Tag Archives: Bible translation

What Are the Most Common Myths About Bible Translation? Part 2

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this two-part series, we looked at a few myths about Bible translation, cited from Daniel Wallace’s blog post.  Below we review a few more.

According to Wallace, another misconception is that

modern translations have removed words and verses from the Bible. Most biblical scholars—both conservative and liberal—would say instead that the KJV added words and verses, rather than that the modern ones have removed such. And this is in part because the oldest and most reliable manuscripts lack the extra verses that are found in the KJV.

The important thing to remember about the original KJV is that those translators were missing many of the biblical manuscripts that translators have in their hands today.  There is simply more manuscript data available today than in the seventeenth century.

Next, Wallace addresses the red letter editions of the Bible.  The myth about them is that

red-letter editions of the Bible highlight the exact words of Jesus. Scholars are not sure of the exact words of Jesus. Ancient historians were concerned to get the gist of what someone said, but not necessarily the exact wording. A comparison of parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels reveals that the evangelists didn’t always record Jesus’ words exactly the same way. The terms ipsissima verba and ipsissima voxare used to distinguish the kinds of dominical sayings we have in the Gospels. The former means ‘the very words,’ and the latter means ‘the very voice.’ That is, the exact words or the essential thought. There have been attempts to harmonize these accounts, but they are highly motivated by a theological agenda which clouds one’s judgment and skews the facts. In truth, though red-letter editions of the Bible may give comfort to believers that they have the very words of Jesus in every instance, this is a false comfort.

Finally, Wallace turns to the myth that the chapters and verses in the Bible are inspired.

These were added centuries later. Chapter numbers were added by Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the early 13th century. Verse numbers were not added until 1551. Robert Estienne (a.k.a. Stephanus), a Parisian printer, added verse numbers to the fourth edition of his Greek New Testament. The pocket-sized two-volume work (which can be viewed at www.csntm.org) has three parallel columns, one in Greek and two in Latin (one Erasmus’s Latin text, the other Jerome’s). To facilitate ease of comparison, Stephanus added the verse numbers. Although most of the breaks seem natural enough, quite a few are bizarre. Neither chapter numbers nor verse numbers are inspired.

Again, if you are interested in reading about all 15 myths, check out Wallace’s post.

What Are the Most Common Myths About Bible Translation? Part 1

Post Author: Bill Pratt

New Testament scholar Daniel Wallace recently wrote an informative blog post on what he considers to be the fifteen most common myths about Bible translation.  While I suggest you read his post in its entirety, I have picked out a few of the myths that I think are the most important to debunk below.

Wallace’s first myth is

that a word-for-word translation is the best kind. Anyone who is conversant in more than one language recognizes that a word-for-word translation is simply not possible if one is going to communicate in an understandable way in the receptor language. Yet, ironically, even some biblical scholars who should know better continue to tout word-for-word translations as though they were the best.

The goal of a translator is to take the meaning of the original language and capture that same meaning in a new language.  Since grammatical rules and vocabulary vary greatly from language to language, word-for-word translation will often fail to achieve that goal.

Another myth Wallace debunks is the idea that the original King James Version was a literal, or word-for-word translation.  Wallace explains:

The preface to the KJV actually claims otherwise. For example, they explicitly said that they did not translate the same word in the original the same way in the English but did attempt to capture the sense of the original each time: “An other thing we thinke good to admonish thee of (gentle Reader) that wee have not tyed our selves to an uniformitie of phrasing, or to an identitie of words, as some peradventure would wish that we had done, because they observe, that some learned men some where, have beene as exact as they could that way. Truly, that we might not varie from the sense of that which we had translated before, if the word signified the same thing in both places (for there bee some wordes that bee not of the same sense every where) we were especially carefull, and made a conscience, according to our duetie.”

Even the KJV translators sought to capture the meaning, or sense, of the original language. They were not attempting a word-for-word translation.

Wallace also addresses the Apocrypha and the claim that those books are

found only in Roman Catholic Bibles. Although the Apocrypha—or what Catholics call the Deutero-canonical books—are an intrinsic part of Roman Catholic translations of scripture, a number of Protestant Bibles also include them. Even the King James Bible, a distinctly Protestant version, included the Apocrypha in every printing until the middle of the nineteenth century. To be sure, the apocryphal books were placed at the end of the Old Testament, to set them apart (unlike in Roman Catholic Bibles), but they were nevertheless included.

While Protestants deny that the Apocrypha are inspired Scripture, we still maintain that they are edifying reading.  They should not be completely ignored, as they provide valuable perspective on the Jewish people in the centuries before Jesus was born.

In part 2, we will look at a few more myths that Wallace debunks.

Where Does the English New Testament Come From?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Christians are often confused about this question, so I want to give a quick summary.

The 27 books of the New Testament (NT) were originally written in the common Greek language of the first century.  They were all hand-written, likely on papyrus.  These hand-written manuscripts were then copied, by hand, for hundreds of years by various Christian laypeople, professional scribes, and even monks.  In the middle of the 15th century, the printing press was invented and the NT, from that time onward, was primarily copied on printing presses.

All of the original NT documents have been lost, mostly because papyrus decays rapidly, and must be stored under dry conditions to last more than just decades.  However, we have many hand-written copies of the words of the NT that were produced between about A.D. 100 and A.D. 1450.

The words of the NT were preserved in three ways.  First, we have copies of partial and complete NT books written in Greek, the original language.  We have discovered about 5,800 of these.  Second, we have copies of partial and complete NT books written in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, and other ancient languages.  These manuscripts number around 19,000 and were produced starting in the late second century.  Third, we have the writings of church leaders from the first few centuries.  We have enough quotes from the NT in the church fathers (thousands of them) that we could reconstruct a good bit of the NT with just this material.

Modern scholars (called textual critics), using these three sources, then construct a Greek New Testament.  Since there are textual variants among the manuscripts, textual critics must apply tests to determine which variants likely represent the original writing of the NT authors (more about these tests in a future blog post).

There are a couple major versions of this Greek New Testament that are used by scholars and Bible translators today: Nestle-Aland (NA 27th edition) and United Bible Societies (UBS 4th edition).

The publishers of an English Bible will use these Greek New Testaments to create their particular translation.  Each translation also must decide how they will translate — word-for-word or thought-for-thought or something in between.

Typically a large committee of scholars will actually create the English translation.

It is important to understand that most English translations are using the same Greek New Testament as their source, so the differences among English versions come down to the method of translation employed by the translation committees.

That’s it in a nutshell.  Now you know the basics!