Back from London and Amsterdam
London Reflection
Of particular interest are The Eurostar Biathlon, about my adventures trying to get back to London from Amsterdam in time to teach; Limmud Netherlands, which includes a short description of what it was like teaching about Bible translation to a group of non-native English speakers in Amsterdam; and London, which has some photos of Hampton Court Palace (where the KJV was commissioned), among others. More photos are on my Flickr page.
Now that I’m back in New York, I’ll be able once again to devote attention to this site. So look for regularly scheduled programming to resume soon.
Dutch Scenery Zipping By
The King James Version (KJV): The Fool’s-Gold Standard of Bible Translation
In 2008, as I was writing And God Said, I described the King James Version (KJV) as the “fool’s-gold standard” of English Bible translation. That was approximately 397 years after the watershed publication of the KJV, hardly a date worth noticing.
KJV Cover
But today the KJV turns 400, and with that anniversary has come renewed world-wide attention to what certainly ranks as one of the most important and influential translations of the Bible ever. But some of the celebration is misplaced.
It’s not that I don’t like the KJV. I do. It’s often poetic in ways that modern translations are not. And I recognize all it has done both for English speakers who are serious about their faith and more widely. Dr. Alister McGrath is correct when he writes in his In The Beginning that the “King James Bible was a landmark in the history of the English language, and an inspiration to poets, dramatists, artists, and politicians.”
Equally, I appreciate the dedication and hard work that went into the KJV, as Dr. Leland Ryken passionately conveys in his Understanding English Bible Translation: “[f]or people who have multiple English Bibles on their shelves, it is important to be reminded that the vernacular Bible [the KJV] was begotten in blood.”
Yet for all its merits, the King James Version is monumentally inaccurate, masking the Bible’s original text. There are two reasons for the errors.
The first is that English has changed in 400 years, so even where the KJV used to be accurate, frequently now it no longer is. (My video-quiz about the English in the KJV — Do You Speak KJV? — illustrates this point.)
The second reason is that the KJV was written several hundred years before the advent of modern translation theory, linguistics, and, in general, science. Just as advances like carbon dating and satellite imagery help us know more about antiquity now than people did 400 years ago (even though they were a little closer to the original events), we also know more about ancient Hebrew and Greek now than they did 400 years ago. In fact, we know much more, both about the ancient languages and about how to convey them in translation.
Bunting Clover-Leaf Map
Like Heinrich Bunting’s famous 16th-century “clover-leaf map” of the world that adorns my office wall (the map puts the holy city of Jerusalem right in the middle, surrounded by three leaves: Europe, Asia, and Africa), the KJV translation is of enormous value historically, politically, sentimentally, and perhaps in other ways. But also like Bunting’s map, the KJV is, in the end, not very accurate.
And those who would navigate the Bible solely with this 400-year-old translation journey in perils.
The JBC Tour
I’m in Houston, my first stop on a four-city, two-week book tour about And God Said. (Read more.) Sponsored by the JBC, the tour brings me to Houston, San Diego, Milwaukee, and Boulder this month, in addition to Queens (last month) and Wilmette, IL (in March).
Those who are so inclined can follow along from the book’s blog.
And God Said Goes On Sale Today
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I want to keep “God Didn’t Say That” as commercial-free as possible, so I’ve set up a separate blog for the book here, though the book is about Bible translation, so I’m sure there will be considerable overlap. More information about the book is available here, and you can even find the book on Facebook. (“Won’t you be my friend?” pleads the book.) It took me four months and fifteen years to write. I hope you enjoy it. |
“Hoffman’s work is the best gift for a careful reader of [the Bible].” -Dr. Walter Brueggemann “Retrieves what the Bible really was.” -The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski |
I’m thrilled to announce that my latest book, 
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