Against the Theory of Dynamic Equivalence

Among Bible scholars there is a school which is always inquiring into the genres or rhetorical forms of speech represented in any given passage of the Bible, and also the social settings which are supposed to be connected with these forms. This approach is called form criticism, and it was developed largely by German scholars in the early twentieth century. Among these scholars, whether they be German or English-speaking, one constantly hears German phrases. The social setting is called the Sitz im Leben. The “oracle of salvation” introduced by “Fear not” is the Heilszusage, and so on. When I was in the seminary learning about all this, I at first wondered why it should be necessary to use these German words; but then I learned that the German words are used because they are recognized as technical terms, and the English equivalents are not. Students were expected to learn the terminology of the field, just as in any other field of study.

Likewise, there were many Greek and Hebrew words to be learned. These were the “technical terms” of the Bible itself. The professors often warned us students about the important semantic differences between various Greek and Hebrew words and their closest English equivalents. The Hebrew word תורה (torah), for instance, was not always equivalent to the Greek νομος (nomos) or the English law, and the Hebrew נֶפֶש (nephesh) did not always refer to the soul, etc. Anyone who has been to a theological school knows very well how often points like this are emphasized by scholars.

I mention this at the beginning of this book on Bible translation because I want the reader who has not been exposed to this kind of study to know how much is made of words and their precise usage in theological schools. Ministers in training cannot go through three years of seminary without being impressed with the undeniable differences between Hebrew, Greek, and English, and with the delicate problems of translating many key words of the Bible into our language. It is not a simple and easy task. Indeed, it is not fully possible, and that is why ministers are taught the biblical languages in seminary. And in addition to this, in the more advanced studies, one must also learn a whole set of technical terms in German. The student in this case might well ask why these German terms are adopted rather than translated, but again, the scholarly culture of linguistic precision is such that the question would seem almost foolish. These are technical terms, and if they are adopted from another language, so much the better, because then they will not be confused with informal expressions used in our everyday language.

It is easy to get carried away with fine distinctions. Scholars are often accused of losing their common sense in a multitude of hair-splitting distinctions, and of using foreign words and difficult terminology merely to impress the unlearned. In some cases this undoubtedly happens. We also must be on guard against the elitist attitude taken by many in the Roman Catholic tradition, which in its extreme form caused the Roman Catholic Church to oppose the translation of the Bible into English in the first place. But I want to suggest here that those who are not used to careful study of the Bible may easily fall into an opposite error: the error of despising many distinctions which really do make an important difference in our understanding of the Bible, despising the role of trained teachers in the Church, and generally failing to recognize the bad effects that arise from vague and loose words on any important subject. The Bible is a very important book, and it deserves our utmost care. This is all the more true when we consider that the later portions of Scripture often dwell upon linguistic details in the earlier books. And if we believe that every word of the Bible is inspired by God, how can we be careless of these words?

I also mention form criticism, with its emphasis on the text’s situation in life, for another reason: I believe that a translation of the Bible must take account of the “sociological setting” in which the Bible came to be, and in which it belongs: namely, the Church of Jesus Christ. The translator must remember that this book was given to the Church and it belongs to her. And this fact, this Sitz im Leben of the Bible as a whole, is not without some consequences for our methods of translation.

1. The Bible in the Church

This passage from Nehemiah gives an account of the day when Ezra and his fellow-ministers of the Word gathered the people together and began to teach them the contents of the “Book of the Law of Moses.” It says that they read from it distinctly, and that they caused the people to understand the meaning of the words. Jewish tradition says that this was the beginning of those translations into Aramaic called Targums, free renderings of the Hebrew which were used by Jews in later times to explain the meaning of the archaic Hebrew text. But it is unlikely that such a translation is referred to here, because farther on in the book we read of Nehemiah’s indignation when he discovered that some of the children of the Jews who had married foreign women could not understand “the language of the Jews.” ⁽³⁾ Nehemiah was not inclined to provide a translation for such, but rather, turning to their fathers, he “contended with them, and cursed them, and smote certain of them, and plucked off their hair, and made them swear by God ...” (13:25) Hebrew was not forgotten by the Jews so quickly during their short captivity in Babylon. At a later time they did forget their mother tongue, but in the days of Nehemiah this had not yet come to pass. This passage therefore describes a situation which is very familiar to us as Christians. The people come together. The Scripture is read to them in portions, followed by explanatory comments. We would call it “expository preaching.” This is how most Christians in all ages have acquired a knowledge and an understanding of the Bible. But there are other ways:

Here is a situation which is also familiar to many of us. The man is alone and reading his Bible. Probably he is reading the Septuagint version. In any case, he is having a problem understanding the passage that he is reading. When Philip comes along he asks the man if he understands the passage, and the man readily admits that he is in need of help. It is for this purpose that the Lord has sent Philip to him, who explains the passage he is reading and several others besides.

What do these two situations have in common? Both of them involve a Bible, an audience or reader, and a teacher appointed for the purpose of explaining the Bible. It is taken for granted that the Bible is not self-explanatory, and that the common reader or hearer stands in need of a teacher. The prologue to Luke’s Gospel states that it was written “that you may have certainty concerning the things (λόγων) you have been taught.” The word translated “you have been taught” here (κατηχήθης, katēchēthēs) pertains to a course of instruction in religious matters, κατήχησις, katēchēsis. The Gospel is thus presented not as a substitute for catechesis, but for the further education and confirmation of one who has already been catechized. ⁽⁴⁾ And in addition to this teaching ministry in the Church we encounter several statements in the Bible declaring that the Bible cannot be rightly understood by those who lack the Spirit of God. Jesus says to his questioners, “Why do you not understand my speech [λαλια]? It is because you cannot hear my word [λογος]” (John 8:43). And Paul declares, “these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit ... we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God ... connecting spiritual things with spiritual.” (1 Cor. 2:10-13, a passage which we will have more to say about below). Some things in the Bible require much patient reflection to be understood.

In the writings of John we even find things that seem deliberately mystifying. In the eighth chapter of his Gospel, the whole point of the dialogue between Jesus and “the Jews” is to show how incapable they are of understanding his sayings. Over and over again “they did not understand” what he was talking about (v. 27). When he says, “the Truth shall set you free,” they answer that they have never been slaves to any man. When he denies that they are sons of Abraham, they protest that they were not born of fornication (v. 41). When he says “if a man keep my word, he will never see death,” they think that he is speaking of physical death (v. 52). Because their minds are stuck on the level “of this world” (v. 23), they take everything in a worldly literal sense, and they cannot understand his metaphorical language. They are unregenerate, born “from below,” and “not of God” (v. 47). Many other passages make this same point in both the Old and the New Testament.

The relationship, then, between the Bible and its intended readers is not simple and direct. It is conditioned by the reader’s relationship to Christ and to his Church. The Bible itself declares that it is not easy to be understood by all.

2. The Bible apart from the Church

Our observation that the Bible is a difficult book to those who are outside the church does not sit well with many people these days. “On the contrary,” they say, “the Bible is really quite simple: it is all a matter of translation. The old literal method of translation, which makes for such hard reading, is to blame. But if we will only put the Bible in simpler and more idiomatic English it will need no explanation. People who are unfamiliar with ‘church jargon’ might then read and understand it with ease.” This is the basic presupposition of the method of translation called “dynamic equivalence.”

The name of Eugene Nida, an American linguist, is usually mentioned in connection with this method of translation, because it was he who coined the phrase “dynamic equivalence.” He is generally regarded as the seminal theorist behind it. Nida was for more than thirty years (1946-1980) the Executive Secretary of the Translations Department of the American Bible Society, and during this time he published a number of books and articles explaining and promoting this approach. ⁽⁵⁾ But in fact there is little that can be called original in Nida’s books. His contributions were more on the practical side than on the theoretical. He gathered up a number of ideas about language that were current among linguists in his time, he applied them to the task of Bible translation, and he presented these ideas in a very engaging and understandable way. He was essentially a popularizer of theoretical ideas and principles that might serve to bring some methodological discipline into “the pioneering efforts of missionaries translating the Scriptures for remote, primitive tribes.” ⁽⁶⁾ His books are packed with examples of translation problems drawn from the experience of missionary translators who were trying to put the Bible into the local languages of South-American and African tribes (most of which lacked even a system of writing at the time), and his examples show very plainly that if people were to have the Bible in these languages, in versions that were to be immediately intelligible to the uneducated, the only practical approach to the task was to use a paraphrastic method. Reading his books, one gets a vivid impression of how difficult the task is, and how wrong it is to think that an essentially literal translation could be produced in these languages in their present state of development.

For our purposes, it is important to notice that Nida was not primarily concerned with English translations. He was preoccupied with the problems of translating the Bible into the tongues of primitive tribes who were at that time being reached for the first time by Christian missionaries, and with the need for new approaches to deal with the kind of linguistic constraints that made translations into these languages so difficult. This missionary orientation is conspicuous in Nida’s writings on the subject. But it should also be noticed that in addition to the purely linguistic constraints that he discusses, Nida also imposes some constraints which are non-linguistic in nature. These come from his philosophy of ministry, in particular his conception of the task of the Christian missionary. Nida believed that a missionary should not be much concerned with the planting of churches, or with the perpetuation of any tradition of biblical interpretation.

From this and other similar statements we can see that Nida was concerned with producing versions of the Bible which might be useful outside the context of an established church—outside of or prior to any teaching ministry, that is. Obviously, such a version could not be one which required explanations or any introductory preparation of the readers; the versions would have to be made as simple and idiomatic as possible — not only because of the nature of the languages into which it is being translated, and not only because of the primitive cultural state of the people who spoke these languages, but because the teaching ministry of the Church was simply left out of the equation. Nida asserted that “the real test of the translation is its intelligibility to the non-Christian,” and he even maintained that “there certainly must be something wrong with the translation” if phrases in it are misunderstood by “illiterates who have not been under the influence of the missionary’s teaching.” ⁽⁸⁾ The Bible is simply delivered into the midst of a society, in such a form that it may be immediately understood by the common people. Here Nida is making statements as a missiologist, not as a linguist; and he is using a particular philosophy of ministry as the basis for his philosophy of translation.

Although Nida’s primary focus was on foreign missions, he observed that his principles of translation might also be applied in the making of English versions for people in civilized nations. We notice the phrase “whether in central Africa or central Kansas” in Nida’s paragraph above. It was not only the primitive tribes who were to receive the new “indigenous” versions, but all peoples everywhere. Despite the fact that in civilized nations we have a fully-developed Christian ministry, in which a special vocabulary has always been used for theological subjects, the new versions would pretend that none of this existed. This is the attitude towards the Church and its ministry which underlies the “dynamic equivalence” approach.

The remainder of this book will largely concern itself with the goals, effects, characteristics, and the presuppositions of this method, under whatever name it may be practiced. The Good News Bible (also called Today’s English Version) of the American Bible Society may be taken as the best example of what Nida was proposing. The Contemporary English Version and the New Living Translation are other well-known examples.

We have already brought under discussion the first, and, I believe, the most fundamental presupposition of the method: the idea that the Bible precedes the Church. This is an alluring idea for us Protestants, because it agrees with our idea that the Church is founded on the Scriptures, not the other way around, as in Catholicism; but in fact Nida’s idea represents an extreme position which does not comport with other elements of Protestant ecclesiology. Strictly speaking, the Bible as we have it did not precede the Church. The Church was founded by the oral ministry of the prophets and the apostles, which is incorporated in the Bible; but the writings which we have in the Bible in their present form are addressed to the Church as already founded. This is evident even on a superficial level, in the forms of address used throughout the Scriptures; and it is true at much deeper levels also, in the many things that go unspoken or unexplained in the Bible. There is much in the Scriptures which cannot be understood—not even in a “dynamic equivalence” version—without preparation of some kind.

Historically, at least, Protestants have recognized that the gospel must first be preached, and that people must be introduced to the Christian faith and the Bible by various summaries and explanations, whether they be written out in the form of catechisms, or conveyed from the pulpit, or included in editions of the Bible. The early Protestant translations of the Bible included a good deal of explanatory material in prefaces and marginal notes. It is said that Tyndale once claimed that he would make “the boy who drives the plough” know Scripture better than his Popish adversaries did, ⁽⁹⁾ but to this end he supplied the ploughboys with prefaces and footnotes. His preface to the Epistle to the Romans (which was for the most part a translation of Luther’s) was longer than the epistle itself! The makers of the Geneva Bible included thousands of explanatory marginal notes. These early versions were in fact “study Bibles.” Luther and Calvin gave much of their time to writing commentaries, catechisms, and theological treatises. The Protestant Reformation came about through much more than the mere circulation of copies of the Bible. No, the Church does not spring from the Scriptures in the simple manner that Nida envisions, and God did not intend for it to do so. The Bible is not a rack of cartoonish tracts, to be picked up willy-nilly by mildly interested individuals who are unwilling to give time and effort to understanding it.

Undoubtedly the reductionistic view of Scripture and the casual denigration of the Church that we see in Nida and other champions of “dynamic equivalence” has much to do with the extreme individualism which has been destroying all sense of community in Western societies for the past century. We are now assumed to be reading the Bible at home alone. And so of course the idea comes that the Bible must be made free of difficulties, easily understood throughout. It should be unambiguous, simple, and clear even to the “first-time reader” who has not so much as set his foot in a church. But however much these versions may smooth the way for such a lonely reader on the sentence level, they cannot solve the larger questions of interpretation which must press upon the mind of any thoughtful reader, such as question asked by the Ethiopian in Acts 8:34. After all the simplification that can be done by a translator is done, there is still the need of a teacher.

3. The Language of the Bible

So said the makers of the Geneva Bible in their preface. It is very interesting that the Puritans who gave us this version would find in Scripture itself their guidance for a method of translation. The Apostles themselves were translators, after all. They did not give us a complete translation of the Old Testament, choosing rather to use the familiar Septuagint in their ministry to the Greek-speaking nations; but in a number of places where they quote from the Old Testament they do not use the Septuagint, and give us their own rendering. From these examples we can see readily enough that the inspired authors of the New Testament favored literal translation, with Hebrew idioms and all carried straight over into Greek. ⁽¹⁰⁾ And why? Undoubtedly they believed that there was something significant in every word of the Scripture, as do some of us today. In any case, the Bible was certainly not written in idiomatic and colloquial Greek, as some defenders of dynamic equivalence have claimed. A truer estimate is made by E.C. Hoskyns:

I do not think that the promoters of simple everyday language in Bible translation have any appreciation for the important conceptual differences which uncommon “biblical” phrases and words often serve to convey. In the Good News Bible at 2 Cor.12:2 we read, “I know a certain Christian man.” The expression εν Χριστω “in Christ” is often rendered “Christian” in this version. But they are not really equivalent expressions. The phrase “in Christ” conveys a whole package of meaning. It implicitly teaches the relationship of the man to Christ, and emphasizes Christ himself over the man. It makes a metaphysical statement: the man is in Christ. They are in vital union with one another. ⁽¹²⁾ The man is not merely one of a category of people who go by the name of “Christian” as a descriptive adjective. This is important. It is not trivial. The language teaches us something that cannot be translated into banal newspaper language. This is the kind of thing that is always being discarded in “dynamic equivalence,” and the cumulative effect of so many changes like this is that it prevents us from entering fully into the concepts that are unique to the Scriptures. We are allowed to remain in the newspaper-world of twenty-first century America, and this is not for our benefit.

