Summer in the Systematics – Bibliology (Part Seven): The Translation of the Bible

Transcript

JRS 32
08/13/2023
Summer in the Systematics – Bibliology (Part Seven): The Translation of the Bible
Selected Verses
Jesse Randolph

Well, good evening again. As a parent I’m very well aware as I’m sure many of you know, that school is around the corner and summer is quickly winding down. That means our summer study of Bibliology is just about over. Tonight, is lesson number seven in this series meaning we’ve got three more to go after tonight and if you can believe it, we have Labor Day, Fall Kick-off and all the rest. It’s already here.

By way of review, so far in our study of Bibliology we’ve covered five topics. The authority of the Bible, the inspiration of the Bible, the inerrancy of the Bible, the canonicity of the Bible, the canonization of the Bible. You know from the last two lessons we broke that topic up into two, the canonization of the Old Testament and the canonization of the New Testament.

Tonight, we’re going to be still in the field of Bibliology but we’re going to head in an entirely new direction and consider a brand-new topic which is the translation of the Bible. That’s our subject for this evening, the translation of the Bible. As we work through the material tonight, we’re going to do so according to three major headings you see on your worksheets there if you got one of those in the back. These are the three headings, and you can go ahead and fill in these blanks now if you’d like. The early history of Bible translation, theories of Bible translation, and recent history of Bible translation. I’ll do those one more time here. Early history of Bible translation, theories of Bible translation, and recent history of Bible translation.

So, we’ve a lot of material to get into tonight so we’ll jump right in starting with our first major heading tonight, the early history of Bible translation. Now as we begin, I’ll just let you know in the front end that because we live in the United States of America and because our national language is English, my focus for tonight is for the purpose of equipping and training this English-speaking church tracing out the history of the translation of the English Bible. We won’t be looking at how the Chinese Bible came to be, or the Spanish Bible came to be or the Swahili Bible and how that came to be. We’re going to focus on instead how various Hebrew scrolls and then Greek manuscripts and Aramaic Targum, and all the rest made it into our English Bibles so that we now as English speakers are able to not only hold God’s Word in our laps but read it, and be transformed by it and that whole series of events happened according to a certain sequence in history that we’re going to get into tonight.

To tell that story of the history of the translation of the English Bible we need to start with John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe was an Englishman who lived from 1324-1384. He’s known as “The Morning Star of the Reformation.” He was a distinguished Oxford academic who was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the then dominant Roman Catholic Church. He was very open in his criticism of the papacy there in the mid-14th century. In Wycliffe’s day and going all the way back to the days of the ancient Roman Empire Latin was still considered the dominant academic language and importantly, it was the language of the church. With a very sharp theological mind and a natural distrust of the Roman Catholic Church Wycliffe declared that the laws of the Bible were more important than the laws of the church. He deemed it necessary that the churches in England have the Scriptures in their own language, so he went on the path of translating the Bible, the Scriptures into English. Copies of Wycliffe’s original English Bible appeared between 1380 and 1384. It was a very highly literal translation with very poor and uneven English. You could tell it was still influenced by the old Latin of the day which makes sense, because he was translating from Latin as we’re going to see later. He was not translating from Hebrew and Greek. One other interesting detail though is about Wycliffe’s translation, and just wrap your mind around this fact. He published an English and translated an English Bible and circulated an English Bible before the printing press. That didn’t come until the mid-1400’s, sixty years after Wycliffe. That means that every copy of the Wycliffe Bible that was circulated was circulated based on handwritten manuscripts. People hand wrote, scribes hand wrote his translation and that’s what went into circulation.

Now as far as Wycliffe the man, he was put on trial by the Catholic Church for heresy in 1382 and he was convicted and pronounced a heretic by the Catholic Church. The verdict essential was to place him under house arrest for the rest of his life, that’s how he lived the rest of his life. About 30 years later after his death at the Council of Constance in 1414 all of Wycliffe’s writings, including his Bible translation, were condemned posthumously. At this council it was also ordered that Wycliffe’s bones be dug up, burned which is what we see happening here. You see it’s kind of grainy on my screen, I’m sure it’s grainy for you too but that’s his skeleton being dug up and set back on fire. Not sure what that was supposed to accomplish. He was dead.

Next up is William Tyndale. No one has made more of an impact on the translation of the English Bible than William Tyndale. This man lived from 1494 until 1536 and like Wycliffe about a hundred years before him, Tyndale was Oxford educated. He graduated in 1515 with a master’s degree. Tyndale lived right in the heart of the Renaissance era, which was this period of intellectual ferment which was spreading all across Europe. This was a period of renewed interest in culture and learning about a variety of different subjects, arts and sciences and all the rest. That included learning and relearning the ancient languages like Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew.

We saw last week this man, Erasmus of Rotterdam was right in the heart of renaissance learning, especially as it related to the recovery of biblical languages. Erasmus, his claim to fame is that he compiled and printed a full copy of the first Greek New Testament which he did in 1515. There were of course all these manuscripts of Greek everywhere but he’s the first to put it all together in one comprehensive Greek New Testament. That again was in 1515. In 1517 this familiar man, Martin Luther, he nails his famous 95 Thesis to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. That sparks the Protestant Reformation. He goes on to translate the Bible into his native German. But back to our subject of study, William Tyndale and the English Bible, he had his mindset to do very same thing in English. Here’s a famous quote from Tyndale that shows his resolve to translate the Bible into English so that God’s Word would be accessible to the common Englishman. He says, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, before many years I will make sure that a boy who drives the plough knows more of the Scriptures than you do,” speaking to the Roman hierarchy.

