Episode Transcript
Carey Griffel: [00:00:00] Welcome to Genesis Marks the Spot, where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel. And today, we are going to talk about Bible translations. This is a topic that I have had slated to do for quite some time, and to be honest, I'm motivated to do it today because recently there has been quite a bit of chatter about this new translation called the LSB, the Legacy Standard Bible.
So, what better time to talk about translations than when a new translation comes out, and it starts getting used and distributed in ways where people are wondering, what is this? Where did it come from? And can we trust it? It is a very important topic to really look at [00:01:00] translations and how they came about because there are translation methodologies that different translation committees use. There's different reasons for a translation to be put out, and all of that is really quite important to know something about that if you're going to be looking at this translation or using it.
Now, I'm going to say straight out that there's really nothing wrong with translation bias. There just isn't, because there has to be a translation bias. You're not going to get away from a translation bias. And people who say that you can, either really don't understand the translation process, or they're trying to sell you something. Or both. And not to be cynical about this, but every time a new Bible translation comes out, they are trying to sell you something.
That's not always necessarily a bad thing, okay? Just because somebody's trying [00:02:00] to sell you something doesn't make their motivations bad. It doesn't make what they're doing a bad thing. Just be above board in what you're doing and how you're doing it, and be transparent with at least some of your motivations, and, you know, that's fine.
I mean, people spend time doing things, and they deserve to be compensated if that thing that they're doing is benefiting people to some degree. Right? At least that's my perspective, and you know, sometimes that doesn't work out. Sometimes you're not compensated for the effort that you're doing it, but you do it anyway because you love doing it, or you have a motivation to do it, and that's all just fine.
So I'm not saying that just because somebody is selling you something that there are necessarily Nefarious motives, or anything wrong going on there, anything like that. But, it is true that a lot of Bible translations sell [00:03:00] more copies of the Bible. And, of course, we want Bible copies to be sold. We want that to be spread. We want people to be reading the Bible. So, again, I'm not trying to say that that's necessarily a negative thing. But at the same time, it is fair to ask, Do we need another Bible translation? Why are they doing another Bible translation? And to be honest, that's a particularly relevant question when we look at the LSB. And you'll see why that is as I get into it.
But before I do that, I'm not just gonna dive right into modern translations. Because that doesn't tell us what they are and where they come from. And maybe I'm going to be getting into a little bit of the weeds here, but I think it's really interesting. I think if you're listening to this podcast, you'll probably find it at least a little bit interesting.
But for today, I will try not to get into too many of the weeds. Because I think [00:04:00] first and foremost, most of us really need a very solid basis of some basics of what's going on here with Bible translation. And so I'm going to be trying to take kind of a big picture view. So we'll be doing a brief overview without hopefully too much depth because as soon as we get too deep into that, we might lose the forest for the trees.
So hopefully this won't be too packed with data that you can follow along and really understand what's going on here. But at the same time I am going to be offering you a good bit of data. If you're already familiar with the story of biblical translation, then a lot of this might be a bit basic. But I will in the end be getting into some specifics about this new translation and my opinion of it.
As well as sharing a few of my opinions regarding what I have heard about this translation from certain sectors of Christianity. [00:05:00] In particular, the LSB has been praised by both John MacArthur as well as Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis, and the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum and all of that. They have praised this version of the Bible as the best translation that we currently have.
So they are so prominent to many Christians that I think it's really valuable to pay attention to their opinions and ask ourselves, is this in fact the best translation that we have? So, I will be getting into that, and I will be digging a little bit into the aspect of why somebody would say that this is the best translation.
What would make someone choose this translation over other translations? I think there are some real motivations there. Not necessarily bad ones, but real ones that, as Christians today, We [00:06:00] ought to be aware of these trends and this thinking that is going on in the church today. Like, whatever thinking I'm talking about here. If there's some sort of way of thinking about the world, and way of looking at the Bible, and to Christianity in general, and how we are supposed to live our lives, if there are trends that are happening in the world of Christianity today, We, as Christians, no matter what our personal tradition is that we come from, we ought to be aware of these trends.
We ought to be aware of what they are and where they're coming from and how people think about these things, because we ought to be really good faith communicators with one another and trying to understand why we have the opinions and the worldviews that we have. So I hope that that all makes sense.
Like, if we want to understand what somebody thinks and how they think and why they [00:07:00] think those things, then it's really beneficial to try and enter their perspective and try to think about that. But it's also useful to step outside of that perspective and view it from other angles as well. So that's part of what I'm going to be kind of embarking on today towards the end of the episode.
But like I said, first we're going to start out with looking at the history of biblical translations and there is a lot here that we could talk about So like I said, I'm just going to give a brief overview and we'll dive into little aspects of this There are many other aspects we could get into, but again, we don't want to get lost as far as what our target is today. And most of what we want to get into is talking about modern Bible translations. And to be honest, most modern Bible translations come from Protestant traditions. Now, that's not to say that non Protestant traditions [00:08:00] don't do Bible translations. Because they do. But a lot of that has traditionally been driven by reactions to Protestants.
So, it's a very interesting thing, and we will probably at some point get into more of this information about the different canons between the different branches of Christianity. And all of these other things. But that's not on our docket today. So I'm not going to be talking too much about the Apocrypha or the Deutero canonical books as others call them. They have their own very rich and interesting history. And in fact they were actually included in the King James Version. So that's pretty interesting because it's not often that you see a King James Version onlyist reading the Apocrypha.
At any rate, you guys know that I like to give you guys resources so that you can go and learn on your [00:09:00] own. So, for those of you interested in really digging into this overview of Bible translation, I highly recommend this book called The Journey from Texts to Translations, The Origin and Development of the Bible. It is by Paul D. Wegner. That's W E G N E R. It is a fantastic overview of the entire topic.
So when we are talking about Bible translation, there are many different ways that this is done, and there are different philosophies behind the translations. We don't have the original manuscripts for anything in the Bible. Like the original manuscripts being the original document that the scribe or the biblical author put his hand to. And I say scribe or biblical author [00:10:00] because a lot of times, writing was dictated to somebody else who was writing it down.