The Scriptures say in several places that God spoke his words through or by means of the prophets. For example, in Matthew 1:22 we read that the Lord spoke δια του προφητου “through the prophet,” and in Hebrews 1:1, εν τοις προφηταις “by means of the prophets.” This manner of speaking is meaningful. It is not equivalent to the expression, “God’s prophets spoke his message to our ancestors” as in the Contemporary English Version at Hebrews 1:1, or “the Lord’s promise came true just as the prophet had said” at Matthew 1:22. These renderings do not convey to the reader the emphasis on God as the initiator and author of the prophetic message, and it does not convey the concept of mere instrumentality on the part of the prophets. The word “through” is a little preposition which carries a lot of meaning here.⁽¹³⁾ But the literal translation was avoided by the CEV translators because they thought it too difficult. Barclay M. Newman explains, “The use of through with persons or abstract nouns has been rejected by the CEV translators because doing something ‘through someone’ is an extremely difficult linguistic concept for many people to process.” ⁽¹⁴⁾ Indeed this manner of speaking may seem strange to someone who is unfamiliar with the concept of inspiration which it expresses, but in such a case would not this verse and several others like it, as literally translated, serve well as a means of explaining inspiration?

A similar case is in John 3:21, “But he who does what is true comes to the light, that it may be clearly seen that his deeds have been wrought in God” (RSV). In his commentary on John’s Gospel, Westcott explains that the phrase “wrought in God” (ἐν θεῷ ἐστιν εἰργασμένα) means that the works of a believer are produced “in union with him, and therefore by his power. The order [of the Greek words] lays the emphasis on God: ‘that it is in God, and not by the man’s own strength, they have been wrought.’” ⁽¹⁵⁾ Compare this with the New Living Translation: “But those who do what is right come to the light gladly, so everyone can see that they are doing what God wants.” This is indeed simpler and more natural-sounding than any literal rendering could be; but the meaning of the Greek, as explained by Westcott, is completely hidden by it. Instead of the believer working with and through God (ἐν θεῷ) to bear the fruit of righteousness, he simply does “what God wants.” Even worse is the rendering of Today’s New International Version: “... so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God” — in which the words “sight of” have been inserted quite arbitrarily. In both versions the distortion of meaning is caused by forcing the statement into something that sounds more idiomatic in everyday English.

In the passage quoted from E.C. Hoskyns above, he mentions the presence of “literary allusions” in the Bible. In literary criticism, an “allusion” is an indirect reference to something written by another author, as distinguished from a direct quotation. One standard handbook of literary terms defines “allusion” as follows:

It is perhaps misleading to talk about the allusions in the Bible as a “literary” phenomenon, however, because the allusions in the Bible are not just artistic literary touches to be appreciated by those who read the Bible “as literature.” In Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen and John Milton’s Paradise Lost there are many allusions to the epic literature of pagan antiquity, but these literary allusions do not carry the same religious significance as their allusions to the Bible. They did not believe the pagan myths and legends to which they allude. In the same manner some authors of the Victorian Era allude to the Bible without any serious religious purpose. Their allusions are merely literary. But when the Apostles who wrote the books of our New Testament allude to something in the Old Testament, they are not merely decorating their writings with literary tropes and bric-a-brac. They are interpreting events of their time as fulfillments of the Word of God.

Some allusions are so obvious that very little knowledge of the Old Testament is required to perceive their meaning. When John the Baptist says “Behold the Lamb of God” (John 1:29, 36), this is an allusion to something in the Old Testament, and the meaning of it would have been clear to any Jew of the first century. It expresses the atoning purpose of God in Christ, by comparing him with the sacrificial lambs of the Mosaic Law. This does however require some knowledge of the Old Testament to be understood. The New Testament contains hundreds of such allusions to the Old Testament, some of them more obvious than others. Some depend upon just a word or two, when an unusual expression or combination of words serves to bring to the reader’s mind something in the Old Testament. But if the text is translated loosely, so that the verbal correspondence no longer exists, these allusions are lost.

For example, I think most interpreters would agree that in Galatians 1:15 there is an allusion to Jeremiah 1:5. ⁽¹⁷⁾ When Paul says that God set him apart “even from the womb” of his mother, and called him to preach “among the Gentiles (or, nations),” one is reminded of the word of the Lord to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the belly I knew you, and before you came forth from the womb I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet unto the nations.” The allusion is signaled here by the use of the Hebraic expression “from the womb” (ἐκ κοιλίας, comp. מבטן or מרחם) in connection with being sent “to the nations,” and the effect of this allusion is to suggest that Paul conceived of his calling as being like the prophet Jeremiah’s. But the allusion is weakened if the words that constitute the verbal link are not translated literally. In modern versions we have in Galatians 1:15 the renderings “before I was born” and “from birth” instead of “from the womb.” These renderings expresses the sense in a general way, but the very generality of them weakens the allusion, which depends upon distinct verbal cues. In many cases this loss is wholly unnecessary. Readers who are not very familiar with the Old Testament would of course fail to recognize the allusion in cases like this, and we admit that the literal rendering “from the womb” may seem rather odd or unusually graphic for modern Americans; but few readers will fail to see that it means “from birth” or “from before birth,” ⁽¹⁸⁾ and if the verbal correspondence with Jeremiah 1:5 is preserved, the allusion may be noticed in due time.

Words that are unremarkable, bland and ordinary can never be very allusive. In order to be allusive, words must somehow stand out and point to a special context elsewhere. Translators who are more interested in making the text “idiomatic” for the reader than in preserving significant verbal connections like this have practically erased most of them from the New Testament in recent Bible versions.

Consider Acts 5:30, which in the New Living Translation is rendered, “The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead after you killed him by crucifying him.” ⁽¹⁹⁾ Literally Peter’s words are, “The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree.” This expression as literally translated ought to give some pause to the reader. Why does Peter say “hanging him on a tree” (επι ξυλου) instead of “crucifying him”? Anyone who has read Galatians will know where the unusual phrase comes from, and what it means. It is from Deuteronomy 21:22-23, quoted in Galatians 3:13-14, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us; for it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” See also 1 Peter 2:24 and Acts 13:29. And so by this phrase “hanging him on a tree” Peter evokes the whole theology of the cross! But apparently the translators missed it, or found this to be unimportant. By flattening out and simplifying the language they have caused the reader to miss this thought-provoking allusion.

In 1 Peter 1:13 the expression “girding up the loins of your mind” has been rendered “prepare your minds for action” in the New International Version. Peter’s use of the peculiar “girding up the loins of your mind” may at first sight seem clumsy and even a little weird to many people. It certainly is not idiomatic in English. But neither was it idiomatic in Greek. Peter deliberately uses this Hebraic expression as a way of bringing to his readers’ minds the words spoken to Israel concerning the Passover: “and thus you shall eat it, with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand” (Exodus 12:11). This would have been one of the most familiar passages of the Old Testament to a Jew like Peter, because it was recited every year at the Passover holiday. One commentary on the Greek text here states that the reference is “unmistakable.” ⁽²⁰⁾ But readers of the NIV (and most other modern versions as well) will miss it entirely. Instead of an accurately translated verbal allusion, they are given an “equivalent” expression.

Someone may ask, What exactly is gained when we see an allusion to the Passover here? Isn’t Peter’s main purpose here to exhort his readers to be prepared, and doesn’t “prepare your minds for action” serve this purpose well enough, without an allusion to some ancient Jewish commemoration? In answer to this, we must concede that those who have never identified with the Israelites will gain little. But for a Jew who has been taught to identify with them, ⁽²¹⁾ and for all those who are able to identify with Israel on that night, it can make a very great difference when an allusion invites them to do it. The effect of an allusion like this—when it is recognized as an allusion—is to add a whole new dimension of meaning. The few words of the allusion are invested with all the historical and religious associations of the passage alluded to, and so the amount of meaning gained by allusions can be very large. We might compare a sentence without allusions to a house built up in the usual way, with individual boards, bricks, and panels being fasten together on site. These pieces correspond to the words of a sentence under construction. But when an allusion is introduced, the construction goes modular. A prefabricated “living room” arrives on the truck, and at one stroke, a large and complex module of meaning is added to the sentence. The same meaning might perhaps be built on the construction site, but it would require several chapters of additional text to build it there, and there is no reason to do that if the prefabricated unit already exists in the reader’s mind, to be summoned by an allusion. Of course the reader must have the “module” in his head, or else the allusion fails; but the writers of the New Testament assume that their readers’ minds are stocked with the usual “modules” of popular Hellenistic Judaism.

Another allusion in 1 Peter which will be missed by readers of some modern versions is in 4:12-19. Here the NIV renders the Greek word πυρωσει in verse 12 as “painful trial” instead of the more literal “fiery ordeal,” and in verse 17 the word οικου is rendered “family” instead of “house.” These renderings are defensible enough in the immediate context, and we grant that some readers may be helped by a translation which explains that “house” often means “family” in Scripture, but it may be doubted whether any considerable number of Bible-readers really need this explanation, and, as so often happens in paraphrastic renderings, the “helpful” interpretation here really hinders the reader’s ability to discern the correct meaning. As Dennis Johnson points out, “a proper application of the principle of context in word studies must give attention not only to the word’s immediate literary context but also to more distant literary contexts to which the author may be making conscious allusion,” ⁽²²⁾ and he convincingly shows that there is an allusion here to Malachi 3:2-6, “... he is like a refiner’s fire ... and he shall purify the sons of Levi ... that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness.” The reader who is familiar with this passage from Malachi will catch the allusion to it in 1 Peter 4 when the phrases “fiery ordeal” and “house of God” are in the translation before him, but who would perceive it in the NIV? The phrase “house of God” may refer to the “family” of God in some contexts, that is true, but here we see that it is probably an allusion to the Temple, with which the Church is being compared.

An extreme example of this erasure of allusions is found in Isaiah 31:5 in the Good News Bible. In the last clause of this verse, Isaiah uses the Hebrew verb פסח, lit. “pass over,” which occurs elsewhere only in the Passover narrative of Exodus, chap. 12. The allusion may be seen in a literal rendering:

When Isaiah says that the Lord will cause Jerusalem to escape (that is the proper meaning of the hiphil of מלט) from destruction by “passing over” it, he is of course alluding to that great deliverance of the children of Israel, when he “passed over” their houses while slaying all the firstborn of the Egyptians, allowing them to escape from death. But apparently the translator of the Good News Bible regarded this last clause as a mere repetition, adding nothing meaningful to the preceding one. Therefore, being warned by Nida that “in most parts of the world ... receptors are often irked by what they regard as obnoxious repetition and tautology in Semitic poetic forms,” and following his counsel that “synonymous expressions” in adjacent lines may be deleted if they serve only to impart emphasis, ⁽²³⁾ he left out the whole clause:

The translators of some other versions use the word “spare” instead of “pass over” for פסח here, and translate the hiphil form of מלט as “rescue” (RSV, NRSV, ESV), which is better than nothing, but still inadequate for the purpose of conveying the allusion. ⁽²⁴⁾

In all of these examples of lost allusions, the loss is caused by a philosophy of translation which seeks to eliminate anything unusual in the diction. Because allusions depend upon relatively uncommon expressions that stand out from the immediate context and point to another, they are bound to suffer this fate in a version that systematically “normalizes” the style and diction. This tendency to normalize anything that strays from the beaten path of everyday language affects not only allusions, but all sorts of interesting linguistic features of the text.

In Isaiah 57:15 there is a striking expression in the Hebrew text: שכן עד (shokeyn ad), lit. “he who inhabits eternity,” which theologians commonly point to as an expression of God’s transcendence. God is not bound by time, nor does he live within time; rather, he transcends time and space. He “inhabits eternity.” ⁽²⁵⁾ D.A. Carson calls this memorable phrase one of Isaiah’s “fine expressions that stretch the imagination” of readers, as they ponder the transcendence of God. ⁽²⁶⁾ Unfortunately, the reader of the NIV will not encounter Isaiah’s expression here. Instead of “he who inhabits eternity” the NIV has a rather unsatisfactory and prosaic rendering, “he who lives forever.” This is certainly easier to understand, but it is not equivalent to the original.

In Mark 1:12 we find a typical example of the NIV’s tendency to turn what is semantically sharp and colorful in the Greek text into something very bland in English: “the Spirit sent him out into the desert.” Here the Greek αυτον εκβαλλει, lit. “pushed him out,” is translated as “sent him out;” but this is unsatisfactory, because the Greek word carries a connotation of command and compulsion, which is why more literal versions try to express the meaning with “drove him out” (ESV), “impelled him to go out” (NASB), etc. One of the NIV translators later recalled that this expression was the subject of irreverent levity at the committee’s meeting, with some of the editors “facetiously wondering what kind of a car the Spirit used” to “drive” Jesus into the wilderness. ⁽²⁷⁾ But Mark’s word is no joke. Commentators have often observed that it is a strong word, descriptive of our Lord’s “sense of urgency” (Meyer) his “intense preoccupation of mind” (A.B. Bruce), and the “dynamistic” working of the Spirit in Him (F.C. Grant). ⁽²⁸⁾

Words that are normal and ordinary for the average modern reader inevitably convey only thoughts that are ordinary for such readers. But what if the things expressed in the original are not ordinary for modern American readers?