Well in 1523, because he wanted to publish and English Bible Tyndale approached a church official in London and asked for official church support to translate the Bible into English and the church shockingly, this is still Roman Catholic times or Roman Catholic dominated times, refused. They didn’t allow him to do it. That led Tyndale to leave England and go to continental Europe to do his work of translating the Bible into English. His translation work started in 1524 in Cologne, Germany. Eventually he migrated to Worms, Germany and it was while he was there in Worms between 1525 and 1526 that he was able to complete and publish 3,000 copies of the New Testaments into English which were then smuggled back into England.

After his work on the New Testament there in Worms he was now motivated to translate the Old Testament into English. Only problem was, he didn’t know Hebrew. Guess what he did? He learned Hebrew by himself, self-taught Hebrew scholar! And he did so in Antwerp in the country of Belgium. From 1530 and 1535 he published five books, all five books of Moses, the Torah, Jonah, and then all the historical books between Joshua and II Chronicles. He translated them as a new Hebrew neophyte into English.

Tyndale was eventually arrested, apprehended, caught in 1535 and he was executed on October 6 of 1536. Here’s the account of that in “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.” It says, “He was brought forth to the place of execution, was there tied to the stake, and then strangled first by the hangman, and afterwards with fire consumed, crying thus at the stake with a fervent zeal and a loud voice, ‘Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Here is a depiction of Tyndale’s strangling and then burning at the stake. Now what Tyndale could not have known was that his answer or his prayer, it’s actually written there on that banner that I’m sure you can’t see from where you are seated, where he says “Lord open the King of England’s eyes,” what he couldn’t have known is that an answer to that prayer was already unfolding as of the time of his execution because on the heels of Tyndale’s arrest and on the heels of multiple divorces and remarriages, by King Henry VIII which sparked the English Reformation, King Henry VIII had actually authorized an English Bible. The publication and distribution of a complete English Bible.

That brings us to our next link in the chain as we keep moving historically here to the Coverdale Bible of 1535. This Bible translation is noteworthy because it was the first complete English Bible, meaning, with all 66 books in it ever produced in the English language as of this time. Wycliffe’s translation from the 1380s didn’t have the complete Old Testament nor did Tyndale’s from the 1530s. The Coverdale Bible was produced by Miles Coverdale. By this point in history, Henry VIII had broken all ties with the Pope and with the Roman Catholic Church and this Bible is notorious because it was the first English Bible to have full backing of the English crown. The first English Bible to circulate freely in England. However, this gentleman, Miles Coverdale was nowhere near the scholar as was Wycliffe or Tyndale. He didn’t know Hebrew or Greek, made no pretense of knowing either and he worked almost exclusively from inferior Latin documents as he stitched together his own English translation.
One notable feature of the Coverdale Bible, you might remember this from last week, is that like Tyndale and like Luther, Coverdale placed Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation in what he called an “outer canon”, and he placed them at the end of his English translation. That was sort of par for the course in these decades. Those books were in question or brought up for question in the 1500’s. His translation, Coverdale’s, didn’t last very long because in 1537, Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of what was now called the “Church of England” urged that a royal license be granted to issue and print a new Bible. That license was granted, and that Bible translation was printed and that was the Matthew’s Bible of 1537, and this new Bible was attributed to someone named “Thomas Matthew.” But Thomas Matthew was actually a pseudonym for a former associate of Tyndale named John Rogers. So, it’s called Matthew’s Bible, but the editor was actually a man named John Rogers. Matthew’s Bible was based on Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament and Tyndale’s translations of the books of Moses, but the rest of this translation was based on the Coverdale Bible with John Rogers being really nothing more than an editor on the project. By the way, John Rogers, there he is, would later be burned at the stake, in 1555. He was one of the many Protestant martyrs who lost their lives during the reign of the “Bloody Mary,” the Catholic queen of England. Certainly not living his best life now in that moment.

Next, we have Taverner’s Bible, 1539. This was a revision of Matthew’s Bible from 1537 and why I bring this one in is this Bible has the distinction of being the first English Bible to actually be printed on English soil. The other Bibles were printed on the continent of Europe. The popularity of this Bible though was very short lived because just a few months later a much better Bible with a much better name was published, that being the Great Bible, also in 1539. The history behind this one is that King Henry VIII, he of the multiple divorces, issued a decree which he ordered the publication of “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English, and the same set up in some convenient place within the said church whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it.” He wanted a big Bible. That’s the translation. A revision of Matthew’s Bible, called the Great Bible was prepared in 1539 for that purpose. Again, the meaning this title or the reason for this title is the large size of the Bible. It was a big Bible placed and chained in these large pulpits and podiums in England. One notable fact about the Great Bible, in addition to its sheer size is that this Bible, for the first time, did not use that Luther arrangement where they placed Hebrews, and II Peter, Revelation at the end. This actually put the books in the order that we know them as today.

