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What is Involved with Bible Translation? · Centrally Speaking

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  SPEAKER_00: Centrally speaking, is the central strength of the church's family.
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  SPEAKER_00: It speaks to ambitions.
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  SPEAKER_00: It would be of interest to our society.
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  SPEAKER_00: In particular, in the jurisdiction of a Christian worldview, interconnection with Western secular culture.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the spirit of the church's family, we take the perspective of the middle women, which is in agreement with the historic Christian Church.
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  SPEAKER_01: I'm Dr.
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  SPEAKER_01: Drake Williams, Minister of Mission and Theology of the Church.
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  SPEAKER_01: Our website is www.cscfamily.org.
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  SPEAKER_01: Our topic today is what is involved with Bible translation.
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  SPEAKER_01: And we're pleased to have Dr.
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  SPEAKER_01: Scott Hafen with us today, who has had quite a bit of experience with translation.
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  SPEAKER_01: Scott has uh taught at the School of Divinity at the University of St.
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  SPEAKER_01: Andrews in St.
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  SPEAKER_01: Andrews, uh Scotland.
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  SPEAKER_01: He has also served as the Mary Rockefeller Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and is also the uh Gerald F.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: Hawthorne Professor of New Testament, Greek and exegesis at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois.
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  SPEAKER_01: He also has a contact with uh the pastorate.
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  SPEAKER_01: He's a licensed minister with the Baptist General Conference and has served uh uh two churches in uh Massachusetts.
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  SPEAKER_01: Scott and his wife Deborah, who now make their home in Savannah, uh Georgia.
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  SPEAKER_01: He's been involved uh with um uh Bible translation on several committees, uh though.
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  SPEAKER_01: He served for two to three years with the NIV Translation Committee and has also been a consultant uh with the ESV, the English uh standard version on first and second Peter.
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  SPEAKER_01: And then in his Scott's own scholarly work is uh producing translations for people to consider as he um uh continues his writing on articles and and books.
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  SPEAKER_01: So, Scott, we're very glad to have you um be with us again and uh welcome again to uh Centrally Speaking.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
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  SPEAKER_02: It's great to be here.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Let's um start by asking a few general questions about uh Bible translation.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: When was the very first uh Bible English Bible translation accomplished and and who did it?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, of course, there were small snippets of passages that were being translated here and there for English readers, but the first, you might say, full-scale attempt was by John Wycliffe up in England, who produced a New Testament in 1388.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: It went already then through some different editions.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_02: A guy by name by the name of John Pervy updated it into a second version in 1397, and then because of course it was persecuted at the time to have a translation other than the Latin, you could say, in a sense, the translation went underground for quite a while.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_02: The next public project, if you will, was by William Tyndale, who worked on the New Testament and the Pentateuch in 1530, convinced that they needed to know the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, in order to understand the New Testament.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: So he worked on those simultaneously uh from the Greek and Hebrew, and his translation, then in 1530, got expanded into what we call the Coverdale tradition of English translation, 1535, a beautiful edition, and then that just continued to develop after that.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_02: John Rogers did one in 1537, there was a revised edition in 1539, it just kept going.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: A so-called Bishop's Bible was produced by the church then in 1572, and then of course the crown jewel of English translations was the King James Version, obviously named after the king who paid for it and wanted it done in his name and to help the Reformation impulses in England.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_02: That, of course, was accomplished in 1611, the so-called King James Version.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And just for our uh listeners that may be less uh familiar with Bible translation, um, Bible, of course, wasn't written in English originally, uh, and it wasn't even written in one language uh originally.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're talking about coming out of Hebrew and Greek and um and Aramaic and then going into uh Latin.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: And when we talk about uh translation from about the English Bible, uh we're we're working, you know, you're referring to um translations literally out of uh the Greek or the Hebrew, correct?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, um, they were translating out of the Greek and Hebrew, but also uh they were doing it in light of the other translations that were very much, of course, happening.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that Coverdale, for example, in 1535, is based on Tyndale's work, which was going back again to the original languages, but he was also, Coverdale, that is, using and looking at the Latin translation, the German translation that Luther had done, the German translation that Swingley had done down in Switzerland.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yes, they were not only looking at the original languages, but then as we do today, one translation was uh in conversation, if you will, with other translations to see how other people rendered the same text.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they would get insights and help and sometimes, you know, correct their own understandings by looking at how other people did it.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe you might have a word as to uh why uh someone like uh Wycliffe or somebody like uh Tyndale needed to translate the Bible out of uh uh the language uh at the time.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's a that's a really good question.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I think there were two reasons why they began to say we wanted English translations rather than simply relying on the Latin or the German that was available.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, when Wycliffe and Tyndale worked, we didn't yet have full-scale German translations, but there's certainly, of course, Latin.