BIBLE TRANSLATIONS AND BIBLE STUDY (1)

BIBLE TRANSLATIONS AND BIBLE STUDY (1)

BERNARD BURT The Testimony1997 p.42 This is the first of two articles by Brother Burt with which we conclude the present series analysing Bible texts and versions.

IT WOULD BE reasonable to suppose that the great majority of subscribers to The Testimony are unable to read Hebrew and Greek. The writer of this article is very firmly in that category. If we want to read the Bible (which was originally written in those languages) it must therefore be translated into the language which we can read, that is, English.

However, because God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, and because there are some things in Scripture which are "hard to be under stood" (2 Peter 3:16), the Bible translator has a difficult task. When he comes to a ’difficult passage’, should he translate the original text exactly into English, complete with all its diffi culties, or should he attempt to make its mean ing clear to the average reader? What if the translator does not understand the meaning in tended by the Spirit? What if the translator has strong views on certain doctrines and allows these views to colour his translation? What is (or, perhaps, what should be) the true spheres of operation of the Bible translator? The purpose of translations

I believe that a Bible translation should tell us as clearly as possible what the original text says, however difficult it may subsequently be for us to understand it. It is not the job of the translator to try and tell us what the text means—that is our task. We should be able to take any accurate and faithful translation and, by comparing spir itual things with spiritual, establish the true meaning of a passage. Any translation which enables us to do this is, in my judgement, a ’good’ translation. ’Translations’ which inter pret meaning by means of paraphrase, etc. are nowhere near as valuable to us, because they may give us a meaning which is incorrect and thus hide the meaning which God intended us to understand. So what translations are there? The list in the table at the top of page 43 is not exhaustive, and includes only translations of the whole Bible. The abbreviations given are those which will be used in the text of these two articles. These arti cles cannot possibly attempt an evaluation of all of these translations. What it is intended to do is to highlight some of the significant features of six of the translations, and make comparisons between them and the AV.

Manuscripts The Bible has been translated from copies of the original writings of the prophets and apostles. These copies are called manuscripts, and gener ally the older the manuscript the more valuable it is considered to be to the translator. The He brew manuscripts from which the Old Testa ment has been translated have for many years been regarded as accurate and reliable, and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has confirmed this view. There is therefore little argument amongst scholars and Bible translators as to what the true Hebrew text of the Old Testament is. A very different situation exists with the New Testament manuscripts. The AV was translated from manuscripts dating back to the ninth cen tury A.D., which were the oldest then known. Since 1611 several very much older manuscripts, going back to the fourth century A.D., have been found. There are many differences between the two groups of manuscripts: for example, the last sixteen verses of the Gospel of Mark and the first eleven verses of John 8:1-59 are not found in most of the older manuscripts. The translators of the RV were instructed to make a revision of the AV using the same manuscripts as used by the AV. They did this in the Old Testament, but the Cambridge scholars Westcott and Hort per suaded them to use for the New Testament a text based on the fourth-century Greek manu scripts. Most of the translators of versions pub lished since the RV have followed the same course, and examples of the effects of this prac tice will be highlighted in the consideration of particular translations.

Precis

Paraphrase is the expression of the sense of a piece of writing in different words; precis is its expression in fewer words. Some of the more modern translations freely admit that they are paraphrases of the original. It is a concern that the translators of the LB and the GNB appear also to have done a precis of the Old Testament and reduced its length by about fifteen per cent, as the following table shows: The writer’s cop ies of the RSV and LB have New Testa ments of similar length, yet the Old Testament in the lat ter is over 250 pages shorter—what has the LB omitted? It is difficult to say in de tail without an ex haustive reading of the two versions, but here are a couple of examples:

Judges 21:24 "And the people of Israel departed from there at that time, every man to his tribe and family, and they went out from there every man to his inheritance" (RSV; 29 words); "So the people of Israel returned to their homes" (LB; 9 words).

2 Chronicles 12:9

"So Shishak king of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took away the treasures of the house of the LORD and the treasures of the king’s house; he took away everything. He also took away the shields of gold which Solomon had made" (RSV; 43 words); "So King Shishak of Egypt conquered Jeru salem and took away all the treasures of the Temple and of the palace, also all of Solo mon’s gold shields" (LB; 26 words).

There are some slight differences in wording between the American New King James and the Revised Au thorised versions. While the overall sense of the above verses is given in the LB, there are clearly details omit ted, and these details are part of God’s revela tion to us. We cannot say that they are not important and may be left out.