Moving forward a few decades we get to the Geneva Bible of 1560. This was an English Bible translation which bore the name “Geneva,” a city in Switzerland. So how did that happen? Why an English Bible in Switzerland? Well, the story starts with the coronation of Mary Queen of Scots, in 1553 known as “Bloody Mary.” She’s the one who was the Catholic Queen of England at that time and was cracking down on Protestants like John Rogers who I mentioned earlier. In response to Mary’s brutal reign where many Protestants were killed, many fled to Geneva, Switzerland, which became a new center of English Protestantism in that day. It was in the midst of that unique little English-speaking bubble there in Geneva, Switzerland that the Geneva New Testament appeared. The complete edition, as you can see on your screen there, was published in 1560. The Geneva Bible had many unique and distinct features to it. It was the first Bible to have numbered verses. It used Roman type instead of that old-school English Gothic type, so it was much easier to read. It used italics for words did appear in the Hebrew or Greek manuscripts, so you’d see the word italicized if it was supplied by the English translators. It was also the first English Bible to be translated exclusively from the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. So, others were referencing more recent Latin manuscripts, but the Geneva Bible was using the older Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. But the most notable feature of the Geneva Bible, was probably this. That it had a large number of marginal annotations and notes. That’s what you see on the side of your screen there, that is super tiny. Basically, the text of scripture is in those two columns in the middle and then there were all these annotated notes on either side, the right or the left to sort of comment on what was happening in the text. This was a very popular Bible; the Geneva Bible was. From its publication in 1560 even for forty or fifty years after the King James Bible was published in 1611. This is the Bible of Shakespeare, and Milton, and Bunyan. This is the Bible that came across the Atlantic from the pilgrims on the Mayflower as they settled here in America.

Well, as I just mentioned, the Geneva Bible wasn’t produced in England. It was produced, as its name indicates, in Geneva for these English settlers there. The success of this translation not produced on English soil irked some Englishmen. So, work was undertaken back home in England to produce a new and improved version of the Great Bible there on English soil. That translation was the Bishop’s Bible of 1568. It was considered to be the Bible of the Church of England, homegrown, sourced in England for a bit of time. Impressive copies of this Bible like the Great Bible were chained to the desks of pulpits in parish churches, and it was the norm, this Bible was, along with the Geneva Bible, for many decades after.

Now that sets the stage for the Bible translation which would end up dominating the religious l landscape for the next 300 or so years and I’m speaking, of course, of the King James Bible. Now to appreciate the significance of the King James Bible, it’s important to cover some of the history. In 1603, James VI of Scotland took over the English throne and he was then crowned James I, King James of England. James was the son of ‘Bloody Mary,’ the former Catholic Queen of England but James wasn’t Catholic, he was Protestant. When he assumed the English throne there were a number of different bible translations that were still floating around. Which translation you used actually was a source of religious disunity at the time. The disunity really existed between what I will call run-of-the-mill Protestants and those who called themselves “Puritans.” Actually, those who are dubbed “Puritans.” Without getting into the whole history of Puritanism here, the Puritans stood on the shoulders of the Protestant Reformers, from about 100 years prior. But at the heart of what made Puritanism “Puritanism” is that they wanted to purify the church even further. They wanted even deeper reforms in the English church. As I mentioned just a minute ago, the Geneva Bible was their favored translation. That’s why it came across on the Mayflower.

But there there were others in England, like James I who favored the Bishop’s Bible. There were still others in England who still liked the Great Bible or older translations like the Coverdale or even Tyndale’s old Bible. It was all sort of a mess and in the face of that mess King James I convened this thing called the Hampton Court conference in January 1604. At this conference, he proposed that his preferred translation, the Bishop’s Bible, be revised and in his words “as little altered as the truth of the original will allow.” So, he was a Bishop’s Bible guy. At Hampton Court, King James’ proposal was pushed forward and what happened after that was a panel of scholars was brought in. There were about 50 of them. There was a panel that met at Oxford, a panel that met at Cambridge, and a panel that met at Westminster. As each panel did their work they would share their work with the other panel members in the other cities, at the other universities, and sort of collaborate and share thoughts and ideas and revise each other’s work; and actually, that methodology even exists today in modern translation work. Through this project though for this new Bible translation, that was all approved at Hampton in 1604. Then the work got started on the actual translation in 1607 and then the final product was published and distributed in 1611. That translation, again, became the King James Bible, or the King James Version.

Now the King James Version of the Bible which is known in various circles as the “Authorized Version” was written in everyday language to be understood by the everyday people. It was really written and translated the way it was, it was designed to be read aloud because only a small minority of the English-speaking population at the time, estimates are 1 in 4 could actually read or write. It was designed to be read aloud and it was designed to appeal to the ear as it was heard. And so, in that vein it was known for employing very rich beautiful English prose. The beauty of its language is unparalleled. In fact, here’s Leland Ryken on that topic of the natural beauty of the King James English. He says, “Stylistically, the KJV is the greatest English Bible translation ever produced.” Note the word “stylistically,” I’m camping it there. “Its style combines simplicity and majesty as the original requires, though it inclines toward the exalted. Its rhythms are matchless.”

I mean, he’s right. As a piece of English literature, the King James Bible is easy to listen to and beautiful to take in. For some, of course, the King James Version is the only Bible. That brings up a phenomenon known as KJV-onlyism. I won’t get into it too deeply tonight. If time allows me, I’ll spend some time next Sunday night diving into that topic. But for now, I do want to mention a few concerns that I have with the KJV, notwithstanding its admitted richness in its language. First, is this. The KJV wasn’t delivered on stone tablets as some would suggest. Rather it came from the Textus Receptus which is a series of texts from the 15th Century which is quite recent which the majority of scholars acknowledge today are not only, not only the oldest texts, but not the best texts. Second, our understanding of Biblical Hebrew and Koine Greek has grown exponentially over the past four centuries since the KJV translation was published. Meaning modern translators are far more informed and have far better tools at their disposal than did the men who worked on the 1611 translation. Third is that the King James Bible contrary to those who are in the KJV only camp, was not the first English translation as we’ve just seen. It just wasn’t the only one. Instead, it was actually built on and simply a revision of several previous versions and translations. Well notwithstanding some of those concerns I’ve just mentioned and again I’ll get into more next week, Lord willing. The KJV became very popular in the 1600s. It didn’t eventually eclipse the Geneva Bible until about the mid-i6oos in terms of its popularity, but it eventually got that place. In fact, an interesting note, it wasn’t until 1988 that a different Bible translation finally surpassed the KJV in terms of popularity. That’s how long its popularity, its reign lasted. 1988 by the way was the NIV that surpassed the KJV.