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_02: Latin was the translation of the Bible.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: We called it the Vulgate because it was vulgar, not in the sense that we use the word vulgar, but in the sense of common or everyday.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: The Latin Vulgate was the only translation of the Bible used in the church and with people uh since 383 AD.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: So by the time we started getting English translations, we're a thousand years down the road.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: And so when they looked back at the Latin, and as they were gaining more familiarity with the original languages, they began to realize that since every translation is a commentary in disguise, the Latin renderings of Greek and Hebrew texts were also offering uh their own theological take on the text, if you will.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so they wanted to go back to the originals to begin to come up with their own English translations in order to, as they would understand it, provide a more accurate understanding uh in the translation.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_02: So that was one reason, accuracy, and the other uh reason was so that people could read it.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the amount of people that could actually read the Latin Vulgate was very, very limited.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, many of the Catholic priests in the medieval period couldn't read it, they would just memorize the liturgy and conduct services based out of memory, but were often sometimes you know virtually illiterate.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_02: So uh there were those two impulses, the popular, let's give the Bible to everybody in a language they can understand, and let's uh rethink uh what these texts mean and we try to represent our understanding in in our own language.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes, it does.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: You say uh that we get to the crown jewel here with the King James uh Bible being uh formed.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh can you tell us uh what led to the circumstances of the King James uh being the King James translation?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: In just very general terms, uh for the sake of time, it was really the same two impulses because by the time we get to 1611, we have a, if you will, uh an English translation tradition that's already developed from Wycliffe and Tyndale through the Coverdale tradition through the Bishop's Bible, and this translation, very much, of course, in conversation with the Catholic tradition and orientated to a different period of time, was the king thought, too much influenced or involved in pre-Reformation understandings and debates.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And also, I think just to be honest, out of his own pride and arrogance, he wanted a Bible that could be associated with his reign and rule.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so he collected scholars, the best scholars of the day, and paid for them to come together and work on the King James translation.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, again, for his contemporary generation, but also he wanted them to go back one more time to the Greek and Hebrew and see where they thought the English translation that they had inherited could be updated, changed, improved.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: Also because we were discovering more manuscripts, scholarship on the original text was getting better.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: And so he just thought it was time for a new scholarly update, if you will, uh, in the English translation.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: So the King James marks a break because it goes back to the Greek and Hebrew rather than simply relying on the English translations that had been uh passed down, as it were, in the tradition ever since uh Tyndale and Coverdale.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that that marked a real turning point and became then the dominant translation really for uh about 270 years.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: It was considered uh, if you will, the standard version of the Bible for English speakers, so much so that it became uh associated with with uh the Holy Spirit and inerrancy.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: The King James gained such prominence in the church that they believed that it was such an accurate representation of the original languages that it too somehow was inspired by God.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you went against the King James, you they felt like you were going against the Bible itself.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_02: We have movements in contemporary Protestantism that are called the King James only movements, in which even to this day they believe that you shouldn't go against the King James renderings of the text.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: That also has um some basis in a debate over which original Greek manuscripts are better in uh in terms of presenting the original readings of the New Testament.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about um uh Bible translations since uh King James, since there have been so many in the English language.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, why have these other Bible translations been composed?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh wasn't the King James enough?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_02: Here again, I think there are two reasons for that, slightly different than the two we mentioned before.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: One was that the growing confidence in the original readings of the of the Bible based on textual criticism led scholars to realize that the manuscripts that were behind the King James Version weren't always the best available manuscripts uh for getting at the original text of the Bible.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_02: They were, of course, the best manuscripts that the folks in 1611 knew about.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_02: So they were working with the best material they had.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_02: But as time went on in the next 200, 250 years, our understanding of textual criticism developed.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: We discovered more manuscripts, and people began to realize oh, we've got a better original manuscript tradition now than they had in the days of King James, 1611, and Hebrew as well.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: Let's produce another translation tradition that's based on uh a rereading of the Greek and Hebrew in light of these better manuscripts that we've discovered in the meantime.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_02: That was one reason.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_02: The other reason, of course, was that King James was outdated both in its language and its style and its vocabulary, so that modern readers, starting in the early 20th century, really, were having more and more difficulty just understanding the King James.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so they wanted to have then a language that would be much more accessible to contemporary English readers in the modern world.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: So taking out words like uh thee and thy and thine, uh and perhaps others.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: So exactly.