Recently while giving a lesson on the topic of modesty I referred to 1 Timothy 2:9, where the Greek text has the phrase μετα αιδους και σωφροσυνης. These are words that ancient authors commonly used in their teachings about personal virtues, and they describe attitudes or states of mind, not merely (or even primarily) outward actions. The first noun here, αιδως, denotes a capacity to feel shame, in a good sense, as opposed to shamelessness or impudence. In modern English versions it is usually translated “modesty,” but “bashfulness” may sometimes be a more adequate way of expressing its connotations. John Wyclif’s “shamefastness” is nearly perfect, and would still be the best rendering if that word had not become obsolete. ⁽²⁹⁾ The second noun, σωφροσυνη, denotes an habitual self-regulation or moderation of desires and thoughts, as opposed to mania, self-indulgence and excess, and it is usually translated with “sobriety” or “self-control.” My purpose in referring to these words was to emphasize that “modesty” in the Bible is not merely outward compliance with some dress code, but a state of mind characterized by a capacity for shame and self-inhibition, and that the biblical authors connect this cultivated “sense of shame” with virtue and honor, especially in the case of women. This is a commonplace of exegetical writings, and it needs to be emphasized, because it is so foreign to the modern liberal ethos that dominates our society. ⁽³⁰⁾ My students on that occasion had copies of the NIV translation, and so I asked them to turn to that place, expecting to find something close enough to build the lesson on. But to my surprise, I found that μετα αιδους και σωφροσυνης was translated “with decency and propriety.” Evidently the translators felt that these prissy words would be in some manner equivalent to the original. ⁽³¹⁾ I suppose they are the sort of words that a modern American would fall back on when recommending clothing that is suitable for Christians. But they do not begin to convey the meaning of Paul’s words. People associate “decency” with conformity to minimum standards of social behavior, and “propriety” with things like proper etiquette, but Paul speaks of something much more personal — a virtuous sense of shame, coupled with self-control. The problem here is not just about an archaic word that needs to be updated, it has to do with an ancient moral concept that has no name in the modern idiom. I am not sure what should be done in this case. Even “modesty” seems very inadequate. Perhaps we need to reclaim the word “shamefastness.” But there is no use pretending that “decency” will convey the meaning of αιδως. The inadequacy of colloquial modern English in this instance brings to mind an observation of J.D. Michaelis:

Perhaps most serious of all is the normalizing treatment that χαρις (charis) receives in some modern versions. This word lies at the heart of the gospel message, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that its translation and interpretation is crucial to a true understanding of Biblical theology in general. The first English versions of the New Testament translated it “grace,” and this English word has been used in most translations right up to the present day. In English dictionaries the range of meanings for the word in biblical and ecclesiastical contexts is given under the heading of “theological” usages, as in the Oxford Universal Dictionary:

All of these “theological” senses of the word are quite old, dating from the period of Middle English (c. 1150-1450), and are well-established in our language. None of them is obsolete. Nevertheless, certain linguists who think that readers cannot understand what is meant by “grace” in the Bible have urged translators to use “kindness” and “favor” instead, and so that is what we find in the Good News Bible, the God’s Word version, and the New Living Translation. But the χαρις of God is much more than kindness or favor. As James Dunn says, “In Paul ... χαρις is never merely an attitude or disposition of God (God’s character as gracious); consistently it denotes something much more dynamic—the wholly generous act of God. Like ‘Spirit,’ with which it overlaps in meaning (cf., e.g., [Rom] 6:14 and Gal 5:18), it denotes effective divine power in the experience of men.” ⁽³³⁾ Again, Louis Berkhof says it ordinarily denotes the “operation of God in the heart of man, affected through the agency of the Holy Spirit.” ⁽³⁴⁾ It is probably true that many non-Christian readers will not understand “grace” in this biblical sense, and will think that it means “graciousness.” We do think, however, that the biblical meaning of “grace” can be gathered easily enough from the context in many places, even if the reader does not make use of an English dictionary, or have the benefit of explanations. Substituting “kindness” for “grace” only ensures that the reader will not understand what the biblical authors mean by χαρις.

One gets the impression that the editors of the New Living Translation did not understand it either: Acts 4:33, “God’s great favor was upon them all;” 11:23, “he saw the proof of God’s favor;” Romans 1:5, “given us the privilege and authority;” 3:24, “God in his gracious kindness;” 5:17, “gracious gift of righteousness;” 5:20, “kindness became more abundant,” and so on, throughout the New Testament. We notice that in Romans 6:14 the word “grace” is used, but the translation ensures that the word will not be understood as a divine influence: “for you are no longer subject to the law, which enslaves you to sin. Instead, you are free by God’s grace.” This makes good sense within the framework of a false interpretation of Paul’s gospel, and a popular one, to be sure; but it differs substantially from what Paul means by ἁμαρτία γὰρ ὑμῶν οὐ κυριεύσει, οὐ γάρ ἐστε ὑπὸ νόμον ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ χάριν — “For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.” By ὑπὸ χάριν “under grace” he means not “freedom” or “forgiveness” but a condition in which one is subjected (ὑπο) to the sanctifying influence (χαρις) of the Holy Spirit, which breaks the dominion of sin in the heart, more than the Law ever could. ⁽³⁵⁾ The New Living Translation, by injecting the word “free,” and using the word “grace” in the sense of “kindness,” practically converts this into the opposite of what Paul really said.

We should have thought that a long-established English word which perfectly corresponds to the meaning of the Greek would be cherished by translators, even if some readers might need help understanding its “theological” sense. But no. Because the perfect word in this case is not sufficiently ordinary, and hence might not be understood by everyone, a more “everyday” word is used, as being the “closest natural equivalent,” though it obviously fails to convey the true meaning in many places.

Many further examples could be given. Hundreds, in fact. But these few may be enough to illustrate the points made here. The reader of these versions has not been required to enter into the conceptual framework of the Bible as it is expressed over and over again in its phraseology; he has been deprived of the opportunity to perceive the network of allusions and verbal associations which give the Bible such richness of meaning; and he is protected from exposure to anything very demanding or unusual. The reader is left in his own familiar and everyday world of thinking. And this is the whole purpose—and the explicitly stated purpose—of those who are promoting “dynamic equivalence” in Bible translations. The whole idea is to present nothing to the reader which is strange. Nothing foreign or “offensive.” Nothing evocative. Nothing which requires a pause for reflection, orientation, and discovery. Nothing that stretches the imagination. ⁽³⁶⁾ I submit that this theory of translation is not only unscriptural, but self-defeating and perverse.

4. Transculturation

Apologists for “dynamic equivalence” commonly make a distinction between it and “transculturation,” which involves an adaptation of the text not only to the language but also to the cultural and historical context of the modern reader. Robert Bratcher, the chief translator of the Good News Bible, makes this distinction while criticizing Eugene Peterson’s The Message:

But Nida’s own explanation of the goals and characteristics of a “dynamic equivalence” version makes this distinction hard to observe. In his book Toward a Science of Translating (1964), he introduces the theory thus:

It is hard to see how Phillips’ “hearty handshake” (as an equivalent for “holy kiss”) could be approved on the same principles that would rule out Peterson’s “takes unfair advantage of you” (as an equivalent for “forces you to go a mile”). In fact it really seems to us that of these two, the former is more of a “transcultural” rendering than the latter. Peterson at least refrains from turning the original saying into something specific to our culture, and merely generalizes the thought; but the “hearty handshake” is unquestionably an instance of transculturation. It is a relatively unimportant instance, but in view of the fact that Nida himself chose to illustrate his theory with it, one can hardly claim that his theory rules out any kind of transculturation. And moreover, his description of the method’s goal even seems to require this kind of adjustment. It aims “to relate the receptor to modes of behavior relevant within the context of his own culture.” Other statements in the same chapter show that this call for cultural accommodation is not a mere slip of words:

Here Nida twice repeats his dictum that a dynamic translation must be adapted to the culture as a whole. If left unqualified, the practical implications of this principle are enormous. But to be quite fair, we must hasten to add that Nida also warned against attempts to completely “naturalize” the text. He writes:

A key phrase here is “all traces.” The idea is that transculturation is theoretically desirable and should be carried to a certain point for the sake of “dynamic equivalence,” but unfortunately, not everything can be “naturalized” for the modern reader without seriously compromising the meaning of the text, and so the cultural accommodation cannot be perfect. After giving some examples, Nida leaves it to the wisdom of translators to discern what other “foreign” features of the text should be allowed to remain in a Bible version.

People who are already familiar with the Bible and its background may not realize the extent of the changes that would be necessary for a version which really aspires to be “dynamically equivalent” for those who are completely ignorant. The problem here is not even primarily verbal. For instance, in an old version of Judges 12:14 we read that Abdon the son of Hillel judged Israel for eight years, “and he had forty sons and thirty sons’ sons, that rode on threescore and ten ass colts.” The Good News Bible modernizes this language by saying that he had “forty sons and thirty grandsons, who rode on seventy donkeys,” but the meaning of this will not be any clearer to modern readers if they do not know that having many sons, and riding about on a donkey, were status symbols in Israel at that time. The forty sons could not have been possible without multiple wives, a sign of great wealth. We know that the infant mortality rate in ancient times was more than 50 per cent, even among the wealthy. Ludwig Köhler informs us that “Marcus Aurelius [Emperor of Rome] had thirteen children, but the majority of them died young. Sultan Murad III (1574-95) had one hundred and two children, but at the time of his death there were only twenty sons and twenty-seven daughters still living.” ⁽³⁸⁾ Only when this kind of information is provided can the reader really appreciate what the text is designed to convey. American readers who are unfamiliar with status symbols of the second millennium before Christ are likely to associate donkey-riding with poor hillbillies and other rural folk of low degree. Having many sons, by several wives, is not a sign of status in modern Western society. So it cannot be taken for granted that uneducated readers will intuitively understand that the purpose of the statement is to indicate how wealthy, blessed, and prominent this man was. Implicit in this statement is quite a bit of cultural information. It is not hard for a teacher to explicate it, but what can a translator do with this verse to make explanations unnecessary? If any reference to the donkeys is retained, the reader needs to be brought into an ancient setting where riding on a donkey was a luxury.

Familiarity with ancient agriculture is necessary to understand many things in the Bible. As just one example of this, consider the complex metaphor used in Micah 4:11-13.

Why is the “daughter of Zion” (Jerusalem) suddenly transformed into a beast with horns and hoofs in this passage? Because in ancient times, the sheaves of the harvest were often threshed by driving oxen over them on the threshingfloor. Thus the nations who know not God shall be threshed, as the wheat is beaten from the chaff by the hoof of the farmer’s ox. Now, this metaphor should be interpreted, and a Christian preacher would do well to explain it in a spiritual sense, after the example of Edward Pusey:

But the translation of the passage cannot and should not be adapted to the limits of someone who does not know anything about threshing. It is very instructive to see how this passage is handled in some “dynamic equivalence” versions. In the New Living Translation, instead of “Arise and thresh (דּוּשׁ), O daughter of Zion,” we read “Rise up and destroy the nations, O Jerusalem.” In the Good News Bible we find, “People of Jerusalem, go and punish your enemies! I will make you as strong as a bull with iron horns ...” Likewise in the Contemporary English Version, “Smash them to pieces, Zion! I’ll let you be like a bull ....” These loose translations depart from the threshing metaphor in the Hebrew text, presumably because the translators felt that it would not be understood. Instead of a literal translation of דּוּשׁ, “thresh,” which implies the ox, two of them substitute the figure of a rampaging bull. Although both figures involve an animal with horns and hoofs, the meaning is quite altered. And in the rendering of the New Living Translation we note how “destroy the nations” clashes with the observation made by Pusey, that “the very image of the ‘threshing’ implies that this is no mere destruction,” and practically excludes it. Thus readers and preachers alike are paying a high price for this pottage of “equivalence,” which is really no equivalence at all.

The meaning of many expressions in the Hebrew Bible cannot be conveyed in ordinary English without explanations. One literal translation of Jeremiah 7:29 reads,

Here the translators of the English Revised Version have done what they could. The words O Jerusalem have been added to express the force of the feminine singular forms used in the sentence. These forms are used because Jeremiah is employing a common trope in which cities are figured as women (cp. 6:23). When he tells Jerusalem to cut off her hair he is partly alluding to an ancient mourning custom — a form of self-humiliation practiced by women in extreme demonstrations of mourning, like the tearing of garments. ⁽³⁹⁾ But a marginal note on “thine hair” indicates that a more literal rendering of the Hebrew word נזר (nezer) is “crown,” which provides a clue to even more meaning. Actually the primary meaning of נזר is “consecration,” as symbolized by a crown or by the uncut hair of one who has made a Nazarite vow. When used in reference to the hair of the Nazarite, it denotes the hair as a sign of consecration. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Only here does the word seem to be used in reference to the long hair of a woman. The word שׁפים shephayim “bare heights” probably refers to the barren and wind-swept hills of the Judean Wilderness east of Jerusalem. We note that the word is used here for poetic reasons, indicating not only a desolate location away from Zion, but also one which is bare, like the head of the mourner. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Even casual readers of English versions might discern that the complex figure used here, of a defiled and grieving Jerusalem crying out in waste places, symbolizes the desolation of the coming exile. But an English translation cannot convey all that Jeremiah means by “cut off your nezer.”

Nida has said that “the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message.” But how, exactly, can the message of Jeremiah 7:29 be so translated? Let us try to imagine what could be done to make this verse seem “natural” to a reader living now, in a location like Ohio. This reader has never heard anyone speak to a whole city as if it were a woman. He does not, of course, live in Jerusalem. He has never heard of a woman cutting her hair in mourning, and he is not sure what a “lamentation” might involve. Does it mean crying? He doesn’t know a Nazarite from a Jebusite. There are no “barren heights” in Ohio. And perhaps he does not accept the idea that God sometimes gets angry. I think this would describe the average person in my home town. Just how are we supposed to make the message of Jeremiah here seem “natural” to him and his culture, like something he hears every day, expressed “just the way we would say it,” while also seeing to it that there is an “equivalent effect” when he reads our translation?

The impracticality of these goals should be obvious in this case. We can modernize the language somewhat, using “your” and “has” instead of “thine” and “hath”; and perhaps instead of “take up a lamentation” we could have “sing a funeral song,” as in the Good News Bible. But this does not bring us very far in the direction of Nida’s goals. Our naive reader will only wonder what is meant by “a funeral song.” At the last funeral I attended we sang Jesus Loves Me, because it was the favorite song of the deceased; but this is not the kind of song that Jeremiah has in mind. Few people in America have ever heard anything like the קִינָה (kinah) to which Jeremiah refers, a heart-rending elegy sung at funerals in ancient Israel. There is nothing even remotely equivalent to it in modern American culture. We cannot make this verse say things “the way we would say” them if it says things that we never have any occasion to say. How can a distortion or loss of meaning be avoided in the attempt to make all this seem “natural” to our reader, when it is inherently not natural to him or his culture?

The New Living Translation makes things easier here with its “weep alone on the mountains,” but much of the meaning is lost in this paraphrastic rendering. Instead of the poetic “bare heights” we have “mountains” — as if the barrenness of the location were not an important part of the meaning intended by Jeremiah. The articulate “lamentation” is reduced to mere weeping alone. This reduction of meaning is typical of the “dynamic equivalence” versions. While claiming to make the meaning accessible, they make much of it inaccessible. In theory, the purpose is to convey the meaning to everyone; but in practice, anything that requires an explanation for the average reader is simply eliminated.

The hard truth is, there is no easy and familiar form of colloquial language that can express in English what Jeremiah says in the Hebrew. The use of familiar words like “song,” “weep,” and “mountains” only prevents readers from recognizing that Jeremiah is talking about something that is unfamiliar to them—something outside their experience, which they must learn about. I do not think it is unrealistic to expect people to learn things about the ancient culture and geography of Israel while reading the Bible. Ordinary readers of the Bible will pick up items of knowledge like this from a properly translated and annotated text. The word “lamentation” will convey the meaning of kinah if readers infer its biblical meaning from other places in which the word is used, as in the Book of Lamentations. The very unusualness of the word will suggest to them that it refers to something unusual or even foreign to their experience, and will facilitate the linguistic process whereby English words acquire biblical senses in the mind of the reader. The meaning of nezer is more difficult to convey, but it can be explained in a footnote. The “bare heights” (shephayim) can be explained with a map and a picture. The advocates of easy-going “dynamic equivalence” will naturally scoff at this old-fashioned method, which requires the reader to avail himself of the help provided in the margin, but the patronizing and reductionistic tendencies of their own method is much too obvious to be denied.

