How Did We Get the Bible? Part 2

Greetings! Welcome to Discerning Truth. Today we're going to take a look at how did we get the

Bible, part 2. Now in part 1 we looked at the manuscript evidence we have for the scriptures, the

Hebrew Old Testament scriptures and the Greek New Testament scriptures, the manuscripts that we have in our possession today.

We have many, we can compare them. There's no doubt that those manuscripts have been accurately copied over the generations, because we have ones that are very close to the original, especially for the

New Testament. And so there's no doubt the Bible has been accurately transmitted. Today we're going to ask, has it been accurately translated?

How did we get our English translation of the Bible? Now there are many translations of the

Bible. It's been translated into many, many different languages. It's even been translated into Klingon, which you know

Klingons, they're not related, they're not descended from Adam, they're not related to Christ, so they can't be saved, which

I think it's a shame to give them a gospel that can't possibly apply to them. But in any case, we're going to focus in on English translations.

How did we get our English versions? And not all of them, because there are many, but we'll go through the major historical events that happened to give us our modern

English Bible. Now I will talk about a few translations in other languages, but only in so much as they are relevant to how did we get our

English version. We've already talked about one of these. We talked about the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the translation of the

Old Testament Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek language, and that was very helpful in the early church, because in the first century that's,

Greek is what everybody's speaking. Greek is kind of the international language at the time of Christ's earthly ministry.

Now the New Testament is written in Greek, so there wasn't any original need for a translation, because that was the language that everybody spoke.

But not a lot of people spoke Hebrew, especially those Gentiles who had been brought into the family of God, those who had become

Christians. Most of them couldn't read Hebrew, but they could read Greek, and so the early church relied on the

Septuagint for their Old Testament Scriptures, largely, because it's what they could read.

Some people assume that, well, the Septuagint must be superior to the Hebrew Scriptures that were available at the time.

No, it's just people could read the Septuagint. They could read Greek, and not a lot of them could read

Hebrew. So the Septuagint was the Old Testament translation that was used, primarily, by the early church.

And remember the Septuagint, it's represented with the letters LXX, the

Roman numeral for 70, because there were 70 scholars approximately that translated at least the first five books of the

Bible, and then other scholars came in and did the rest of the Old Testament later. The New Testament Scriptures were written in a very short period of time, shortly after the ministry of Christ, probably all completed by 70

AD. Some estimates put it out a little bit, like up to 90 AD, something like that.

But in any case, they were written in a very short period of time, all in the first century. And again, the oldest manuscripts that we have are early second century, so we have manuscripts that are very close to the original writings of the

New Testament. Now in the second century AD, there was another language that was becoming fairly well known, and that is

Latin. Latin, of course, was the language of Rome. Rome had conquered the world, the

Roman Empire, and people were still speaking Greek because of the previous empire, but now the language of Latin was becoming fairly well known, and so some of the earliest translations of the

New Testament were into Latin. And these are collectively called the Vitas Latina. That's not a single manuscript, it just references all these different Latin translations of the

Bible. Now the New Testament was translated directly from the

Greek into Latin, but in most cases the Old Testament was translated from the

Septuagint into Latin. And that's not really the best way to do it.

That makes it a translation of a translation. New Testament is directly from the original language.

The Old Testament, for the Vitas Latina, is a translation of translation. And the more times you translate, the less likely it's going to have fidelity to the original, so that's not ideal.

But that continued up until the 5th century, and around 405

AD, Pope Damasus I commissioned the scholar Jerome to produce a new standard

Latin translation of the Bible, because these different Latin translations that were floating around, the

Vitas Latina, they all had little differences in them, because different people will take a look at a text and they'll say,

I think this is the best way to translate it. There's going to be minor differences, not so much in the meaning, but in terms of just the exact wording by which things are expressed.

And so it would be nice to have a standard copy of the Bible in Latin that's the same for everyone.

