic of idioms. There are idioms in Greek, just like there are in your language or my language. I was telling someone at a break that I had a friend who was a missionary in Germany for a while and in the particular part of Germany where he was ministering, the older people in that part of Germany had an idiom when they wanted to speak of something that just was amazing. In English, we might say, that blows my mind, which is an idiom itself. It just means that I'm astounded at what's going on. If you translated the German from those people at that time in Germany, especially the older people, if you translate the phrase the idiom, literally, it meant something like, I think my hamster is polishing the floor. So it doesn't make any sense in terms of what the words say. But the idiom is something that people in the culture understood. Just like when I say in English, that blows my mind. I grew up in the American South and it was common for us to say to someone, Can I carry you to town? Well, in English, that probably brings to your mind me thinking about picking somebody up and carrying them to town. What that meant, it was an idiom for Can I give you a ride in my car to town? But idioms have to be understood. And it's the same way with the Bible. So you have a passage in in the Corinthian correspondence from Paul, where Paul says in the King James version, it says like this and Second Corinthians chapter six, verse 12, Ye are not straitened in us, but you are straightened in your own bowels. Well, that's straightforwardly translating a Greek word that referred to our guts, our entrails, you know, our intestines is what the word literally referred to. But it could also, in that culture, figuratively speak of the emotions because the tummy was kind of the seed of the emotions in the culture at that time. And what Paul is doing here is he's using an idiom to speak about a person's affections. And that passage is translated, for instance, by the CSB, he is saying we are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours, your affection from us. And I think that's a very good translation of that passage, because it's using an idiom that speaks about the seat of the emotions, and Paul is addressing the Corinthians on that basis. So clarity would be a second thing translators are trying to get at.

[00:22:53] A third thing is naturalness. When we speak of naturalness, we just mean is this the normal way that people speak in this cultural situation. If I'm translating this into a specific language and cultural context, is this the way people would say this sentence? So let me give you one example there. My friend Clint Arnold. When he came to Christ, came to be a believer, he attended a church that at that time was using the King James version. And the King James is a beautiful, wonderful translation of the Bible, but it was written for people in the early 1600s. And the language sounds kind of strange to us in the modern world, but he read this passage from the Book of James that says, My brethren count it all joy when you fall into diverse temptations. Well, that's accurate if you're in the early 1600s. But for my friend Clint, what came to his mind were divers. He thought, What kind of temptation are these divers experiencing? Because he didn't understand the meaning of the word divers. That word is just the translation of a Greek word that means various, so count it all joy when you fall into various kinds of temptations is really what James is saying at that point. So translators are going to work and say, you know, how does this sound to a person who is speaking this language? Well, that's a little bit of what modern translators are trying to do.

[00:24:25] Let me kind of wrap up by talking about why translations are different from one another and then how you can choose a translation for yourself. So why are translations different from one another? Let me give you two reasons. The first is because of the flexibility of human language. If you had two translators in the modern world, for instance, in a Spanish speaking context and someone said go out and communicate with the audience and tell them this, those two different translators would probably say the same thing, but not in exactly the same way, because human language is fluid. It's very flexible in the way that we describe things, in the way that we talk to one another. We use a variety of expression. So sometimes translators are communicating the meaning or the sense of the text and they're saying the same thing, but there's a nuance, little bit different way of saying it. So part of that's just part of the nature of the process of translation.

[00:25:30] But the second thing is because there are different approaches to translation, and let me just say a word about that. Different translations are trying to arrive at accuracy, clarity and naturalness, but at times balancing those in a little bit different ways. The two main types of translation, or what we might call formal translations or functional equivalence translations. The formal translations are those that are going to try to stay with the form of the original text as much as possible. They're going to follow the words as much as they can. Now, let me make clear there's no such thing as a literal translation where it's just word for word following the original text. It wouldn't make any sense as it came from Hebrew or Greek over into English. But the reality is that formal translation is trying to stick with the word meanings and the grammatical structure of the sentence as much as it can. And that's the point. A functional translation is trying to bring over the meaning or the sense of the different words and phrases and sentences in a way that most clearly communicate. So functional translations are trying to function in communicating the sense and bringing that sense over into the translation. You can think of this along a scale. So on the left side of this scale, you have more formal translations. The New American Standard would be more formal. The ESV is more formal. In the middle you have those that are trying to balance the form and the function. And then on the right hand, you move to what we call paraphrase, which is not really a translation at all. It's it's bringing over the thoughts. And even if you look at something like Eugene Peterson's The Message, which is a very popular paraphrase of the Bible, it's what I would call a transculturation, because at times he's even bringing modern cultural language into rendering the ideas in the text. But what a functional equivalence translation like the NIV or the CSB translation is trying to do is it's trying to bring over the sense or the meaning of the passage. So let me just say that all translations employ both approaches and all of them are going to try to get at this balance in different ways.