Paraphrase

There are examples of paraphrase in the text of Scripture itself. For example, John 21:1-25 records Jesus as saying: "If I will that he [fohn] tarry till I come, what is that to thee?"; and then contin ues: "Then went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" (John 21:22-23). Jesus’s words were not easy to understand, so the disciples paraphrased them into a saying which had a clear and unambigu ous meaning—but it was the wrong meaning. This is the danger of paraphrase: unless it is well done, it can distort or even destroy the meaning of the original. The GNB paraphrases Genesis 3:15 : "I will make you and the woman hate each other; her offspring and yours will always be enemies, her offspring will crush your head, and you will bite their heel". It is certainly easier reading than the AV, but in the process of paraphrase the meaning of the verse has been changed and the GNB will not lead its readers to anticipate that an individual male descendant of the wo man would ultimately fulfil these words.

Similarly, in 2 Samuel 7:16 the GNB has: "You will always have descendants, and I will make your kingdom last for ever. Your dynasty will never end". Here, the paraphrase has created a ’prophecy’ which has failed, for it is evident that the dynasty of David ended with the de throning of Zedekiah by King Nebuchadnezzar. The GNB also fails to show that this verse is a prophecy of an everlasting Kingdom in the pres ence of David: "thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee" (AV). Thus the implicit teaching of the resurrection of David is completely missed. The GNB paraphrase of John 20:17 clearly implies that Jesus existed originally in heaven with God: "’Do not hold on to me’, Jesus told her, ’because I have not yet gone back up to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them that I am returning to Him Who is my Father and their Father, my God and their God’". It takes less than five minutes’ work with a concordance to demonstrate that the Scriptural meaning of the Greek words translated ’ascend’ and ’as cended’ in the AV, and paraphrased as ’go back up’ and ’return’ in the GNB, is ’to go up’ or ’to rise up’, and the ’return’ sense introduced by the GNB will not fit the other contexts. For ex ample, Acts 2:34 says: "For David is not as cended into the heavens ..."; is it suggested that David was in heaven before his birth?

Turning now to the LB, in John 1:1-3 it para phrases the text: "Before anything else existed, there was Christ, with God. He has always been alive and is himself God. He created everything there is—nothing exists that he didn’t make". There are no words in the Greek text that corre spond to "existed", "Christ" and "been alive"; this is not in fact translation at all, it is interpre tation, and interpretation which is clearly at vari ance with other Scriptures. In 1 Peter 1:3-6 the LB is very easy reading, but it introduces heaven-going into a text which, when properly translated, teaches the opposite: "Now we live in hope of eternal life because Christ rose again from the dead. And God has reserved for His children the priceless gift of eternal life; it is kept in heaven for you . . . And God in His mighty power, will make sure that you get there safely to receive it, because you are trusting Him". This is just one of a number of passages where the LB forces in the concept of heaven-going: "Good Teacher, what must I do to get to heaven?" (Mark 10:17). Here the Greek is ’the life of the aion’, and the passage is con cerned about the quality and time of this future life, and not about its location. To summarise, paraphrases can help us to understand passages which are difficult in the older translations. But any ideas that we find in them need to be carefully checked before we accept or use them.

(To be concluded) BIBLE TRANSLATIONS AND BIBLE STUDY (2)

BERNARD BURT The Testimony 1997 p. 73 In the previous article Brother Burt considered the limitations of the Bible ’translations’ which paraphrase or even in some cases precis the Scriptures. He now looks at some of the more literal versions.

Psalm titles and the New English Bible

MUCH HAS been written about the titles of the Psalms, but the first consideration is to recognise that they are part of Scripture. This fact can be easily demonstrated by comparing the titleof Psalms 18:1-50 and Psalms 18:1-2 with 2 Samuel 22:1-2. The psalm is repeated in the passage in 2 Samuel, and the title of the psalm appears there as the first verse of the chapter. I would therefore sug-gest that when brethren are called upon to read a psalm they should always read any title that the psalm may have. However, some of the modern versions, particularly the NEB, L B and GNB, either leave them out or significantly change their meanings. The effect of this is to lose or corrupt many verses of Scripture. Several examples from the GNB and LB have been consid-ered, so what is the NEB like? It trans-lates Genesis 1:1-2 as follows: "In the beginning of crea-tion, when God made heaven and earth, the earth was without form and void, with darkness over the face of the abyss, and a mighty wind that swept over the surface of the wa-ters 7 ’. Thus where most other transla-tors have, "the Spirit of God", the NEB has, "a mighty wind". This is not the place to ask, Why did the NEB translators use the phrase ’mighty wind’? But we can legitimately ask if they have been con-sistent with this rendering, and how it fits in other contexts. In Genesis 41:39 the NEB trans-lates Pharaoh as saying: "Can we find a man like this man, one who has the spirit of a god [mg. the spirit of God] in him?". "Mighty wind" just will not fit the context in Genesis 41:1-57. Spirit of God will fit both Genesis 1:1-31 and Genesis 41:1-57, there-fore the NEB is unnecessarily inconsistent in this piece of translation.