Now, after this translation, the version, the King James Version in 1611 it was actually a relatively quiet period for several centuries, in terms of Bible translation. There wasn’t a whole lot of activity brewing once the KJV came out.

So, what I’m going now is I’m going to take a break and a breather, not like I’m going to go to the restroom right now, I’m just going to take a different detour in terms of where we’re going and I want to hit a topic that’s going to set us up for what we’re going to talk about at the end which is theories of Bible translation.

That’s actually our second major heading for tonight, theories of Bible translation. We’ll pick up the historical development after we work through this one. There are essentially two theories of Bible translation that have been put to use in recent years. Those two theories are these formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence, formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Let’s start with formal equivalence and what that means, what that entails. A formally equivalent translation which is also known as a form-driven translation focuses on the form of the original language. It focuses, it retains, as best as possible, what was said in the original language. Which, in the case of Bible translation, means Hebrew, Greek, and here and there Aramaic. Formal equivalence says that even if the end product comes out awkward or less than perfectly smooth in the receptor language, meaning our language English, we’re going to focus on the original language and what was intended and designed in that original text, in that original manuscript. What this theory does, or this method does is leave to the modern-day interpreter in the receptor language, in our case English, the task of resolving any ambiguities they have in their translation and what’s in the original. That all goes to translation work and sound hermeneutics and interpretation work and the like.

By contrast, I’m just speaking very broadly in generalities here. We’ll get into some examples in a minute. There’s dynamic equivalence theory. Dynamic equivalence theory focuses more on sweeping up the big-picture idea in the original text and then carrying over that idea to the receptor language, again English for us, so that it is most clearly understandable to readers in that receptor language. So applied to the translation of the Bible into English, in a dynamic equivalence translation, the requirements of good natural English, by the way at a wedding I did a couple days ago I used the word “goodest” during the ceremony. That was not good English. But the requirements of good natural English, proper natural English will often determine the shape of the translation. For instance, in a dynamic equivalence translation a long Greek sentence might be broken up into shorter English sentences or the words might be arranged somewhat so it’s easier to track and to follow and to understand. Here’s some helpful thoughts from Wayne Grudem on this distinction between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. He says, “An essentially literal translation,” that’s his term for a formal equivalent translation, “translates the meaning of every word in the original language, understood correctly in its context, into its nearest English equivalent, and attempts to express the result with ordinary English word order and style, as far as that is possible without distorting the meaning of the original.” Then he says, “Sometimes such a translation is called a ‘word-for-word’ translation, which is fine if we understand that at times one word in the original may be translated accurately by two or more words in English, and sometimes two or more words in the original can be represented by one word in English. The main point is that essentially literal translations attempt to represent the meaning of every word in the original in some way or other in the resulting translation.” By comparison, here’s Grudem again, “A dynamic equivalence translation,” that’s the other type, “translates the thoughts or ideas of the original text into similar thoughts or ideas in English and attempts to have the same impact on modern readers as the original had on its own audience. Another term for a dynamic equivalence translation is a ‘thought-for-thought’ translation.” That’s a helpful way to think about the distinction between a formal equivalence translation and a dynamic equivalence translation. One is more “word-for-word,” and one is more “thought-for-thought.”

To give us a better idea because I’m speaking abstractly here so far, to give us sort of a comparison to help us out, let’s take a look at the same text from two different camps. One being a formal equivalent translation, one being a dynamic equivalent translation. We’ll do it through the lens of Romans 3:21-26. We’ll look at the NAS first. This is a “word-for-word” formal equivalent translation then we’ll look at the Contemporary English Version for the same passage. Here’s the NAS passage “But now apart from the law the righteousness of God has been manifested, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe; for there is no distinction; for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus; whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed; for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” Should be familiar.

Now we have the CEV, Contemporary English version, same passage. It says, “Now we see how God makes us acceptable to him. The Law and the Prophets tell how we become acceptable, and it isn’t by obeying the Law of Moses. God treats everyone alike. He accepts people only because they have faith in Jesus Christ. All of us have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory. But God treats us much better than we deserve, and because of Christ Jesus, he freely accepts us and sets us free from our sins. God sent Christ to be our sacrifice. Christ offered his life’s blood, so that by faith in him we should come to God. And God did this to show that in the past he was right to be patient and forgive sinners. This also shows that God is right when he accepts people who have faith in Jesus.” You can see, better stated, you can hear the differences between these two as they are read. The NASB has longer sentences. A more complex vocabulary. It doesn’t have the poetic flow that other translations might have. That’s to be expected when we translate a dead language like Koine Greek and try to bridge it into our context, in English. The CEV, by contrast, has more sentence breaks. It has a simpler vocabulary. It delivers shorter and punchier sentences, and it makes significant changes to word order, to make the translation fit better with conventions of English grammar and how we would structure sentences.