And so Jerome began working on what we now call the Vulgate. The Vulgate is the

Latin translation of the entire Bible by Jerome. Now Jerome, unlike many other scholars of his day,

Jerome could read Hebrew. And so when it came to the Old Testament, he went back to the original

Hebrew manuscripts and translated them directly into Latin. Now the interesting thing is, because most other

Latin translations were translated from the Septuagint, and because the Septuagint does have some errors in it, nothing huge, but there are some differences, people noticed that this new

Latin translation was a little different from the one they were reading, especially in the Old Testament, and that bothered them.

And there were some Christians who said, well, you know, why do we need this new Latin translation? We have our own. Why do we need this?

Some of them rejected the Latin Vulgate because it was different from their translation, even though it was probably better than their translation because it had gone back to the original language, at least in the

Old Testament, and the New Testament. Between the years 450 and 650, we have a new development.

A new language is invented, the English language. We would call it Old English.

They called it English, but in any case, this is the beginnings of how we get our

English Bible. The language had to come about first. And if you take a look at Old English, it's very hard to read.

People think that the King James Bible is Old English. It's not really. Old English is very difficult to read.

Just as one example, here is the heroic poem Beowulf, and you can see it's very difficult to read.

This is English, but it's Old English. And the spellings of many words are very different from the spellings today.

And there's good evidence even the pronunciation was quite a bit different from English today. So it's almost a different language, but it's becoming, we're in the process of becoming the

English that's spoken today. And that process develops until around 1150 is around the time most scholars pin the development of Middle English.

Now it's starting to become a little bit more like the language that we're familiar with today. You can kind of read

Middle English. So the Latin Vulgate, it's still going strong. It's been in existence for hundreds of years at this point.

And so it has become the standard Bible. It's kind of ironic, because many people originally objected to the

Latin Vulgate, because it was different from their translation. But now it's become the standard, and if you differ from the Latin Vulgate, then you're in trouble.

But in any case, around this time in history, you started seeing some English translations of certain books of the

Bible, but not the entire Bible, until the years 1382 through 1395.

A man named John Wycliffe translated the entire Bible into English.

But he translated from the Latin Vulgate. And again, that's not the best thing to do, because the

Vulgate is itself a translation. So the Wycliffe Bible is an English translation of a translation.

Best to go back to the original languages, but if you can't read Hebrew and Greek, and you can read Latin, then you got to do what you can do.

And keep in mind, many people at this point in history started thinking that maybe the

Vulgate was perfectly translated, and that God had inspired not only the original text, but he sort of re -inspired the translation of those texts.

And so it was just as good to translate from the Vulgate as it was the original languages. Well, that's not really a biblical reason, but nonetheless, that was the attitude at the time.

And beginning again in the late 1300s, you now have a Bible in English that you can kind of read.

If we take a look at what we would call John 316, now they didn't have verse numbers back then, but this is the way it looks in the

Wycliffe Bible. And you can kind of you can kind of read it, "...for God blood so the world that he hath his own begotten

Son." You can tell what it's saying, primarily because we already know what that verse says.

The spellings are weird, the pronunciation strange, but nonetheless, it's starting to resemble our modern

English Bible. Now another development that will be very, relevant in the history of our modern

Bible happens around 1440, and that is the invention of the printing press.

Now the the Chinese already had something that could, something like that, but in Europe, 1440 or thereabouts, was the invention of the printing press.

You have the Gutenberg printing press. It looks something like this. It is a machine that allows people for the first time in history to print multiple copies of a document very quickly and nearly simultaneously, and they are identical to each other, and hopefully to the original from which they've been copied, but at least to each other.

And so that's going to revolutionize the ability to produce books and to produce them rapidly. And one of the earliest books to be printed on the printing press was the

Bible, the 1455 Gutenberg Bible. Now it's a Latin version, it's the

Vulgate, but it's the first time the Bible has been printed, and so that is rather revolutionary.

Now keep in mind, when the printing press is invented, that doesn't mean that that manual copying of manuscripts stops, because frankly most people don't have their own printing press.

And so you still are going to have handwritten manuscripts, handwritten copies of manuscripts, that's still going to continue, but at least since the invention of the printing press, you can have printed copies as well.