There are, however, passages where the AV is obscure in its meaning and the NEB can be very helpful. "If a person hears a solemn adjuration to give evidence as a witness to something he has seen or heard and does not declare what he knows, he commits a sin and must accept re sponsibility", is the NEB rendering of Leviticus 5:1. Comparison between this and the AV trans lation soon reveals that the NEB is much more comprehensible. One of the least readable books in the AV is 2 Corinthians; in the NEB it becomes very much easier to follow Paul’s arguments— compare, for example, the respective renderings of 2 Corinthians 1:20; 2 Corinthians 3:12-13; 2 Corinthians 6:7-10; and 2 Corinthians 8:1-4. To return to the titles of the Psalms, many of the modern versions make some attempt at trans lating them, but "not according to knowledge"; for example, Moffatt translates the title of Psalms 22:1-31 as, "From the Choirmaster’s collection. To the tune, ’Deer of the Dawn’. A song of David"; whereas (as Brother Leen Ritmeyer has shown) an accurate translation is, "To him that over cometh the powers of darkness, the best fruits of the beloved".

Words such as Selah and Higgaion, which ap pear in a number of psalms, are omitted by Moff., the NEB, the GNB and the LB. These words are part of the text of Scripture, and therefore the versions which omit them are not being faithful to the originals. The Revised Standard Version In many places the language of the RSV is easier to follow than the AV; for example: "So she called the name of the LORD Who spoke to her, ’Thou art a God of seeing’; for she said, ’Have I really seen God and re mained alive after seeing Him?" (Genesis 16:13); "My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate upon Thy promise" (Psalms 119:148);

"Are you better than Thebes that sat by the Nile, with water around her, her rampart a sea, and water her wall?" (Nahum 3:8); "For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not pre cede those who have fallen asleep" (1 Thessalonians 4:15). In some areas the RSV is more accurate than the AV; for example, it omits 1 John 5:7, which, although it appears in the AV, is said to be found in only one of 113 extant Greek manuscripts. However, in other areas the AV is more depend able than the RSV and the best of the other trans lations of that era. In Genesis 22:17-18 the RSV and most of the modern translations have ’de scendants’ (plural) or some equivalent, instead of the singular term which is required by the context and Galatians 3:16.

One of the great virtues of the AV is the con sistency with which it generally renders a par ticular Hebrew or Greek word by the same English word. Consider the following RSV pas sages where (in the AV) the Hebrew word ra is translated "evil":

"an evil spirit from the LORD" (1 Samuel 16:14); "a company of destroying angels" (Psalms 78:49); "I make weal and create woe" (Isaiah 45:7); "by bringing upon us a great calamity . . . all this calamity has come upon us" (Daniel 9:12-13).

If the RSV is used consistently then this sort of link which the Spirit has built into the original text will never be seen. A translation needs to be reasonably consistent in the way in which it renders original words, and to do this the Eng lish word which will be used to translate a par ticular original word has to be chosen with great care. A number of the translators of the modern school have not given evidence of this degree of care in their work. For the most part the RSV translates the origi nal—there is little of the interpretation which has been noted above in some of the modern paraphrases. One notable exception is found in the final chapters of Ezekiel, where there is a serious inconsistency of rendering the terms ’reed’ and ’cubit’. In Ezekiel 40:5 the reed is defined as "six long cubits", but in Ezekiel 42:16-20 the Hebrew word for ’reed’ is ’translated’ ’cubit’, which has the effect of reducing the overall dimensions of the future temple to one sixth of the size given through the Spirit to Ezekiel. ’Translations’ of this sort give incorrect substance to the view that the future temple will not be of the great size which will be needful for the worship of the Kingdom age. In John 1:18 the RSV completely fails to trans late a Greek word which (as I understand the matter) occurs in every known text of this Gos pel. Thus it reads "the only Son [mg. the only God]" instead of "the only begotten Son". Having said all this, the RSV (like the NEB) can be very helpful, but I would strongly coun sel against using either version on its own, and that any unusual ’translations’ should be care fully checked. The New International Version The NIV appears to have achieved a greater level of popularity and acceptance than any other modern version. Yet it contains many of the de fects which have been noted to exist in the ver sions considered so far. The NIV translators frequently use paraphrase. For example, in Joshua 24:14 the AV reads, "serve Him in sincerity and truth"; while the NIV has, "serve Him with all faithfulness". The NIV masks the fact that two distinct aspects of service are being asked of Israel (neither truth nor sincerity being sufficient of their own), and also makes it impossible for the reader to notice that this is one of several linguistic links between Joshua 24:1-33 and John 4:23 ". . . worship the Father in spirit and in truth" . The way in which the RSV translates the He brew word ra (usually ’evil’ in the AV) has al ready been noticed. The table above shows that the NIV has an even greater variety of ’transla tions’ of the Greek word sarx—which th e AV almost always renders as ’flesh’. In this table are ten references, all with a dif ferent ’translation’ of sarx. The average reader of the NIV is never going to realise that a common thread runs through all these passages. Of par ticular concern is the apparent avoidance by the NIV of any rendering which would support the Biblical doctrine that Jesus had the same flesh as we do. In John 1:18 the NIV translators perpetrate a similar error to the RSV (omitting the word ’be gotten’ and adding ’God’), coming out with "God the only [Son]". In Romans 8:6-9 the word ’con trolled’ is inserted into the ’translation’ three times, without any warrant in any Greek manu script, thus producing the phrase: "the mind controlled by the Spirit". In Php 3:14 the NIV reads: "I press on towards the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heaven wards in Christ Jesus". This is not what the text says, still less what it means. It is what the trans lator believes. Such translations will not help us to understand the depths of the Scriptures, nor will they help those who are seeking the Truth to find it (and I would include Sunday School children in this category).

