#116 – Bible translation ain’t easy!

Words without spaces or vowels and multiple manuscript versions with different words are only the beginning of the problem!

Have you ever wondered why there are so many different versions of the Bible: the King James, the Revised Standard Version, the New Revised Standard Version, the English Standard Version, the New English Bible, the New International Version, and dozens of others? Ever wondered why scholars can still be haggling over how to translate a given verse?

The problem doesn’t only begin with needing a trustworthy lexicon that lists the various English meanings for any given Hebrew or Greek word, nor trying to figure out from the context of the words around that ancient word to decide which English meaning to choose. Sometimes you have to guess at the word itself …. because the ancient Hebrews didn’t use spaces or vowels!? So translators had to first decide which strings of letters formed which words, then insert different vowels to see what made the most sense: for example, did “CRT” mean “create”, “crate” or “court”?

Our expert — Dr. Mark Elliott — also tells us that the problem isn’t only needing to choose between different possible words, but sometimes you had to choose between different versions of ancient manuscripts which used entirely different words and phrases. Usually, it would seem, you go for the oldest manuscripts because they’re closer in time to the original, rather than the newer manuscripts which might have undergone editorial changes since the original was written. But the older manuscripts tend to be in worse condition: more moth-eaten, mouldy, fragmented, and therefore missing key portions of the text message.

And sometimes the decision to choose between different manuscripts came down to the one that aligned more closely with the theology and politics of the translators themselves!

We then go through three examples of contentious Bible translation to highlight how these decisions are made, and how they can radically alter the theology that is conveyed in the passage:

• was Jesus angry when he healed a leper who stopped him on his missionary journey (as an older reliable manuscript indicates), or was Jesus compassionate (as per the newer manuscripts)?
• did Abraham refer to God in the plural form because he was just confused and misspoke, or because he was condescending to his polytheistic audience, or because he was himself a polytheist at the time?
• did Matthew “get out of his lane” when he took an ancient Hebrew prophecy about a young woman conceiving and birthing a son as a sign that would be fulfilled just a few years later, and turned that into a centuries-old prophecy of the Virgin Birth of Jesus?

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find more information about our guest, Dr. Mark Elliott, at his faculty web-page.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like Episode #57 (Dr. Peter Enns; origin of the Old Testament) or Episode #81 (David Carr: origin of the New Testament).

Episode image from Pixabay.

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