As you may already know, the bible was not originally written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew—the early parts in Early Biblical Hebrew, and the later parts in a combination of Later Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. Around the 2nd century BC, the OT was translated into a form of ancient Greek called Kine Greek (pronounced KEE-nay, though usually mispronounced KOY-nay), the same language the New Testament was written in.
Now, a lot of ancient Jews objected to the idea of translating the bible into Kine. Their attitude was that God had caused the bible to be written in Hebrew, and any translation—because it changed the words of the bible into another language—would mean it was not the bible. Something would be lost in translation.
At the same time, a lot of Jews had no problem with the idea of translating the bible into any language. The words of the bible are not as important as the meaning of the bible, and if you can convey the meaning of the Hebrew words into the Greek language, it means Greek-speakers can read of God.
And thanks to Alexander the Great, there were a lot of Greek-speakers back then: Greek had become everybody’s second language, much like English is everyone’s second language today. A bible written in Hebrew would always be limited to a few million Jews; a bible written in Greek could be read by anybody in Alexander’s former empire, and by most people in the rapidly-growing Roman Empire.
Recognizing this, the Jews not only permitted the bible to be translated; as the story goes, they sent their own scholars to translate it. This translation, the Septuagint, became the bible, as far as Greek-speakers were concerned—and as far as the early Christians were concerned, since most of them spoke Greek.
So translation has been an accepted part of Christianity since the very beginning. Compare this with Islam, where most Muslims consider any translation of the Qu’ran from Arabic to not be the Qu’ran. Their attitude is that every Muslim should learn Arabic in order to study the Qu’ran properly. And while it’s not a bad idea for every Christian to learn a little bit of ancient Hebrew and Greek, we recognize that nobody needs to learn Hebrew and Greek in order to read a bible. If the meanings of the original words have been validly translated into English, an English bible is just as much a bible as an original-language bible.
“Inspired translations.”
Problem is, nobody bothered to read an original-language bible for the longest time. Once the Septuagint was completed, Greek-speakers read it, learned about God, and became His followers. The early Christians read it too; nearly all of the bible quotes in the New Testament are word-for-word from the Septuagint.
To Eastern Christians, the Septuagint, plus the New Testament, became the bible. They never bothered to double-check the translation with a Hebrew bible; they didn’t see the point. They believed that because the writers of the New Testament had quoted the Septuagint (in fact, even Jesus’s quotes in the New Testament were word-for-word quotes from the Septuagint) the Septuagint was an inspired translation: God had made sure that when it was translated from Hebrew, it was just as inspired as the original texts. And since that was the case, there was no point in looking at the original texts.
Western Christians, who largely spoke Latin, wanted a bible in their language too. They hired linguist Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus (whom we nowadays call St. Jerome) to translate the bible from Greek into Latin. Jerome—contrary to most Christians of the day—believed that the Old Testament would be far better translated from the original Hebrew, and went to Jerusalem to learn it. Jerome’s translation, eventually known as the Vulgate, likewise became the bible for Western Christians. Like the Eastern Christians, they believed that the Vulgate was an inspired translation: Jerome, like the translators of the Septuagint, had been inspired by God to convert the bible into Latin flawlessly.
To this day, Eastern Christians consider the Septuagint to be the bible, and Roman Catholics considered the Vulgate to be the bible until the Second Vatican Council, when they decided their huge emphasis on Latin wasn’t spreading Jesus very effectively. They’ve since started translating the bible, like Protestants, into every language they can find… and in the process have, like Jerome, started to look at the original Hebrew of the Old Testament, and the original Greek of the New Testament.
There are still Christians, however, who believe in inspired translations. More than a few Christians believe the King James Version is an inspired translation. I agree that it’s a very good translation, but it has flaws. Every translation does.
Inspired translation is not an idea taught in the bible at all. It’s a dangerous practice to demand that people believe something that has no biblical basis. It’s far too cultlike for my taste, and you’ll notice that King James Only fans do tend to slide far away from the fruit of the Spirit when they defend their favorite translation. That’s because they’ve made an idol of the KJV, rather than just respecting it as the brilliant translation that it is.
Original-language bibles.
Because the bulk of Christendom wasn’t interested in original-language bibles for quite a few centuries (except for the Greek-speaking Eastern Christians, who had never stopped reading the original-language New Testament) the preservation of the Hebrew bible was largely in the hands of the Jews.
A lot of credit is given to the Masoretes—a group of scribes and scholars who had come up with a very precise method of copying the bible, and who had invented the system of marks above and below the text of the bible to indicate vowel sounds, accents, and musical tones for chanting. But the Masoretes didn’t start copying bibles till the 7th century of the Christian Era. So the credit doesn’t just belong to them; it belongs to all the Jews who put a great deal of care into making sure the bible was copied precisely, generation after generation. We can see just how precise they were when we compare their bibles with the Dead Sea Scrolls, copies of the bible (and other books) discovered in the 1940s, which date between 150BC and 70CE. Hebrew bibles today are based on the Masoretic texts.
Christians, on the other hand, were not as careful. Eastern Christians, though they revered the bible, were not so cautious, and allowed errors to creep in. When Dutch scholar Desiderus Erasmus decided to try to fix the Vulgate in the early 1500s, he discovered several problems with the Greek New Testament as well, and edited together a Greek NT that we today call the Textus Receptus. Martin Luther used the TR to translate his German bible, and the Church of England used it to translate the King James Version.