Now the next major development was in 1516. A man named Desiderius Erasmus produced a new translation into Latin of the

Greek New Testament. So he's going back to the Greek language, translating it directly into Latin, and again there were some

Christians who objected to that, because they had come to accept the Vulgate. The Vulgate was a thousand years old at this point, it had been well established as the

Bible of the church. And here comes Erasmus, and he goes back and he tries to find the oldest manuscripts he can find,

Greek manuscripts, and to try and find, oh you know what, the Latin was based on that, the

Latin Vulgate was based on this copy, there's a mistake there, we should use this older version, so on. So there were some differences in Erasmus' Latin translation from the

Vulgate, and some people just assumed that it must be his version that's wrong, because the Vulgate, that was perfectly retranslated under inspiration of God, which the

Bible does not say. But nonetheless, that was the attitude a lot of people had. Now Erasmus is doing a little bit of what we would call textual criticism.

He's looking at different families of manuscripts and saying, oh yes, these two agree, and they're very different families, this one has an error, and this one is different, so it must be the error.

He's doing some of that. But he didn't have as much to work with as we have today. We have 5 ,800

Greek New Testament manuscripts accessible today. Erasmus, for any given book of the

Bible, might have had maybe six. So if that's enough, you can at least see where there's agreement and where there's disagreement, and so you can try to reconstruct the original.

And again, for the most part, there's tremendous agreement. There's very few places where there is a viable variant that is meaningful.

We saw that in the previous webcast. One problem that Erasmus had was with the book of Revelation.

With the book of Revelation, he couldn't find a single manuscript. And so what did he do?

He found a commentary that had... where the person was providing comments, but the person also included the

Greek text, and so he used that as the basis for translating the book of Revelation into this new

Latin version. Except this commentary was missing the last page, and so the last little bit of Revelation, of the last chapter, he couldn't find any

Greek sources for it. So what did he do? Well, he back -translated it from the Vulgate. Okay, and that's interesting.

That'll become relevant later, because it turns out the Vulgate has some mistakes in the last sections.

As the Latin... you know, the Vulgate was copied for a thousand years, and mistakes crept in, and there's a fairly prominent one in the last section of Revelation.

And so Erasmus, thinking that that's correct, back -translated that into the Greek. And it had to do with the phrase, the tree of life.

And you see in in Latin, the word tree, ligno, is very similar to the word for book, libro.

And so at some point that got switched, and so later Latin Vulgates have book of life instead of tree of life.

And since that's all that Erasmus had, because he couldn't find any Greek manuscripts, today we know all the

Greek manuscripts say tree of life. There's no doubt about that. But Erasmus didn't know that, and so he took the

Vulgate's version, and that's why certain older translations of the Bible today that are based on Erasmus, they have book of life towards the end of Revelation rather than tree of life.

That doesn't make a huge difference in terms of the meaning, because both the book of life and the tree of life symbolically represent eternal life with God.

So it doesn't really affect the meaning, but it is interesting to see why there's that difference. Now the neat thing about Erasmus's new

Latin translation is he didn't just include the Latin, he included the Greek as well. And so it's actually a parallel Bible, and it looks like this.

You can see the Greek on the left and the Latin on the right. You can tell that's John chapter 1.

Even if you don't read Latin, Latin is similar enough to English. It's using the same alphabet, and some of the words are similar.

Like in Principio, Principio would be beginning or first in the beginning. Erat, sermo, was, speech, or the word.

The word was with God, and God was the word, or the word was God, and the way we would say it in English.

So you can see that there. And it's kind of interesting because Erasmus was really interested in producing this new

Latin translation, but in doing so he provided, he provided some, the

Greek as well. This is the first time the Greek Bible had been printed, as opposed to being simply hand -copied.

So pretty neat, a real advancement in the progress toward getting our modern

English Bible. The next really significant advancement was in 1525 -26,

William Tyndale produced an English translation of the New Testament from the

Greek that he got from Erasmus. And remember, Erasmus is going back and getting the oldest

Greek manuscripts he can find and comparing families, and so that's a very good thing, except for the last little bit of Revelation where he back -translated from the

Vulgate. And so the Tyndale edition also has that little mistake where it's a book of life instead of tree of life, because Tyndale didn't know that, that all the

Greek manuscripts had a tree of life. He's using Erasmus, which has that one little mistake in it.

