2 - School of Biblical Hermeneutics, English Bibles

Well, welcome back to the

Striving for Eternity Academy's School of Biblical Harmoneutics. This is lesson number two that's usually what comes after lesson number one.

See, I'm pretty smart, huh? One, two, next comes four. Maybe not.

So, well, welcome back. We are in lesson number two of our lessons on learning how to best use the tools and then the principles of interpretation so that we can rightly study the

Word of God. It's a very important thing to be doing is to make sure that we're right and accurate when it comes to the study of the

Word of God. First off, I would like to welcome some new students that are out. We know that we had a couple of new people enroll and we want to encourage you and thank you for being part of these classes.

Anyone else that may want to enroll, go here, down more, there, somewhere around here.

Find the website and go there and you can go into the Striving for Eternity Academy and enroll up there and get all the information.

But we are in these lessons here because when we come to rightly dividing the

Word of God, rightly interpreting the Word of God, that is an extremely important thing to get right.

I was interviewed on a radio program just last night and they asked me, why is it important to be right about your interpretation of the

Word of God? Why are these classes important? Quite simply because if you're going to go out there and say, thus says the

Lord, you better be right. If we're going to say God said something, we better make sure that we're accurate because we don't want to be in a position of saying

God said something when it's not what God said. That's why these classes are important.

Many people will teach different ways of interpreting the Bible. One of the things that we're looking at, we're in our syllabus.

If you are a student of the academy, you have your syllabus over this way. Right there.

There. Okay. It's see, I see it in thin air. My hands are gone. All right. So if you have your syllabus over here, you can look and we are in section number two.

And what we're looking at there is the tools for Bible study. You say, well, wait a minute,

Pastor Andrew. Why are you not jumping into all the principles so that we can rightly interpret the Word of God?

What we want to first do is give you the tools for you to use. Now, when I give you these tools, the tools that we're providing are actually in an order that are the ones that if you're going to want to start to study

God's Word indepthly, these are actually the order in which you should purchase things or books.

Now, granted, a lot of this stuff you don't have to because a lot of these tools are now online for free.

So we live in a new generation where everyone goes online. That's cool. We're actually going to get, later on, some different websites that you can go to get things for free or software you can buy stuff.

But if you are looking to maybe build a library of tools to help you in the interpretation of the

Word of God, we're going to go through these tools in the order in which we think they're going to be most helpful to you in the order in which you want to start if you're going to get one tool at a time.

And so today we're going to start with a very important one and that is our Bible, specifically our

English Bible. Now, I don't know about you. Maybe you know some other language. I don't. I know

English. And so we're going to start with the Word of God. Now, what we're going to look at this week is going to be specifically our

English Bible. All right? And then next week we're going to look at study Bibles.

Then we're going to look into some other tools that you'll find helpful as we go through. Now, what we want to do is as we're digging in to this study, we want to act as if we're digging for buried treasure.

And we are going through and going to map our way through. If you're going to look for some treasure, you want to have some good tools, okay?

And these are the tools that we're looking to provide you with to help teach you how to use these tools so you can dig deep into God's Word and understand it better.

Now, have you ever played the game when you were a child if you were in a pool or in a lake and you have a ball and you drop it just kind of just under the surface and it bob up just a little?

You ever notice that if you took that ball and went deeper down and let go of it, it would shoot up higher? And if you were anything like me, you tried to see how high you can get it to shoot out of the water so you'd have one person go all the way to the bottom of the pool, let go, and the other person would stand up and watch it shoot up?

You know, that's actually a similar thing to the study of the Word of God. The deeper that we dig into the study of the

Word of God, the higher our worship is going to be to that God that we study about. It's a really good analogy because the reality is that if we just bob just under the surface of our study, we kind of worship

God but just a little. But when we drop down and dig deep, we fly up higher in our worship and that's what we want to do.

We want to have a heightened worship, a heightened awareness of the awe and the love for Jesus Christ.

So with that as our approach, we want to start by looking at the

Bible. Now, we're going to look at different translations of the Bible today and we're going to also do a little bit, and some of this is going to be a little bit deep, in the sense that it's going to be some things that maybe you won't pick up all the way at first.

And if you follow through when we get done with the class on Biblical Harmonetics, we have the school on Systematic Theology.

