Christian Publishing House Blog
Apologetic Defense of the faith, the Bible, and Christianity
An important necessity of good communication is that it be understood without difficulty. If the words that we use are not immediately understood by the one we are communicating with, it will be like they were attempting to carry on a conversation with a foreigner, in the foreigner’s language. All of this is vitally important if we intend to have effective communication.
One of the challenges you have in being a lone translator is remembering your lexical (word) choices. Any give Hebrew or Greek word has 2-10 different terms in the lexicon and many times 2-4 are very close synonyms with a little difference in the sense.
Each committee disagreed with other committees. Within each committee, each translator likely disagrees with other translators. This is evident from the differences in the translations. Where does this leave the Bible reader?
What is the fight for the truth worth if the person misrepresents (alters by adding to or removing from) God's Word (Revelation 22:18-19) when the textual reading or the translation does not favor the theological position of a textual scholar or the Bible translator/publisher or an interpreter or a Christian reader. Do we prefer outright lies in the translations? Would Jesus want that?
Even though there has been a serious decline in Christianity over the past 70 years, the Bible is still the bestselling book throughout the world. In fact, it seems that since 1960 there have been dozens of new translations over the years.
Ecclesiastes 11:1-2 Updated American Standard Version (UASV) 11 Send[1] out your bread on the waters, for in many days you will find it. 2 Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you do not know what disaster may happen on earth. (Heb. shalach) does not mean to throw out or scatter but to “send,” to... Continue Reading →
Dynamic equivalent (interpretive) translations are very much guilty of over translating the words of the original text, which might be better expressed as going beyond the words of the authors. The literal and essentially and optimally literal translations may err in that at times they may make poor choices in their translation by either over-... Continue Reading →
In translation philosophy, the goal of DE/FE is to produce a translation that is the “functional equivalent” of the OL text. As I said earlier, I take strong exception to the use of the term “equivalent,” regardless of whether it is used to describe interpretive translation or literal translation. But for the purpose of this... Continue Reading →
Major Critical Texts of the New Testament Byz RP: 2005 Byzantine Greek New Testament, Robinson & Pierpont TR1550: 1550 Stephanus New Testament Maj: The Majority Text (thousands of minuscules which display a similar text) Gries: 1774-1775 Johann Jakob Griesbach Greek New Testament Treg: 1857-1879 Samuel Prideaux Tregelles Greek New Testament Tisch: 1872 Tischendorf’s Greek New Testament WH: 1881 Westcott-Hort Greek New... Continue Reading →
A Worthy Translation is Faithful What exactly do we mean by faithful, and faithful to what or whom? By faithful, we mean unwavering to the original, to the author himself. However, there are times when translation committees choose to be unfaithful to the original text. Obviously, theological bias should not affect its rendering. Romans 9:5 Revised... Continue Reading →