But aside from that, it's a really good translation of the New Testament, and it's printed so people can read that.

And what a wonderful thing to do, and he was killed for it. Not everyone liked the fact that, you know, you don't want to let just let everybody read the

Bible, but certainly the Roman Catholic Church didn't like that people could read the Bible in their own language.

They liked having it in the Latin. The Latin Vulgate had become kind of the standard at that point, and so people didn't like these new translations, and they actually, they killed him for it.

William Tyndale, he was strangled, and then his body was burned. He died so that you can have a

Bible that you can read in your own language. He's a hero of the faith, in my view. Now, if we look at the

Tyndale version, it's starting to become pretty readable. We take a look at what is now John 3 16. For God so loveth the world, yet he hath given his only

Son, that none that believe in him should perish, but should have everlasting life.

The spelling's weird, but when you read it out, it's pretty clear. It's pretty similar to what we would say today, and so it's becoming our modern

English Bible. Now, Tyndale continued to translate the Old Testament as well until his death in 1536.

Again, he was executed by strangulation for translating the Bible into English, so he didn't get to finish the

Old Testament. He did the Pentateuch. He did a lot of the historical books. He did Jonah, but he didn't get to finish it, but a friend of his did.

In 1535, we have the Coverdale Bible. Myles Coverdale completed Tyndale's work.

He finished the Old Testament, so the Coverdale Bible is the first printed English translation of the entire

Bible. It's based primarily on Tyndale's work, but since he didn't finish the Old Testament, Coverdale relied on Luther's, Martin Luther's German translation of Scripture, and the

Vulgate as well. Now, that's not as good as going back to the originals, so it's a mix because what

Tyndale did, Tyndale went back to the original Hebrew and Greek texts. Coverdale didn't necessarily, and so it's kind of a combination.

Sections of it are a direct translation, and other sections are a translation of a translation. But still, it's the first printed

English edition of the entire Bible. In 1537, we have the publication of the

Matthew Bible, named after Thomas Matthew. That was a pen name. His real name is

John Rogers. He was also a friend of Tyndale, and Tyndale having been executed for coming up with a new

English translation made sense for John Rogers. Maybe not use my real name when publishing that, but in any case, it's also based on Tyndale, but it's not based on Luther's German.

He goes back in as much as possible to the original Hebrew and Greek, in as much as they're accessible.

In 1539, we have the Great Bible, and it's called that because it was physically large.

It was a big Bible, and this was commissioned by King Henry VIII, and not really for good reasons.

King Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, and he asked the Pope for permission, but the Pope did not grant permission because his reason for divorcing was not biblical, and so Henry VIII, really out of spite for the

Pope to defy him, produced a new English translation because he knew the Catholics, Roman Catholics, didn't like a

Bible that people could read in their own language, and so he funded this new translation of the

Bible, and it was, in fact, he made sure that it was distributed to every church and chained to the pulpit so that everyone would have access to that.

King Henry VIII then considered himself to be the head of the church, and that's where you get the

Anglican Church, those those Christians that accepted that kind of went off in that direction rather than the

Pope being the leader. Of course, at this point you have many Protestants as well. Martin Luther has come along and wanting to correct the

Roman Catholic Church, and it ended up causing a split, and you have the Protestant Reformation as well.

The Great Bible was the first authorized English Bible. In other words, it was legal to own it.

Nobody can put you to death for having this Bible as long as King Henry is in power because he has authorized it.

Now, when the next person comes into power, next king or queen, then all bets are off, but at that time it was authorized.

You could legally own it, and you had no fear of being killed. In 1560, we have the

Geneva Bible. This is a really good translation, and it was the first English version to have verse numbers, so if you're wondering where those come from, those actually were invented in 1551 by a man named

Stephanas. That was actually his pen name, Robert Estienne. In his 1551 Greek New Testament, he was the first to include verse numbers, and people thought, yeah, that's a pretty good idea.

Now we can reference. Now we can say John 3, verse 16. The chapters had been introduced in 1205, and then the verses in 1551.