And when we get to the lessons where we study Bibliology, we study the Bible, we're going to get into what we study in today's lesson in more depth.

So if you keep tracking with us, you're going to come back to this and you're going to understand it better at that later time.

But we're going to talk about textural criticism. Can we really trust the Bible? Well, we're going to talk about that.

But we are going to start with translations, all right? Translations of the

Bible. I'm going to stick to English because it's kind of the one I know, all right? So we're going to look at different ways that translation occurs, all right?

Now, first I want to talk about three different types of translations that you can have, all right?

So if you look at here, we have three types of translations. One is called a literal, one is called a free, and one is called a paraphrase.

Now, literal is also sometimes called a formal equivalent, okay?

And a free or paraphrase is called a dynamic equivalent, just in case you hear those words.

But let's first define these and take a look. The literal translation is a translation that's a word -for -word translation.

This is one where what you have in a case of a word -for -word translation is you would take every word one at a time, translate it from the

Greek or the Hebrew or Aramaic into English, and you go to the next word and you do that in each word one at a time.

And you'd work your way through the entire sentence and paragraph and chapter and book. And as you would do that, you'd translate the word.

So if you're going from Greek to English, you're taking the Greek word, you're seeing one word, and you're translating it into the

English word. You go to the next word into English. And when you get done with that sentence, then you kind of step back, look at that sentence, say, you know, this doesn't flow right in the

English. So you may have to change word orders or add some things in to help with the grammar.

Now, grammar is not my favorite subject. Yes, I know.

And if you've ever read my papers before they get to the proofreader, you'd know that.

But grammar is actually important. And I know some people will be shocked to hear me say that. But it is.

So grammar is so important when we get to the translation issue, because sometimes words have to be added in to make things flow better or you have to change the order of words.

And sometimes when words are added in, they don't always help. Let me give you an example of that.

When we look at the case when Jesus is being arrested, he's in the garden and it says that Jesus asked, who are you looking for?

And they say, Jesus of Nazareth. And he says, I am he.

Now, if you have certain translations, certain of the literal translations, you're going to see that it is going to say he and it's going to be in italics.

The he in italics is there because of the fact that it's added in.

Now, in a literal translation, what they do is they try to help you to understand the words that have been added in for grammar's sake.

Okay. And the way that becomes helpful is because if you see that passage that we just referred to, and you say, well, wait a minute.

Jesus said, I am he. Well, actually, no. What he said is, I am.

And they fell backwards. And then he got back up. And so all of a sudden, we see again that he says, who are you looking for?

And he says, I am. You see, the he was added. Now, is there something special about the word

I am? Ego, I, me in Greek? Well, yes, because it's the same phrase used in Exodus when

Moses says, who should I say? What's your name, God? And he says, I am.

That's the name of God. Jesus wasn't saying, I am he. I'm the one that you're looking for.

He's saying, I am. He's claiming to be a deity. You see, adding the word he in that passage does help grammatically, but it hurts us theologically.

And so sometimes those things help us to look at that and say, oh, wait a minute. Ah, the he is in italics in my literal translation.

Therefore, I know that wasn't in the Greek. So cross that out.

Now I have a different reading of it. It says, I am. Oh, now

I understand. Now this is a theological issue. You see, sometimes those words that we have are helpful.

But one of the advantages of a literal translation is that they add the words in italics so that you can tell which words were added in for the grammar.

OK? So that's an advantage of a literal translation. It will help you to understand when you go through and study that so that you can see, oh, this is the meaning.

All right? Let's take a look at the next one. So that's a literal. The next is a free translation. That's a sentence by sentence.

So what that is, oh, let me back up, actually. That's right. Thank you. The literal translations. Your literal translations are going to be your

King James, your New King James, your American Standard, your English Standard Version, ESV, your

Holman Christian Standard Bible, your, let's see, the Net Bible, NET, New English Translation.

That one was kind of neat. We'll get to that maybe later on. Those are your literal translations.

So now the free translations. Your free translations are those that are a sentence by sentence translation.

OK? A sentence by sentence translation. And so with that, what you have the authors or the translators doing is that they are taking a full sentence.

Instead of going one word at a time, they're taking the sentence and they're translating the full sentence at one time.