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  SPEAKER_02: And then, and maybe we can talk about this now, also translation theory began to develop in ways that it had not yet developed in the 17th century.
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  SPEAKER_02: And so understandings of how to translate a text greatly changed through time.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_02: And so by the time we get to what's called the revised version in 1890, or what some of us might remember as the revised standard version, which is the one when I went to college, that was done in 1950.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we had the New American Standard Bible that was done in 1963 with updates in 95 and 2020.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: Remember the Jerusalem Bible, done by a bunch of scholars in Jerusalem, 1966.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_02: We've got, and then of course, today we've got the NIV and the ESV, which are the two predominant English translations.
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  SPEAKER_02: So we have really now four main translation traditions in English that are floating around in churches today.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_02: We've still got the King James, of course.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_02: We've got the New American Standard Bible, which is a development from the Authorized Standard Version and the Revised Standard Version, and then we've got this Jerusalem Bible, and then we've got the NIV and uh ESV traditions.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_02: So those are four different kinds of groupings, you will, if you will, of the translation traditions.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_02: And again, as I was saying, it goes back to our development of translation theory.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe I could just talk about that for for a moment.
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  SPEAKER_02: Certainly, please do.
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  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
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  SPEAKER_02: Uh, because this explains really where we're at today and why the translations are are very different that are available to us.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_02: Linguists have shown and developed now that the the uh conviction that there are three different ways actually to uh translate from one language to another.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_02: There is the the formal equivalence method, the functional equivalence method, or sometimes called dynamic equivalence, and the paraphrase.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_02: So formal equivalence is of course where you try to take the original language and represent it in the translation language, let's say we're going from Greek or Hebrew to English, you try to represent what's in the Greek or Hebrew phrase by phrase, clause by clause, prepositional phrase by prepositional phrase, vocabulary word by vocabulary word, so that you could, as best as possible, match up an English translation with its original language.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: This, of course, means that the English can be very often stilted and uh woodened.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: It can also then sometimes obscure rather than clarify the text because it's not always easy to go exactly from you know Hebrew and Greek into English in a formal equivalence method.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: But that's that's the what sometimes people call the literal translation.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_02: The King James, the New American Standard, and the ESV, they would all view themselves as formally equivalent or literal translations.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_02: Then there is uh the next move into functional equivalence or dynamic equivalence.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_02: This is also an attempt to render the exact meaning of the original text, but now instead of trying to go piece by piece, clause by clause, word by word, now the translators take an entire sentence, they ask themselves what does that sentence mean in the original language, and then they try to represent that meaning in the target language, like English, even though it might not match up one with a one-to-one correspondence to the original.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: And then the third option is the so-called paraphrase, which is technically not a translation anymore at all, but it is simply the attempt on the part of the paraphraser to render what he or she thinks is the original meaning of the text into the most contemporary English possible, even though that might mean that you have to go beyond the original text by adding more words or phrases or whatever in order to bring out its original meaning.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna give you an example from growing up.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: When I grew up in Minnesota, we had a formal equivalent statement that we used all the time as kids when we wanted to go someplace, we'd say, Let's blow this pop stand.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_02: So now if somebody came up to you and said, What does that mean?
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: Let's blow this pop stand.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_02: That's literal, that's what we said, that's the English, that's the formal equivalent meaning.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_02: You could translate it into another language, and the translation would mean blow up the pop stand.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_02: But people said, Well, what's that mean?