And it was also the case that quite frequently, books or letters were written by more than one author. You can see traces of this, or more than traces really, In some of the letters from Paul, for instance, he mentions other people and he mentions sometimes writing in his own hand. So this complicates matters when you're talking about the origin of some writing, because sometimes you might have very different sound to a letter, even though they're all written by Paul. But they might sound slightly different and use different phraseology and different wording. Because he's not just writing these things by himself, usually. So, you know, we're used to, today, you write a book, you have an editor, you have a publishing process, and hopefully you have more than just yourself who's involved in the writing of the book.
I [00:11:00] mean, for us, in the end, it makes a better product. We tend to think that that's not going on in the past. But it was going on in the past. There were multiple authors, there were editors, there were revisions, there were changes to the text. I mean, maybe not always, but sometimes there were, and authors could also bring together multiple sources into a new text.
And you might wonder, why the heck I'm talking about this, when I'm supposed to be talking about translation. Well, in a sense, when texts get edited, or they get compiled, or put together in some form, even in a canonical list, that's almost the same as some form of translation or editing going on. Because you're giving the text that you're handling, you're giving it some form of interpretation. You're giving it a shape that has a [00:12:00] meaning to you. If you are using a text in your culture, then that means it has a meaning to you. You are interpreting it on some level. Even if we are only collecting texts because we have some scientific or historical interest in them, Well, our scientific and historical interest is the meaning that we are giving them.
But clearly, when we're talking about the biblical text, people aren't just treating the texts like they're in some sort of vacuum, like they are value neutral. That's not how we treat our sacred texts. So anyone who is approaching a sacred text with a purpose is going to have a bias. They're going to have an intent to what they're doing. They're going to treat the text in a way that is faithful to the way that they are living their religious lives. And, surprise, surprise, that changes from time [00:13:00] to time. So, the way that people are going to view this sacred text from one time to another is, just not the same. We kind of expect the Jews of the first century to be using their sacred text in the same way that we do.
And for many Christians, that means that there is one best Bible translation, there is one that you want to use to the exclusion of others. When we look at the way that the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, however, what we see is that there was not just one translation, there was not just one authorized version.
So well before the time of Jesus, we already have translation going on. Unfortunately, we have fairly scattered evidence of the time period. We do have the Dead Sea Scrolls, and we have several other caches of ancient manuscripts. But [00:14:00] unfortunately, there's a lot we don't know about the earliest translations.
So, the earliest translations that we have to talk about are the Aramaic Targums and the Greek Septuagint. Now, the Aramaic Targums are translations, but they're also very mixed up with a lot of commentary and a lot of weird paraphrasing and things like that. So they're very interesting to read because they give a bit of a window into how people were thinking. And so from scholarly information we have today, we can see that there really is already a disconnect in culture and time and understanding between the original authors of the Hebrew Bible and the people who are writing the Aramaic Targums.
So, as far as the Septuagint, or the Greek translation, that was probably done in Alexandria, Egypt. So, understanding that, we can see that there were probably certain [00:15:00] concerns and views that the translators had that really might be very different from the perspective of the Israelites in the Promised Land. I've already mentioned how every translation is an interpretation. So, if we're wondering, why is there a major disconnect between the Christian church, or the Jews of the first century, and the people of the Old Testament, the original writers of the Torah, the prophets, the exile, all of that.
You know, the more that we learn about the Bible in context, the more we see a disconnect in understanding of certain things. And that just naturally affects our interpretation of Scripture. So the Septuagint being translated into Egypt is already a step away from the context of the Israelites in the Promised Land.
Now, please don't misunderstand me here. I'm not saying that we can't read the Hebrew Bible [00:16:00] or read our Old Testament and understand it. That's not what I'm saying at all. I'm not saying that any essential thread of the narrative has been lost. I'm just saying that when we go to those particular passages in the Old Testament, And we're reading them and we don't quite understand what the deal is with those weird places in the text.
What do we do with these strange passages? It's this disconnect in culture and time that makes those weird to us. To the original author and the original audience, they wouldn't have been weird. So once we understand that original context, then those strange passages in the Bible become a little bit more clarified. And we can see how they fit into the overarching worldview of the Bible. So, since we are students of the Word, and we want to understand everything that we can about the Bible as we're reading it, we want to understand these strange [00:17:00] passages. This is the benefit of studying the Bible in context. It's not that you have to do that in order to understand the overarching story, or God interacting with humanity on Earth.
But as good students, we want to understand the full import of everything that we're reading. Alright, so speaking of translations, it is the Septuagint's translation that became the Old Testament for Christians. Then, combined with the fact that we have the New Testament in Greek, the Greek language becomes very important to Christian history and Christian understanding.
There weren't very many of the early church fathers who could even read Hebrew. And once you see that they just needed to be able to read the Greek Septuagint, well, that makes perfect sense that most of them didn't need to read Hebrew because they had it in Greek. This is, I think, very essential for us Christians because we [00:18:00] hear these terms of inerrancy quite frequently, right?
The Bible is inerrant according to its original manuscripts. The Bible is inerrant according to what we had written originally. We don't like the idea of corrections and things like that when it comes to the biblical text. But already, in the early church, they are working from translations. If God had a problem with translations, then we already have a problem in the early church.
But we can see, from the New Testament itself, that the writers of the New Testament We're perfectly capable of using different versions of the Hebrew Bible, so that should inform the way that we view translations of the Bible. At least that is my suggestion to you. Alright, so I'm going to leave the topic of the Septuagint here for the moment, but we're going to keep in mind that translation has [00:19:00] been a long tradition in the Church.
Once we jump up to the translation of the Bible into Latin, which was done in the late 300s by Jerome, we've already had several translations. The Bible was translated into Gothic, it was translated into Coptic, but it's obviously this Latin translation that's going to have a massive worldwide impact.
Now, this brings us to another essential topic to discuss when we're talking about the idea of translations. You see, a lot of people think of translation as this long history of translating one thing into another thing, into another thing, into another thing, and it's like this game of telephone. So, anyone who's played the game of telephone knows that messages get jumbled when you do that.
If every translation is an interpretation, and you have to make interpretive choices, then every [00:20:00] time you re translate the previous thing into something new, You're losing a little bit there. Now, that is the case if you are not going back at all to the original. But if you were playing a game of telephone, and you could go talk to the person who initiated the message, then you're going to understand the message a little bit better in order to pass it on.