Here’s another example. I Kings 2:10, this is NAS, the NAS translation. It reads “Then David slept with his fathers and was buried in the city of David.” Now we are going to look at another dynamic equivalent translation, the New Living Translation. It says, “Then David died and was buried in the city of David.” Now, the translators of the New Living Translation are open about why they have given this meaning here, why they have translated it this way. They say in their editorial notes, “Only the New Living Translation clearly translates the real meaning of the Hebrew idiom ‘slept with his fathers’ into contemporary English.” Essentially the argument being made here is that in our day, English speakers like you and me would not say that somebody who died has “slept with his fathers.” Now we would say if somebody has died what? They died. That’s the way we speak. Which is exactly what the translators of the New Living Translation have done. They have not translated the Hebrew word-for- word, rather they’ve done it thought-for-thought. The result is that the passage’s main idea, that David died, is carried to modern-day readers.

Now at first thought that’s great, right? That’s a good aim and it’s a noble aim. We want to be able to understand the Bible and we want to be able to know what it says and get connected to the big idea that’s being presented, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. That doesn’t really end the argument because what the New Living Translation editors have done by taking “slept with his fathers” and changing it to “died” is they’ve stripped away some of the context and the meaning to what this passage is communicating in the original Hebrew. By stripping away even the statement “slept with his fathers,” by taking out the words “with his fathers” they’re removing that link between David and his ancestors who actually played a very important role in the history of Israel, and it would be profitable for us to read that and to become familiar with that. Or what about the word “slept” or “sleep” that statement about somebody sleeps when they die? Well, when you just change it to die, you’re taking away some of the meaning of that term “slept” which is that death is only temporary. Right? We are eternal spiritual beings no matter what side of, for us today, the cross, we’re on. All who sleep will one day rise in the resurrection. But you lose all of that if you replace “David slept with his fathers” to the very summary statement “David died.”

So, which way should we go? What should our preferred mode of translation be? Should we lean more in the direction of accuracy and fidelity to the original text like formal equivalence would have us do? Or should we lean more in the direction of ease of reference and readability in English for the student of the Bible, dynamic equivalence? I think you know what my answer is. But let’s go back anyway and refresh ourselves a bit on what we’ve already learned about Bibliology. We have to remember going back to that passage we come to many times in this study, “all Scripture,” II Timothy 3:16, “is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.” Now, an important threshold question for us here. Does “all Scripture” mean the individual words of Scripture themselves, every single word? Or only the “thoughts” and “ideas” that are being expressed in Scripture what’s in view here? The answer is Scripture itself puts the emphasis on actual, individual words. Proverbs 30:5 says that “Every word of God is tested.” Meaning, every single one of God’s words is reliable and trustworthy. Each conforms to reality. Each communicates exactly what an omniscient and all wise God designed to communicate. Or Psalm 12:6 says, “The words of the LORD are pure words; as silver tried in a furnace on the earth, refined seven times.” That again, refers to the actual spoken or written words of the Lord not just to thoughts and ideas. Note that the words of the Lord here are said to be “pure.” So pure that they are compared with silver refined seven times. The individual words of God, in other words, are immeasurably pure. Or Matthew 4:4, in response to Satan’s attempts to tempt Him, Jesus said that “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God,” quoting Deuteronomy there. Note, it’s not every “idea,” not every “thought.” It’s “every word.”

If we’re convinced that all the words of Scripture in the biblical manuscripts in the original autographs are from God, then it is important to focus on accurately translating the meaning of each and every one of those words in its context. Meaning, translators of the Bible should not only ask, have I rendered the main idea or thought of this sentence correctly, the idea, the thought? They should also ask, have I represented correctly the meaning that each word contributes to that sentence?

So the most reliable translations, in other words, are those that attempt to get back to the source through word-by-word translations, not mere thought-by-thought translations. The most faithful translations embrace the fact that God didn’t choose to deliver His word to His people, to us, in English but instead He did so in Hebrew and in Greek with a smattering of Aramaic. So those translations rightfully leave it to us, the reader, the translator, the interpreter to roll up our sleeves and to figure out what was being said in the original context. And then, only then, do we, after we’ve done all that work do we try to “bridge” it to our current modern English-speaking context. Here’s Anthony Nichols, with some helpful thoughts on this topic. He says, “a good translation of the New Testament will take the modern reader back into the alien milieu of first century Judaism where the Christian movement began. It will show him how the gospel of Jesus appeared to a Jew, and not how that Jew would have thought had he been an Australian or an American.” That’s very well said. Here’s another one, “One cannot escape the fact that the Bible contains many concepts and expressions which are difficult for the modern reader. There is no evidence that they were much less so for the original readers. They, too, had to cope with technical terminology, with thousands of Old Testament allusions and with Hebrew loan words, idioms and translation that must have been very strange to many of them.” In other words, using a formal equivalence translation, like the NASB, might require some deeper digging and some tougher sledding, but that’s OK. It wasn’t “easy” for the original readers of Scripture either. Here’s more on that topic from Wayne Grudem. He says, “Lest we think that understanding the Bible was somehow easier for first-century Christians than for us, it is important to realize that in many instances the New Testament epistles were written to churches that had large proportions of Gentile Christians. They were relatively new Christians who had no previous background in any kind of Christian society, and who had little or no prior understanding of the history and culture of Israel. The events of Abraham’s life were as far in the past for them as the events of the New Testament are for us!”