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_02: You say, okay, let's go from formal equivalence to functional or dynamic equivalents.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: Blowing the pop stand means hitting the road.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: See, now I'm using a dynamic equivalent because my audience knows what hit the road means.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's not exactly literal, but it is the meaning of blow the pop stand.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_02: But it still doesn't get the entire significance of the original language because there's nuances missing in the functional equivalent hit the road or let's go.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: So the paraphrase might be something like, let's get out of here right now because there's nothing left for us to do here, and it's so boring.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: So blow the pop stand could mean hit the road, but it could mean let's get out of here because we're bored.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_02: Formally, functionally, paraphrastically.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_02: Let me give you an example from the New Testament.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_02: Romans 12, 2.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Literally, don't be conformed to this age.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: That would be a nice ESV, King James, or New American Standard kind of translation.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_02: Don't be conformed to this age.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: Age?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_02: You mean like I'm 13 years old?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: What do you mean, age?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: We don't talk that way anymore.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_02: So what does the NRSV say?
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, we're not gonna do formal anymore, be conformed to this age.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: People won't get that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna translate it.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: Don't be conformed to this world.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_02: Age now means world to help the reader understand the literal meaning.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the NIV said, no, that's still not clear enough.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna do dynamic equivalence.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna rend it.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Don't be conformed any longer to the pattern of this world.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_02: Now we've gone from a time reference, age, to a place, the world, to a way of living, pattern of this world.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Phillips, a very famous trance uh paraphraser, he rendered this text in his paraphrase: don't let the world around you squeeze you into its own mold.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Real paraphrase.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: So those that's a real paraphrase.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I think you can see the difference.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: You know, when we look at Bible translations today, our two most common translations used in most Protestant churches today are the ESV, English Standard Version, and the NIV, New International Version.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: The ESV is a formally equivalent translation in the tradition of the King James Bible, the RSV, the New American Standard, etc.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: The NIV is a dynamic equivalent translation.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Neither one of them, of course, are paraphrases.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_02: Why do you decide to do one over the other?
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: You decide when you ask as a translator, how many decisions do I want to make for my reader?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Do I want to leave formally one-to-one correspondence and then assume that my reader can figure out what's going on?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: Or do I want to help them understand it more and more?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: The more I help them understand it, the more I move to dynamic equivalence.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to make more decisions for them.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to take the text out of their hands.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'm going to tell them what I think it means, all the way to a paraphrase where I'm going to explain it to the max.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: Can you handle one more example?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_02: By all means.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think it'll help our uh listeners.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: This is my favorite.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: There's a Greek word sarx.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: It means flesh, literal.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_02: So if you were going to do a literal translation, a formal equivalent translation, every time you saw the Greek word sarx, you would translate it flesh.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_02: Problem is, because context is king, that one Greek word sarx can mean many different things in many different contexts.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: It can mean the flesh that's over your bones, on one hand.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_02: It can even mean your descendants or your ethnic group, my people according to my flesh.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_02: It can even mean this sinful world.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_02: Don't walk according to the flesh, but according to the spirit, the famous flesh-spirit contrast in Paul.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_02: And there are many other meanings.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, there are so many different meanings that no translation, not even the King James, could render Sarks as flesh all the time.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_02: The King James, New King James uses five different words to translate the one-word sarks in different contexts.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_02: The New American Standard, which everybody thinks is super literal, 22 different words in English for the one-word sarks.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_02: What about the NIV?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: They think we need all the help we can get.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_02: They render the one-word sarks with 48 different English translations.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: Let me give you some examples.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: Will the real Sarks please stand up?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_02: John 17, 2.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_02: Jesus says that the Lord has given to Jesus authority over all sarks.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Does that mean he has authority over the flesh on my bones?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_02: What does that mean?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: King James, he's given him authority over all flesh.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_02: New American Standard, over all mankind.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: NIV, over all people, because we don't like the reference to man and mankind.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: So we go, flesh, mankind, people.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: How about Romans 11, 14?
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: Paul says, I'd gladly give my own life, and I'm ministering to the Gentiles.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: Quote, if somehow I might make jealous my flesh and save some of them.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_02: King James, those who are my flesh.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_02: New American Standard, my fellow countrymen.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: NIV, my own people.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_02: How about Romans 8, 6?