[00:28:13] So let me give you one example of this. First Corinthians 7:1 is a passage that the New American Standard Bible translates as, It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Now, that is a very straightforward rendering of that passage in Greek. The word hoptomai in Greek does mean to touch. And yet if you went with that very straightforward translation, it would miss the point of what Paul is really trying to say at this point, because he's using an idiom. He's using a way of expression that is trying to communicate an idea that is not exactly along the lines of not, you know, don't touch a woman. So he's not saying, if you're at church, make sure that you don't bump into a woman or don't reach out and shake hands with a woman. That's not what he's saying. The CEV translation says it is best for people not to marry, which is one understanding of the text at that point. But it specifically, I think those who have it best are the ESV, NIV the NET and the CSB translation. It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman. Because what Paul seems to be doing at this point when he uses this idiom of touching a woman, he's talking about not having sexual relations. Now, the broader context we talked about context of that passage is dealing with the issue of marriage. And so Paul is saying that sexuality, he's putting sexuality in the context of a Christian way of thinking about it in sexuality is for marriage itself. He's saying it's best for a person not to have sexual relations except in the context of marriage. And he goes and unpacks that in First Corinthians chapter seven. But the point of translation is that you have the translations trying to say, okay, how do we communicate this? And they're going to be a variety of different ways that translations communicate that. I think the best ones are those that balance that idea of the form, of the meaning of the words and the grammar with the function, how that meaning is meant to communicate to people to whom the text was written.

[00:30:37] All right. So these are trying to to bring these dynamics of form and function together. So how do you choose if you're dealing with looking at all of these different Bible translations? In English, for those of you who are English speakers, you do have some choices to make because there are so many translations to choose from. For those of you in other parts of the world where maybe there's only one Bible in your heart language, then you may, you know, zero in on that. If you also are an English speaker, then it would be a great idea for you to have another translation in another language that you speak so that you can have those side by side and consider just what insight you gain by looking at various ways of rendering the text. So the first thing I would say is use four or five key translations when you're doing more detailed study of the text. So if you're starting to get into this reading of the Bible and you're starting to study more specifically, maybe you've gotten a study Bible and you're reading those notes. Well, it's a good thing to have at least a couple of translations that you're reading when you're wanting to go a little bit deeper and or maybe a passage that you don't understand. Have a couple of different translations on hand to say, Well, how does the NIV say this? Or How does the CSB say this?

[00:32:01] And it can help you at times begin to tune in and say, you know, this particular translation seems to consistently line up with the study that I've been doing in the text and the study notes in the text, and you'll kind of begin to get a sense of which translation is both speaking to you, but seems to be an accurate reflection of what's going on in the text. Choose one main Bible that you're tracking with a lot, you're reading a lot you're memorizing from. And if you do that, I would suggest that you choose one of those balanced translations. Again, if you're an English speaker, try to get something that is balancing the form and the function of the text.

[00:32:42] A third thing would be understand that the more interpretive translations, the ones who are kind of on the right side of that scale, that are that are focusing very much on communicating the meaning of those translations at times can be very helpful and very good to bring home the power or the punch or the impact of a passage. So it's a good it's a good thing to have even something like the Message I mentioned before, because at times it's an interpretation of the passage that can really speak and be very, very powerful. But I would not use that as my main version of the Bible that I'm reading.

[00:33:25] A fourth thing would be feel free to memorize Scripture from various translations. As you do study, you might tune in to different ways that various translations are expressing a particular passage and those different translations. If one really speaks to you and seems to capture the sense in a way that speaks to you, then feel free to be eclectic with your understanding of the text.

[00:33:49] Now, let me mention one other thing that can be helpful. There are online study tools, and I'm going to say more about this in our final session together. But things like Blue Letter Bible online where you can access a lot of different translations online so you don't have to go out and buy ten translations, you can access these things online. Blue Letter Bible would be one example. And for those of you in various parts of the world, our good friends at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England are putting together the Step Bible, which has the Bible translated into dozens of languages around the world. And they've set this up so that you can study the Bible in your own language and also see other translations as well. So hopefully that will give you a little bit of help.

[00:34:39] As you think about using Bible translations, people always ask which is the best translation? Well, my answer to that is the one that you're using on a regular basis. There are a lot of good translations in the world and we want to mainly begin to learn about them zero in on those that we are hearing and understanding ourselves. And then we want to spend time reading the Bible. And as we do that, these translations can help us read the Bible better.

Speaker 2 [00:35:10] When you're comparing the different translations, are there very many significant doctrinal differences between the translations that will make a difference in how you read them?

Speaker 1 [00:35:24] No, that's that is a very, very good question. What I would say to that is if you're looking at what I would call the standard translations, like the ones that I've mentioned here, you really don't have places where there is significant doctrinal difference. These these are very consistent. In fact, the thing that's amazing is even if you look at something like the King James, which is the most popular old English translation, and you compare the King James. After the King James, one reason why we have the modern translations differ at a few points from the King James is because of all of the manuscripts of the Bible that have been found in recent centuries that have increased our understanding of the original text of the old and the New Testament. But even when you compare the King James to Bibles that were translated 400 years later, you don't have major doctrinal differences. And so what I would say to people is that you can be confident in the translations that you have in your hands if you're sticking with these kind of mainline translations and not getting off. There are cults and other movements that are not really kind of mainline Christian movements that have their own translation of the Bible, and you don't want to go there. But if you're using kind of these standard translations we've talked about, you're going to be on solid ground.