The 1555 Latin Vulgate was updated with these verse numbers, and so that's the first time you have them in the

Vulgate, and then in 1560, you have the first English Bible with verse numbers. The Geneva Bible is also the first English version to be entirely translated from the original languages.

No influence of the Vulgate, no influence of Martin Luther's German version. It goes back to the original Hebrew and Greek, and so it really is a phenomenal

Bible. It had many marginal notes in it, and those are good things because people would write in, and they'd give either cross -references, or they'd give little helpful information, and the problem is a lot of people objected to those marginal notes, even though I think many

Christians today would agree that those are very helpful. The bishops, in particular, did not like those notes because they implied that the bishops really should have less power than they actually have, among other things, and so the bishops produced their own translation of the

Bible, the 1568. It's just called the Bishop's Bible. It's not a very good translation.

It was a response, really, to the Geneva Bible and all the marginal notes that they had in there. They didn't object so much to the

Geneva Bible's translation as they did the marginal notes. The Bishop's Bible was mostly based on the

Geneva Bible and the Great Bible of 1539. However, original scholarship was sadly lacking, and it was revised over 50 times.

There was a major one in 1572 where it was revised. Then, in 1610, you have the

Dowery Rheims Bible, and this really was a response to the Protestant Reformation by the Roman Catholics.

This was translated by Roman Catholic schools, and it was translated from the Vulgate, which seems like an enormous step backwards because now we have these great

English Bibles. We have the Great Bible, the Matthew Bible, the Geneva, the Bishop's Bible. All of these were translated from the original languages, the

Hebrew and Greek, at least primarily, and with the Geneva Bible entirely. Why would you go back to translating from a translation?

Well, there was a philosophy among many people in the Roman Catholic Church, especially that the

Latin Vulgate, well, that had been perfectly preserved, even though we know there's some errors that have crept into it.

But nonetheless, there was the philosophy that that was perfect. God had ensured that that not only was his original word perfect, but that the

Vulgate translation was perfect, even though the Bible does not say that. But if it's perfect, you might as well translate it from it, rather than from the original

Hebrew and Greek. And so that's where you end up with the Dowery Rheims Bible, really a response to the Protestant Reformation.

A year later, you have the King James Bible. King James himself commissioned this version.

It was really based on the 1602 edition of the Bishop's Bible, but nonetheless, the scholars that translated the

King James, they did go back and look at the original languages, obviously. One of the things that is distinctive about the

King James Bible is it originally had very few marginal notes. That was a bit unusual, but that was because King James had insisted.

He didn't like marginal notes. He didn't like this extra little bit of information. He just wanted the Bible. That's it. And of course, sometimes those marginal notes are helpful, because they'll maybe say, well, we're not certain as to which of these two readings is original.

Unfortunately, the original King James lacked that information, but that was at the request of King James.

One of the advantages of the King James, one of the reasons it's still in existence today, is the poetic passages were just beautifully translated.

Beautifully translated. The wordings of the poetic sections were just wonderful, and that beauty is one of the reasons why it still is a popular translation today.

The original 1611 King James is difficult to read, but not impossible. Granted, the spelling of certain things is different.

They used a very bold, ornate font. It's beautiful. It's just a little hard to read, and the way certain letters are written as well.

Like, look at Psalms at the top in the middle there. It looks like P -F.

That's actually an S. That's just the way lowercase S's were written in some instances, when it's sort of a hard S.

It's like an F, but the bar extends only to the left, not to the right. And then, of course, at the end of the word, it's the way we would write

S's today. So it makes it a little hard to read. Some people have the impression that the 1611

King James was the one perfect translation, but it did have some mistakes in it, in the first printings.

And, of course, there have been several printings of the King James Bible, and several different revisions, some minor, some major.

The original 1611 had an error in Psalm 69 -32. Seek good, and it really should be seek

God, and that was fixed in 1617. Ecclesiastes 1 -5, the place is fixed to his place.

That was fixed in 1638. Matthew 6 -3, thy right doeth. They left out a word.

Fixed to thy right hand doeth. That was fixed in 1613. Isaiah 49 -13, God is fixed to the

Lord. Matthew 26 -34, originally it said might, when it should have been night. That's a pretty obvious mistake, and people could figure that out.