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: The way of thinking of the flesh is death.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: King James, to be carnally minded is death.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Whoa, flesh is carnally minded.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: New American Standard.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: The mindset on the flesh is death.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, back to a more literal.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_02: NIV.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: The mind of sinful man is death.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I think you can see what the issues are.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Can see all the the precision that comes from uh translation theory, which I guess uh uh someone like a William Tyndale or a John Wycliffe or uh the King James uh committee just never would have would have considered um at at that time.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Would that be correct in the way that was that that would that be how you would present it?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, for example, the King James, I mean they knew that they had to do some dynamic equivalent translation.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, in the Hebrew it it it says all the time, sons of God, Bene Elohim.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they thought, you know, there's women out there too, so it's not just males.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: So even the King James will render sons of God as children of God.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that's interesting, because you go from a Son to a child, and then you make it plural.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because they said, Well, what does sons of God mean?
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't just mean male adolescents or whatever, it means actually all children.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: So you can see, even in the King James, they know that they can't always just be literal all the time.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: They have to also be dynamic sometimes.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: But the question is the degree to which you do it.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so the more you offer dynamic equivalents, the more you move from literal through dynamic to ultimately paraphrases.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_02: So everybody was aware of it.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_02: The question was just to what degree should we make decisions for our readers?
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you come to working with the NIV translation committee, you're working with the dynamic equivalent uh uh translation.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Were there other uh distinctives involved uh with that uh Bible version?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I'll just give you yes, there are lots of other ones.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_02: One was the the attempt, of course, to render in more gender-neutral language whenever you could, and that raised all kinds of discussions and um debates and decisions.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_02: So, for example, when Jesus calls himself the son of man, should you render that son of humanity?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: Should you render it a person?
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: Ezekiel uses the the language son of man just to mean himself, should you translate son of man I, even though it refers to an individual male, because it's an allusion back to Daniel 7, which talks about this divine figure who shows up looking like a man.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: So again, there you have to decide when would a dynamic equivalent translation obscure the passage instead of clarify the passage.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: Give you another good example that's not just uh vocabulary.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody recognizes that Ephesians 1, verses 3 to 14 in Greek is one sentence.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's one sentence, it goes through 11 verses in our English Bible.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_02: So the NIV said, you know what?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: English readers can't read long sentences anymore.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: Our English consultant was aiming for about an eighth grade English reading level because they want to sell these Bibles and have these Bibles read all over the place.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: So you're not going to aim at university level English, you're not going to aim at grade school, that won't work.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: They picked eighth grade.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Well, eighth graders can't read long, complex sentences that go for a page.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: Germans, maybe not Americans.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: So what did the NIV do?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: They took the one sentence in Ephesians 1, 3 to 14, they broke it up into eight different sentences, from one sentence to eight sentences.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, when you do that, you have to add or take away conjunctions.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: You have to figure out how these little clauses become sentences.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_02: You can change the meaning dramatically by breaking up one sentence into eight sentences.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: Everybody did it.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the ESV did five sentences for the one.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_02: The King James did, this is interesting, they did 12.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_02: They even out NIV'd the NIV.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: Now they had a different series of punctuation options in 1611.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: So they they used semicolons and colons in ways we wouldn't today, but they nevertheless broke this thing up into 12 different pieces, if you will.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_02: So that's another kind of decision the NIV had to make.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: The NIV also said, well, look, in contemporary English, we don't like conjunctions very much anymore.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, you can use words like and, but, therefore, however, nevertheless, but you don't want to use them too much.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: So then you get to somebody like Paul.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_02: He loves conjunctions.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: But they go, if we translate all of Paul's conjunctions literally, it's going to sound really pedantic to English readers.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_02: So they just eliminated all kinds of conjunctions.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: And uh that then relies on the reader to be able to supply from context the missing conjunction.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_02: Well, sometimes readers do a good job of supplying that, sometimes they don't.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's a risk you have to take.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_02: Sentence structure, style, like conjunctions, word choice.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_02: These were all things.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, contemporary issues with gender, these were all issues that the NIV was struggling with, that the ESV didn't struggle with so much because they're trying to be more of a formal equivalent translation.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I think that that would be very helpful for our listeners.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe some of our listeners are wondering uh now, how does somebody be selected for a committee like this or for uh you know who who's being chosen and and how how do they uh go about um having valuable people uh on this on these committees?