Looking at it from another angle, Leland Ryken writes this. “The most salient impression that I receive from reading the prefaces of modern,” he means dynamic equivalence there, “translations is how patronizing they are toward their readers. The premise is that modern readers are inept people with low abilities in reading and comprehension.” Ryken, by the way, then goes on to list out various fallacies about modern Bible readers which proponents of dynamic equivalence translations will commonly engage in. I won’t list them all, but I will mention a couple. Here’s fallacy number one, that contemporary Bible readers have low intellectual and linguistic abilities. That’s the fallacy that Ryken points out to which he replies, “There was a time when the English Bible itself raised the linguistic and cultural level of English-speaking societies. In the sixteenth century, Bible translation actually helped increase English vocabulary. There is no reason why English Bibles should not serve the same purpose in our own day.”

Here is another fallacy he notes, proposed by the dynamic equivalence translators. That number two is Bible readers cannot handle theological or technical terminology. As I stand here delivering Summer in Systematics, I fundamentally disagree with that statement and so does Ryken. He says, “We do not need to assume a theologically inept readership for the Bible. Furthermore, if modern readers are less adept at theology than they can and should be, it is the task of the church to educate them, not to give them Bible translations that will permanently deprive them of the theological content that is really present in the Bible.” Amen, and amen.

Well, that ends our little detour on the topic of those two major theories of translation. I thought we ought to cover that material sort of midway in the presentation, not just to break up the long list of dates but also because those two theories of translation, formal equivalence, dynamic equivalence, really factor into the thinking of the various modern-day translations that have become available, especially over the past hundred to hundred-fifty years.

That brings us to our third point. The recent history of Bible translation. The recent history of Bible translation. As A.C. Partridge has noted “There were two dynamic periods of English biblical translation” and he’s right. The first period was between 1520, Tyndale era and 1611, the King James Bible. That’s what we covered under our first heading when we looked at Tyndale and the King James Version and everything in between. Now what we’re going to do is head into the second chapter of the history of English Bible translations which really picked up steam in the Civil War era and beyond. One of them was called this, the Literal Translation of the Bible. It was put together by Robert Young, in 1862 under that title, “Literal Translation of the Bible.” That title is appropriate because Young’s translation is literal to the extreme. He even retains the original Hebrew and Greek word order which in many cases makes the English completely unintelligible. For instance, here is his rendering of II Corinthians 1:9-11. It says, “But we have had the rescript of death in ourselves in order that we may be having no confidence in ourselves, but in God, Who rouses the dead, Who rescues us from a prodigious death, and will be rescuing, on Whom we rely, that He will still be rescuing, on Whom we rely, that He will still be rescuing also; you also assisting together by a petition for us, that from many faces He may be thanked for us by many, for our gracious gift.” “And all God’s people said?” What?

Then we get to the Revised Version of 1885. The story behind the revised version of 1885 really starts back in 1870. The Church of England issued a report, in 1870 to assess “the desirableness,” this is their words, “of a revision of the Authorized Version,” the King James, “of the New Testament.” That led to a proposal being made to provide an authorized update and amendment to the King James Version and that proposal passed, and the work started in 1870. Now the work on the Revised Version was done by a team of scholars in England and in Scotland. American scholars, interestingly were invited to join, but they declined because they wanted to do their own thing and their own translation, we’ll get that in a little bit. Very America of us. The complete edition of the Revised Version containing both the Old and the New Testaments was published in May 1885 and the Revised Version of the New Testament, so the New Testament portion of this new edition represented several positive steps. One of the reasons is that the Greek text that these translators used was so much better than the text that the King James translators used back in the 1611 era. See, in the time leading up to this translation there had been two major discoveries of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus which are better, closer in time to the original Greek manuscripts. These were older manuscripts. They were better manuscripts than the Textus Receptus that the KJV translators used. A weakness of the Revised Version is that these translators were really committed to living and dying by this principle known as “concordance.” That means they were committing to using one English word and only one English word to correspond to any Greek or Hebrew word. We’re in the New Testament now so the Greek. So, by way of example, you’ve heard me say in the morning service as we study of the Colossians that there’s this Greek term “pleroma” which means, here I go it can be either “complete” or it can be “fullness” or there’s other English words you can use for that Greek word “pleroma.” The Revised Version editors would have none of that of what I just said. They would say if there’s a Greek word you can only use one English word for that Greek word. It was a very stiff reading because they would use the same English word when proper translation and even grammar for us would allow for more flexibility of other English words to be inserted there. Spurgeon of this version, because of that concordance principle said that the Revised Version is “strong in Greek, but weak in English.” In the Old Testament section of this version, the Revised Version, the Hebrew was much improved; and that’s not because they had new Hebrew manuscripts to work with. That’s just because in the hundreds of years since the KJV knowledge of Hebrew, biblical Hebrew and how it works, and the various grammatical principles had just increased and improved so the translation got better.

This was overall an appreciated update and version, but it never really threatened to replace the King James Version, but it was a vital steppingstone toward new translations coming out. One of those was the American Standard Version of 1901. I mentioned the Americans were left out or actually they declined to join the revised version editors’ team. That’s because they wanted to do their own thing and they did that in 1901 with the American Standard Version. They incorporated some six hundred or so changes that were preferred by American scholars. Some significant ones to mention are that they changed “Holy Ghost” to “Holy Spirit.” This is not preferable; they changed the capitalized “LORD” to “Jehovah.” Better would have been Yahweh because that’s His name, but that was a change that they made. Like the Revised Version though the American Standard Version of 1901 was based on better textual and manuscript evidence than the KJV of 1611. But the issue was that the actual translated English that this version used as was true of the Revised version, was still quite dated and old. It was still sort of stilted and out of date even when it came out.