Revelation 22 -19, Book of Life should be Tree of Life. That still exists. That error still is found in the

King James Bible, and that's because it's not an error of translation. It's the manuscript.

It had to do with the fact that Erasmus back -translated that portion of Revelation from the Vulgate, not from the original

Greek manuscripts. All the original Greek manuscripts say Tree of Life, but again it just shows how how the history has influenced the precise wording of certain things in Scripture.

It's not going to affect the meaning significantly. There were a few other additions. There was the, in the 1631 edition of the

King James Bible, the printer accidentally left out the word not in one of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 -14.

So instead of saying thou shalt not commit adultery, it said thou shalt commit adultery, and so that's sometimes called the the wicked

Bible. The so -called printers Bible of 1702 is a

King James that read printers have persecuted me instead of princes in Psalm 119 -161.

There's the vinegar Bible of 1717 that read the parable of the vinegar rather than the parable of the vineyard.

So it's interesting, these little little mistakes, nothing major, but it's kind of interesting to see that.

There have been some revisions of the King James Bible. There was a substantial revision in both 1629 and then in 1638.

There was another substantial revision in 1760, just going back and fixing some of the some of the little mistakes, updating the spellings, updating a few little words that had been mistranslated in the earlier versions.

The 1760 Cambridge revision was reprinted without change in 1762, so sometimes you'll see 62 for the

Cambridge revision, and then in 1769 there was the Oxford revision, which is considered the best, and if you if you buy a new

King James Bible today it will be the 1769 Oxford edition, that particular revision, and that eliminated most of the really archaic words in English and updated them to words that we can understand today.

Now all of these early English Bibles, all of them were based very heavily on the scholarship of Erasmus.

He did a great job with these six or so manuscripts that he had. They're based on Stephanus, also did a good job with the few manuscripts that he had, but since then we've discovered a lot of other manuscripts, and some of them are earlier, and granted they don't change any major doctrine at all, but there are some minor wordings that, oh we realized, you know, in the oldest

Greek manuscripts it's worded this way rather than this way. Most of these English translations rely primarily on one family of texts, which is called the

Byzantine family. Now there's influence from a few others, but it's primarily that family, because there were a lot of those manuscripts in existence, and that had to do with the rise of Islam and so on, but in any case, there was additional scholarship that was done in the 1800s, very significant work by Westcott and Hort in 1881.

They produced a new Greek New Testament based on older manuscripts that had been available to Erasmus and Stephanus and some of these other ones, and again you have the same kind of reaction.

Some people don't like that, because there's a few very small changes in wording, and they like the version they grew up with, and that makes a few changes.

There are a few verses that, well, actually these aren't found in the original. Nothing major. Again, 99 .8

% of the manuscripts, in terms of viable texts, agree in terms of meaning.

So it's nothing major, but nonetheless it allows us to know which passages are the 99 .8

% that there's no dispute, and what are the 0 .2 % where there's some disagreement in the earlier manuscripts.

Some people don't like Westcott and Hort, because they were theologically liberal, which they were, but their scholarship was very good, and so that's a good thing to take a look at.

We don't have to agree with their interpretation of scripture, but their research in terms of finding these old manuscripts has been very helpful.

It's not just them. There have been other folks as well that have come along and have found these very old manuscripts and said, oh, this is very close to the original, and look at the wording here.

It's very slightly different from here, and that helps us to reconstruct how the Bible has been copied in these various families.

Westcott and Hort relied very heavily on Sinaiticus and Vaticanus. Those are the two earliest complete

Bibles that we have. In 1885, there was an update to the King James Version. It's called the

Revised Version, but it's actually an update to the King James. A lot of people don't realize that. And then there was another update to the

King James in 1901. It's called the American Standard Version. And then we have a number of other translations.

In fact, in the 20th century, English translations just exploded. There have been so many that I can't possibly cover them all.

So what I'm going to do is focus on a couple that I really like and a couple that have a very different translation philosophy.

And the two that I'll focus on are the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version.

The New American Standard Bible, which was published in 1971, updated in 1977, again in 95, and then in 2020.