The New Testament presents similar problems, and it assumes that the reader is familiar with the Old Testament, or at least with some important elements of Jewish religion based on it. Paul’s argument in Galatians 3 is addressed to recently-converted Gentiles, but it would not have made much sense to a reader who did not already know who Abraham was. Even the title χριστος “Christ” would be confusing to Greeks who knew nothing about the Old Testament, because the sense “anointed one” is a Hebraism introduced by the Septuagint, used only in Jewish Greek, and the custom of anointing kings was unknown outside of Judaism. In ordinary secular Greek the word χριστος was an adjective meaning “to be used as an ointment,” specifically a pharmaceutical ointment. So “Jesus the Christ” would have meant “the ointment Jesus,” if it meant anything at all to the heathen. But it seems that they commonly confused χριστος with χρηστος, meaning “benevolent,” and understood it as a name. ⁽⁴²⁾ Despite this, we do not find in the New Testament any explanation of the term, or any avoidance of it. The writers simply required readers to know what “Christ” means.

The New Testament also assumes that the reader is familiar with many aspects of ancient Jewish culture that cannot be learned from the Old Testament. Luke’s use of the phrase “a sabbath day’s journey” in Acts 1:12 assumes that the reader is familiar with the Jewish custom of limiting travel on the Sabbath day to about two thirds of a mile (two thousand cubits, to be exact). ⁽⁴³⁾ And the knowledge assumed by the writers consists of far more than isolated bits of information like this. Consider what the reader must know to understand Matthew 12:38-41.

In order to fully understand these three sentences, readers must know who the scribes and Pharisees were, and what kind of “sign” they were asking for. They must know the story of Jonah, and of Christ’s death and resurrection. They must also know the meaning of the phrases “Son of Man,” “the judgment,” “adulterous generation,” and “heart of the earth” — the last two being understood as figures of speech. If I were giving an unhurried lesson on this passage, I would also like to explain that “generation” does not express all that is meant by γενεα here, because γενεα refers not only to a group of people born at about the same time, but also to people of a common origin and nature (something like “brood” or “kindred”). And I would think readers must have some explanation about how Old Testament stories present types of the Messiah, in order to understand why Christ focuses on the “three days ... in the belly of the whale.” Again, what can a “dynamic equivalence” version do to convey all this?

I chose this last example (Matthew 12:38-41) because Nida himself, in a sentence we have quoted above, mentioned the “Pharisees” and the “adulterous generation” concept as examples of “foreign” elements which cannot be converted into something more familiar to modern Americans without a loss of meaning. To say that they are “deeply imbedded in the very thought structure of the message” is a rather obscure way of putting it. A better way of describing this linguistic situation would be to say that these words have meaning within the context of first-century Judaism that they cannot retain when taken outside the whole interconnected system of people and ideas that constitutes the religious culture of the time. The phrase “adulterous generation” serves to invoke a concept developed in the writings of the prophets, that the people of Israel have violated the terms of their covenant with God like an adulterous wife, and have estranged themselves from the covenant, like the Gentiles who worship other gods. Jesus, who speaks as a prophet here, describes the γενεα that “desires a sign” in these terms because he is comparing them (unfavorably) to the heathen people of old Nineveh. One cannot convert “adulterous” into “faithless,” as in the New Living Translation, without losing important culturally-specific content. The complex metaphorical concept represented by the phrase “adulterous generation” is a cultural specialty for which there is no ready-made equivalent in other cultures and languages. Again, Nida recognizes this in the case of “Pharisees” and “adulterous generation,” in his short list of “foreign objects.” But the point I would make now is this: the same may be said for all of the things I mentioned in connection with Matthew 12:38-41 above. None of the key words of the passage can retain their meaning outside the total context of people and ideas to which they belong. Acknowledging a few terms as exceptions really misrepresents the situation, because the meaning of words and sentences in a discourse like this cannot ordinarily be abstracted from the cultural context. The mind of the reader must become acculturated to the world of the Bible to get the meaning.

“Foreign objects” that require some degree of linguistic acculturation are especially abundant in the words of Christ. In the dominical saying recorded in Matthew 11:11 and Luke 7:28 we find the expression γεννητοις γυναικων “those born of women” used in reference to humanity. This is a Hebraism, corresponding to the phrase ילוד־אשה used in Job 14:1, 15:14, and 25:4. The expression used in these places is not idiomatic in secular Greek or English, and doubtless many readers who are unfamiliar with idioms of Scripture will fail to perceive its import, but it is not merely another way of saying “all who have ever lived,” as the NLT translates it in the Gospels, or “humanity,” “human,” or “who in all the earth,” as we find it translated in Job. In Scripture the facts pertaining to the birth of a man are supposed to indicate his nature. Therefore אדם ילוד־אשה is not just a pleonastic way of saying אדם, “mankind.” It refers to man according to his condition from birth, or even according to his inherited nature, which is often associated with weakness and impurity in Scripture. The meaning of “born of woman” includes the concept expressed elsewhere in Scripture by “that which is born of flesh” (John 3:6, compare 1:13) and “born according to the flesh” (Gal. 4:23, 29). ⁽⁴⁴⁾ If we translate it simply as “humanity,” the most interesting part of the meaning is neglected and made completely invisible to the English reader.

Someone may object that a more literal translation leaves the uninformed reader in no better position, because the background information must be supplied in either case. But it is only the promoters of the “dynamic” approach who claim to remove the need for such a learning process, by making the text immediately understandable to people of widely different cultures. We grant that a smoother path is made for the reader when awkward and foreign-sounding expressions like “those born of women” and “sons and sons’ sons” are converted to something which flows better in our ears. But even small adjustments like this, which might seem to be only a matter of style to many, often leave out part of the meaning, or involve little transculturations which distort the meaning in subtle ways. ⁽⁴⁵⁾

In Matthew 1:19 the New Living Translation describes Joseph as Mary’s fiancé. But the Greek says, ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς, “her husband.” The Jews made no distinction between a husband and a fiancé. In fact they would not even have understood what we mean by fiancé. They observed a custom more accurately called betrothal, and for them the state of betrothal was tantamount to marriage, and legally binding. The only thing lacking in betrothal was the physical consummation of the marriage. The NLT’s use of fiancé here is anachronistic and misleading, because it implies that the relationship was like a modern engagement. We see the same thing in Luke 2:5, where Mary is described as Joseph’s fiancée. The word μεμνηστευμενη here denotes not a modern-style “engagement” but a state of betrothal. This is a good example of why it is impractical to try to translate the Bible into a form of English which is entirely natural for “today’s readers ... while also accurately communicating the meaning and content of the original biblical texts,” as the version’s preface claims. A modern and familiar style is suitable for modern and familiar ideas. But very often the ideas of the biblical text are not modern, and they are unfamiliar to modern people who have not received any prior instruction in the historical background of the text. It would be better to translate ὁ ἀνὴρ αὐτῆς accurately as “her husband” and μεμνηστευμενη as “betrothed,” and to provide an explanation in a footnote.

There are other places in this version where the marriage customs have been accidentally modernized through the use of modern expressions. In ancient Israel, a girl was “given” to a husband by her father, usually when the girl was about sixteen years old; and so in the Hebrew text of Deuteronomy 7:3 Israelite fathers are instructed, “You shall not give your daughter to [a Canaanite’s] son, nor take his daughter for your son.” But the NLT paraphrases this sentence, “Do not let your daughters and sons marry their sons and daughters,” as if the father had only to “let” a son or daughter marry. Now, presumably the NLT translators had the Hebrew text in front of them and were able to read it, and yet they chose not to translate it literally. Why? Is it because they felt that modern readers would not be able to understand what is meant by “giving your daughter”? This seems unlikely, because we all know what it means when a father “gives a daughter” in marriage, and we even make fathers go through a ritualistic giving of the bride in our wedding ceremonies. The expression may be old-fashioned, but it is understood. It seems that the NLT translators avoided the literal rendering here because they wanted to use a more modern-sounding and idiomatic expression. “Do not let your daughters and sons marry ...” is more idiomatic in modern English, to be sure, but there is a cultural reason why this is more idiomatic today: it reflects modern Western realities of courtship, engagement, and marriage.

The most important kind of cultural background information concerns items of mental culture, which often cannot be conveyed in quick explanations. Take for example the usage of the word αληθεια (“truth”) in John’s Gospel. This has been the subject of many discussions among scholars, and not all agree in their conclusions; but one thing agreed upon by all is that John’s usage is anything but “modern” or even common in its day. When John quotes Christ saying Εγω ειμι ... η αληθεια “I am the truth” (14:6) he is not just using some idiomatic Greek expression meaning “I am truthful.” Εγω ειμι η αληθεια is no more idiomatic in Greek than “I am the truth” is in English. In two places we find αληθεια used as the object of ποιεω (“do the truth,” in John 3:21 and 1 John 1:6), apparently after the pattern of the Hebrew expression עשה אמת, which means “keep faith,” i.e., “act faithfully” (Genesis 32:10, 47:29, Nehemiah 9:33). ⁽⁴⁶⁾ This may indicate that John’s αληθεια bears connotations, at least, derived from the Hebrew equivalent אמת. But the dualistic meaning attached to αληθεια in Hellenistic philosophical writings — eternal spiritual “reality” as opposed to the unsubstantial and temporary things of this world — is clearly intended in most places where the word is used.

The meaning of these pregnant words, concerning a spiritual kingdom, to which those who are “of the truth” belong, cannot be adequately conveyed by any English translation if the reader is not familiar with the background of Jewish-Hellenistic thought, in which αληθεια “truth” and αληθινος “true” refer to “the realm of pure and eternal reality, as distinct from this world of transient phenomena.” ⁽⁴⁷⁾ We have no word or any stock phrases that could evoke the Hellenistic concept of αληθεια in modern colloquial English, because it is mystical and foreign to anything that might be expressed in an ordinary conversation. For most readers of the Bible, who lack this background, an explanation is necessary. What we find in versions that try to make explanations unnecessary, by use of “equivalent” expressions that are easily understood by everyone, is something rather different from the true meaning. For example, in John 18:37 the New Living Translation has, “I came to bring truth to the world. All who love the truth recognize that what I say is true.” This banality is the “closest natural equivalent” that the translator could find in the conceptual scheme of uneducated modern people—but it is not equivalent to the original, and it will only interfere with a teacher’s efforts to convey what Jesus is really saying here. A true understanding requires some study or instruction, in which the English word “truth” receives a “biblical” sense borrowed from αληθεια in its Hellenistic milieu. Any English words used for this purpose must be adapted and bent to the meaning of the ancient Greek. There is no possibility of conveying the meaning in “Common English.”

It sometimes happens that the “common English” requirement works indirectly to avoid or suppress certain biblical attitudes and ideas. In most versions of the Bible it will be noticed that the people of God are sometimes called “the saints.” The words commonly translated thus are קדשׁים in Hebrew, קדישׁין in Aramaic, and ἁγιοι in Greek. When these words are used in reference to people, they mean the people sanctified and consecrated to God. Our word “saint” began as “sanct,” borrowed from Latin (sanctus, holy one), as an exact equivalent for the original words. But in the New Living Translation קדשׁים is translated with such phrases as “the Lord’s people” (Psa. 34:9), and ἁγιοι as “his very own people” (Rom. 1:7), “God’s children” (Rom. 12:13), “God’s people” (Phil. 1:1), “believers” (Rom. 8:27) “Christians” (Rom. 15:25), and so forth, in which the basic idea of sanctification goes unexpressed. The same is true of the Good News Bible. Clearly the reason for this is that modern Christians do not usually call themselves the “saints” or “the sanctified ones.” And a translation that adheres to habits of “common English” must use words as they are commonly used today.

But why is it that we do not we call ourselves “the saints” or “holy ones”? Probably because in our modern church culture it would be seen as presumptuous, or perhaps we just don’t feel that we deserve the name of saints. It is a name that makes some uncomfortable demands upon us. This same feeling, a thousand years ago, may be one reason why some began to reserve the term “sanct” for only the holiest Christians, so that “saint” came to have the ecclesiastical sense: “persons who are formally recognized by the Church as having by their exceptional holiness of life attained an exalted station in heaven” (Oxford English Dictionary). The history of this word illustrates the fact that ordinary language is not always to be accepted as theologically neutral. It is shaped by our culture, and it sometimes promotes a culturally-determined mentality that is incongruent with the teachings of the Bible.

A clear example of systematic transculturation in some recent versions of the Bible is the attempt to suppress the so-called “sexism” of the authors. When we translate Romans 12:9-10 literally as “Let love be without hypocrisy, abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good, love one another with a brotherly love ...” it is alleged that the last phrase is “sexist,” or at least that it would be perceived as such by many modern readers, though not by the original recipients. For this reason several recent versions have given loosely approximate renderings like “genuine affection” (NLT), “love” (TNIV) and even “be good friends” (The Message), instead of “brotherly love.” But the fact is, Paul used the word φιλαδελφία, which means brotherly love. We should not have to point out how much more brotherly love implies than mere friendship, especially in a culture where family membership means everything. The translators or editors of these new versions, if they are at all competent, know this full well; but they were more interested in adapting the text to modern sensitivities than in conveying the full meaning of the original. The revisers of the “Inclusive Language Edition” of the New International Version (1996) stated this plainly enough when they explained that their purpose was “to mute the patriarchalism of the culture of the biblical writers through gender-inclusive language,” and claimed that “this could be done without compromising the message of the Spirit” (Preface, p. vii).

Some of the gender-neutralized renderings that have appeared in recent Bible version have all the awkwardness and evasiveness that we have come to expect from politically correct speech. For example, the Contemporary English Version tries to convey the kinship connotation of אחים “brothers” in Psalm 133:1 by rendering the verse, “It is truly wonderful when relatives live together in peace.” The problem here, of course, is that “relatives” does not have the connotation of closeness or the extended sense that “brothers” has in such contexts. So the sense of the verse is really destroyed, in the interests of gender-neutrality. The Good News Bible and Today’s New International Version use “God’s people” here, which fails in another direction. But again, the editors believed that readers had to be protected from the Psalmist’s intolerable “sexism.”

Much more could be said about this ideological agenda of “dynamic equivalence” versions, because the number of inaccuracies introduced on its account run into thousands, but I have elsewhere treated the subject at length, in an essay on The Gender-Neutral Language Controversy.

5. Giants and Windmills

In the famous story of Don Quixote, a Spanish nobleman who has been reading legends about giant-slayers, among other things, goes forth to live the life of romantic adventure. Coming upon some windmills on a plain, he sees them as giants, and attacks them. One might say that the windmills were the closest thing to giants in his environment. But what a difference there is between giants and their “closest equivalent”! Still, he goes from one adventure to the next, “translating” the stories he had read into real life, using whatever equivalents he can find around him.

I would describe Nida’s theory as Quixotic, in the sense that it leads to many incongruous identifications. A translator should not be trying to bring the original message into a present-day context to make it directly “relevant,” if in fact it does not belong in the present. Cultural differences are not just an inconvenient barrier to conveying “the message” to modern people. The original message itself pertains to the original situation, and it cannot always be abstracted from its situation and transferred to another setting, as if the cultural context were just some accidental stage-scenery. The attempt to “naturalize” a text that comes from so long ago, and so far away, is bound to come to grief. Readers should instead be conscious of a distance between themselves and the original receptors of the biblical writings, because an awareness of the differences as well as the similarities is necessary for right interpretation and application. Whether they realize it or not, all Bible-readers are interpreters of the Bible, and they must take into consideration the historical context. This is one more reason why the Bible should not be “naturalized” in a translation.

I do not want to discourage the natural impulse of Christians to apply the teachings of the Bible to themselves personally, insofar as possible. This is actually very important, and I think most people do not do enough of it. But it must be recognized that not everything in the Bible is equally relevant for everyone.

Consider, for example, Christ’s polemic against the Pharisees of his day. It presupposes their dominance at the time, as the established authorities in a very legalistic religious regime. In this context, his teachings often stand out as relatively “liberal.” Certainly many of his sayings were designed to promote an attitude more liberal than the prevailing one, concerning such things as sabbath observance and fasting. So an “equivalent response” in our own times would be for us to become more liberal than usual, and less careful about the Sabbath, fasting, prayer vigils, and so forth. But is that really appropriate for us, who are already so liberal, and so much at ease in Zion? If Jesus were to return now, I doubt that his arraignment against our generation would have much to do with excessive traditionalism, legalism, and works-righteousness. He is more likely to convict it of complacency: “Remember then from what you have fallen, repent, and do the works you did at first!” (Rev. 2:5). In our effete times, harping on the evils of legalism, and using the most rigorous or scrupulous people as bad examples, is like sparring with shadows. The opponents are now absent and largely imaginary. We cannot edit Scripture to suit our ideas of what needs to be said today, of course; and in any case, different things need to be said to different people within the same cultural setting; but a proper interpretation and application of Christ’s polemic against the Pharisees comes when the reader knows just who the Pharisees were, what the religious culture of the Jews was like in the middle of the first century, and how radically different it was from the culture of today. The “dynamic equivalence” principle leads instead to the transformation of the Pharisees into timeless bogeys, to be equated with anyone in the modern Church who would criticize the prevailing complacency and lukewarmness. Or worse still, it may lead to a facile equation of the Pharisees with modern-day Jews — who are more like modern Episcopalians than ancient Pharisees. Ultra-observant Jews who do resemble the Pharisees are today a marginal group which does not represent modern Judaism any more than the Amish represent Christianity, and they do not pose any threat to the Church.

David Burke, former Director of Translations for the American Bible Society, has warned that “poorly informed” readers are likely to interpret the polemic against “the Jews” in the New Testament as if “Jews of all time are somehow implicated.” ⁽⁴⁸⁾ His concern is well-founded, because for more than forty years his organization has been promoting the idea that poorly informed readers should be able to read (and thus interpret) the Bible for themselves. How can the reader of a “dynamic equivalence” version avoid equating “the Jews” who persecuted the early Church with “the Jews” of their own time and place, when the whole purpose of the translation is to produce an “equivalent effect” in “the language of today”? Burke’s solution to the problem is to eliminate the word “Jews” from Bible translations, so that the reader will not think of modern Jews wherever Jews are criticized in the Bible. He boasts that Bible versions produced by the ABS have been most innovative in this regard, and criticizes more literal versions (specifically the RSV and NRSV) for not being “sensitive to this issue.” But Burke fails to recognize that the problem is created by “dynamic equivalence” in the first place. A version that preserves the forms of antiquity and does not try to force the Bible into modern molds does not invite such anachronistic equations. But when Jesus and his apostles are disguised as modern Americans, the reader can hardly be blamed for interpreting them as if they were.

An outstanding example of inappropriate contemporization is the use of “Israelis” instead of “Israelites” in the Living Bible (Exodus 9:4; 12:34; 14:20; 19:1; Judges 7:14; 1 Sam. 14:21; Isaiah 14:1, etc.). The use of “Israelis” in these contexts equates the ancient people of Israel with the occupants of the modern-day state of Israel.

This is congenial to certain literalistic interpretations of prophecy, to be sure; but it involves the same kind of cultural foreshortening that would equate modern-day Jews with the “scribes and Pharisees” of ancient Palestine. On the same principle, one might also translate םלך בבל (“King of Babylon”) as “President of Iraq.” But surely it is better to translate the text in such a way that readers can sense the cultural and temporal gap that intervenes between the ancient civilizations and our own. Whatever is proper to the ancient world should not be domesticated.

The general point made here is, not everyone should identify with the original receptors in all respects, because these original receptors were often addressed in situations radically different from our own. If the shoe fits, we should by all means wear it. But in order to know whether it fits or not, we must have knowledge of the original cultural context. In Scripture there are many lessons that are always pertinent, for which the historical setting makes little difference. But very often it does make some difference when, where, how, why, and to whom something is said.

6. Literary Conventions

The impracticality of attempts at “dynamic equivalence” become even more obvious if we turn our attention to units of discourse larger than the sentence or paragraph. Readers of the Bible will find that in order to understand it one must give up any expectations that the narratives will be composed according to modern Western conventions. This is one of the common expectations of naive readers, and it generates many problems for them. Take, for example, the famous question about Cain’s wife. In Genesis 4:17 we read “And Cain knew his wife,” before the existence of any woman (other than Eve) has been mentioned, and so the skeptic captiously asks, “Where did Cain get his wife?” The answer is simple (he married a sister), but many are temporarily baffled by the question, because they would have expected at least some mention of the fact that daughters were born to Adam and Eve before one is abruptly brought on the scene as Cain’s wife. The reader has to reckon not only with the fact that the sons of Adam would have only their own sisters to marry, but he must also get used to the fact that the narrators of the Bible tend to omit things that we would certainly not omit if we had composed the stories. The difficulty felt by readers here arises from false expectations about the Bible’s literary form, and it disappears only when it is recognized that the biblical writers felt no need to mention the birth of daughters, ⁽⁴⁹⁾ or to explain the existence of Cain’s wife. When these narratives were first written and compiled, they satisfied the expectations of an ancient Near Eastern audience; but nothing short of a re-writing of the Bible, after the manner of Sholem Asch’s The Apostle or Walter Wangerin’s The Book of God, could bring them into line with modern expectations. It is for this reason that works of biblical fiction like Asch’s and Wangerin’s have been written. They alone can satisfy the culturally-determined expectations of modern readers.

7. Disintegration of Biblical Concepts

Language influences thought in several ways. When we have a word for some object of thought, it focuses and clarifies the thought. When we distinguish between things by making a distinction in words, it sharpens our perception of the difference. When we use the same word for different things, it tends to keep them together in the mind. The development of multiple meanings for one word (called polysemy by linguists) usually reflects a train of conceptual associations, and is commonly spoken of under the figure of a branching tree. Various meanings diverge from a primary “root” meaning which may contribute something to the extended meanings. We should beware of the “etymological fallacy,” in which the branches are mistaken for the root, ⁽⁵⁰⁾ but below I will argue that polysemy does sometimes establish conceptual bridges and connections between things. When a single word is used in Scripture for things that we would ordinarily distinguish by the use of different words, we ought to consider the possibility that the original words establish or facilitate a conceptual relationship that would be weakened if different words were used. A translator should not hastily or unnecessarily separate what the biblical languages put together. The regular use of a certain English word to translate a certain Greek or Hebrew word is desirable, within limits, because it allows the English reader to see the verbal connections that exist in the original.

To prevent any misunderstanding of my meaning here, I would first emphasize the limits of this “concordant” approach to translation.

It is not always possible to translate concordantly, using the same English word for all occurrences of a Hebrew or Greek word. For example, both the Hebrew word כַלָה (kallah) and the Greek word νυμφη (nymfē) mean “bride” in some contexts and “daughter-in-law” in others, and we cannot consistently use only one English equivalent to translate these words in every place, ignoring the demands of the context, because we do not have a word that can refer to both. ⁽⁵¹⁾ Sometimes it is impossible to translate a word concordantly even within the same context, as for example in Romans 12:13-14, where Paul uses forms of the word διωκω in two different senses, “pursue,” and “persecute.” The word-play here cannot be fully reproduced in English.

One very important word in the Greek New Testament that cannot be translated concordantly in English is the word λογος (logos). This word occurs often in the New Testament (about 300 times), and it is translated several different ways in English versions. In the great majority of cases it is translated “word,” but it ordinarily refers to a “saying” or “statement” that expresses an idea or a series of connected thoughts, especially those which involve reasoning. Some of the connotations of λογος may be seen from the fact that it has entered the English language as logic, and as part of the words prologue, epilogue, and Decalogue (the “ten statements” inscribed on the “tables of the testimony”). The suffix logy at the end of many English words (biology, theology, psychology, etc.) reflects the meaning “treatise” or “reasoned discourse.” Λογος may also refer to a “calculation” (hence our word logistics), “an accounting,” a particular “reason,” etc. In at least two places in the New Testament, it is used in a special metaphysical sense, referring to the personified Λογος of God (John 1:1, 14, and in the Johannine Comma). Although it is usually translated “word,” it does not have the sense that “word” usually has in English: “a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use.” That it does not refer to the mere sound of words, may be seen in John 8:43 — “Why do you not understand my speech [λαλια]? It is because you cannot hear my λογος.” The λογος here refers to the mental concept expressed by the audible speech. Lattimore translates it “reasoning” in this place.

Ironically enough, some versions misinterpret this saying, by failing to distinguish the λαλια and the λογος. The RSV (followed by the ESV) does this, and tries to give point to the saying by interpreting “hear” as “bear to hear.” (“Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.”) The NEB effectively conveys the meaning with, “Why do you not understand my language? It is because my revelation is beyond your grasp.” The NLT’s rendering provides an outstanding example of how much meaning can be lost in a “dynamically equivalent” translation: “Why can’t you understand what I am saying? It is because you are unable to do so!” Here λογος is simply quashed, and the saying is reduced to an empty tautology, losing virtually all of its meaning. ⁽⁵²⁾

The semantic associations of λογος are also inherited by words derived from it, such as the adjective λογικος (borrowed into English as logical). Because the word λογος acquired spiritual significance through association with the Word of God, the derived adjective can mean “spiritual” in addition to “reasonable.” And thus in 1 Peter 2:2 the λογικος milk would be understood as “spiritual” milk, but λογικος also suggests a connection with the “living and abiding Λογος of God” which has just been mentioned. And hence we find in some English versions “milk of the word” (KJV, NKJV, NASB). It is not helpful to ask which of the alternative renderings gives the meaning; rather, what needs to be seen is that no English rendering can be entirely adequate, because we lack a word like λογικος which suggests both concepts, or invokes the same cluster of associations. As one scholar observes, in this context λογικος implies that “the spiritual food the believers consume comes to them verbally through the Word of God.” ⁽⁵³⁾

Again, it is important to bear in mind that a word often has different meanings in different contexts. One should not try to find all of the senses of a word in every context where it occurs. But, as I hope to illustrate with this example, it sometimes happens that the sense-distinctions we would make for the purpose of English translation are not so distinct in the original word, which may represent a complex concept that combines ideas in ways that English does not. Consider the following sentence from Athanasius’ treatise On the Incarnation.

This is not a mere play on words. Athanasius (who is among the least playful of authors) is linking ideas in a way already prepared by his language. He makes these connections quite naturally in his language because he has a set of terms that refer to “reason,” “word,” and the Logos of John’s Gospel. It is really almost inevitable that a Greek theologian would connect the image of God with the Logos, and the Logos with rationality in particular. Anything created as a reflection of the divine Logos must first of all be logikos, rational. The tendency of the Greek language to combine these things is very evident here. But the connection fails in English, because we habitually make a linguistic distinction between the internal reasoning and the external speech, and so we have no word that refers to both. Someone might say that the Greek vocabulary lends itself to the confusion of two different things here, but from another point of view the Greek λογος represents a concept that disintegrates in English. In any case, the translator who would bring the full meaning of this sentence across the language barrier has no choice but to override the restrictions of the English language and bring over the Greek words themselves, either in brackets or footnotes, to exhibit the chain of thinking. Despite the fact that these same words have already been adopted into English in several ways, expressing various meanings belonging to them, we still do not have a word that means both reason and word!

English translators have always sensed the inadequacy of their language when faced with the problem of translating λογος in the prologue of John’s Gospel. There is no English equivalent for the metaphysical sense in which it is used there. In such cases it may be best simply to borrow the word in a transliterated form, as James Moffatt did in his “Modern Speech” version of the New Testament (“The Logos existed in the very beginning ...”), and allow teachers to explain the meaning of it. It would not be the first time this word has been borrowed.

If borrowing is ruled out, and the common English “word” continues to stand in the place of λογος, then an explanation is needed to establish a particular biblical sense for “word” here. Explanations like this are often given in expository preaching. For example, Augustine in his Homilies (or Tractates) on the Gospel according to St. John had to face the same problem in Latin as we do in English, because Latin also lacks an entirely adequate equivalent for λογος. The Latin version uses Verbum (‘word’) in John 1:1, but Augustine explains that Verbum here does not mean what it ordinarily means in Latin. The divine λογος can be called a Verbum only if we understand that this Verbum is really more like a cogitatio (thought) or a consilium (purpose). It is like “a word in the man himself which remains within” (in ipso homine, quod manet intus), not the spoken word, “but that which the sound signified, and was in the speaker as he thought of it” (quod autem significavit sonus, et in cogitante est qui dixit). For “you can have a word in your heart, as it were a design born in your mind, so that your mind brings forth the design; and the design is, so to speak, the offspring of your mind, the son of your heart” (Si tu potes habere verbum in corde tuo, tamquam consilium natum in mente tua, ut mens tua pariat consilium, et insit consilium quasi proles mentis tuae, quasi filius cordis tui). With this explanation he invests the common word Verbum with a special biblical meaning that reflects the meaning of λογος in Hellenistic Greek, although he does not even mention the Greek word. Any preacher today could do the same with an English translation that represents λογος with “word.” Instead of borrowing the Greek λογος, the English “word” can be made serviceable (if not entirely adequate) by explanations or by contextual indications which give it a modified biblical meaning.

The vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew also includes some important words that resist translation. The word חֶסֶד (chesed), for instance, combines the concepts “covenant obligation,” “loyalty,” “act of kindness” and “love” in a way that no English word can match. It denotes a kind of dutiful love, connected with promises, family relations, and covenants; and also any action that is motivated by such love. When attributed to God, חֶסֶד implies much “mercy” within the context of a covenant. The word thus has different shades of meaning in different places; but it is not as if it meant “kindness” in one place, “mercy” in another, and “loyalty” in another. It represents a complex concept which cannot be reduced to just one of these English nouns in any of its occurrences. The חֶסֶד concept goes to pieces in English.

The Hebrew word נֶפֶש (nephesh) refers to the “soul” of a human being, but its connotations are not nearly so ghostly as the English word’s are in modern usage. It denotes the soul as embodied, and so it is used in reference to such primal bodily urges as the appetite, along with the deepest emotions. A man’s נֶפֶש is what really motivates him, either spiritually or carnally. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ Being the name for an entity which causes a creature to be alive, it came also to be used in the sense of “life” itself, as a condition of the body; and by a synecdoche (the most important part standing for the whole) it acquired also the sense “living being.” (It is important to note that in the Bible, all animals have souls. The soul is what makes any creature alive. Man is not set apart from the beasts by the possession of a soul, he is set apart by being created in the image of God.) All of this is also true of the Greek word ψυχη (psyche), which was used to translate נֶפֶש in the Septuagint, and is used in all these senses in the Greek New Testament. Concerning the translation of ψυχη the BAGD Lexicon rightly says, “It is often impossible to draw hard and fast lines between the meanings of this many-sided word” (p. 893), because the different senses blend into one another, producing ambiguity, and the concept of “the soul” as an entity casts its shadow over all the various usages of ψυχη and נֶפֶש. As an example of this linguistic chemistry in action, consider the following words of Isaac to Esau in Genesis 27:4.

Syntactically, the phrase “my נֶפֶש” here is functionally equivalent to the personal pronoun “I,” or to any other way of referring to oneself, but semantically it is not just another way of saying “I,” because in addition to serving the function of self-reference, it refers to the soul. And this is generally true in cases where an expression with נֶפֶש refers to persons. It is used in contexts where the fact that they are living is pertinent, where a matter of life and death is prominent, or where the most primal desires of the person are in view. In this context, both the carnal appetite and the impending death of Isaac have made a reference to his soul especially appropriate. Obviously it means more than “I,” and so the NIV’s “that I may give you my blessing” fails to express the whole meaning. ⁽⁵⁶⁾ The only way to convey the whole meaning in a case like this is to translate literally, “that my soul may bless you,” and to explain in a note that the word translated “soul” may also refer to the “appetite.”

This important text briefly sets forth a theology of the atonement. The first נֶפֶש evidently refers to a person, but again, its function is not merely referential, it is used for the sake of its “soul” connotations. Moreover we note that the participle and pronouns connected with it are grammatically feminine, which gives the impression that it is the soul (a feminine noun) which eats and is cut off. In its second and fourth occurrences נֶפֶש might seem at first to mean vitality or life, but in the intervening “atonement for your נֶפֶשות” it must be understood as “souls” or “selves” (the NRSV’s “atonement for your lives” makes no sense), and this reacts upon the interpretation of the other occurrences, because the sentence clearly equates the נֶפֶש of the sacrificial victim with the נֶפֶש of its presenter, for the purpose of explaining how atonement is accomplished. If the word is translated three different ways in these two verses, the connections which are obviously being made in the mind of the author are dissolved. But that is exactly what happens in many English versions. Some versions give no indication that a “soul” is ever mentioned in this passage. The NLT renders it thus:

Observe here that not only is the “soul” missing, but also the “altar,” and any indication of the substitution of one life for another on the altar. The substitutionary idea was expressed in the original by verbal connections which are completely eliminated in the English translation.

No version can entirely avoid this phenomenon of translation, in which the semantic connections of important words “disintegrate” in the passage from one language to another, but the problem becomes most acute in versions produced under the dynamic equivalence philosophy, which demands complete naturalness of expression in the receptor language. This demand is often incompatible with the requirements of an accurate translation. A translator must sometimes employ the principle of concordant rendering, even if it goes against the idiomatic grain of the receptor language, in order to preserve the meaning. Some have argued that “soul” is a misleading translation for נֶפֶש because in popular usage it does not have the range of meaning that belongs to נֶפֶש. But what is the alternative? If the translator gives several different renderings, according to his ideas of what the word means in each context, then the reader who relies upon his translation will never acquire the knowledge of the general concept that נֶפֶש represents. Concepts without names are like souls without bodies. They become invisible. And furthermore, avoiding the word ‘soul’ has the effect of leaving the naive reader’s concept of the soul undisturbed by Scripture. So we cannot agree with Gerhard von Rad when he says, “we should refrain from translating this term as ‘soul’ wherever possible.” ⁽⁵⁷⁾ Rather, we should refrain from rendering it otherwise, and allow the context to indicate how ‘soul’ must be understood. In this way the reader’s concept of the ‘soul’ will be shaped and informed by Scripture.

Fortunately, the defects of our language are not so numerous and serious that we are unable to produce a serviceable, tolerably accurate translation of the Bible. But the linguistic capacity we do enjoy is often owed to the historic influence of Greek and Hebrew upon English, as mediated by literal translations of the Bible. The English word grace owes its range of meaning to the fact that for so many centuries it was used in English Bibles as a translation of χαρις, and in this way had acquired all the meanings of the Greek word. When such a process of linguistic preparation has occurred, it is foolish not to use the especially prepared words. Our ability to produce a fully adequate translation really depends upon them.

One biblical concept that has suffered unnecessary disintegration in recent versions is the concept expressed in Scripture by the Hebrew word בָשָׂר and the Greek word σαρξ, traditionally rendered “flesh” in English versions. These words refer not only to “flesh” in the narrow sense, but to creatures made of flesh, humanity in distinction from God, and human nature in general. Often the words are used in a pejorative sense, emphasizing the mortality, corruptibility, and weakness (both physical and moral) of mankind. This usage is not confined to musty old Bibles, it is a recognized sense in common use. People do not assume that “the flesh” in a phrase like “the world, the flesh, and the devil” refers only to skin and muscle tissue, anymore than they would assume that “the world” refers simply to the planet earth. They understand that “flesh” in such a context refers to the impulses of the flesh, that is, the natural or instinctive desires of the body. But the NIV does not use “flesh” in that sense; it uses the word only where it is thought to refer to the material of the body. Elsewhere it offers, as translations of the word σαρξ, such abstractions as “sinful nature” (Rom. 7-8, etc.), “sinful mind” (Rom. 8:7), “human ancestry” (Rom. 9:5), “human standards” (1 Cor. 1:26), and “human decision” (John 1:13). In some places the word is not translated at all (Rom. 4:1), or its place is filled with a mere pronoun (Matt. 24:22, Rom. 3:20, 1 Cor. 1:29, etc.). One of the NIV translators, Ronald Youngblood, has responded to criticism of its renderings thus:

We do not deny that the word has this range of meaning. Our point is, when the word is rendered in so many different ways, the reader cannot perceive how these things are associated and sometimes even identified in the Greek language. With regard to two of them Herman Ridderbos observes that it is an “indication of the universality of sin, in that flesh on the one hand is a description of all that is man, and on the other of the sinful in man.” ⁽⁵⁹⁾ We might also observe that the same word is used for corruptibility, sinful tendencies, and biological descent, which suggests not only the universality but also the inheritability of the sinful nature. The whole matrix of semantic connections and connotations is destroyed when different words are used for the different aspects of this complex concept.

Youngblood apparently believes that Hebrew and Greek readers are able to discern the intended meaning of the word in each context, but he does not seem to recognize that the context will in the very same way indicate the meaning to readers of English versions that translate σαρξ consistently as flesh. Why should the defining effect of the immediate context be acknowledged for the one and not for the other? It is as if the constraints and indications of the immediate context are not really thought to be adequate. Readers are assumed to be incapable of inferring the meaning of the term from the context. But is there really any basis for the idea that readers cannot perceive what is meant by “flesh” in places where it means something more than the physical substance? In some places it quite obviously refers to unregenerate human nature in general (e.g. Galatians 5).

More recently Douglas Moo has explained that members of the committee who revised the NIV in 2002 “thought that the word flesh in contemporary English would either connote ‘the meat on our bones’ or (where context rendered that particular meaning impossible) the sensual appetites, and especially sexual lust.” ⁽⁶⁰⁾ But the special association of “the flesh” with sensual desire is not just a quirk of contemporary English. The word σαρξ also had this connotation in first-century Greek. ⁽⁶¹⁾ It is no coincidence that Paul in his list of “works of the flesh” (Galatians 5:19ff.) begins with three items associated with sensuality. Martin Luther complained that the Latin equivalent caro and the German das Fleisch were also commonly understood as referring either to “meat” or to “lust” in his day. ⁽⁶²⁾ But notwithstanding this, Luther found such significance in the Bible’s use of “flesh” as a designation for humanity and human nature, that he preferred to translate σαρξ and בָשָׂר literally as Fleisch. ⁽⁶³⁾ The approach taken by Luther may be illustrated by comments in his Preface to the Epistle of Paul to the Romans.

He goes on to define these key words for his readers. The difference between Luther and the translators of the NIV is that Luther had higher expectations of his readers, despite the fact that in his time illiteracy was much more of a problem than it is today. ⁽⁶⁴⁾ He did not believe that a Bible version without explanatory notes and prefaces could convey the whole meaning while making all misunderstandings impossible. He expected readers of his translation to read his notes and prefaces, and he expected preachers to explain the Bible in their sermons also. But the NIV is shaped by much lower standards and expectations, as Moo explains:

Moo agrees that a concordant and literal translation of σαρξ is probably best for “the careful reader” and for those who have received instruction, but he assumes that the majority of Christian readers will not be careful and will not receive instruction. So, careful readers are marginalized by the NIV, while the careless readers are treated as normal. But we do not share such low expectations. We object to the idea that the entire congregation should be using a Bible version adapted to the limitations of those who will not read it carefully, and who are expected to learn nothing from teachers.

I wish to emphasize here that any discussion of what is thought to be best in a translation must inevitably bring under consideration pedagogic and ecclesiastical questions for which a biblical scholar may have no special qualifications or wisdom. There is no reason for us to think that Moo, for example, is a better judge of what people can understand, or of what reading level is best for a Bible version to be used by the whole congregation, or of how much explanation should be left to pastors and teachers. These are questions that lie outside his area of expertise. I assume that we are in agreement about the meaning of the word σαρξ. At least I find nothing in Moo’s remarks which causes me to think otherwise. My disagreement with Moo is about his assumptions concerning the readers of the English version, and what is best for a Christian congregation. Again, I would point out that he admits that concordant renderings will benefit careful readers in this case.

The desirability of concordant renderings may also be seen when we consider the metaphorical relationship that often exists between different senses of the same word. In Hebrew the word שָׁמַיִם (shamayim) means both sky and heaven, and the same is true of the Greek word ουρανος (ouranos). It is by a metaphorical extension of meaning that the word for “sky” came also to mean “heaven,” in the sense of God’s dwelling-place. The metaphorical sense no doubt originated in the intuition that divinity must be “above” our world, because power and authority is naturally associated with being in a “higher” position. God is so high, he is above the clouds. This is a way of expressing the transcendence of God, and it contrasts with pantheistic conceptions that prefer an immanent world-spirit or nature deity. Scripture often uses variations of this “God is high” metaphor, and some events recorded in Scripture give sanction to it. At the Baptism of Christ, “the heavens were opened.” When he ascended into heaven, he quite literally went up into the sky. This must be understood as a symbolic action, as Bruce Metzger explains:

This symbolism will seem “natural and appropriate” to people who ordinarily associate the transcendent realm of heaven with the sky above, and this association is facilitated by the linguistic fact that ουρανος means both “sky” and “heaven.” But when a language requires us to use different words for these things, it works against the semantic association upon which the scriptural symbolism depends. Polysemy often lays the groundwork for symbolism, and it can play a large part in establishing mental associations that are taken for granted and seem only natural to members of a linguistic community.

Although it may seem poetic, until recently no one thought it would be hard to understand if ουρανος were translated “heaven” in places where it denotes the sky. But it seems that many Bible translators now think that “heaven” must be distinguished from “the sky.” Even the NASB reflects this, by giving two different renderings for the same word in Acts 1:10-11, and the Good News Bible consistently avoids calling the sky “heaven” or “the heavens” even in poetic contexts (e.g. Psalm 19, “the sky reveals God’s glory”). What is lost when the sky can no longer be called “the heavens” in the Bible? We lose the power of a scriptural metaphor, which sets the throne of the Most High God upon the stars, and also the symbolic meaning of Christ’s ascension. ⁽⁶⁷⁾

The teaching concerning death and resurrection is sometimes expressed in Scripture by extended senses for words meaning “sleep” and “awake.” In Daniel 12:2 we read, “And many of those sleeping (ישׁני) in the dust of the earth shall awake (יקיצוּ), some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting abhorrence.” The word translated “sleeping” here is an adjective derived from ישׁן (“sleep,” BDB Lexicon p. 445). The word translated “awake” is a form of קיץ (“awake,” BDB p. 884). See also the use of these words in 2 Kings 4:31, Job 14:12, Psalm 13:3, Isaiah 26:19, and Jeremiah 51:39, 57. In the New Testament, see the use of the verbs καθευδω (“sleep,” BAGD Lexicon p. 388) in Matt. 9:24 (= Mark 5:39, Luke 8:52), 1 Thes. 5:10; and κοιμαω and its cognates (“sleep,” BAGD p. 437) in Matt. 27:52; John 11:11, 13; Acts 7:60, 13:36, 1 Cor. 7:39, 11:30, 15:6, 18, 20, 51; 1 Thes. 4:14; and 2 Pet. 3:4. I would also point out the parallelism in Ephesians 5:14. Surely it means something that words which in their primary sense mean “fall asleep” are also used in reference to the death of the body. To say that one of the senses is “fall asleep” and the other is “die” is to miss the significance that derives from the connection of the senses. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ For if the dead “sleep,” they will awake! As Louis Berkhof observes, it is likely that Scripture uses this expression “in order to suggest to believers the comforting hope of the resurrection.” ⁽⁶⁹⁾ But the connection is lost in the NLT rendering of Daniel 12:2 (“those whose bodies lie dead and buried will rise up”), 2 Kings 4:31 (“the child is still dead”), Psalm 13:3 (“I will die”), 1 Thes. 5:10 (“dead or alive”), Matt. 27:52 (“who had died”), Acts 7:60, 13:36 (“he died”), and in all places where a word meaning “sleep” is used to speak of death in the epistles. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

A memorable word used seven times in Jeremiah is הַשְׁכֵּם (hashekkem), lit. “set out early.” In what appears to be a bold anthropomorphism, Jeremiah represents God “rising up early” for the work of sending his prophets to Israel (7:13, 25; 11:7; 25:4; 29:19; 32:33; 35:14). Lexicographers from Gesenius on have supposed that in these places the word is used in an extended sense of “doing with a sense of urgency” or something similar, which is not unlikely. Less likely is the recent idea that it had also a sense “repeatedly.” ⁽⁷¹⁾ But however that may be, everyone acknowledges that the same word is used in the sense “setting out early” nearly everywhere else, so it surely must have connoted early morning activity in Jeremiah also. In the more literal versions of the Bible the word is consistently translated “rising up early.” In the less literal versions we have the weakened renderings “repeatedly” (NLT) and “again and again” (NIV) in Jeremiah. “Persistently” (RSV and ESV) is scarcely better. Why not use “urgently” or “earnestly” at least? We want a rendering that gives some indication of the word’s proper meaning. The rendering “rising up early” may not be the most perspicuous one for literal-minded readers of Jeremiah, but it certainly does indicate the primary meaning of the word, and there is really no compelling reason to think that it was not the only meaning of the word for the biblical authors. Why should it not be understood as a lively and metaphorical way of speaking in Jeremiah?