So the question for many people is, is biblical translation like this game of telephone, where you're just changing one thing into another thing continuously? And I'm not going to say that no translation is not done like that. Because we do have translations that go from English into another language, or the Latin into English or another language.
That absolutely happens. Now, hopefully the ones who are doing that also have a good knowledge of the original language and are at least accessing that original [00:21:00] language and looking at it to help them make interpretive choices. But I'm afraid that that's probably not always the case with translation committees.
They don't always have a good knowledge of the original. They don't even look at the original. And so, in that case, we might have this game of telephone where some of the message is genuinely lost. Most of the time, however, that's not what is going on. So, we have Jerome who is translating what's called the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible. And he is using other Latin texts that preceded him, but he realized that those are not sufficient, that they're not really enough for him to go on, and so he did go back to the original Hebrew and the original Greek. We do have to remember, though, that a lot of that Hebrew context was lost by the time of Jerome.
[00:22:00] Okay, so in the interest of keeping this as an overview, rather than getting too lost in the weeds of all the different translations that were going on, we're going to skip over into English translations. Okay, so we're focusing here on what's going on in the Western Church. And most of us are familiar with the fact that for the Roman Catholic Church, Latin was the thing, right?
You didn't use other languages other than Latin, and the church didn't want the Bible to be translated into other languages, and it just never was translated into English or anything else, right? At least, that's the story that many of us have in our heads. We could go down a path of disabusing some of that and saying it's not really that simple.
Because it wasn't that simple. At least, certainly not across the entire history of the church and everywhere that the church was. But again, we're going to keep this as an [00:23:00] overview. And so, to some large degree, that was the case. Latin was the thing. But it wasn't always illegal to translate anything, and we actually have several Anglo Saxon translations that were early on, although either they didn't translate everything, or we just don't have copies of everything that they translated.
One example that we have of Anglo Saxon translation is the Lindisfarne Gospels. In between the lines of this gospel, we have the Anglo Saxon translation, and this is from about the 8th century. Alright, but Anglo Saxon isn't exactly English, so when do we have the first English translation? Obviously, that was the King James Version.
Well, I'm sorry to burst some of your bubbles, but that's actually not true. In the 1380s, which was well before [00:24:00] 1611, John Wycliffe translated the Bible into Middle English, and he did translate this based on the Vulgate. Now Wycliffe's relationship with the Roman Catholic Church was a bit of an interesting one.
He did not agree with the idea of an intermediary between people and God. He also disagreed with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is the doctrine that the bread and wine of the Eucharist actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. For a time, Wycliffe managed to hang on to his scholarly appointments until he was finally ousted.
But he firmly believed that the people needed the Bible in their own language, so that they could understand it. And so it's called Wycliffe's Translation, but it's quite likely that he had several of his students who were working alongside him to do this. At the time, the language was Middle English, so if you pick up the [00:25:00] translation that Wycliffe did, you're going to have a hard time reading that.
The church did not like the translation, and some of the people involved were burned at the stake. Now, it's easy to say that it all went underground and that nobody had access to it unless you could find a copy illegally or something like that. And we do have some indication in writing that if people were caught reading this Bible, then they might have to forfeit land or cattle or other property.
However, we also have other documents that give the cost of renting a Bible. So it's not super clear as to how enforced this was. If maybe some of this was just scare tactics? But, reading from this book that I referenced earlier, The Journey from Texts to Translations, it says, quote, The threat of severe penalties had the reverse effect of rousing curiosity among the people to know what the forbidden [00:26:00] Bible said. Now that England had a Bible, albeit a forbidden one, people wanted to learn to read. So Wycliffe not only gave England the Word of God, But also sparked a desire for literacy. End quote.
In 1415, John Huss, who was a disciple of Wycliffe, was burned at the stake. The council that declared this also condemned all of Wycliffe's writings, and even though he was already dead, the council ordered his bones to be dug up and burned.
Another quote from the book, it is said that Wycliffe's ashes were carried out to the sea, and his teachings spread to other lands. which is why Wycliffe is sometimes called the , Star of the Reformation. End quote.
So it's about 150 years later that we get our next English Bible translation, which is still not the King James Version. [00:27:00] But the next translation we're going to talk about was an extremely formative one. This was done in 1525 by William Tyndale. And rather than starting from the Latin Vulgate, he began with the Hebrew and the Greek. Because it was outlawed to do translations in England, he was actually working in Germany.
And this was actually at the same time that Martin Luther was doing his German translation. It's really not known how much overlap Tyndale and Luther had, or like influence on one another. But it does seem like Luther probably had some influence on Tyndale for Tyndale making his translation.
So, in addition to being translated differently, because Wycliffe was using the Vulgate and Tyndale was using Greek and Hebrew, is the fact that Wycliffe's Bible had to be hand copied, whereas Tyndale's Bible was printed. Also, because [00:28:00] time had passed, Wycliffe was translating into Middle English, Whereas Tyndale's version belongs to the modern English period.
Now, here we also need to talk about the next very important element to all of these translation histories. And that is the Greek version that they were using in order to do their translations.
So, remember we were talking about the Septuagint. But texts don't just live in a vacuum. So, we don't go from the Septuagint that we have in the 1st century, or really before the 1st century, and then hop over to these English translations and say that they're using exactly that same thing. By the time of these English translations, the Greek text had disseminated and had gone through some changes itself.
So now let's talk very briefly about these different Greek [00:29:00] manuscript traditions. Again, I don't want to get too lost in the weeds here. But I really, really want to emphasize how important this is to the way that we understand Bible translation and the way that some Christians today relate to Bible translations.
This really is very, very key. This is going to feed directly into the way that the King James Version was translated and how that history has transpired to where we are today, where we have many people who are King James Version only ists, where we have the idea that the King James Version is the perfect Word of God, and that no other translation is necessary or good or right. And all of this kind of idea.
And I would argue that even those who are not King James Version Onlyists, who continue to have the idea that there is one single [00:30:00] perfect or best translation, they're still hitting on this whole idea that came up from these King James Version Onlyists. Alright, so we're going to talk a bit about that, but first we need to see that the root of these English translations comes from a particular line of Greek manuscripts.