By this time in the early 1900s when the ASV comes out, there was this recognized for a solid translation with these good manuscript, solid manuscripts to back them up but also in a more modern language that’s suitable to modern English speakers. In the first fifty years of the 1900s, so like from the ASV time until about 1950 you have a bunch of individual translations coming out where so and so in his basement and so and so in the church library come up with a new translation of the Bible. I won’t mention them here, there’s too many of them to bring up. But I will bring us to the Revised Standard Version, which was a committee driven, credible translation of the Bible and we’ll pick it up here as we keep on with the timeline. Now none of those translations I’ve mentioned earlier like the Revised Version, the ASV, really threatened the popularity or the predominance of the KJV. This version, the RSV marked a real turning point because this was a version that was translated and published not only with the help of intelligent scholars but was backed by denominations and multiple denominations and this is still them time when several denominations were still somewhat tied to biblical orthodoxy. For Protestants, this was considered, the RSV was, to be the first Bible translation that would provide a real alternative to the KJV. Work started in 1938 actually and it wasn’t finished until 1952. A World War had something to do with the delay. But this translation made some positive strides. It modernized the English, without in any way sacrificing the meaning of behind the original Greek and Hebrew texts. For instance, “saith,” “this saith the Lord,” became “says.” Or “it came to pass,” which is a very KJV statement was removed. Or “thee” and “thou,” those were all changed in this version. Also, this was a positive, “Jehovah” was taken out and “the LORD” all capitals were put back in. Those were good changes. But there were concerning changes as well. Like in Isaiah 7:14, the “virgin” was not called the “virgin.” She was called the “young girl.” In Colossians 1:14 the words “through his blood,” meaning Christ’s shed blood, were taken out. The publishers of this version also published a Catholic version which left some people heated. In fact, to some this translation because of these other issues like Isaiah 7:14 and the Catholic version, that this was really a tool of the devil. In fact, there’s a story I read of a pastor who ceremonially burned a copy of the RSV and sent the charred remains back to the editors, to the translators. I guess you can’t please everybody.

Next is the Amplified Bible of 1955. The Lockman Foundation put this one out and it is “amplified” in the sense that it included additional, bracketed words together with various signs and punctuation marks within the text to bring out the full nuanced meaning of the original text, in the original language. I’ll give you an example. Here’s John 3:16 in the Amplified Bible. “For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the world that He [even] gave up His only-begotten (unique) Son, so that whoever believes in (trusts, clings to, relies on) Him shall not perish—come to destruction, be lost—but have eternal (everlasting) life.” A bit clunky. A little bit hard to read. A bit hard to preach. One writer said, “Reading the Amplified Bible is like swallowing a thesaurus.”

Here's the New English Bible, 1970. The Revised Standard Version in 1952 was translated by a team of North American scholars and while those North American scholars were putting the RSV together there was a group of British scholars who were putting this version together, the New English Bible. Interestingly this translation team was made up of a Hebrew panel or an Old Testament panel, a New Testament panel, and a literary panel. On that literary panel was the English author C.S. Lewis. The goal of this translation team was not to replace the King James Version but instead to give a Bible translation that was updated, that people could use alongside their King James. It became pretty popular, especially in England in various schools and churches.

Next, we have the New American Standard Bible, nobody rooted for that one, huh? Okay. Even as in English there were some modernized translations being given, like we just saw there was still a continuing demand for an evangelical translation in English that was modern in its language but still rooted in formal equivalence theory like we just looked at. To that end, in 1959 the Lockman Foundation began work on its own revision of the old American Standard Version from 1901. Sixty translators worked on this project. It was completed in 1971 and the New American Standard Bible was born. The NASB was a literal translation. It was considered and is considered to be more form-driven than the Revised Standard Version and other translations of this time. The NAS had several distinct features. It had those italicized English words when and English word was inserted that wasn’t in the Hebrew or Greek manuscript. Every verse began on a new line. There was a careful distinction drawn in the NAS between different tenses in the Greek New Testament. “Jehovah” was replaced with “The LORD.” It inserted capitalized pronouns for God, and Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. It printed entire Old Testament quotations in the New Testament in that small caps font that we all know and love now. And it had a very highly useful cross-referencing system that was relatively new. In fact, by 1977, the NAS was the best-selling modern Bible in America. But that success was short-lived because it was eclipsed in 1978, just one year later, by the NIV. Actually, before I get there, the NAS though has retained a real solid level of popularity among conservative evangelicals because of its literal rendering of the original languages. An update of the NAS appeared in 1977. Another update appeared in 1995. That’s the translation that we use here; then another update was made in 2020. And sadly, that update, the 2020 had some problems including the insistence of the editors in 2020 to the NAS to include gender-neutral language when clear masculine and feminine terms were being used in the original.

Jumping ahead on our timeline for just a second, it was those concerns with the 2020 edition of the NAS that led John MacArthur and the various faculty of The Master’s Seminary in conjunction with a company called Three Sixteen Publishing to release a new Bible translation that was much more in keeping with the text of the NAS 1995. That translation released in November 2021 in full is called the Legacy Standard Bible. I’m sure that we’ll be hearing more about it and interacting with that translation in the years ahead.