These are going to be your, really, your New International Version is probably the most popular.

I'm very glad that Zondervan got rid of their, what was it, the Today's New International, is what it was called, and that was a really bad translation because it denied the, they tried to make

God a neuter, which actually changes some of the nature of things when we look at it theologically.

So I had a real issue with that. But the NIV is going to be a free.

So what they're going to do there is now, you're not going to have in a free translation that extra wording that's added in for the grammar and it's going to be in italics because now they're translating the whole sentence as a whole.

So now what you're getting is you're getting further away from the literal words that were in the Greek and the

Hebrew and you're getting into now studying out something that's a little bit more having someone's interpretation of the meaning.

OK? And when we want to study, we don't want to be influenced by other people's interpretations.

We want to study those out on our own. That's why if you really want to do diligent study, I'm going to encourage you throughout this lesson to make sure you stay to a literal translation.

Now Pastor Andrew, are you telling me that we can't read the NIV? No, I'm not saying that at all. The NIV may be fine for devotions and even for study.

But if you want to get as close to the original, if you don't know the original languages, then you want to stick to a literal translation.

Then we have one more and that is called our paraphrase. Our paraphrase is a paraphrase of the text.

This is more of a thought by thought translation. This is really someone giving you their interpretation of the passage.

OK? This is going to be the Message Bible or the

Amplified Bible or New Living Translation. These are translations that are paraphrases.

This means you're getting a person's interpretation, not what people are actually claiming or what the translation actually is.

But you're getting a heavy influence of someone's interpretation of it.

And so they're trying to translate the thought of the passage, not the sentence.

OK? So you're further removed from that original. These could sometimes be good to use to further study.

I like the Amplified. The Amplified, what they try to do is they give you all the possible Greek words that something could mean and to try to give it more emphasis so you understand it more.

And so those things are good. Now, what I want to do before we get into looking at the specifics of looking at the different types of Bible translations that we have today,

I want to give a little bit of what's called textual criticism. How do we study the text, criticize the text to know that the

Word of God can be trusted? I mean, that's a good thing to do, right? We want to know that the Word of God is actually credible.

OK. This is an issue that people argue all the time on the streets.

Men wrote the Bible. What are they trying to say? Well, if men wrote the Bible, it cannot be trusted. It can't be credible.

We want to address that issue. Now, there's people who write books.

Bart Ehrman, who's not a believer, he writes books. He claims to be a Christian, but he's not. He doesn't believe in the authority of the

Word of God. Therefore, he can't be a Christian. OK? He doesn't believe in Christ of the

Bible. So, he would argue in his book, Misquoting Jesus, that there's hundreds of thousands of errors and changes in the

Bible. Therefore, we cannot know what the original said. All right. First off, let's start with a couple things.

Bart Ehrman admits that most of those, 95 % about, are spelling mistakes and punctuation.

Well, hold it. The original didn't have punctuation. You see, there's a problem there.

The original writing had block letters, no punctuation, no spacing, no sentence structure.

It was just letter after letter. So, if most of the errors are punctuation, it means that most of the errors weren't in the original anyway.

It was added later for human consumption later on. So, right off the bat, we see that.

OK? Now, there can be errors in understanding something.

Let's do an example. Let's look real quick. What does this say underneath me here? Is that right?

OK. Does that say, God is now here?

Or does it say, God is nowhere? Do you see? There's just one space that makes the difference.

It's all a matter of where you put the one space that will show you that this could have two different meanings.

Right? I mean, there's a difference between God is now here and God is nowhere. But if you're looking at a text and it just says,

God is N -O -W -H -E -R -E, as all one word, there's no spacing, you can't tell which one it's properly saying.

God is now here or God is nowhere. So, you see, in just that little example, we see that when we look at the letters without having spacing, someone could make a mistake.

There could be letters that spell a different word. That doesn't mean there's an error.

It means that when someone was translating it or putting the spaces in, maybe they put it in the wrong spot.

That doesn't mean we can't know what the original is. If I want to write a letter, and I really want to make sure this letter gets out to people, and I don't have a computer and we're back in the days of writing of Scripture.

If I write a letter and I want to get this out, spread out really quick, what am I going to do?