So, what I'm saying is that now we have this idea that it is this particular Greek line of manuscripts that is the Word of God that we have the English from. I don't know if you've recently seen some of this viral TikTok or Instagram reel or whatever it's from of the pastor who says that he can take his English King James Version and quote unquote correct the Greek from his English King James Version.
And that sounds nonsensical to most of us, I think, but actually I can see a line of reasoning [00:31:00] here. Because if what he's talking about is that he can correct the other Greek textual traditions by using his King James Version, which is based on one particular line of manuscripts, then it makes a little bit more sense?
I'm not saying it actually makes sense. I'm just saying that this might be a reasoning that they have. So this is why this information is important for us today, because then we can kind of see this perspective that people have.
So the Greek textual manuscripts that they were using is known as the Textus Receptus. That is Latin for Received Text. The Textus Receptus came from a Greek translation of the New Testament from a man named Erasmus. Now, there is a lot that I could say about Erasmus. He's a very interesting figure in church [00:32:00] history. But again, we are just doing an overview here. So for those of you who are interested, you might want to go and do a little bit of research and reading yourself.
Church history is fascinating and there are so many people who are just really interesting characters. who have played really, really big roles in where we are today, to be honest. Most of that is beyond the scope of this podcast, but there will probably be other places in the future where I'll be addressing more of church history.
But at any rate, it is this Textus Receptus that is a very core to a lot of these ideas about the supremacy of the King James Version and all of these ideas. So we have the Textus Receptus. And the Textus Receptus itself came from Erasmus Greek translation, and Erasmus used Greek manuscripts that were from what [00:33:00] scholars now call the Byzantine text type.
This is also known as the majority text. Now, that doesn't mean that these are the best texts, the best translations. All that means is that most of our New Testament manuscripts are of this type. And that also means, in comparison to other manuscript traditions, that these are not our oldest manuscripts.
So, here we have Luther's German translation, we have Tyndale's English translation, we have the King James Version, and all of these are being translated from Greek manuscripts that are not the oldest manuscripts. There are two other Greek text types. One is called the Western text type. We're not really sure exactly how old this text type is, but there aren't very many examples of it.
And then we [00:34:00] have the Alexandrian text type. It is now thought that the Alexandrian text type originated in Egypt and is generally thought to be the closest to the original New Testament manuscripts. Okay, so I want you to keep all of this in the back of your mind as we go on to talk about modern Bible translations.
And just to give you a little bit of information before we get to that specifically, it is the case that even in our modern Bible translations that are based on the King James Version, of which there are many, and this does include the Legacy Standard Bible, It's also true that many of the modern translations don't just use the Textus Receptus, but they draw upon this Alexandrian text type, as well as using new discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
These are all decisions that a modern translation committee has to make. Again, we don't have very much [00:35:00] time to really go into all of the distinctions between the text types and why they're different. It's not necessarily that they make massive changes. Sometimes it's simple word choice. Sometimes some texts are demonstrably better because you can explain some differences in other texts as far as like scribal mistakes and things like that.
But you do have differences in textual length overall as well. Like there are some stories in some manuscripts that are missing in other manuscripts. So if you're using a translation and it has footnotes and some of those footnotes might say things like The earliest manuscripts have this, or the earliest manuscripts don't have that, or your version seems to be missing verses, or, oh no, they've taken verses out.
That's really what's going on here, is that certain translations are looking at these [00:36:00] Greek manuscripts and saying, we don't have certain things in the earliest texts that we have. And so, was it added later? Can we really be sure that this was in the original New Testament manuscript when we don't have any early evidence of it being in the manuscript at all?
So, it looks like things have been taken out because when the King James Version translated, it used these Greek manuscripts that were later than other Greek manuscripts. And the Greek manuscripts that the King James Version was using included stories and passages in the New Testament that simply are not there in earlier manuscripts.
And so to us, when we compare the King James Version to a more modern translation that's using older Greek manuscripts, it looks like things have been taken out. When really, it looks like the Greek that the King James Version was using had, [00:37:00] for some reason, added things in. Now, there might be other explanations as to why the earlier manuscripts don't have some of these passages.
Maybe some of these passages were in the original Greek New Testament manuscripts. Maybe they were in earlier versions that we simply don't have anymore. But that's an argument from silence. So, if your goal is to do a translation of the Bible that is closest to what the New Testament manuscripts would have had originally, then what are you going to do?
Are you going to choose to use the latest manuscripts we have, or are you going to choose to use the earliest manuscript options that we have? when you hold the King James Version to be the standard Bible ever and you have to acknowledge that the King James Version was built on later manuscripts rather than [00:38:00] earlier manuscripts, then you've got a real disconnect there. But you see, because church history isn't taught very well in the church, and Bible translation is certainly not taught very well in the church, we don't really understand that this is what's going on here. We don't understand that our supposed top standard actually comes from the middle part of history rather than the early part of history.
Alright, but back to our history of Bible translations. Again, we're doing an overview. So There were translations between the Tyndale Bible and the King James Version of 1611. Shortly after the Tyndale Bible, we have the Cloverdale Bible, and this was approved by Henry VIII. Miles Cloverdale ended up using Tyndale's translation. In 1537, we have Matthew's Bible. This was supposedly by Thomas [00:39:00] Matthew, but that was a pseudonym for John Rogers. His pseudonym didn't help him because he was still burned at the stake. The Matthew Bible was a revision of Tyndale and Cloverdale. After that, we have the Great Bible, which combined Tyndale, Cloverdale, and the Matthew Bible.
And then we have a very popular Bible called the Geneva Bible. That was translated specifically for use by the populace. We have another version called the Bishop's Bible. Which was translated specifically for use in the church. So, you can see how suddenly we have this flood of Bible translations.
Eventually, it got to the point where it's like This is going to happen, so how do we choose the best version, and how do we encourage the best version? This was important because Bible translation was also political. Part of the [00:40:00] controversy of Tyndale's translation was that He translated the word church as congregation and he translated priest as either senior or elder.
And so many people saw this as an attack on ecclesiastical organization and governance. In addition to the translation, Tyndale also made marginal notes, which were comments on how the text related to contemporary life. And some of these comments were political or even geared towards attacks on the pope.