Everything I've read about the 2020 version suggests it's just superb. It's one of the best Bibles out there in terms of translations.

And I like the 77 version because certain wordings in Genesis where it matches the Hebrew very closely.

But in any case, it's a good translation. The New International Version, published in 1978, there was a significant update in 1984, and then one in 2011.

I actually like the 84 version of the New International Version of the Bible. I'm not real happy with the 2011 version where they started introducing a sort of gender -neutral language.

And they're not doing it to be woke. They're doing it because, well, because they think it best communicates the meaning.

But I think that goes a little too far. So in any case, the 1984 version is very good. And these two translations employ different translation philosophies.

There are basically two philosophies when translating a text from a parent language into a language like English.

There's what's called the formal equivalence. Formal equivalence is a word -for -word translation.

And then there's what's called dynamic equivalence. Dynamic equivalence is a thought -for -thought translation.

With formal equivalence, it's word -for -word. So basically, you look at the original language, you see this word, and you say, okay, what

English word would best match that word in the context of the sentence in which it's in?

And so you try to get a word -for -word translation. With dynamic equivalence, you're not focusing on the individual words.

You're focusing on kind of the sentence. What does this sentence mean? And what is the best way to convey that meaning in English?

Even if you're using words that are not parallel to the individual words that are in that sentence, what sentence best conveys the meaning?

And one example of that, there's a proverb in the King James where it says, the liberal soul shall be made fat.

The liberal soul shall be made fat. And that's pretty close to a word -for -word translation from the

Hebrew text. The NIV translating that passage says, a generous man will prosper.

That's far more understandable, isn't it? They both mean the same thing. But a liberal soul, that word's kind of changed its meaning since the

King James was translated. But it originally just meant generous, right?

And soul is used in place of a person sometimes, so that a generous man, a liberal soul is a generous man, will be made fat.

That's a way of saying that you have abundance, you have plenty, you're going to prosper.

And so the the NIV translates that, not word -for -word, but in a way that's more understandable.

Now in fact, no translation of the Bible is exactly word -for -word or exactly thought -for -thought.

None of them, no Bible is 100 % formal equivalence or 100 % dynamic equivalence. There's a spectrum, and this gives sort of the spectrum of modern translations.

You can see the NASB, the New American Standard Bible, is very far off there on the word -for -word.

It's about as formal as it gets, other than an interlinear, where you'd have the Greek and then just the

English word below it. The NIV is well on the thought -for -thought side.

It's a dynamic translation. That's why I picked those two. They're kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. The New Living is also a thought -for -thought, and actually a pretty good one overall.

The King James, you can see it's more on the word -for -word side, but it's got a little more thought -for -thought than the

NASB, for example. So anyway, those are some of the translations and the philosophies that have gone into that.

Which philosophy is best, word -for -word or thought -for -thought? And different people have different opinions as to which is better.

It kind of depends on how much you know about the Bible, how much you know about the culture. If you think about it, there are certain expressions that we use that if you were to translate them word -for -word into a different language in a different culture, maybe it's an idiom that they don't use, it would not be understood.

Whereas a thought -for -thought translation would be. So for example, if I said, it's raining cats and dogs, you know what

I mean by that because of our cultural heritage. But if I were to translate that word -for -word, it's raining cats and dogs, into another language, into another culture where they don't have that idiom, they might be very confused by that.

They might say, well that's ridiculous, it's raining water, that's the only thing it can rain. On the other hand, the best way to translate that into another language might be a dynamic translation, a thought -for -thought translation, where I basically would say in their words, it's raining very heavily.

That would convey the meaning better than a word -for -word. So which is better? If you're very familiar with the idioms and the customs of the original language, then word -for -word is probably the way to go.

If you're not familiar with the culture and the idioms of that culture, then thought -for -thought would probably better get you the meaning of the text.

I'll give you an example of this, because again, no translation, no English translation of the

Bible is exactly word -for -word, or 100 % word -for -word, or 100 % thought -for -thought. And I just thought we'd look at example of this,

Romans 6 15, which in English says, what then, shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?