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know how they do this.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_02: Somehow the the pity people that are in charge of the committees, uh which sometimes usually a publisher like the ESV is under the auspices of Crossway Publishing, the NIV is under the auspices of Zonderman and the International Bible Society.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_02: So they are the ones that are in charge of the committees.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_02: Those folks, in consultation with members of the committee, will say, Oh, we got two members who retired or quit or died or whatever.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_02: We need two more members.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_02: So then they'll just get a list of who do you think are good scholars on the Greek New Testament or the Hebrew Old Testament?
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_02: And they'll get a list and then they'll, I guess, prioritize it, think about it, and then one day you get a phone call or a text message, I guess, today, and say, You want to be on the committee?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: And then you they tell you what's involved and you decide yes or no.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm not sure, to be honest, how they came up with my name way back when, but they did.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_02: And one day I got a phone call saying, Would you like to be on the NIV committee?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: I said, Yeah, that would be an honor.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_02: One of the reasons was I want to get more conjunctions back into the NIV.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_02: Because the NIV was updating.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_02: When I joined the NIV in the 2000s, they were updating the 1984 NIV.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: Because the NIV had been widely disseminated in its 1984 edition, but the 1984 edition was becoming like the King James.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_02: It's like you couldn't go against it, it was becoming almost viewed as inspired.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the committee said, you know what, lots has changed.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: I understand the Bible's getting better and better and better.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: We need a new translation.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_02: So they began to revise the 1984.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the committee that I got involved in, was this committee.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, anyway, that's that's kind of how it works.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then all the decisions for translation are made by a committee, and that means that they're a democratically voted decision.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you uh just to kind of demystify this for a minute, we would be assigned in advance when I was in the NAB, we'd be assigned in advance some passages from the Old and New Testament.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_02: Say, okay, we're gonna meet in this motel, Michigan, and in this motel, we're gonna deal with you know these five passages.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_02: So then you study them and you're assigned.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Would you would you really focus on this passage, Joe Blow and Susie Q, would you focus on that one?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: And everybody else focus on all of them, of course, but you're gonna you're gonna lead the discussion.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_02: So then we would get together as a committee from across the US and Europe, and then we come to the first text, and the leader who had been assigned would say, Okay, here's our text, here's what I think we ought to do with it, here's what other English translations do with it.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're gonna stay the same, change, adapt, whatever, and you you present your opinion.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then everybody else that's been studying it too, before you get there, they throw in their two cents, they argue, argue, argue.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_02: I love your idea, I hate your idea, here's why, whatever.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: And then you always have a timekeeper, because if you just let the these are scholars sitting around a room, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_02: If you let them go on forever, you'll never get anywhere.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_02: So then suddenly the timekeeper will say, Well, we got we've got 18 minutes for this decision, time's up, let's vote.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_02: And then you vote, and whoever wins the vote gets the translation that they are voted for.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: So you trust, of course, God's sovereignty, but it's a very human enterprise.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_02: And hence I want to say the two things that probably come up in our conversation.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_02: One, every translation is a commentary in disguise.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_02: Should you render flesh sinful nature?
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_02: Should you view it, should you render it descendants?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_02: Should you view it, render it just flesh, right?