For instance, there's Tyndale's note next to Numbers 23. 8. Numbers 23. 8 says, How shall I curse, whom God curseth not? Tyndale's note in the margin says, The pope can tell how? So we have these margin notes by [00:41:00] Tyndale. And so later translators are going to do the same thing for their own pet ideologies, right?
So Protestant Bible translations are going to say things against Catholicism, and then translations that are geared towards Puritans are going to speak against the monarchy. So then we have King James I who comes along and he doesn't like the Geneva Bible because it speaks against the kingdom. But the Geneva Bible is exceptionally popular.
And clearly, by this time, we're not stopping the translations into English. So, let's join the club and do a translation, only let's do one that people can agree on, that people will want to use, and that doesn't go against the king. So, even though we might have expected King James I to do something that's opposite the Geneva Bible, that might attack that position, [00:42:00] He wanted it to be acceptable to Anglicans of high church faction and Puritans of low church factions because if he couldn't accomplish that, then he couldn't prevent the Geneva Bible's popularity.
So what King James did was he created six committees. There were three for the Old Testament, two for the New Testament, and one for the Apocrypha. Yep, that's right. The King James Version included those nasty Apocryphal books. Now, because we don't need to reinvent the wheel when we're doing something, Tyndale's translation was used 83 percent of the time, but they tried to get a Jewish perspective in, and they did themselves go back to the original language.
But keep in mind the situation of the time. They simply didn't have access to all of the earliest manuscripts that we have today. Now, all of this is from the Protestant [00:43:00] perspective, right? The Catholic Church still had the Vulgate, but they saw the need to create an English translation because you can't stop progress.
And if they didn't create an English translation, then all people would have would be those terrible Protestant versions. So here we have the Douay Rheims translation. I'm going to read a quote from the Journey from Texts to Translations. It says, quote, The translators acknowledge in the preface that they were compelled to make a translation to refute the many false translations produced by the Protestants. Quote from the preface, To meet the Protestant challenge, priests must be ready to quote scripture in the vulgar tongue, since their adversaries have every favorable passage at their fingers ends. They must know the passages correctly used by Catholics in support of our faith, or impiously, misused by heretics in [00:44:00] opposition to the church's faith end quote.
Now, the Catholic translation wasn't quite up to snuff as much as the Protestant translations were. And it really didn't try to go back to the original Hebrew and Greek. They just translated the Vulgate into English. Here's another quote from the preface. Quote, It is translated from the Vulgate, which possesses ecclesiastical authority and is the least partial text, truer than the vulgar Greek itself. The translators follow it precisely, risking unfamiliar Latinisms and not presuming to mollify hard places for fear of missing or restraining the sense of the Holy Ghost to our fantasy. Whereas Protestants use presumptuous boldness and liberty in translating end quote.
So today we have King James version Onlyists who say that the King James version is [00:45:00] truer than the Greek. And here in this Catholic translation of the Vulgate, they also are claiming superiority to the Greek. I wonder how much of our modern pressure, especially in Protestant circles, of seeing the text as inerrant, is reacting against these kinds of ways of thinking. This is why I started out the episode talking about the first Greek translations and the translations that the people of the first century had. The way that we view Bible translation It just isn't the way that the New Testament authors themselves viewed their own scriptures.
So Catholics used this English translation for quite some time. It was revised in 1749, but it wasn't until after World War II that they got yet a new translation. This was, again, perhaps something of a [00:46:00] reaction to the many Protestant versions that were starting to appear.
I mean, I'm not suggesting nefarious motives here, it's just quite interesting to see the distinction between the way the Protestant churches treat their scriptures and translations versus the way we see it done in the Catholic Church. And so now, from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, they use the New American Bible. And that needs to be distinguished from the New American Standard Bible, which is an entirely different translation. Now, that doesn't mean that Catholics don't use plenty of other translations, because many Catholics have taken Protestant versions of the Bible and done a Catholic version of it. There are other traditions that also do their own versions. There are certain versions, for instance, that Messianic Jewish congregations prefer.
Okay, so a little bit more needs to be said before we move [00:47:00] past the King James Version into other translations. Because we do have this idea prevalent in certain circles that the King James Version is the best version.
It is even claimed that the King James Version has never been changed. This is demonstrably not the case. There have, in fact, been many changes to the King James Version of 1611. Some of those changes were just because of printing errors, but there was also a genuine revision done in 1769. So, if you believe in the King James Version, and you're not reading the 1611 version that has the Apocrypha in it, then you demonstrably cannot say that there is only one King James Version.
It's also the case that the original translators of the King James Version were not themselves suggesting that they were creating the ultimate translation. The problem is, [00:48:00] in later versions of the King James, the introduction wasn't printed, so people weren't even reading this preface from the original translators.
But here's something from that introduction. It says, quote, Truly, we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better, or, out of many good ones, one principal good one, end quote.
So they weren't setting out to create the ultimate be all translation. They just wanted to make a faithful translation, and that was their goal. All right, so now we are finally in the position to talk about modern Bible translations. So first we're going to talk about the translations that stem from the King James Version. In fact, mostly what we're going to talk about is the versions that stem from the [00:49:00] King James Version, because they are some of the most prevalent.
They aren't necessarily the most popular or the most well read today. I believe it's the New International Version that gets top billing for the highest seller. So you have certain translations that are really not stemming directly from the King James Tradition. You have things like the Christian Standard Bible, the New Language Translation, the New English Translation.
I could just keep listing versions over and over and over, there are so many. But there is a definite translation line from the King James Version through some of our most popular translations today. So I'm going to talk about those before I get into translation philosophies.
The first new version of the King James was the Revised Version, and that was in 1895. That didn't end up very [00:50:00] popular. There was something about the language used that people just didn't like it. We also have the New King James Version, which was in 1982, so that's fairly recent. But going back to the 1800s, when the revised version kind of fell on its face, there was an American committee that tried to do yet another version.
And so here we have the American Standard Version. This is in 1901. So we can basically think of the American Standard Version as a revision of the King James Version. If we're thinking in terms of a family tree, here, we have the King James Version, the Revised Version, the American Standard Version, and those are kind of like children.