Thus the NIV has many serious shortcomings as a translation, and it is not a version which I would recommend for regular use. The New King James The New King James, or Revised Authorised Version, is almost unique amongst the modern translations in that it uses the same Greek text as the AV. Because of this it renders Revelation 5:9,10 as: "You are worthy to take the scroll . . . for you were slain, and have redeemed us to God . . . and have made us kings and priests . . .". By contrast most of the other recent trans lations have something like: "You are worthy to take the scroll . . . because you were slain, and with your blood you purchased men for God . . . You have made them to be a kingdom and priests . . ." (NIV).

Thus the AV and RAV make these words the song of the redeemed; the NIV and many others make them a song about the redeemed. Now in the context of Revelation 5:1-14 these words are sung by the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures. If the AV and RAV are correct (as I believe they are) these beings are symbols of the saints. If the majority of the modern versions are right, the twenty-four elders and the four living creatures cannot represent the redeemed in the vision, and our understanding of Revelation 4:1-11 and Revelation 5:1-14 must therefore change to accommodate this fact.

Sadly the RAV departs from the AV’s faithful translation of Genesis 22:17-18 with the render ing: "in blessing I will bless you, and in multi plying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the sea-shore; and your descendants shall pos sess the gate of their enemies". However, like the AV, it follows the Hebrew text of 2 Samuel 7:16, "your house and your kingdom shall be estab lished for ever before you", rather than that of the Septuagint and Syriac, "... established for ever before Me" (see also NIV, NEB, RSV, etc.). The RAV is more accurate than the AV in its translation of Romans 6:1-2 : "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly notl How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?". It is also very con sistent in translating the Greek word sarx as ’flesh’; in all the ten passages listed above in the NIV section the RAV has ’flesh’ for sarx. It is only fair to state that the RAV does in places present the Holy Spirit as a person rather than a power (for example, Romans 8:11, Romans 8:16, Romans 8:26). It also advances the idea of "the evil one" in such passages as Matthew 5:37; Matthew 6:13 and John 17:15. The RAV therefore fails to some degree in its basic aim, which was to be an up-to-date revi sion of the Authorised Version. This is a great pity, since all the translators signed their agree ment that the original manuscripts were the in spired Word of God; yet they have introduced into this version doctrines which are not taught in those manuscripts.

Conclusions A translation should be the means to the end, the end being that we understand what God has said to us through His revelation. It should be perfectly transparent in the sense that the beliefs and feelings of the translators should not ob scure the detail and sense of the original texts. We (for the most part) have to use translations in order to study the Word of God. What are the best means available to us today for studying God’s word? The modern paraphrases (GNB and LB) do not give honour and glory to God because their presentation of His Word is, in many instances, simply not faithful to the original texts from which the translators worked. The translators of the NIV make it clear in their preface that (par ticularly in the New Testament) they would first decide what the text should say and secondly translate it. In many of those decisions and trans lations their doctrinal bias is apparent. These features, and others which have been alluded to above, render the GNB, LB and NIV unfitted for our purposes of searching out the meanings of God’s revelation to us and communicating these things to those who are in darkness. The NEB, RAV and RSV can all be helpful to us as we read and study the Scriptures. They can be a means of increasing our understanding in cases where the AV is difficult to understand. However, as the above considerations have briefly shown, they should be used alongside the AV and not as substitutes for it.

Inherently, the appearance of so many ’new’ translations over the past few decades implies a dissatisfaction with the AV. Let us not be swept away by this critical viewpoint. George Bernard Shaw, one of the foremost of modern literary critics, wrote of the AV: "The translation was extraordinarily well done because to the transla tors what they were translating was not merely a curious collection of ancient books written by different authors in different stages of culture, but the Word of God divinely revealed through His chosen and expressly inspired scribes. In this conviction they carried out their work with boundless reverence and care and achieved a beautifully artistic result" (cited in the RAV preface).

(Concluded) ‘As a son over his own house’ (Hebrews 3:6)