May it never be. And I want to focus in on that that last phrase, may it never be. That's actually translated from just two words in Greek, and they kind of have the meaning of not, not be.

It's an emphatic no. So Paul's asking a rhetorical question, shall we sin because we're not under the law but under grace?

And he's basically saying no. And the NAS renders those two words as may it never be.

That's probably as word -for -word as that passage allows, but let's look at some other translations.

The King James Version says God forbid. Now that gets the point across, but it's not word -for -word.

The word God is not found in that little phrase, nor forbid. But you get the idea,

God forbid. We don't want that to happen. No way, right? NIV says by no means.

That captures the meaning. ESV also by no means, and also the NRS. The New King James Version says certainly not.

And the New Living Translation says of course not. And by the way, that's probably the most natural way we would say that in English.

The New Living Translation is probably the best thought -for -thought on that verse, whereas the the

NAS is probably the best in terms of word -for -word. It's closest to the original.

But you can see all of those really capture the meaning, don't they? And so I would tend to recommend for people who are very new believers, people who are, or maybe people who are not yet believers in Christ, but they're kind of curious and they want to read a little bit of the

Bible, often a dynamic translation would be best for them, because it's going to get across the meaning better.

Whereas for someone who has been a Christian for 20 years and knows the

Bible pretty well, often a word -for -word translation, a formal equivalence, would be probably better for them.

Especially if you're going to memorize scripture, because it's closer to the original languages in terms of the exact wording.

But frankly, it's good to read multiple translations of the Bible. It's best for figuring out the meaning of a particular phrase in scripture.

So which is the best translation of the Bible? The one that you will read. The one that you will read.

If you have difficulty reading a formal equivalence like the NAS, King James, something like that, then by all means, read something like the

NIV or the New Living Translations. They're the major English, I should say, all of the major conservative

English translations of the Bible are very good. There are translations that are bad, like the

Jehovah's Witnesses. They have their own New World Translation. It's not a very good translation, because they're intentionally changing some things to make it compatible with their faith.

There are wordings that do not agree with the original languages. But all these other translations that we have, we have the

NAS, we have the ESV, it's a new English translation, very good.

We have the New Legacy Bible. These are all very good translations. It's just a question of which one you will read.

Now if you want to do a detailed word study, obviously a word -for -word translation, formal equivalency, you're going to want to stick with those.

But frankly, even there, it's probably best if you really want to focus in on the nuances of a word, the best way to do it is to get some computer software or an interlinear, where you can look up where it's got the original word in the original language, and then you can look up the meanings and see where that same word is used elsewhere in Scripture, and gives you kind of the parameters for the meaning of that particular word.

What is the range of meanings? So unless you want to go back and learn the original languages, and some people do that, and that's commendable.

I can read a little bit of Hebrew. Greek is very difficult. Biblical, Koine Greek, a lot of students struggle with that, because there are a lot of nuances in the

Greek language. But in any case, that's a great thing to do. Aside from that, if you don't want to go back and learn the original languages, you can still get the meaning from any good

English translation, especially if you read two or three English translations. Some people have parallel Bibles where they have a couple translations next to each other.

That's a great thing to do, and it helps you to get kind of the meaning of the phrase when it's been translated a little bit differently by different people.

We shouldn't be bothered by the fact that there are slight differences in wording in different translations, as long as the meaning is captured.

And if they differ on the meaning, then you know it's probably a difficult text, and you'll have to do a little more homework on that.

But there are very few places in Scripture where that happens, and none that would affect any fundamental Christian doctrines.

So you can say, if you have an English translation of the Bible in your hand, a good conservative one, NAS, New King James, whatever, you can say, this is the

Word of God. This is the Word of God. I do prefer Bibles that have notes on the manuscript evidence.

You know, let's say, well this verse isn't found in the oldest manuscripts. I like to know that, even if you disagree with me on whether or not it's the original.

I at least like to know that, okay, there's some doubt about that one. But that tells me that all the verses that don't have those notes then, there's no substantial disagreement in the manuscripts.

There's no viable disagreement that would affect the meaning. So if you have an

English Bible in your hand, a good conservative translation, you have the Word of God in your hand. There's no doubt about that.