So then we have the American Standard Version. And the American Standard Version had two children itself. The American Standard version gave birth to the revised standard version, as well as the [00:51:00] New American Standard Bible. So you have the A SV giving birth to the RSV and the NASB. The NASB or New American Standard Bible came about because some people thought that the RSV, the Revised Standard Version was too liberal.
Alright, so the American Standard Version kind of goes by the wayside and splits into the Revised Standard Version and the New American Standard. I know that I'm repeating myself here, but when we're talking about Bible translations and we have all of these acronyms for them, I don't know about you, but they get really mixed up in my mind and repetition of what we're talking about, it helps me, so that's why I'm repeating myself here. And every translation tends to kick off some other translations. It seems like that's especially the case when we're looking at the King James Version tradition.
[00:52:00] So we have the Revised Standard Version, the RSV, and eventually that splits off into two children. We have the NRSV, the New Revised Standard Version, as well as the ESV. The English Standard Version. The ESV has been my traditional go to for quoting passages and just general reading. And part of that is just because a lot of scholars that I listen to use that version. I do use the NRSV in my favorite study Bible, which is the Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible.
And the reason that I chose the NRSV was because I don't particularly like the NIV. And that was the other option, I think. I think when I was purchasing my Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, the options I had were KJV, NIV, and NRSV. And I didn't have a copy of the NRSV, so that's the one I chose. [00:53:00] Okay, so now we're gonna go back up to the American Standard Version and its child, the NASB, the New American Standard Bible.
And this is basically where we're going to be camping out for the rest of the episode. The NASB currently has three revisions. The first NASB was released fully in 1971. It was revised in 1995, and it was revised again in 2020.
Now, if you want to compare Bible translations easily, there are many places that you can do so online. I know that you can do it at BibleHub, you can do it at BibleGateway, My personal favorite is the Blue Letter Bible. When you go to something like Blue Letter Bible, you actually have the ability to access the original language. You can do word studies that are based on Strong's [00:54:00] Lexicon, which, Strong's Lexicon is kind of an older one. It is connected to the King James Version specifically. So, it's got a little bit of a limited access to things, but when you're looking at translations that stem from the King James Version, Strong's lexicon is very helpful, especially.
Now, one thing I'm going to note here. Even if you have a Bible translation that is in the tradition of the King James Version, that doesn't mean that it is necessarily tied to the Greek translation that the King James was using, the Textus Receptus. Because each time you have a new translation, the translators are free to go back to the original language. They're free to look at all of the options that we have, including information from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, they're free to make choices from all of the available data.
For instance, the ESV takes Deuteronomy 32. 8 [00:55:00] to say that God divided the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. The sons of God there is a reading that comes from the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so, the ESV translators decided that's our earliest manuscript. That's probably what was in the original, or at least as close as we can get, so that's what we're going to use.
So they weren't beholden entirely upon the Textus Receptus in order to make their translation choices. And that is the benefit of a modern translation, because they can use the information that is in their textual tradition's history, or they can make other choices that they think make sense.
So, hang on. I thought we were going to talk about the Legacy Standard Bible, weren't we? Well, the Legacy Standard Bible is very much in the tradition of the NASB. It's by the same publisher. The LSB came out in [00:56:00] 2021, and you'll note that the NASB's last revision was 2020. So, what gives? Why is there a new translation suddenly?
It's the same publishers. And the reason they named it the Legacy Standard Bible was because they're trying to connect it to this long history of the NASB. And yet, it's an entirely different translation. So, what gives, really?
Well, part of it is, I think, because it's the same publisher, but it's almost not quite the same publisher. It's like, the same publisher is working with a different group. First of all, all of the translators of the Legacy Standard Bible come from Master's University and Seminary, I believe. And Master's University and Seminary has a very stringent doctrinal statement. Part of that statement says, quote, [00:57:00] We teach the literal, grammatical, historical interpretation of Scripture, which affirms the belief that the opening chapters of Genesis present creation in six literal days, describe the special creation of man and woman, and define marriage as between one man and one woman.
I would like to read the whole statement so that I'm not just pulling out part of it, but I don't really want to take that much time here. I don't want to say anything against their doctrinal statement, but it's a very particular, you see. And, I admit that I'm speculating here, at least to some degree, but I really think this is part of why they did this translation.
And, it's really fair for us as readers of the Bible to know where all of the bias comes from in our translations. Like, we can't get away from bias. There's nothing inherently wrong with a bias. It just ought to be out in the open. And, for the most part, it is here. Like, they're [00:58:00] admitting where all of this is coming from, even if most of us are going to have to do a little bit of digging in order to find this out.
So, should we toss out this translation because of this bias? Because, oh, if I don't agree with that, or even if I do agree with it, but would prefer to have a little more representation of other views, maybe we shouldn't read this version. Well, with every version, we ought to do the due diligence and actually look at it for ourselves.
And I'm really happy to say that the Blue Letter Bible that you can just access online has both the LSB as well as the two most recent versions of the NASB. So you can directly compare verses in each of those translations.
As we are talking now about Bible translations and comparing them, We need to understand differences in Bible translation philosophy. [00:59:00] So, there is a spectrum, we might say, of Bible translation. You might have heard of word for word translations versus paraphrases, perhaps. The more technical terms here are formal equivalence and dynamic or functional equivalence. A formal equivalence translation tendency is to try and find English words That line up with the original Hebrew or Greek.
So this is the idea of word for word. Every word in your English Bible should correspond to another word in the Hebrew or the Greek. That's the goal. At any rate. Now, of course, when you're talking about translating from language to language and culture to culture, there's gonna be vastly different kinds of idioms, figurative language, and just word usage in general so that if you do a literal, quote unquote, word for word [01:00:00] translation, or formal equivalence translation, and you're just translating the words from one language to another, without really considering the language structure of the language that you're translating into, and how it's going to be read and understood by the target language, then you're going to end up with awkward phrases, it's going to be hard to read, People aren't going to understand the idioms and things like that.
So the goal of a translator who is doing a dynamic or functional equivalence is that they want to get the meaning of the text across. So, if they have to change word order, if they have to use different figurative language, then that is perfectly okay in this kind of framework, because they're trying to get the meaning of the text across, and they're trying to do it in a way that makes it super readable in the target language.