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_02: You have to make decisions.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: And those decisions are informed by your understanding of the text, which means you're interpreting the text.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_02: But the second thing, of course, is not only is every translation an interpretation of the text, but nobody on the committee views themselves as inspired by God.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_02: Just scholars doing the best job we can.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why translations get updated.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_02: Not very often, unfortunately, but they do.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_02: I say not very often because they're extremely expensive to keep, you know, 12 or 15 scholars working on stuff all the time and getting together and then reprinting things.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so in the contemporary world, there's only been three translations that have been updated in the 20th century, believe it or not.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: The New American Standard, updated from 60, what did I say?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: 60, the first one, 63, 95 in 2020, because the Lockman Foundation pours a lot of money into it and they support it.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: So they're not based on sales, they're based on donations.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: The NIV, because they sold so much, they were the only committee that was able to keep going based on revenue from their sales.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: And then the ESV, like that, was also able to keep going for a while.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: But then I'm not sure, a year and a half, two years ago, they decided, well, we got to stop for a while.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: So now the ESV is frozen, if you will, for a while.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: The NIV is still going, I believe.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not 100% sure, but I think they still have a viable committee.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then the New American Standard, I'm not sure where they're at right now.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_02: I think they're kind of frozen.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: So that's why, for example, through all these years, they'll be making small changes.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_02: You might have an NIV that was published in 2020, let's say, and you're reading it in a Bible study next to somebody who's got an NIV that was published in 2010.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_02: You're reading the same verse.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: There may be a slight difference because they decide to interject a change along the way.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: When the changes get too many, then they go, Oh, we hold it, we need a whole new revision.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: But along the way, you can make little changes.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what the committee is doing.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think most of our listeners will find this uh fascinating.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, thank you for demystifying uh uh some of this.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but perhaps maybe you can make one uh final comment uh um as we bring this interview to uh to a conclusion.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly there are interpretations being uh made off of uh you know words like SARCs, as you uh uh refer to, or uh other phrases.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um but now that this may be demystified in our minds, should we still have confidence in the English text?
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_02: It's a great question.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: My answer is yes, for two reasons.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: One is because our English translations today don't come into existence out of a vacuum, even though we've had three major turning points: the 1500s and the 1600s and the 1900s, when we went back to the Greek and Hebrew full whole scale.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Nevertheless, every English translation has stood on the shoulders of the translations that come before them.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: The ESV, for example, is an update revision of the revised standard version.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so one English translation will do its work not in a vacuum, but in consultation with a 300 and 400-year translation tradition.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: Two heads are better than one, and there's a lot of heads that have been involved in how to render this.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: I love the strength and numbers of the English translation tradition.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: And if you've worked in other countries like I have, I can remember one time teaching in Latvia, and I was just pouring my heart out and soul about this text, and I was looking at my students, and I could tell they weren't getting it at all.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like, what's going on?
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_02: And they were just looking at me blanked or bewildered, and I go, Oh, wait a minute, read to me your Latvian translation of this text.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_02: Well, they read it, and in my humble opinion, it was just completely bad, wrong.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_02: But they had only one Latvian tradition, that was it.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so, of course, what needs to be done is there needs to be new Latin, I'm sorry, new Latvian translations.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, who's gonna do that?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_02: So we have an amazing, amazing wealth in the English translation tradition.
• 33:08
  SPEAKER_02: So much so that when Wycliffe Bible translators go around the world to render the Bible in new languages for the first time, they will use a version of the English Bible that has, I think, three or four or more English translations side by side so that they can see what they're doing in comparison to the English tradition because it's so wealthy and so accurate, if you will.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_02: Now, that doesn't mean we're all going to agree on when flesh should be flesh and when flesh should be world, but the point is we we have a wealth of information to go on.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_02: The second thing I would say is the scholars involved in English Bible translations, myself excluded, are really good.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_02: They're really good.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I I was honored to sit in this committee with the NIV with people that are really first rate scholars.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you have not only the best of the tradition, but you have folks being chosen because of their finely hewn exegetical interpretive skills.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_02: So those are the reasons why I think you should have a lot of confidence.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_02: But again, not everybody in the church should know Hebrew and Greek, but there should be people in the church who know Hebrew and Greek because no translation's inspired, and we can always improve.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I hope we always will improve.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's good that your church can have people like you, Drake, on staff who are scholars in their own right and can help them, together with the rest of the pastoral staff who are careful scholars as well, uh, understand the text for themselves.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_01: We do um believe in an educated uh uh clergy uh with the Schwenckfelders, and it's it is important to be able to read uh from the original language, especially with uh different translation theories and uh different uh uh benchmarks for um uh reading ability.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, we think it's quite important.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you for uh taking the time to uh to answer some of these questions about uh Bible translation, Scott.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh we wish you all the best in your continued scholarly work.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Greg.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: Appreciate it.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Take care of the city.