I'm not going to play the telephone game, which is the way most people think that we got our Bible. They think one person told another person told another person, so I write a letter,

I hand it to another person, they make a copy, they hand it to another person, they make a copy, and then the copies get messed up.

And so we can't go back to the original. Well, that's not how we did the Bible. More what it would be is I write 10 copies of my letter.

I have my letter, I write it, I then make 10 copies of it, I give it to 10 friends, say, you guys make 10 copies.

They go and make 10 copies, okay? But I got one friend that, he's a little dyslexic like me, and so he sits there and he transposes some letters.

Now what's going to happen? He gives the copies to a bunch of people, and we quickly notice that then in the third generation, we have 90 % all have it spelled one way, but there's one set that's spelled differently.

And oh, they all go back to one source. So what do we know? We end up realizing that this is a family.

So now we have two families of texts, of manuscripts. One family that is 90 % agree, one that has one little mistake in it, and it got copied that way.

Well, that would become its own family. We define it as a family of manuscripts because of that, because we identify the source of where that's coming from.

This will become important later on as we talk through the different English Bibles. But the importance of this is that we see that we can tell where those mistakes are.

Now, when it comes to the Bible, we have over 70 ,000 manuscripts of the

Bible. Two things that you want to do when you study textual criticism to see if an ancient document is credible is you want to have lots of copies and you want to have early copies.

The later the copies are, there's more of a gap and you don't know what could have been in between.

When it comes to the Bible, we have over 70 ,000 copies of the manuscripts of the

Bible. The next closest thing we have of ancient writings is about 612.

That's the Iliad. That's a big difference. So, why has that become important? Well, that becomes important because by having so many copies, we know exactly where these changes occurred.

And here's the thing. Those changes occurred, most of them are mistakes in people's either spellings of names or places or numbers.

A king was 40 years old or 42 years old. It doesn't make a difference. Not a single one of these things that are called mistakes or errors is in anything that affects doctrine.

That becomes important. The other thing I said is you want to see how close you can come. The oldest manuscript we have is from 129

AD, 30 years after its writing. Okay, it's the writings of John.

And so we have that within 30 years of its writing. Next closest thing that we have in ancient writings is about 1500 years.

We all believe that Julius Caesar, we lived and we believe the accounts of Julius Caesar, even though the closest historical documents we have are 1500 years after Julius Caesar.

And no one questions Julius Caesar. They question the Bible. And that we have copies within a generation.

Okay, so I explain these things so you understand some of how the Bible was written. We're going to get into this in much more detail when we get into the school of systematic theology.

But we wanted to give you this little bit of a background before we get into the study of these specific

English translations. And while this is not going to be an exhaustive study of the families of translations, we are going to examine the benefits and the weaknesses of some of the major translations that we have in English.

All right, we're going to look at six translations used by many of the churches currently.

And we're going to focus on their history. We're going to look at their strengths. We're going to look at their weaknesses.

We want to start with the King James Bible. All right, we want to start with the

King James Bible. This is also known as the Authorized Bible.

I'm going to get into some describing this first and then we're going to look at some controversy that comes up with the

King James Bible so that we can make sure we can address this. So, the history of it is because, and actually the

King James was not your first English translation. There were actually translations like the Tyndale and all before King James, the

King James translation. But because of a variety of independent versions that had been out there, the

Puritans petitioned King James I in 1603 to have a standard

Bible to be used in the church. There was a lot of debate between the

Catholics and the Protestants or the Puritans. The Puritans wanted James to come up with a

Bible that would be used in all of the churches that would be a good translation that wouldn't be

Latin. And that would be an English translation that would be commissioned not by a

Catholic church that the Puritans had disagreements with. So, this is actually what it says in the prefix of the

King James, that a translation be made of the whole

Bible as consonant as can be with the original Hebrew and Greek and that this be set out and printed without any marginal notes and only to be used in all church services in England in the time of divine service.

Now, you see that without the marginal notes. They're trying to say they don't want any of these notes to get in there.

Now, I am going to say something, I'm going to come back to this in a moment, is that the work began in 1607 and the work was completed on this in 1611.

Fifty men made up of six panels of translators worked on it.

