One of the commonly suggested solutions for overcoming bad Bible translations is to “learn Hebrew and Greek” and “read the Bible in the original.” While there are many good reasons to learn biblical Hebrew and Greek, I don’t think that better insight into the original meaning of the Bible is one of them. This came…
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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. But today the KJV turns 400, and with that anniversary has come renewed world-wide…
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The debate between “formal equivalence” and “functional equivalence” has come up again at BBB, this time in the comment thread to a post about David Ker’s The Bible Wasn’t Written To You. (It’s a free e-book. Take a look.) Dannii started the debate with a reference to his post “In which I ask if there’s…
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Zondervan has a chart (reproduced immediately below at right) suggesting that effectively conveying both the form and meaning of the original Biblical documents is the best way to reflect the original reading experience. I disagree, and I think that Zondervan’s approach represents a common and fundamental misunderstanding about how form works. Form and Meaning For…
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Still following up on my question about accuracy and choosing Bible translations, and by way of answering my question about whether it’s okay if people choose what the Bible is, it occurs to me that music might be a useful comparison. Many, many parts of the Bible have been set to music, and the options…
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I recently asked how people choose a Bible translation. (And I have more here.) One interesting (though entirely predictable) result was that some people prefer more than one translation: the NLT for “readability,” for example, but the NET for “accuracy,” or the NASB for use in formal settings. Even people who only have one preferred…
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I saw the following on the NLT website (my emphasis): I found out that I had a lot to learn from the God of my New Living Translation Study Bible […] Why didn’t I discover this about him earlier? I had allowed my pride and prejudice to cloud my judgment. The kind of pride that…
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The question of the value of consulting multiple translations comes up from time to time (recently here, for example). But beyond flagging passages where a reader might want to investigate a bit more, I’m not entirely sure what the value is. As the chart to the right depicts (click on it to enlarge it), multiple…
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Recent posts from my Ancient Wisdom, Modern Lives:
