Bible translations and their development

Transcript

good evening everyone uh so tonight i thought we would take a look rather than looking at the bible uh rather we're gonna look at our bibles and uh talk a little bit about translations and different bible translations that we all might have and there are three main questions that really we're going to try and answer tonight one is going to be what is being translated what has been translated second question is going to be about how that is being translated and finally why it's being translated and the importance of the bible being translated as many times it has been so to start i thought we would begin excuse me by taking a look at uh the time before the bible was even in english now by the time that the bible was first translated into english it was before uh before that it was translated into latin and it was something called the latin vulgates and this was a translation that was used by the roman catholic church and they held a certain level of authority over the known world and even over the word of god at the time um in particular they prohibited the translation of the bible into common english and instead they insisted that the common people would simply hear the word of god read and expounded from from latin from again this latin vulgate translation and it was this prohibition this uh this ban on translating the bible that actually naturally you know as as humans are naturally rebellious led them to the controversial and dangerous task of translating the bible into english and thankfully they did and the first one to undertake the duty of translating the bible into english was a man by the name of john wycliffe and it was in the late 1300s and this is just a brief little history class that i'm sure rich would do a much better job with but in the late 1300s uh wycliffe created the first english translation of the bible however it was translated not from the original greek and hebrew that we might think about but rather this was translated out of the latin and again this was wycliffe's bible and his work inspired future bible translations into the common english william tyndale is uh the next person of note here who was no doubt inspired by uh the first english bible by john uh john wycliffe but he continued this very dangerous task of translating the bible into english uh and this time he actually did translate it from the greek and the hebrew texts and as a result he was labeled a heretic and actually executed and murdered for his work in the early 1500s and then shortly after that and and with tyndale's bible that you know inspired a multitude of other english bibles and finally we get to uh the king james version and its revision the new king james uh version and these are i skipped ahead uh so this does bring us to the king james version not the new king james and ahead of myself uh but um it brings us to what's likely the most widely used translation within our community here at the very least in the top three uh and it is the king james version and it was inspired by uh this man william tyndale's work to first translate the bible from the original greek and hebrew into english and it shares a lot of similarities the king james shares a lot of similarities with this with the tyndale bible and most notably are the greek manuscripts that are used to translate the new testament when like translation scholars will will sort of talk about you know the different different texts and manuscripts used usually the old testament is pretty cut and dry but it's the new testament manuscripts that have a bit more uh a bit more of an argument one way or another and the king james version and its revision the new king james version are the only two bible versions today i think i'm as far as i know uh that use and base its translation of the new testament on a set of greek manuscript greek manuscripts that are known as the textus receptus now that's latin for the received text and this is the same greek manuscripts that william tyndale was was uh basing his translation on his original english translation now the textus receptus is uh again the greek manuscripts at the time uh and it contained only six just six greek manuscripts that dated back only to the 10th century uh so quite a bit of diff of distance between the textus receptus these greek manuscripts and the original uh original texts when they were first first written these were copies of copies of copies however however many many times and of these six texts in this collection only one of them contained the gospels and another one uh was the only one that contained most of the book of revelation the final six verses were missing completely and were translated what is called back translated from the latin into greek and so there is a lot of sort of variances and discrepancies uh there then manuscripts that are found later in uh in history and so while the textus receptus appears to have quite a few drawbacks uh we have to remember that these manuscripts were well they were the best available at the time and as more and more of these manuscripts began to be discovered uh it turned out that the majority of these manuscripts that were discovered they did agree with the textus receptus in most places albeit the mo the most sort of the majority of all of these manuscripts also dated around the same time period as the textus receptus so still quite a long time between when these manuscripts were written and when the originals were written you know a good several hundred years and so the question remains if the majority of greek manuscripts agree with the textus receptus why then do only two bible translations base the new testament off of it right so it's only the king james and only the new king james based their new testaments off of this set of greek manuscripts which again uh agree with the majority of manuscripts discovered today and this question is actually the source of quite a bit of controversy among you know bible scholars and translation scholars and uh unfortunately it's i think it's quite needless um you know i recently saw a post shared on facebook and this i think was sort of the the thing that kind of implanted this idea for a class in my head and it was it was a post on facebook essentially criticizing modern translations of the bible particularly the niv and the esv for quote unquote removing verses from the bible and on one hand this post was not totally incorrect because there in fact are verses in the king james version that appear to be missing from any modern version with the exception of the new king james but the truth of the matter is that these verses well they weren't so much removed as they were added and this leads us to the answer of our question a question being why would only two bible translations base their new testaments off of the majority of these greek manuscripts that have been found because there exists another set of greek manuscripts of greek texts of the new testament that date much earlier than the textus receptus the received text and the majority of manuscripts so they're much closer to the time that the original would have actually been written in this set of greek texts is referred to as the critical text so we have on one hand we have the textus receptus or the received text in this again as the king james and the new king james and then we have the critical text on the other hand and this is everything else um and so still we we asked why would translations use different greek texts if the textus receptus agrees with the majority of manuscripts and so the argument then for for the textus receptus the argument for the greek manuscripts for the king james and for the new king james is to put it simply that that more is better you know majority rules kind of thing the majority of texts agree with us and that's a fair argument um and i think my point with this is is not to make you lean one way or another but it's just to present you both both arguments here one is that more is better than the argument for the critical text which is you know the esv the niv the nasb the whatever else translation you can think of the argument here then is the older the better right so the critical text includes greek manuscripts dating as early as the 2nd century as opposed to the 10th like with the textus receptus admittedly there are fewer surviving manuscripts of this age but many bible translation scholars and experts although not all but many of them prefer the critical text this older being better um sort of argument and the ultimate reason for this is that there are no originals in existence but rather there are copies of the text there are copies of copies of comments and obviously this was all well before the invention of the printing press there was no you know there was no command to see command v copy and paste uh and rather these manuscripts would have been copied out by hand and well these copyists made mistakes and so the argument goes that majority of these texts which again date much later than the early manuscripts of the critical texts that these texts the majority of them actually reflect the accumulation of these copying errors over the years now it's similar to a game that we might remember from like elementary school and that's the game telephone it's when you have a group of children sitting in a big circle and one of them whispers a phrase into the ear of the person next to them then that person whispers it to the next person and so on and so forth all around this big circle and then what began as my dog likes to fetch eventually turns into my birdhouses from the beach and it just there's a lot of change and in this to a much lesser degree uh you know than that example uh is what we see with these copies of uh the greek new testament and thankfully you know thanks be to god for this that that most of these variations and these uh copying errors are insignificant and they don't affect any major doctrines most of them perhaps the biggest i think glaring example of this sort of this copy error that was added later to the original text perhaps this biggest example could be found in 1st john chapter 5. so let's all actually take a look there now at first john chapter 5 and it's verse verses 5 through nine i'm going to read them from the king james the king james reads who is he that overcometh the world but he that believeth that jesus is the son of god this is he that came by water and blood even jesus christ not by water only but by water and blood and it is the spirit that beareth witness because the spirit is truth and now this verse in the king james for there are three that bear record in heaven the father the word and the holy ghost and these three are one it continues and there are three that bear witness in earth the spirit and the water and the blood and these three agree in one if we receive the witness of men the witness of god is greater for this is the witness of god which he had testified in his son so there's a pretty i think concerning verse in the middle there for us is christadelphians there are three that their record in heaven the father the word and the holy ghost and these three are one it kind of you know is is a a bit of a head scratcher um and it's brother ron abel in rested scriptures in his book he writes of he writes about this verse and here's what he says he refers to it as uh being extremely unlikely that it was included in the original text he says but it turned out that the discovered manuscript which is called the uh the manfort manuscripts now in trinity college library dublin this was the document submitted to erasmus the the publisher of the textus receptus the manuscript that was submitted to him is but a 15th century production of no critical value and the disputed words are taken from some corrupt latin manuscripts now that is what uh brother ron abel has to say regarding that verse and that's not just a christadelphian uh take but that's that's something that's regarded pretty universally among a lot of uh a lot of translation experts um is that the this particular verse was something that was added later and if we were to take a look at the same set of verses from a more modern version such as the esb we would see that it skipped right over and it's just missing so the problem verse that we saw in the king james is completely removed and thankfully this verse stands alone as being one that's really kind of contrary to sound doctrine that that kind of opposes what we know the bible to teach uh and thankfully that again it stands alone because a lot of these other additions are insignificant less significance and another example of one of these less significance changes the more common kind of changes that we're going to see is found in 1 thessalonians chapter 1. first thessalonians chapter one reads from the king james paul and silvanus and timothy atmotheus unto the church of the thessalonians which is in god the father and in the lord jesus christ grace be unto you and peace from god our father and the lord jesus christ however when we read the same verse from the esv we simply read grace to you and peace and it skips it removes from god our father and the lord jesus christ now this sort of error or addition as we can think of it seen in the king james is referred to as a harmonization it's kind of a nice music teacher word so i like it harmonization and it's where it's where the copyists likely added a phrase that's found elsewhere to harmonize uh the one passage with the other and in this case it's the beginning of most paul's letters where he says grace to you and peace from god our father in the lord jesus christ this is how second thessalonians starts in the king james and in the esv this is how many of paul's letters starts it's most commonly seen ever in the gospels as the copyists somewhat often likely added certain phrases to let's say the gospel of matthew since it was in a parallel account of the same same uh you know the same passage essentially in luke and so they added a phrase from the one to the other passage and once again you know i i can't stress this enough thanks be to god that that all of these changes and these variations with the one glaring exception we talked about they're only minor and insignificant uh and they don't stand you know opposed they don't butt heads with with any major doctrinal points um and so we we can rest assured with that and again this is just to provide an overview of sort of the two camps that we have with bible translations again we have the textus receptus which has the majority of texts that are later and the critical text which are fewer manuscripts but date earlier and closer to the time of the original writings and so that's sort of i know that's a lot of information um and that's really getting down to the what of what is being translated uh so we'll pause here if anyone has any questions because i know i i threw a lot at you uh so i want to know if rich dineen agrees with peter actually so so pete thanks for the for this um so did you say in the beginning texas receptus and the critical text are limited to the greek they're limited to the new testament that's what this is all about so this is strictly about the uh new testament the old testament is is much more cut and dry regardless of which translation is going to be much more similar regarding the uh the what's called the textual basis okay all right and it seems like there's a lot of um uh a lot of stress in our community on using the king james as a matter of fact it's in our constitution that we're supposed to read in boston from from the king james from the platform um and i i wonder i mean you you've highlighted uh one difference uh between the two sets um are there others that um are there others that what are the other ones that are that are driving chris adelphians to use uh the texas receptus and away from the critical text if they if i mean your appreciation is that these are all kind of ho-hum why well what do you why are you arguing so do you know what yeah just a historical community argument about about right version now there are some um you know that that are larger again not not tackling any major uh like not introducing any anything contrary to major doctrine but an example that comes to my mind is the lord's prayer where the ending of the lord's prayer for thine is the kingdom in the heaven and the kingdom and the power and glory forever amen uh is missing from uh the uh the critical text yeah so so that is called the the doxology the ending of the lord's prayer that would be an example of one that uh you know some people might certainly prefer we text this receptus over and uh and we're gonna talk more about the use of different translations in our community and looking more at so we've talked about what was being translated in the the basis of a lot of these translations and then we're gonna dive into in a moment uh the how things are being translated and so i think we'll we'll clear up some things that you uh are uh wondering about um so let's let's actually move on just for the sake of time so so now that we've tackled the question of what is being translated we can start to shift our focus now to how it's being translated see every bible translation seeks a balance between two goals right there's accuracy and there's readability and this balance is what's referred to as a translation philosophy and it looks different for each translation so what we're going to see then is that each bible translation philosophy it falls somewhere on a spectrum now i'm going to share my screen here uh and i have a image here here we go see that already has word for word thought for thought yep and all that great so now that we've uh we can we can start to take a look at this translation spectrum so on one side uh we have word for word and you'll see there it says formal equivalence um and formal equivalence also known as word for word or a quote-unquote literal translation it seeks to keep the form and the sentence structure the same as the original greek and hebrew so for individual words these translations are going to try to use the same english word for a hebrew or greek word as often as they can as well as maintaining the same dramatic structure as the original texts now there are advantages and disadvantages to to any of these uh any of these translation philosophies so with this word for word formal equivalence literal translation the advantages and strengths are uh found in its accuracy to the biblical language found in the original manuscripts with a formal equivalent translation you're going to have a clearer you're going to have clearer bible callbacks clear bible echoes and illusions with certain keywords and key phrases there's a lot of depth and a lot of benefit in looking more deeply into the original language and formal equivalent translations do a great job at maintaining the structure and the form of the original greek and hebrew but perhaps the biggest disadvantage of this approach to this approach is that the adherence to the form and the structure of the original language is achieved at the expense of readability of readability excuse me um achieve at the expense of readability so formal equivalent translations often are more difficult to understand especially if you aren't used to a translation like that and you can think of people who read at a lower level people who perhaps have english as a second language uh they're going to struggle more with a formal equivalent translation they're going to struggle to to understand and really grasp the meaning of god's message so that is formal equivalent word for word translations uh i'm not going to tackle each subset of this spectrum here but on the other side we have functional equivalent translations or thought for thought as they're sometimes referred to as opposed to word for word sometimes you might hear the phrase idiomatic translation as well now these kinds of translations these are translations such as the niv the new living translation the new english translation and these translations are going to alter the form and the sentence structure of the original languages in order to present the main idea of a verse phrase or sentence more clearly in english now this approach offers a lot of strengths first of all it's going to have a very readable translation translators of this kind of philosophy this thought for thought um well they have a unified goal which is to be faithful to the original meaning of the text while using language that is clear and natural to modern readers to put it another way the goal is that today's readers of the bible will understand it in english in the same way that the original readers understood it in greek or in hebrew so as well as simply being readable a thought for thought translation is going to provide you with a different perspective in regards to connections and uh illusions and callbacks and echoes see with the word for word translation you might read something and think well this word or this phrase reminds me of another passage which is great and that's a wonderful connection we can make whereas a thought for thought translation it might make you think well the main idea here reminds me of the main idea of a different passage and so it's a similar you know as we're as we're seeing the connections and the intricacies of god's word it just provides you with an another perspective that i think uh can be very beneficial but then for the disadvantages the clear disadvantage here is that with the thought for thought approach there is a greater room for error on the translators part now while the naturalness of the language that that's clarity and uh the the fact that it kind of sounds the way that we might say it that naturalness of the language while it does provide great readability it sometimes is done at the expense of accuracy sometimes now this translation philosophy requires that the translators determine and interpret the meaning first so that there's greater margin for error in addition this approach can also lose some of the nuance of the meaning in pursuit of simplicity and clarity of language so that is the thought for thought the functional equivalence translation so as opposed to the king james esv nasv that we have with the word for word translations here we have the niv the new living translation um [Music] that the net bible however it's important to note here that we see exceptionally it's important to note here that even translations like the king james like the esv like the nasb they also have to alter the original text so that the translation is comprehensible so that it makes sense right and as well as to fit what the translators decide is appropriate based on the context so even the more literal translations have some margin for error in regards to translators interpretation now if you have a bible that falls under this category if you take a look at the preface of your bible you'll likely find the phrase essentially literal translation now that word literal that we read there is sometimes equated with better um and even these literal translations have the margin for error and so it's a shame i think that we make that connection between literal and automatically better than say a thought for thought translation because well do we really know what we mean when we say the word literal let's take for instance the word key in english the word key k-e-y if i asked what the literal meaning of the word key is i'm sure that many of you were thinking what you used to unlock the door but perhaps some of you were thinking about the key on your computer's keyboard or maybe you were thinking about the key of c major or the florida keys or an answer key or the key point see words can have many different meanings and often they don't just have one literal meaning and so to further complicate this then when we add in and we factor in the idea of translation it gets even trickier so let's pretend that we wanted to try and translate the word key from english into spanish now the issue here is that there are five different words in spanish for the same english word ki so when translating the bible the same goes for translating greek and hebrew into english and there's a whole lot of of difficulty in this and what we get at what we ultimately see is that all translators whether it's the translators for the king james version or for the niv they first had to look at the context of the word the context of the phrase the sentence the verse to determine for themselves what the text is saying and at its core what we will understand is that all translation is interpretation now that might be an idea that makes us a little uncomfortable at first after all you know each translation is going to have its own biases and sometimes those biases can lead to interpretations that are wrong and incorrect but god reassures us that his people can learn the truth of the gospel through the use of translations that are not in the original greek and hebrew even with its errors let's consider the septuagint now this is the greek translation of the old testament so it was taken out of the hebrew and translated into greek and when we read the new testament and we read paul's letters or we read the letter to the hebrews or even when jesus himself is quoting the old testament they're often quoting from the septuagint from this greek translation of the old testament out of the original language and so clearly it's what we see is that reading god's word through a translation into our own language clearly it's an acceptable way to read god's word but don't get me wrong i i am not saying that every translation is ultimately correct i mean we we looked at that verse in in first john that that sort of trinity heavy verse that we we talked about as being an addition uh to to the the original text and what we see is that sometimes the translators do get it wrong and this is something that i think our community has has recognized at least on paper uh in our statement of faith there is a section talking about inspiration of the bible and it reads like this that the book currently known as the bible is the only source of knowledge concerning god and his purposes of the present extant and the present time are available in the earth and that the same the bible was wholly given by inspiration of god in the writers and are consequently without error in all parts of them then there's a little clause here that says accept such as maybe due to errors of transcription or translation there is no perfect bible translation every single translation is going to have something whether it's a small minor thing or something a little bit more major like what we saw in the first john there's gonna be biases in the translators parts there's going to be some errors some alterations of god's word and i think that this is one reason why i believe it's so important for us to read from multiple translations you read from a bible that falls on one side of that spectrum we looked at if the king james is your bible that's great but i think it's important that we read from across the spectrum that we try and read from the niv or from the net bible and on the flip side if we are uh uh the proud owner and reader of an niv there's benefit in reading from something like the esv or the king james the new king james that has that more word-for-word approach we're going to we're going to get different things out of it if we are reading from the king james or the esv and that's what we've known we're going to we're going to kind of fall into a routine when it comes to certain bible passages that we know really well and with any routine sometimes that meaning behind it can lose a little bit of its power for us and when there are passages in the bible that we're so used to reading when we read it in a new word when we read it from a new translation that can actually help to kind of reignite that fire within us that that shines that verse that passage in a new light that really opens our eyes in a spiritual way to to be encouraged and uplifted and on the flip side if you read the niv or the nlt you can benefit from reading one of these word for word translations you're going to get different callbacks you're going to get a different understanding of the biblical language and the the use of certain words of certain phrases and there's a great great benefit and new perspectives that we can gain from reading different translations so we've tackled the what of translation we've tackled the how and we've just a little bit tackled the why and i believe that something to be said here that paul mentions in first corinthians so in first corinthians chapter 14 we're going to read from verses 1 through 4. pursue love and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts especially that you may prophesy for the one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to god for no one understands him but he utters mysteries in the spirit on the other hand the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation the one who speaks in a tongue builds up himself but the one who prophesies builds up the church now this passage when we look at the context is clearly talking about the spiritual gifts of speaking in tongues and of prophesying and and i think and i actually i believe that we can take the principle behind these passages and apply it to our community today that god's message is meant to be understood and whether you understand god's message in the king james or if you understand god's message with the niv or with the nlt god's message is meant to be understood by his people the bible is more accessible today than it has ever been into english alone there's more than a hundred different bible translations we should see this as a blessing god's word is inspired and it is preserved for his creation to read and to learn from so whether you're reading the niv or the esv the new living translation of the new or the new king james you can not only learn the truth of the gospel but you can grow in christ so let's view the different translations that are available to us as a blessing that we can do as paul exhorts in first corinthians so that we all might be able to understand so that the body of christ is built up