Three panels worked on the Old Testament. Two panels worked on the New Testament and one worked on the

Apocrypha. Yes, that's right. The 1611 version had the

Apocrypha in it. I actually happen to have with me here a 1611 edition of the

King James Bible. We're going to look at a snippet of this in a moment. Now, there are those who argue and claim that King James 1611 version was inspired by God, that God needed to give the people a copy of the

Bible in the known accepted international language which used to be Greek and then

Latin and now, although they never claimed Latin was inspired, but the

Catholic Church, I guess, used it. So, what we end up having is that here they say that we have an

English that must be inspired. We're going to get into some reasons. I think that's not true and if you disagree with me, please hold on and follow with us as we go through this, okay?

But in 1611, three versions were accomplished, okay?

The first was known as the He Bible and the latter two were called the She Bible and it was because of their respective rendering of Ruth 3 .15.

Now, we're going to look at Ruth 3 .15 in just a moment, all right?

This revision that we have of the King James was later called the

Authorized and this is what people use today. Nobody reads from the King James version anymore.

They read from the Authorized version. The revision was made in Cambridge in 1762 and later in Oxford in 1769 to modernize the language from the previous version.

It was called the Authorized version. So, right off the bat, you realize that if this was inspired by God, this whole idea that it was inspired by God didn't come about until within this past generation, within the 1900s.

So, you see that in the 1700s, 100 years after, they realized they needed to update the language.

They wouldn't do that if they thought it was actually inspired. So, let me deal with some of the features and then I want to get into this issue.

The King James version of the Bible is a very literal and reliable translation as far as an

English translation goes based on its family of texts that it was on. It's based on the

Byzantine family of manuscripts and the majority text. Now, the real drawback to it is its arcane and obsolete usage of words.

It makes it difficult to read for the modern reader. Now, the issue here is that it's based on a copy of a

Greek manuscript that was rushed when it was being done. There was a rush to print.

Remember, printing was very hard back then. De Gutenberg had just really come out with his printing press, making it a little bit easier to make copies.

But this was something that was being rushed to print and it was put into print very quickly.

They didn't look at all of the possible Greek manuscripts that they had. They have a rushed Greek manuscript, but it became the standard.

We now have many more manuscripts to look at to see that it may not have been the best manuscript copies to go from.

But people will say that the King James version was inspired. Well, let's take a look at the

King James 1611 and see if this is easy for you to read. This is from the copy that I just gave you and this is what we see here is in 1

Samuel. But I want you to notice in the top right there, you see his two wives.

Do you see the spelling of that? That's not spelt the way we would think it's spelt, is it?

You see that these words, if you read some of the text, look at the last word there at the bottom where it talks about David and it's

DAU. You see, these letters are different than we might expect them to be.

The words are not the same as we see them. This is just to show you that this is a different language, okay?

This is a copy of where it was in there. Now, if the 1611 was inspired, as some try to claim, here's some real simple reasons why

I would argue that it is absolutely impossible to believe that the 1611 version of the

English Bible was inspired by God. First, if the 1611 was inspired, then what we have to accept is that the

Apocrypha was also inspired by God because that was included in the 1611 version.

Therefore, all of the arguments that people make against Roman Catholicism saying that it has added to the

Bible, well, guess what? If the 1611 is inspired, then the Catholics are right, okay?

You cannot argue that Roman Catholicism is wrong for adding the Apocrypha and that the 1611 version or translation is inspired by God.

You can't have it both ways. I also would argue that God is not a God of confusion. You see, when we have this translation, they had a dilemma.

The Anglican Church practiced baptism by pouring water on people, specifically infants.

So, they would pour. Now, there is a Greek word, baptismo. We get an English word, baptize.

They created that English word. Why did they create a new English word? Very simply, there was an

English word, baptismo, which meant to plunge or to dip. But if they translated it that way, suddenly the

Anglican Church would realize they're doing it wrong. Now, instead of doing the right thing and saying, oops, our theology is wrong, time to change, what do they do?

They create a new English word to confuse people so that their theology wouldn't be pointed out as being wrong.

So, they create a new English word. They take the word baptismo, they transliterate it, they create a new word as if there is no word for dip or plunge, and they create the word baptism or baptize.

God's not a God of confusion. He wouldn't have done that. He wouldn't create a new English word that adds confusion when there's a perfectly good

English word. We have another case of that with deacon. Deacon, we have an English word for it, it's a waiter of tables or servant.