When we compare English translations of James 1:3 and 1 Peter 1:7, we sometimes find diverse renderings of the word δοκίμιον. In the Revised Standard Version, for instance, it is translated “testing” in James 1:3 and “genuineness” in 1 Peter 1:7. We do not object to the idea that there is a slight difference in the meaning of the word in these two places. However, the difference in meaning is certainly exaggerated in the English here, because the “genuineness” denoted by δοκίμιον is that genuineness which is discovered or proven by testing. This does not need to be explained to anyone reading the Greek, because it is the same word used in James 1:3, and it is very obvious that the two senses of the word are conceptually related. Therefore it is better to translate δοκίμιον more concordantly as “tested genuiness” in 1 Peter 1:7 (ESV).

Earlier in this book, under the heading of “Transculturation,” I discussed the semantic range of the words אָח and αδελφος. The primary meaning is “brother,” but in addition to referring to one who was born of the same mother and father, they may also refer to a “member of a religious community,” “fellow countryman,” “neighbor,” etc., and these various senses are enumerated in the lexicons. Here again the meaning has been extended metaphorically, and so the extended senses retain the connotation of the primary sense, “brother.” It certainly means something that a fellow-Christian is called an αδελφος in Scripture. Therefore, in order to preserve the meaning, a concordant rendering is desirable. We should translate it as brother in all places. If we avoid the word brother and use expressions like “member of the church” or “fellow-Christian” when αδελφος refers to someone who is not literally a brother, then the metaphorical meaning is lost.

Apologists for “dynamic equivalence” typically ignore such considerations. Some have even denied, on a theoretical level, the reality of the linguistic phenomenon we have been talking about here. One new member of the NIV committee, Mark Strauss, has written:

In an illustration of this, Strauss discusses various meanings of the Greek verb ποιεω (“do,” “practice,” “make”, “cause,” “give,” etc), and belabors the rather obvious point that ποιεω cannot always be translated the same way. And so he concludes:

The issue is thus framed by a refusal to acknowledge that the primary sense of a word commonly gives connotations to the extended senses. A semantically mercurial word like ποιεω is offered as proof of this, as if it were typical. After a little specious reasoning we then come to a point where people are even claiming that “member of the church” is an entirely adequate translation for αδελφος, and anyone who thinks that it must still connote “brother” when it refers to a member of the church is said to be guilty of a linguistic fallacy.

We are not here ignoring the theoretical possibility that a word-meaning which began as a metaphorical extension of the primary meaning may lose its metaphorical liveliness after generations of frequent use. There is such a thing as a “dead” metaphor, which has become merely referential in meaning, having lost its original connotations; or if not entirely “dead,” the metaphorical force may have become “dormant.” A good example of this would be the meaning of the verb ordinarily used for “sin” in the New Testament, ἁμαρτάνω, which in the Illiad of Homer sometimes has the concrete sense of “miss the mark” (i.e. in archery). Most philologists think this concrete sense is the original sense of the word, and that the meaning “sin” arose as a metaphorical extension of the more concrete meaning. But “sin” became the ordinary meaning of the word long before the writing of the New Testament, by which time the meaning “miss the mark” was archaic, and would probably never occur to readers—unless of course they were reading Homer. And so the assertion often made in sermons, that the biblical word for “sin” meant literally “miss the mark,” is rather misleading. A preacher who insists on this point of etymology is reviving a dead metaphor, to the detriment of the true sense. ⁽⁷⁴⁾ But the same cannot be said for a word like αδελφος, because “brother” was the ordinary meaning of the word at the time that the New Testament was written.

It is often hard to prove beyond any doubt what connotations a word had in ancient times. But it would be unwise to assume that the primary meaning of a word does not indicate its associative connotations when the primary meaning also happens to be the meaning that is most common.

Strauss is so contrary to our way of thinking that he will not even tolerate footnotes that give the primary meanings of words. He objects to a footnote in the ESV, in which the translators indicate that the Greek word σαρξ literally means “flesh,” though they have translated it as “human being” in the text. He says that with this footnote “they promote a false and misleading view of language and translation.” ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Likewise he charges the translators of the NRSV with a “fallacy” when they give a footnote indicating that αδελφοι literally means brothers, though they have given the gender-inclusive rendering “brother and sisters” in the text: “This is a lexical fallacy. First, the Greek word is not ‘brothers’; it is adelphoi. Second, adelphoi does not have a literal meaning, but a range of possible senses.” ⁽⁷⁶⁾

No one denies that Hebrew and Greek words usually have more than one sense, and that the context indicates which sense is meant. Anyone who is familiar with the languages knows that these senses often do not match up very well with English words. But theorists like Strauss and Nida fail to recognize the true extent of the problem. They assume that it can be solved by sharply segregating the senses and giving different renderings in different places. We, on the other hand, perceive that a variety in the rendering sometimes creates other problems which they do not acknowledge. When the senses of אָח are severed from one another in the “contextually nuanced” translation, much of the meaning is lost. The same is true of נֶפֶש and בָשָׂר and many other words.

English often does have the words needed to express these meanings, but not at the conversational “Common Language” level. Sometimes it is necessary to use borrowed words (e.g. Hades), and sometimes we must take advantage of the “biblical” senses acquired by English words through their usage in literal translations (“brother,” “flesh,” “heart,” “know,” “sleep,” and so forth). The earliest English versions established these senses by using literal equivalents for the primary sense of the words, and allowing the context to indicate the extended biblical senses.

8. Semantic Minimalism

Strauss’s emphasis on the range and diversity of the senses of words and his use of the phrase “illegitimate totality transfer” reflect the influence of James Barr, whose critique of unsound philological practices in biblical studies has greatly influenced many scholars of our generation, especially in America. In his book The Semantics of Biblical Language (1961) Barr coined the phrase “illegitimate totality transfer” to describe a tendency which he had often noticed in theological writings.

Barr’s book does not concern translations, it concerns theological writings which tend (in his opinion) to base their assertions on mere “linguistic fantasy” (p. 44) through the use of speculative etymologies, and which tend to see too much theological significance in biblical words. In my opinion, some of his complaints were valid and necessary, but not all of them. His writing on this subject is polemical in spirit, and he tends to overcorrect, and veer to questionable positions on the other side. Like Adolf Deissmann (with whom he has much in common), his views are distorted by an animus against systematic theology as such, which I do not share. Most important for the present discussion is the fact that he does not draw a line between the fantastic conceits of the “etymologizing method,” as he calls it, and the entirely reasonable idea that polysemy commonly establishes connotations. His attack on the misuse of the “etymologizing method” is strong and compelling; but his “illegitimate totality transfer” charge is not so convincing. (In the paragraphs quoted above he does not even explain why ἐκκλησία should not bring to mind a general conception of the Church in Matthew 16:18.) But my purpose here is not to offer an evaluation of Barr. I am only interested in how his “illegitimate totality transfer” concept has been used in the climate created by Nida’s influence—a climate which differs substantially from the one in which Barr raised his protest.

Nida was of course interested in the implications for “dynamic equivalence” translations. In an article on “Implications of Contemporary Linguistics for Biblical Scholarship” Nida declared that “the correct meaning of any term is that which contributes least to the total context”:

It certainly would be foolish to try to roll together all the various meanings of words sharing the root כבד (which would include the verb כָּבֵד, the adjective כָּבֵד, and the noun כָּבוֹד) and to assert that the resulting mélange of meanings is intended whenever these words are used. But in fact no one is doing this, and it can have no relevance to questions of translation. More to the point would be some discussion of why, in the few places where the noun כָּבוֹד appears to have the meaning “abundance” or “riches” (maybe four times out of about two hundred occurrences), there can be no overtones of the usual meaning of “honor” or “glory.” Because it is not obviously contrary to the “soundest principles of communication science” to think that even in these contexts the meaning of כָּבוֹד would probably have this associative connotation, and therefore the meaning would probably be expressed more adequately with a combination, “wealth that brings honor,” or something similar. I can illustrate this point with the English word “honor,” which in certain contexts has a specialized sense, in relation to women, as in the following lines from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book IV, canto 1:

“Honor” in this context means “virginity.” The word acquired this specialized meaning in relation to unmarried women because virginity was held to be especially honorable for them. But the general sense of “honor” is not so absent in these contexts that we may substitute “virginity” without a loss of meaning, because it means virginity as a condition of honor. Spenser even makes this connotation of the word stand out by the use of the antonym “blame” in the same line. This description of the meaning does not involve any fanciful “etymologizing” method, and it is the kind of observation that even the most cautious philologist would make. It is no “illegitimate totality transfer” when I merely point out that the connotations of the word result from the blending of the specialized with the basic meaning. I think we might need a term for the opposite error here, in which a community or continuum of meaning is arbitrarily broken into segments by analysis.

As for δικαιος, δικαιοω and δικαιοσύνη, I do not believe that “Matthean and Pauline uses” indicate that Paul and Matthew meant such different things by them that they should be translated differently, or that it is illegitimate for us to expect a shared concept of righteousness to be implicit in the meaning of these words when we encounter them in the New Testament. These are not like the word “green”—they are important religious terms. They refer not to physical objects but to ethical concepts, and their relationship to one another is transparent. We may assume that in the context of ancient Judaism and Christianity these words were packed with meaning, and that the three of them formed a self-consistent and integrated set of concepts for the apostles. In any case, the determination of their meaning will have far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of the New Testament, and I must say that I am not willing to give this question over to translators who are very bold to insert their own “contextual” interpretations.

Another path of influence for the same tendency has been the discussion of semantic analysis in a book by Moisés Silva, one of Barr’s students. In a chapter on “Determining Meaning” in his book Biblical Words and their Meaning (1983, revised 1994), Silva shows a tendency to treat words as if they had no fixed or ordinary meanings.

The importance that Silva attaches to the immediate literary context may be seen in his discussion of the “lexical ambiguity” in Galatians 3:4.

A classic example of lexical ambiguity is Paul’s question in Galatians 3:4, τοσαῦτα ἐπάθετε εἰκῇ; We may take the verb in its usual negative sense, “Did you suffer so many things in vain?” We may also translate it in a neutral sense, “experience,” in which case the context would suggest a positive idea, that is, the blessings brought about by the Spirit. This ambiguity illustrates dramatically how two valid principles of interpretation can be brought into conflict. On the one hand, we could insist on choosing the predominant meaning of the verb. That is, since all other passages in the New Testament use πασχειν in malam partem, and since, with very few exceptions, the same holds true for Hellenistic Greek in general, we should presume this negative sense unless the context prohibits it. On the other hand, the principle of contextual interpretation would lead us to emphasize that nothing in the immediate context suggests suffering on the part of the Galatians—indeed, that nowhere in the letter is there an explicit reference to such suffering.

We are then at an exegetical impasse; no resolution is perhaps possible. However, there is an additional consideration that may throw light on our problem. In 1953 the prominent linguist Martin Joos delivered a paper, “Towards a First Theorem in Semantics.” In it he suggested

the rule of maximum redundancy, “The best meaning is the least meaning,” as the explicator’s and defining lexicographer’s rule of thumb for deciding what a hapax legomenon [i.e. a word of unknown meaning, which occurs only once in a body of literature] most probably means: he defines it in such a fashion as to make it contribute least to the total message derivable from the passage where it is at home, rather than, e.g., defining it according to some presumed etymology or semantic history.

At first blush, this statement may appear strange or even unacceptable, for we tend “to assume that an odd word must have some odd sense, the odder the better.” However, a moment’s reflection on the redundancy of natural language will persuade us that “Joos’s Law” is eminently reasonable.

Research into communication engineering has had considerable impact on our understanding of language. In particular, we have become aware of the need for redundancy in communication. When any piece of information is transmitted, considerable interference and distortion (noise) cannot be avoided; if the means of communication is one hundred percent efficient, the slightest interference will obliterate the information. In the course of a normal conversation, the hearer’s reception is greatly distorted by a variety of causes: grammatical lapses on the part of speaker, less than perfect enunciation, physical noises in the surroundings, momentary daydreaming on the part of the hearer. In the vast majority of cases, the hearers do receive the information because of the built-in redundancy of the language. Suppose, for example, that we hear a three-syllable word, but only understand the last two syllables -terday; not only are we able to guess that the word is yesterday, but we make the guess without any awareness that we failed to hear the first syllable. Similarly, missing a complete word seldom bothers us because the sentence as a whole normally discloses that word. Even if we fail to hear a complete sentence when listening to a speech, we are unlikely to miss anything that is not automatically deducible from the rest of the speech.

Joos illustrates his point by referring to Webster’s Third’s definition of per contra, which includes the supportive quotation, “the female is generally drab, the male, per contra, brilliant.” Assuming the user of the dictionary has an adequate grasp of

“the” and “is” and “generally” as discursive English, plus adequate background such as the ordinary or the technically biological and cultural pair “female” and “male,” we imagine him to be in secure possession of exactly two of these three: drab, per contra, brilliant. (That is, any two of the three!) Then the third is “obvious” and the solution is child’s play, both literally and figuratively.

It is literally child’s play, because as children we used precisely the method of maximal redundancy to learn a respectable number of words; indeed, that is the method that we continue to use when we are not consciously thinking about building our vocabulary.

Now while Joos’s article addressed the problem of hapax legomena and other words whose meaning may be unknown, the principle is readily applicable to polysemy. In the case of πασχειν in Galatians 3:4, one could argue that the neutral sense “experience” creates less disturbance in the passage than does “suffer” because the former is more redundant—it is more supportive of, and more clearly supported by, the context. Such an argument is reasonable and this author finds it quite persuasive. However, the principle must not be absolutized (Joos himself calls it a “rule of thumb”), nor can its application in Galatians 3:4 be regarded as conclusive. These reservations do not imply that the context does not give us the meaning; rather, as previously emphasized, it is that we are not fully cognizant of the context. For example, it may be argued (perhaps on the basis of Acts 14:22) that the Galatians had indeed undergone serious tribulation, that their hope of avoiding persecution made them susceptible to the Judaizers’ teachings (cf. Gal. 6:12), and that their conversations with Paul often dealt with this concern. If we therefore imagine that the subject was always in their mind, the sense ‘suffer’ in Galatians 3:4 would not create a disturbance in the (broader) context. Our uncertainty then is based on our inability to identify that context. (pp. 153-56)

Again, we would not want to deny the fact that the context really does have a decisive effect on the meaning of words, and we would even admit that sometimes this needs to be emphasized. But Silva’s statement that the context “virtually makes meaning” is extravagant. The “additional consideration” he introduces by an inappropriate application of “Joos’s Law” really amounts to a denial of the validity of the first principle, that the ordinary meaning of a word should be assumed in the absence of clear indications of a different meaning in the immediate context. A familiar word is here being treated as if it were hapax—a word occurring only once, whose meaning is unknown. But words are not just blanks that acquire their meaning from contexts on the fly. In our comprehension of language we are not usually like children guessing at the meaning of words. Words have persistent “default” meanings that we will think of first in contexts which do not clearly indicate another meaning. “Joos’s Law” is itself rather one-sided, as may be seen in his example of determining the meaning of per contra—because the word contra would probably be associated with contrary by English readers, so that on the contrary would be the first meaning tried in the context. People often assign meanings to unfamiliar words by associating them with words that resemble them phonetically. “Etymological” inferences are probably used just as often as contextual clues in linguistic situations like this. In the realm of scholarly investigation also this is quite proper and normal, as Barr says, “the etymological recognition may be used in conjunction with the context ... to give a good semantic indication” (Semantics, p. 158). But even if we grant the general validity of Joos’s “rule of thumb,” it concerns the determination of the meaning of words which are unfamiliar to the reader, and it is not really applicable to the determination of meaning in ordinary cases of polysemy.