So, there's good things and bad things about both of these translation philosophies. You really [01:01:00] do want to translate the Bible into something that is going to be really easily understood by the people who are going to be reading it. If the Bible is too hard to read, a lot of people aren't going to be reading it.
That is, after all, why we needed to translate it from Latin to English, because people needed to understand it. At the same time, if you change too much about the text of what you're translating, then people aren't going to be able to see things like the hyperlinks in the text. They're not going to be able to see callbacks to previous texts, and that's a real problem in good Bible study.
Now, for most translations, they kind of try and balance this out. They want to make it readable, but they also don't want to change the fundamental meaning and ability to study. And so, any translation that you look at, or at least almost any, you're going to [01:02:00] have somewhere in the middle of this formal equivalence to dynamic equivalence.
Now, if you're looking at translations and you want to choose some from one end of the spectrum and some from the other, because by reading those side by side, you can understand the text more fully than if you only read from one side of the spectrum or the other. So, if you are using Blue Letter Bible, for instance, And you want to know which ones have the formal equivalence and which ones have a dynamic equivalence and which versions maybe try the most to be in between those sides of the spectrum.
It's actually fairly easy because most of the translations are on the side of formal equivalence. The translations that are on the side of dynamic equivalence are according to the listing that the Blue Letter Bible currently has on its website. We have the New Language Translation, the Amplified Version, and the New [01:03:00] English Translation.
All of those are much more on the Dynamic Equivalent side. Versions that tend to be much more in the middle are the New International Version and the Christian Standard Bible. All of the other versions in English on the Blue Letter Bible really do tend towards that formal equivalence. And of course, even there, there is a range of what that means, right?
And the NASB, and also the LSB, are very much trying to be that extreme side of the formal equivalence. They really want that word for word translation. That was their goal. And so, if you are of the persuasion that there was the literal six day creation And we really need to have one version that is the most right, then it does make sense that that kind of a [01:04:00] tradition is going to gravitate towards something like the NASB or the LSB.
And honestly, there's nothing really that's necessarily wrong with that. I think that a translation that really shows that underlying structure of the Hebrew or Greek language, it's really very, very helpful to us as English readers if we don't understand those original languages. I've mentioned before, Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible. And he also is trying to bring out that underlying structure of the language. It's really very helpful, and I think that every student of the Bible should be consulting a version that is trying to do that word for word translation.
So, as I was looking at the LSB and comparing it to different translations, Honestly, I do think it is a pretty good translation. And one thing that really stuck out at me was that in places, the LSB [01:05:00] in particular, this is also slightly true of the NASB, but it was more true of the LSB, in some places, the LSB had footnotes where no other translation had a footnote. So, that means that you can go in and look under the text, so to speak.
It gives you a little bit more information about things that you're not going to be aware of as an English reader. I know that some people are very, very turned off when they hear somebody like John MacArthur or Ken Ham say that this is the best English translation and everybody should use it. And then you further hear that it's done from a very particular interpretive stance.
Then I definitely understand the hesitation in using that kind of a Bible translation. And honestly, because of that, I would not suggest you only use the NASB [01:06:00] or the LSB. In fact, I don't think I ought to use the ESV exclusively. I mean, I guess I would say that I wouldn't use any translation exclusively.
Even the best translation is going to have bias. It's going to have some translation issues that you might have. They have to make choices, and it's much better as a student of the Bible to be able to see all of the choices that are in front of us.
Before I end the episode, I do want to respond a little bit to something that I saw from Ken Ham this last weekend. He was interviewing one of the translators, I guess, and they were talking about the translation, and Ken Ham was talking about a version of the translation that he was going to start selling in the Ark Encounter and the Creation Museum.
Now, how they were presenting the Legacy Standard Bible, it wasn't dishonest, [01:07:00] but it also really didn't give enough information. Specifically, they were brining up the fact that it is a word for word translation. And they really, really stressed this idea that it was a word for word translation. And, first of all, you can't genuinely do a word for word translation. That's literally impossible. Because you don't have correlations exactly between Hebrew words and English words and Greek words and English words.
That's not how languages work. That's not how translation can work. Almost every word in any language anywhere can have a range of meaning. Like, you can translate a word with various words in the target language. You have to make an interpretive choice as to which word you're going to choose. So bias is always there.
Choice is always necessary. You [01:08:00] cannot just use one single word to translate one Hebrew word. Or one Greek word. Maybe most of the time you can, and maybe there are instances where that is possible. But quite frequently, that's just not going to end up making a lot of sense for some words. I know Robert Alter was trying to do that in his translation, and he admits he can only do it so far. That's only going to get you so far. You can't exactly do that in any translation.
So, that felt like a bit of a misrepresentation in the presentation to me, because the translator very well knows that he's making choices, and that he has to make interpretive choices, and yet they were presenting this whole translation as if that wasn't necessary, as if translators weren't making real choices in real time.
So, to me, that feels very disingenuous. I would like to think that they didn't mean [01:09:00] that, they weren't really thinking in terms of that. But I also have to think that they knew gosh darn well that that was true. That you really have to qualify this word for word translation business. But the translator that Ken Ham was talking to made the claim that if you take the LSB and you understand Hebrew, for instance, then you ought to be able to reconstruct the Hebrew simply by using the LSB.
Like, you're gonna know which Hebrew word was used where, and in what verse, and like, you could deconstruct the translation back into Hebrew using the LSB. So I was quite curious to see if you could, in fact, do that. And so I took various words and various verses, and I compared them in the LSB to the Hebrew. And I tried to find places where it absolutely was the very same word every [01:10:00] time in the LSB. But unfortunately, I was able to break that, and it didn't really take that much effort. I will say, however, that they obviously did make an attempt at doing this.
For instance, in the King James Version, you have the word hell in very many places. You have it in the Old Testament, you have it all over in the New Testament. In the King James Version, the English word Hell is used to translate Sheol in the Old Testament. It's used to translate Gehenna in the New Testament. And it's used to translate Tartarus, and it's used to translate Hades. So when you're reading the King James Version, you'll come across this word Hell, and you might not be sure what the underlying word is.