Why didn't they translate it that way? Because the deacons were leaders back then. They acted as leaders.

And therefore, if they translated it servants when they're supposed to be leaders, now what do you do? So, they come up with a brand new word.

They take deacon us and they make it deacon. We have a perfectly good

English word. Why didn't they do it? Well, they didn't do it for a very simple reason. It disagreed with their theology.

Okay, a rightly interpreted word of God disagreeing with your theology, it's not the word of God that needs to change.

It's your theology. That's the problem. And so, I don't believe the King James, it's possible for that to be inspired because if it was inspired, then

God is a God of confusion and the Apocrypha is inspired by God. That's just the reality.

So now, let's move on to some of the others. Let's look at the Revised Standard Version. Let's read what it says in the prefix of that.

It says here that the Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the

American Standard Version, which was published in 1901, which was a revision of the

King James Version published in 1611. There have been a couple of revisions.

You see that? The American Version isn't really used, so we're not going to look at that, but some of the more liberal churches use the

Revised Standard. This text often comes into question for its consistent bent toward liberal theology in the way that they choose to translate things.

Some examples can be seen in Colossians 114, Acts 8 .37,

Isaiah 7 .14. For example, in Isaiah 7 .14, they just translate, instead of a virgin giving birth, a maiden giving birth to remove the supernatural nature.

So, the RSV is basically a literal translation, though it's not often used by conservative evangelicals because of their concerns over the liberal tendencies.

So, we're going to move on from that one. Let's look at the New American Standard Bible. Let's look at what it says in the prefix of that.

That says, when it was felt that the word -for -word literalness was unacceptable to the modern reader, a change was made to the direction for a more current

English idiom. Okay, so the idea was that, as you're seeing later on, we're getting later.

We're now into 19, we go from 1901. This is now 1971. Updating, again, our

English changes. If you don't realize the English language changes, just ask yourself.

Think of some of our English words. Cool, in like 1920s, meant you were cold.

In the 1950s, it meant you were a great person to be around. Gay, in the 1950s, meant you were a very happy person.

In today's day, it means you're homosexual or practice homosexuality. Generation ago, bad meant something not good.

Nowadays, bad means good, literally. You say, that's bad.

That means it was really good. Confusing? Yes. This is why, because our language changes, so must our translations if they're going to be understood by the generation that's reading it.

So, the New American Standard version is one that's based on the

Alexandrian family of text. So, this is a family where we have more copies of it than we had in the

Byzantine. And so, this is going to be going to have, it's also, sorry,

I said that wrong. It has fewer copies, but they're older copies. And so, this is going to give us copies that are closer to the original.

Nowadays, we actually have discovered since 1971, when this was done, we found many more of the older copies.

And so, we actually now have more of them. All right. So, what we end up seeing is that we have, in this family of text, something that's closer to the original dating.

Let's move on to one that's sometimes criticized, and that's the NIV, or the

New International Version. This was developed by a series of three committees.

The translation by the translators of the books of the Bible that provided the basis, and then the translations were then reviewed by one of the immediate editorial committees for revision.

From that point, it went on to a general editing committee who would further make revisions, and the committee on the

Bible translation was the final revision, and the actual work was completed in 1978.

Okay. Now, while proclaiming to the work of all the families of the

Greek, and that's what the NIV tried to do, is open it up to all of the different families, the desire for modern

English translation resulted in the NIV being a free rather than a literal translation.

There's large amounts of verses. It eliminates large amount of verses from the actual texts, and if you have your syllabus, you can see we provide a whole bunch of different translations.

If you have something like a New King James, which is the next one we're going to get to, a nice thing about that, a nice feature is that they'll tell you the words that are added or not, or eliminated from these different families.

In the NIV, some people will argue that that's Satan's Bible because in a couple of passages when you compare the

NIV and the King James, there's a couple of passages where it seems to belittle or negate the deity of Jesus Christ.

James White did a great work on this by looking at areas where the

King James does the same thing when compared to some of the other translations. And so, the issue really is that the

NIV is not Satan's Bible, okay? It's just that you have to understand that the way they went about the translation is not as literal, okay?

It doesn't mean it's not going to be helpful. The translation may be helpful for Bible study, but it just has to be recognized that it's a free translation.

