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, 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 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

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.

It wouldn't have to be, 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 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 so, and that's not really the best way to do it.

That makes it a translation of a translation.

New Testament's 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 be, 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, you know, different people will take a look at a text and they'll say, I think this is a better, 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 was nice to have, 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, it 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, well,

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 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 loved 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, 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, and 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

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 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 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 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.

And 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 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 through 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 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.

Take a look at what is now John 316.

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 the

Eighth, and not really for good reasons.

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

the the Anglican Church.

Those Christians that accepted that kind of went off in that direction rather than the Pope being the leader, and 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

Stephanus.

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, you know, 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, so 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 a 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 the 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 the history has influenced the

precise wordings 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 printer's 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 the 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

all that, 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 text, 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.

And 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?

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, liberal, 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 gonna 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, none of, 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 inner linear, 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 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, man 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, in 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 an 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 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 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 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 pretty good, really.

All of 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, you know, 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's wordings that do not agree with the original languages.

But, you know, all these other translations that we have, we have, you know, the NAS, we have the ESV.

It's a very good translation.

The NET, the New English translation, very good.

We have the New Legacy Bible.

These are all very good translations, 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 meaning, 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 so people do that, 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.

So I hope that's been helpful for you.

We'll see you next time.

God bless.