Back to our timeline though. After the original version of the NAS was published in 1971 next came the NIV, the New International Version in 1978. This is the Bible version is the Bible version I mentioned earlier that eventually supplanted the King James Version as being the worlds’ most popular Bible translation. According to this translation’s editors it sits somewhere between formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. That’s what they say. It says, “As for the NIV, its method is an eclectic one,” that’s a catchy term, “with the emphasis for the most part on a flexible use of concordance and equivalence, but with a minimum of literalism, paraphrase, or outright dynamic equivalence. In other words, the NIV stands on middle ground—by no means the easiest position to occupy. It may fairly be said that the translators were convinced that, through long patience in seeking the right words, it is possible to attain a high degree of faithfulness in putting into clear and idiomatic English what the Hebrew and Greek texts say.” So, in the words of its translators, the NIV is a “middle ground” Bible. It seeks to strike a balance between readability and accuracy and as the editors themselves note, that is no easy “position to occupy,” to seek to do both.

Next is the New King James Version. First published in 1982, this is the most popular edition or attempt to modernize the King James Version. In the NKJV all the “thee/thou” language has been updated. Various archaic words and expressions have been replaced; those were good things. But the greatest weakness of this translation is that it rests on the same underlying Greek text, the Textus Receptus on which the original 1611 KJV rested. Steven Sheeley and Robert Nash point this out. They say “The KJV translators had little choice,” back in 1611, “but to use the majority or ‘received’ text” and that’s because the better of the Greek manuscripts hadn’t been discovered yet. “Given their academic excellence and deep reverence for the Bible one would suppose that they would use the best text available, no matter what difficulties it posed. Any ‘reverence’ for the text in the NKJV, however, seems to be for the English text of the KJV, rather than for the ancient texts of the Bible.” In other words, they are saying when the well is poisoned, they are so committed to the KJV that they are going with whatever the KJV says rather than the original early manuscript evidence.

That brings us next to the New Revised Standard Version of 1990. This was birthed, this translation was out of more recent discoveries from Dead Sea Scroll fragments and discovery of early Greek papyrus fragments. The main idea behind this translation was to improve paragraph structure and punctuation to eliminate archaic old language, to improve accuracy, and clarity, and English style, especially when it’s read aloud. That’s all good and that sounds good. But another stated reason for this translation was to eliminate any masculine oriented language. These editors were clear. They were trying to eliminate the masculine except when used in reference to God. This translation team decided it's okay to use “He” when its but anybody else, we’ve got to use “he” or “she” or “they” type language. For instance, in Proverbs in this translation, “My Son” is changed to “My child” or “mankind” becomes “humankind.” That was in 1990. File that away because we are going to see this happening more all the way up to the 2020 edition of the NAS which I just mentioned.

Next, we have the Contemporary English Version of 1995. This is an openly meaning-driven translation, dynamic equivalent translation. It really borders on a paraphrase which is where like things like The Message are. Just kind of the author’s unique version. The CEV uses every day, conversational English. The sentences are short, the vocabulary is simplified. We saw that when quoted from it from Romans 3. In this translation God’s “grace” becomes His “kindness.” Parables” aren’t parables, they are “stories.” “Hosanna” is not rendered “hosanna,” it’s rendered “hooray” which is kind of sloppy.

Next is the New Living Translation, 1996. This claims to be the first adult-level meaning-driven dynamic equivalence translation made by evangelical scholars. It’s less formal than the NIV so it’s more on the dynamic side than the NIV but it strives to be a bump up from the CEV, the hooray translation. It seeks to import the meaning of thoughts, not necessarily words from the original text.


Now, in this time frame, mid to now later nineties, there were ongoing efforts to include more gender-neutral and gender-inclusive language in Bible translations. Lots of pressure was actually being put on the NIV translators, that being the most popular Bible of the time, to lead the charge toward gender inclusivity in terms of the language that was used. That then led to a counterweight of conservative opponents to that whole gender-inclusivity movement which led to this translation in 2001, the ESV. The work on this project was spearheaded by J.I. Packer who worked with a fourteen-member oversight committee and their work was undergirded by a team of over 100 respected scholars and the ESV is really a revision of the Revised Standard Version. Its translators and its editors place it within the “formal equivalence” camp, closer to the NASB with the intent of making the English translation both accurate to the biblical Hebrew and Greek text, but also readable for an English audience today. Here’s how they say it. These are the words of the ESV translators themselves. They say “The ESV is an ‘essentially literal’ translation that seeks as far as possible to capture the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer. As such, its emphasis is on "word-for-word" correspondence, at the same time taking into account differences of grammar, syntax, and idiom between current literary English and the original languages. Thus, it seeks to be transparent to the original text, letting the reader see as directly as possible the structure and meaning of the original.” The ESV is very readable. So, mission accomplished there. I think it is rightly categorized as a formal equivalent translation. It’s just not as formally equivalent as the NASB or the LSB now.

That brings us up to speed for tonight’s lesson on Bible translation. More could be said. I could have mentioned the Holman Christian Standard Bible of 2004 or the Douay-Rheims Catholic translation or the New World Translation of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or more to say about the King James-only movement, which again I hope to get to next week. But those will have to be South Lobby conversations because I’m out of time.

Let’s pray. Lord, thank you so much for again the way that You have preserved Your word through the centuries. Thank you for the faithful individuals who have gone before us who have literally given their lives for the sake of carrying forward Your precious and Your timeless word. Thank you that we can reap the benefit of the work that those translators and scholars and faithful men from the past began and started and as they passed the torch from generation to generation. May we be as committed, as resolved to stand for the Word, to stand for the truth of the Word, to work hard and to labor to getting at its meaning in the original context and the original content so that we can rightly understand Your word and in doing so rightly understand Your will for us. Thank you for this day. Thank you for the time spent in Your word. Thank you for the time spent in fellowship with Your people. May You be greatly honored and glorified as we go about serving You this week. In Jesus’ name, amen.