Let's look at the New King James. New King James says in its preface that they wanted to make a new translation, not make a new translation, but to make a better one.

They spoke of the Bishop's Bible and the New King James editors used the purpose to refer to their translation.

Basically, what they did was they went to draw from more sources that the

King James didn't draw from, such as the Spittuagint, which is the Greek translation of the

Old Testament, the Vulgate, which is the Latin, and some relevant portions of the

Dead Sea Scrolls, which were discovered at that time. We also see that they used more of the families.

This work was completed in 1982. Now, the really nice thing about the

New King James is that it gives you the different variant readings in the margin notes.

So, if you look in the margin notes, you'll see where it says the Nestlean Greek or the use that to see what things were in the originals in the different families.

It helps you to understand and it does that while updating some of the arcane language of King James.

So, the nice thing about that is you get to see what things were in the different families.

So, if you do understand the different families of manuscripts, you can then understand which ones had different words.

That's one of its strongest things. One of the newer translations that are out is the

English Standard Version. This is the one that I preach out of, mostly because when it comes to the different study tools, the software, things like that, concordances, we'll look at stuff later.

They're all tied in with the English Standard Version and it's the one that nowadays more people have in their laps at church that's a literal translation.

So, I typically preach out of the ESV, though it is not the one that I actually favor the most.

I'll get to that one next. But the English Standard Version grew out of the

Tyndale and King James legacy. In 1971, the RSV text was its starting point and the

English Standard Version had a 14 member Translation Oversight Committee benefiting from 50 different biblical experts.

Their translation mostly drew from the Masoretic text of the Hebrew. In some cases, they looked at the

Dead Sea Scrolls, the Spittuagin, Samaritan Pentateuch, and other sources.

But the real features of it is that it's essentially a literal translation that seeks to be transparent in the original text.

Like the New King James, it's updating that arcane language from the King James for a more accurate understanding of the

KJV and there's many study tools that help for it. So, it gives us a literal translation.

That's one of the real benefits of the ESV. Two other translations I want to mention, it's not in your syllabus, but the

NET, the New English Translation. The neat thing about that one is that that was a translation that was actually done kind of online.

It was done with people online, which was kind of the humor in it.

They called it the NET Bible, New English Translation, NET for short, and it was used, it was done with all the work on the internet.

Okay, the real nice thing about that one is they did a translation, it's available on the internet for free, and you look at that and when you look at it, what they did was the translators provided the translation notes so that you actually see what the debate was between word choices in the

English. Why did people argue for one word versus another word in the English? So, what they gave you was they give you a literal translation, but they provide for you the reasoning for the word choices that they chose.

Okay, that was their game plan. So, that's how that helps. Now, my favorite translation is called the

Holman or the Holman Christian Standard Bible. Why is that my favorite? That's my favorite because when

I do my own translation, when I'm preparing sermons and I'm taking it from the Greek or the

Hebrew and I'm translating and I look at, I start with the original languages and I do my own translation before I look at the

English. And when I then look at all of the translations, and this is what I do in my study and prep for a sermon, is

I start with, say, the Greek. If I'm doing the New Testament, I'll start with the Greek. I will do my own translation. I then write out what my translation would be.

Then from there, I take all of the Bibles that I have available, and I have about 27 different English Bibles available, and I read through all of them to see how they translated those words.

It's the first thing that I do in prep. What I find is that the Holman Christian Standard Bible is most consistent with the way that I translate.

Now, I'm not saying that because it happens to agree with my translation, it's the best.

I'm saying I like it the best because it is most consistent with the way that I end up thinking and speaking in the

English language. So, I really do like that one. Some of the benefits of the

Holman in when I say that it's a good translation, they translate words like, for example, the word slave.

We sometimes see in English, because the word slave has a bad connotation in our culture, the word slave is translated servant to kind of soften its meaning.

So, we're a servant of God. Well, the actual word is a bond slave, okay?

And that's the word, doulos. That's what we are. And Holman translates it that way, a slave.

And it's one that's more consistent that way. It will take some of the words that people, that we're discussing, and it will translate them more accurately.

So, I prefer that translation the most. And so, that's our different English translations that we have.

Some of the positives and minuses of them, some of the strengths and weaknesses. Next class, what we're going to look at is study

Bibles. So, now we have our English translations. That's the first thing we're going to want if we know English.