For this reason, King James Only fans tend to defend the TR, and claim it’s a true and accurate copy of the Greek New Testament. Thing is, the TR has problems. It’s based on copies of the Greek NT that date from the 1400s and 1500s, with all the errors that had slipped into the bible after centuries of copying and recopying and re-recopying. Erasmus, in order to fix some discrepancies between the Greek bibles and the Vulgate actually added some verses—which he had to translate from Latin into Greek.
Today’s scholars don’t use the Textus Receptus. Nearly all use the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, which is largely based on two different Greek bibles (the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus) that date to the early 300s. By comparing the copies of the earliest bibles we have, with the earliest writings of Christians we can find, the editors can accurately determine what the original text of the New Testament likely was. (And every other possibility is included in the footnotes.)
The United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament also uses the Nestle-Aland text. The only recent bible translations that don’t use the Nestle-Aland text would be the New King James Version (which uses the TR), and editions of the New International Version before 2005 (which allowed translators to pretty much use whichever New Testament they preferred; the 2011 edition sticks to the Nestle-Aland).
Translation philosophies.
As I said, if the meanings of the original words have been validly translated into English, an English bible is just as much a bible as an original-language bible. But there are quite a few disagreements about what “translation” really means.
Every time you translate something into another language, you interpret it. I know “translating” and “interpreting” sound like the same thing, but there is a difference. When you convert a word from one language to another, sometimes it’s an easy switch: The Spanish word “perro” means the very same thing as the English word “dog.” But some words are harder: The Spanish word “caballero” can be converted into the English words “gentleman”… and “knight.” There’s a bit of a difference between a gentleman and a knight. Which is it?
Certain words in the bible likewise mean different things. Scholars try to be as accurate as they can, but they can still argue over certain words. One word—ruach—could mean “breath,” “wind,” or “spirit.” A passage about the ruach of God could be about the wind of God, the breath of God, or the Spirit of God. And since we depend on the bible to help us develop theology, the exact meaning of ruach can be kind of a big deal.
So that’s where interpretation comes in. The scholar has to decide—based on the context of the paragraph and book, based on the history behind the book, based on the scholar’s own theology—which meaning fits best. And if they’re honest, and know it can just as likely mean something else, they’ll include that alternate translation in the footnotes. And maybe people will read the footnotes. (But frequently they don’t.)
Idioms also need to be interpreted. An idiom is a saying that means something entirely different from the words that make up the saying. (“Kick the bucket,” for example, has nothing to do with literally kicking any bucket.) If you translate that literally, you confuse people. Translating Exodus 20.3 literally, “Not to be to Me gods other, upon face of Me,” is not only bad English, but gives someone looking for a loophole the idea that you’re not to put other gods on God’s face—as opposed to its proper meaning, “You must not have any other god but Me.”
Even so, Christians who don’t understand how translation works are usually fond of the idea of “word-for-word translation,” because they assume every word in the bible is easy to convert into English, just like “perro” and “dog.” Well, they’re not. Sometimes one word in Greek needs to become two or more words in English to get the idea across. Sometimes the writers of the bible used run-on sentences, or didn’t bother to use verbs, or used euphemisms or words we simply don’t have in English. Don’t get me wrong: Every sentence in the bible can be translated. But “word for word” is the sort of thing a person will insist on when they’ve never studied any foreign language. Bilingual people know better.
So most translators use the “dynamic equivalence” method: It’s literal when literal is possible, but the main point is that before anything else, it means the same thing. And that’s all we ought to want.
So… why are there so many translations then?
Obviously there are a lot of different ways to say the same thing. Hence there are many different translations of the bible. You have the translations that are as literal as possible (like the New American Standard) or try to squeeze in every possible meaning (like the Amplified Bible) or try to make the bible sound as much like American English as possible (like the New Living Translation or the Good News Bible) or at least a Christianese version of American English (like the New International Version).
Sometimes there are different translations for theological reasons. The translators of the New King James Version wanted a New Testament based on the Textus Receptus ’cause they weren’t so sure about all the newfangled scholarship in the Nestle-Aland text. The Jewish Publication Society obviously wanted a Jewish translation that wasn’t influenced by Christians. The New American Bible translators wanted a bible for Roman Catholics. The New International Version translators wanted a bible conservative Evangelicals could approve of.
Honestly, sometimes there are different translations just because bibles make money. The bible is the world’s biggest best-seller, and if you own the copyright to a popular bible translation, you’re going to make money from it. Some publishers fund translations for just that reason. Hey, if it’s a decent translation and it gets the bible circulated, it’s not really a bad thing.
Some Christians object (usually King James Only fans) because they’re concerned that too many translations causes Christians to become confused about what the bible really says. I have yet to meet a Christian who is actually confused about this: Most of them already know that if they want to know what the bible really says, they gotta start learning Hebrew and Greek. Of course, what they’ll discover once they learn these languages… are all the issues that I’ve just discussed in this post under “Translation philosophies.” Knowing the original languages of the bible sometimes means you’re just going to be confused in three additional languages.
Well. In the meanwhile, I’ve already written on this subject: Read and compare several translations so you can see how they all generally agree.
Next week: Genesis.