It could be Sheol, it could be Hades, it could be Gehenna. I am personally of the opinion that we should toss out the [01:11:00] word hell entirely, but I will say that most modern translations do try and make this distinction because Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus, and Hades, they're not the same word, and they shouldn't be translated using the same English word, like what we see in the King James Version.
So in the LSB, The only time you see the word Hell, it is being used to translate the Greek word Gehenna. I think that you should just leave that word as Gehenna, especially if you're doing a word for word translation. But I will give them credit that they only used Hell in translating Gehenna. When it was Tartarus, they used the word Pit. When it was Hades, they used the word Hades. When it was Sheol, they used the word Sheol, which, again, that leads me to say you should just use Gehenna when it says Gehenna, but I give them credit for that [01:12:00] consistency.
But I said that I broke their rule of using the same English word for the same Hebrew word, and where I found that was in the word rule in Genesis 1 16, where the lights are ruling. And in some places this Hebrew word shows up, the LSB translates it as rule, like it does in Genesis 1 16. But in other places, it translates it as dominion. And if they were being consistent with the English words, they wouldn't use dominion for this particular Hebrew word, since they use dominion for a different Hebrew word.
And there's not even a reason that they needed to switch it from rule to dominion when they did. So, I don't know if that's just an oversight, and maybe it's just really, really hard for translation committees to be this consistent. But, just that shows that it's really not quite the case [01:13:00] that you can take the LSB and then deconstruct the actual Hebrew from it.
But, to some degree, that's just being nitpicky on my part. I'm not going to claim a super exhaustive search of this book. But I will give them a lot of credit for making the attempt to do that word for word translation, for giving all of the footnotes that they give, because the more information at our fingertips, the better.
And so in the end, if you want to use the LSB, by all means go for it. In fact, I would suggest that you do consult it. But I don't buy into the idea that you have to use a word for word translation or you're not understanding the Bible. And I think it's going a little bit too far to make some of the claims that they were making about it.
But, you know, if we want to chalk that up to marketing or whatever, that's fine. As long as we're clear [01:14:00] on what's going on behind the scenes to some degree, at least. And the really great thing about Bible translations is that we do have so many. And we really can compare them with each other so that For instance, if you're coming to a translation that is a true paraphrase translation, you can genuinely compare that paraphrase with these other versions of the Bible, and you can say, huh, yep, that's a fine paraphrase, or you can say, nope, won't touch that with a ten foot pole. And yes, I am referencing the Passion Translation when I say that.
And oh yeah, I did mention that Ken Ham said he was going to have a particular edition of the LSB on sale at the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter. I expect they don't do this so often anymore, but when I was little, somebody visited my school and passed out these little [01:15:00] versions of the Bible. And they had psalms. and the Proverbs and the New Testament in these little tiny books. So, Ken Ham has this idea that he's going to have versions that are like this, only instead of just the Psalms and Proverbs, he's going to include Genesis. And, of course, his reasoning is that Genesis is foundational, that it's scientific, that we need Genesis to understand sin and the world and anything else, anything else at all, we need to understand this literal creation account, that this literal creation account and the fact that we have sin in the garden and all of that is foundational to understanding anything else in the Bible.
Now, of course, I'm a big fan of Genesis. So, you know what? Give everybody Genesis to read. That's fine. That's great. That's awesome. But let's [01:16:00] also let people think about it. Let's also let people use critical thinking skills. Let's also investigate all of the interpretive options that we have so that we can come to the best conclusion.
In the interview that I was watching, I was very pleased to see that both Ken Ham and the person he was talking to, the translator, were saying that it is really important that we have teachers. It's really important that Even though the text may not be completely understandable to us when we read it, kudos to them for admitting that, we need teachers in order to teach that. That's awesome! But the thing is, we do this with other members of the church in order to do that, right? , we don't first come to our decisions and then decide what we're going to teach.
We need to communicate with each other, and that includes [01:17:00] communicating across time through the church and all of the interpretive options that we have for a book like Genesis. If you cut off certain things and say, nope, we're not even going to consider that. We're not even going to look at that. We're not even going to go there as far as thinking about it and considering something else as an option.
When you cut yourself off like that, you are cutting yourself off from critical thinking. You are cutting yourself off from good interpretation. You're cutting yourself off from so much belief in church history, right? The idea that it was a literal six day creation, that the earth is young, and all of these ideas, I don't really have a particular problem with any of them, but to present these ideas as if they were what the church has always believed, is simply a misrepresentation of history. It's a misrepresentation of interpretation. It's a [01:18:00] misrepresentation of how we should be approaching critical thinking if, when we look at these, we say that these are our only options, that we cannot look at other options, and that we won't talk to other people or involve other people in translating committees if they view it slightly differently.
So, that is my rant, and that is what I think, and again, I'm not trying to say anything against different interpretive options, but I'm very much a fan of critical thinking, and that requires looking at options. It requires looking at all of the interpretations. It requires this discussion and inclusion of The full body of Christ in how we look at scripture.
I mean, to be honest, I would say that even if you're only staying in your Protestant tradition, or a Catholic tradition, or an Eastern Orthodox tradition, you're also missing out on some amazing thoughts that you could be having with the wider [01:19:00] body of Christ.
Alright, well, I hope this episode was useful to you. Understanding translation history, understanding the way that different translations are done, And the different translation ideas and methodology. Hopefully that's given you some ways to think and to read your scriptures, and I definitely do encourage you to look at different translations, including this new version and see what you see.
Thank you as always for listening and for sharing these episodes for rating my podcast. For involving yourselves in my Facebook community or reaching out to me personally to tell me that you've been listening or that you've enjoyed this It just makes me happy to be connecting with other people and to be talking about Scripture and God working in the world.
Thank you, thank you, thank you my patreon and paypal [01:20:00] supporters You guys are awesome. Coming up in future episodes, I do have several conversations that I'm having with other people that I am excited to be releasing. And just a teaser, some of those conversations involve looking at the character of the Satan in Job slightly differently.
Because, you know, I've presented it in certain ways, and now it's time to flip that script and look at it a little bit differently with some really cool angles that I think you will probably be quite interested to see. And this is going to go hand in hand with some other really interesting ideas. So lots of good stuff coming up.
Thank you guys for listening. I appreciate you all, and I hope you all have a blessed week. And we'll see you later.