Then from there, we want to stick to a literal translation if we can. But after we get our English Bible down, we want to start looking at, how about looking at study

Bibles, where they have study notes. We're going to get into that in the next class. And we're going to look at what are some good study

Bibles to have handy. So, that's going to be next class. I do want to encourage you to consider enrolling in the academy.

If you enroll in the academy, you'll get the syllabus. In the syllabus is all of my notes.

All the things that I'm giving you and much more. You'll see if you happen to have the syllabus, maybe page 5 or 25,

I forget where we moved it. You'll see some really nice outline that's only provided in notes.

We will not go over it in class. But it gives a great overview of how the books are ordered in your

English Bible and why they're ordered the way they are. They're grouped in a specific way. And so, that is some things to have.

We hope that the syllabus will be really helpful to you. Want to encourage you on a couple things real quick.

And that is, in just a few days, in just a little over 3 weeks, will be the

Jersey Fire. I encourage you to register now. If you register and come, you get a free resource bag.

Which we're filling with some really cool stuff. I know that there's some free DVDs coming. Some CDs from different ministries.

Maybe even some free study Bibles. We have a lot of different ministries that are donating to help bless people.

Those are some of the free resources you can get. But you must be registered. And you only have about 18 days left.

We are going to have this year Sy Temprutengate from proofthatgodexists .org. We are going to have

Jason Lyle from Institute of Creation Research. I will be speaking. Will Costello from Faith Bible Church will be speaking.

Then we ended up having Paul Taylor who came out to the Ohio Fire. Got so excited and got so fired up to warn the lost of the fire to come.

That as soon as he got home, he called me up and said, Can I come to New Jersey and participate? And I said, Sure. The next day he got his friend

Eric Hoven to come and said, Hey, can we both come up and we're going to drive up from Florida? Sure.

We said, You know what, if you guys are both coming up, why don't you do a live broadcast of your Creation Today show at the

Jersey Fire. So this is going to be a first. We've never done this before to have a live broadcast of a

TV show at the Jersey Fire. That's going to be something we may never do it again. You may want to make sure you're there.

Jersey Fire is an event to get people fired up to warn the lost of the fire to come. If you're scared to evangelize, it's a great event to go to.

If you go to jerseyfire .org, you're going to see it. There's also some other fire events spreading the fire events that may be in your area.

We got the Ohio Fire, the Jersey Fire, the NorCal Fire and more coming every year. So if you want to have one in your area, contact us and maybe we'll have one in your area.

But Jersey Fire is coming up very soon. We want to encourage you to come out to that.

We want to encourage you if you're in the Jackson area to consider coming and worshiping with us at in Jackson at Faith Bible Church in Jackson, New Jersey.

Lastly, as we always do on this show, we want to encourage you to encourage others. Because truthfully, most of us need encouragement at some point in time in life.

And we need that encouragement. We don't often say the encouraging things about people until after they're dead.

So we want to give you some people to encourage. Now this time we usually have one person. This time we're going to do a group of people that I want you to encourage.

And some of them we've actually encouraged in the past. I'm going to encourage you to encourage four people.

Actually, and it's four people that are out at Wimbledon right now evangelizing.

And that is Brother Tony Miano, Bobby McCurry, Bill Adams and Scott Smith.

Now the first three are on Facebook and they're part of the Striving for Eternity group on Facebook. So go jump into that group and you can find them there.

And Scott, you can find through his wife, Patti Smith. And you could tag them and talk to them, encourage them.

They're out evangelizing in some rough waters right now. They're over in the UK and London and they've been really hit with some serious intolerance.

Literally hit with beer and water and food and different things. So I want you to encourage them this week.

They're going to be there for 10 or 12 days. I was supposed to be out there with them, but my son graduating from high school,

I couldn't go. And I want you to go and encourage these brothers. They're putting a lot on the line.

They're actually going to go to the location where a British soldier was murdered, beheaded by two true converts of Islam because they actually believe what

Islam teaches. And they ended up beheading this man. And they're going to go and preach the gospel at that location.

So pray for these brothers. We will be back next week with more lessons for you on some good

Bible studies. And we want to encourage you to strive to make today an eternal day for the glory of God.