Here it seems that the principle set forth by Joos for the determination of the meaning of hapax legomena in a dead language is made into an overarching “first law of semantics,” which is then supposed to have some bearing on the representation of the meaning of ordinary words in a translation, for the sake of “minimum effort of decoding.” But the logic of all this is not very clear. Joos’s “law” is a heuristic rule, to be used in rare cases when the meaning is wholly unknown. “Best” in this context must mean “most probable.” But in the context of Nida’s prescriptions “best” means “easiest for the reader,” quite apart from any determination of the meaning of the original. How did we get from one “best” to the other? Nida does not seem to care about that, and leaves it to his readers to figure it out; the important thing is that his advice concerning what is “best” should be associated somehow with a “first law of semantics.”

We should reject the idea that “the best meaning is the least meaning.” It is not a principle that deserves any special status in the work of translation, exegesis, or lexicology. None of the authors quoted here have demonstrated that it has much validity apart from its usefulness as a heuristic rule of thumb to be used in special cases.

9. Unnecessary ‘Help’

Several of the renderings discussed above may also be put in a large of class of paraphrastic renderings which may be described as “unnecessary help.” For example, the NIV’s paraphrastic translation of πυρωσει in 1 Peter 4:12-19. Obviously the NIV translators felt that they were helping the reader with this rendering. But did they suppose that ordinary readers of the Bible are so dense that they are incapable of understanding that “fiery ordeal” here refers to painful trials?

Many similar instances of ‘unnecessary help’ could be mentioned. For example, in 1 Corinthians 2:11-13 Paul writes:

The last clause here, πνευματικοῖς πνευματικὰ συγκρίνοντες, lit. “matching spiritual things to spiritual,” looks like a general maxim—the kind of pithy saying that Paul often uses to clinch his arguments. But many translators have felt the need to make the statement more specific. The New Living Translation, for example, has “using the Spirit’s words to explain spiritual truths,” and its marginal note reads, “Or, explaining spiritual truths in spiritual language, or explaining spiritual truths to spiritual people.” There are other interpretations which might just as well have been added to the note. But these different interpretations are not mutually exclusive, and it is likely that Paul would endorse them all as implications of his statement. Why are the translators not content with the general statement? Why not leave it at that, and let the reader discern the implications, the way Paul left his own readers? The urge to explain seems to get the better of them, when no explanation is needed.

Perhaps the most common occasion for excessive interpretation is the treatment of genitive constructions, in which nouns modify other nouns in ways that are sometimes ambiguous. In many places we must be content to say that the genitive merely indicates a connection, the nature of which must be discerned from the context; but these genitive constructions are often analyzed too closely in translation.

In 2 Thessalonians 1:8 we read of the judgment that is coming upon “those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (τοῖς μὴ ὑπακούουσιν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ τοῦ κυρίου ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ). Someone who demands to know if the meaning of the genitive phrase here is subjective (i.e. the gospel preached by Jesus) or objective (the gospel about Jesus) may already be on the wrong track, because the question presupposes that Paul himself made such a distinction, or would have cared about such a distinction. If in fact he never made such a distinction, it will only result in a distortion of his meaning if we import the idea that these are two different things. As one recent introduction to biblical interpretation points out, this is not a case of ambiguity where a choice between alternative interpretations is necessary, but a case of “inexactness,” where “the one meaning is not precise.” ⁽⁷⁸⁾ The rendering of the Good News Bible here, “those ... who do not obey the Good News about our Lord Jesus,” over-specifies the meaning of the genitive.

Another example of this same tendency is the treatment of the phrase δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17. Luther famously translated it, die Gerechtigkeit, die vor Gott gilt, welche kommt aus Glauben ... “the righteousness that is valid in the sight of God, which comes from faith,” etc., interpreting the genitive in an objective sense. This interpretation, which seems rather forced, reflects Luther’s eagerness to introduce the doctrine of imputed righteousness. Calvin explains it in the same way as Luther (“Justitiam Dei accipio, quæ apud Dei tribunal approbatur — I take the righteousness of God to mean, that which is approved before his tribunal”), but he cautiously refrains from injecting this interpretation directly into the text of his Latin translation, and gives instead a literal rendering, justitia Dei. The NIV translators, like Luther, prefer to give a particular interpretation — “a righteousness from God” — but unlike Luther, they interpret the construction as a genitive of author or origin. ⁽⁷⁹⁾ There are other possibilities as well, such as understanding it as a subjective genitive denoting either a quality or an action of God. Commentators of the past two centuries have proposed an amazing variety of interpretations, ⁽⁸⁰⁾ and the exegesis is further complicated by the different meanings assigned to δικαιοσύνη, which in Jewish Greek had acquired the sense of “covenant faithfulness.” ⁽⁸¹⁾ The NLT seems to be combining at least two interpretations with its highly paraphrastic rendering, “how God makes us right in his sight.” But now I would ask: why not simply accept the fact that the Greek genitive construction does not always demand such an exact and specific analysis? There is no good reason to suppose that at this point Paul is saying anything more than that “a (covenantal) divine righteousness” is revealed in the gospel, as opposed to a merely human righteousness. The phrase itself does not express the specific ideas we find in the translations of Luther, the NIV, or the NLT, and the immediate context does not require us to elaborate or constrain the meaning to any one of them. If we want to know more about this “righteousness of God,” we must read on! Not everything is said at once. ⁽⁸²⁾ The Greek language does not lack the means for saying specifically “a righteousness from God” if that is what Paul had meant to express here. He might have written δικαιοσύνη ἐκ θεοῦ here (as in Philippians 3:9), but he did not. And when we get to 3:26, it appears that Paul means at least two different things by the phrase “righteousness of God” — “to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.” So here, as in many other places, the “dynamic” translations seem to be presenting overly-specific interpretations.

In cases like this, where the meaning cannot be narrowed down without risk of eliminating part of the intended meaning, it is best to translate the Greek genitive construction with a correspondingly ambiguous English genitive. In Romans 1:17, δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ should be translated either “righteousness of God” or “God’s righteousness.” ⁽⁸³⁾

In the same verse, the phrase εκ πιστεως εις πιστιν (lit. “from faith to faith”) has received much analysis. The NIV interprets this rather cryptic saying as “a righteousness that is by faith from first to last,” sparing readers the burden of figuring it out for themselves. But here, as often, the difficulty in the literal rendering is not created by the translators: it lies in the Greek text. Many scholars do favor the NIV’s interpretation, but many do not. Some understand it quite differently, and others prefer to leave it an open question. ⁽⁸⁴⁾

10. Inadequate Marginal Notes

It is generally admitted by proponents of “dynamic equivalence” that interpretive renderings can be risky, because they tend to foreclose interpretive options that may be more correct. The standard reply to objections based on this consideration is to point out that the translator can always use marginal notes to indicate other possibilities. In one book co-authored by Nida and Jan de Waard, they write:

Presumably the absence of a marginal note would indicate that the translator is so sure of his interpretation that he does not think any other representation of the meaning is worth mentioning. If this is the case, we must conclude that many “dynamic” translators have a higher opinion of their exegetical skill than they should. Nida unwittingly illustrates this in his remarks on the expression “righteousness of God” in Romans 1:17, which we have discussed above. Despite the fact that Paul himself practically explains the expression in a double sense (“that he might be just and the justifier”), Nida maintains that a translation must prevent readers from interpreting this as “a statement about God’s own personal character.” He claims that misunderstandings of this phrase cannot be prevented by “an informed clergy,” because he believes that too many clergymen are uninformed, and cannot be relied upon to give the correct interpretation.

We would not want to defend translations which are “violating the meaning for the sake of preserving a formal grammatical correspondence,” of course, but Nida’s argument here is unfair, because it misrepresents the motives of the translator. The literal translation is designed to preserve as much of the exegetical potential of the original as possible—making the entire or correct meaning accessible to readers. It is not given merely for the sake of preserving a formal correspondence, but for the sake of the meaning. The translation itself is not “violating the meaning” when it does not make misinterpretations impossible. But the overly interpretive translation which misinterprets or gives only half the meaning does not do justice to the original. We notice that the Good News Bible (which Nida calls Today’s English Version) does not have a marginal note for δικαιοσύνη in Romans 1:17. Nor does the New Living Translation, or the NIV.

In choosing between alternatives the translator would do well to “make use of the best scholarly judgments,” as Nida says, but this is easier said than done. Scholars have argued with one another about the meaning of nearly everything in the Bible. In the past century, especially, it seems that every scholar tries to make his mark by inventing new interpretations. In these circumstances the ability of translators and editors to sort out “the best scholarly judgments” can hardly be taken for granted. One can usually find scholarly support for interpretations found in paraphrastic translations, but they are very often questionable, and represent only one side of a long-standing disagreement between scholars. Sometimes they represent fads of interpretation that prevail only for a generation or two. Moreover, the best scholarly minds in every generation are those who are able to see both sides of a question, who are able to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty, and who suspend judgment when the resolution of some issue is not absolutely necessary. This attitude, which leads the scholar to keep saying “on the one hand ... but on the other hand,” etc., can be rather frustrating for laymen who are looking for simple and fast answers to everything, but scholarship does not naturally produce simple and fast answers.

Let us see what some prominent scholars say about the δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in Romans 1:17. In his commentary James Dunn translates it “the righteousness of God” and explains:

Now if Dunn is right, and the phrase means “covenant faithfulness,” then it does refer to a quality of God’s character, as revealed in his saving purpose and action. For faithfulness is certainly a quality or attribute. Ernst Käsemann, writing in 1979, says that this interpretation “now seems to be predominant,” and he quite properly says it is “a variation of the older idea of righteousness as a divine quality.” ⁽⁸⁷⁾ The increasing dominance of this interpretation in recent decades is probably why the TNIV revision of the NIV changed “a righteousness from God” to “the righteousness of God.”

Perhaps Nida is thinking of an earlier consensus. But if we consult the old standard commentary on Romans by Sanday and Headlam (circa 1900) we find remarks similar to Dunn’s:

Here we see that toleration of ambiguity which is typical of scholarly interpretation. In this case the scholars even insist upon the ambiguity. We do not find here any support for Nida’s demand for a simple and one-sided interpretation. Instead, there is a refusal to comply with such demands. Nida seems to have a wrong impression of “the best scholarly judgments” on this particular question: the best judgment seems to be that the meaning of the phrase is irreducibly ambiguous. In his showcase example Nida is recommending what the scholars call “one side” of the meaning, a “partial and incomplete” interpretation, and a “false clearness.”

I could go on to discuss the similar of treatment of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ in James 1:20 and other places, but I fear that I have already overtaxed the patience of my readers by dwelling upon a subtle exegetical question at such length. I feel it is necessary, however, to give a true impression of how much careful thought scholars have given to questions of interpretation which “dynamic” translators have suppressed and glossed over for the ease of their readers. Those who are familiar with the literature in which these questions are explored will also see readily enough that simplified translations like the Good News Bible and the New Living Translation cannot adequately represent the opinions of scholars, because the opinions of scholars are not simple.

Nida’s argument that alternative interpretations can be given in the margin had better not be just a way of dismissing legitimate concerns about this method of translation. Translators had better be careful to do it. But we find time and again that they do not provide such marginal notes, even where the most questionable interpretations are foisted into the text. In the very nature of the case, one might suppose that translations of this type would include more footnotes than the literal versions, in order to ensure that interpretive options and nuances are not suppressed. But an examination of the versions reveals an opposite tendency: the “dynamic” versions tend to have far fewer footnotes than the literal ones. The extent of the difference can be illustrated by the number of footnotes in Job, a poetic book that is particularly rich in ambiguous lines. The following table gives the total number of footnotes in seven of today’s most widely-used versions.

We observe that one of the most literal versions, the NASB, has more than fifteen times as many notes as the NLT in the Book of Job. The correlation is not proportional, but in general we find that the more “dynamic” a version is, the fewer footnotes it contains. What is the reason for this correlation? I think a clue is given by Nida and de Waard in the same book quoted above, when they state that “for private devotional reading of the Scriptures people normally prefer a text which is not encumbered with numerous references and footnotes” (p. 18). It would be more accurate to say, however, that the editors of the more paraphrastic versions have in view a class of readers who do not want their minds encumbered with the tricky details, alternative renderings, and nuances that might have been provided in the margin. And perhaps they sense that a margin that gives too many alternative interpretations and literal renderings will only damage the credibility of the translation.

The details and alternatives that are commonly neglected in the translation of Job are not trivial. For example, in 13:15 we find the rendering “God might kill me, but I cannot wait” in the NLT, without a footnote, and “I’ve lost all hope, so what if God kills me?” in the Good News Bible; whereas other versions have “Though he slay me, I will hope in him” (NASB, ESV), “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (KJV, NKJV), or something similar. Who will say that this is unimportant? The translators could not have been ignorant of it, and clearly a footnote here is in order. ⁽⁹⁰⁾

When interpretive translators fail to indicate viable alternatives in the margin, they sometimes cause serious difficulties for teachers, even for those who are well versed in Scripture. I once visited an adult Bible class being taught by a young seminary-trained pastor, in which one woman asked a question about Hebrews 11:26, which says that Moses counted “the reproach of Christ” (τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ) greater riches than the treasures of Egypt. Unfortunately everyone there was using the NIV, which states that Moses “regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt,” and she wanted to know how a determination to suffer “for the sake of Christ” could be attributed to Moses (even before the ministry of the prophets), and why the Old Testament failed to mention this motive in its account of Moses. The pastor was caught flat-footed by this excellent question, and began to stumble. He looked at me hopefully, but I could give no help, because I had never heard such a statement being quoted as Scripture, and I had no better version of the Bible with me to jog my memory of the verse. If Hebrews 11:26 had been quoted in a more literal form, I might have explained “the reproach of Christ” in the way that I have always understood it; but I could not explain the NIV’s “disgrace for the sake of Christ.” As happens far too often in modern versions, the NIV here imposes a very questionable interpretation on the text, currently favored in some circles, without providing readers with a note giving the more literal rendering, or in any way indicating the more likely traditional interpretation of the phrase. ⁽⁹¹⁾ In its defense, one might argue that it is just possible to interpret the simple genitive construction in this way, if we suppose that the author was being somewhat lax in his style; but it cannot be said that the Greek genitive ever expresses “for the sake of.” For that, a prepositional phrase is required, like δια with the accusative. The simple genitive construction τὸν ὀνειδισμὸν τοῦ Χριστοῦ is here more naturally understood as “the same reproach that fell upon Christ,” and this meaning is not hard to discern from a literal rendering like “the reproach of Christ” in this context. The question raised by the woman in my friend’s Bible class would not have been raised if it were not for the “helpful” NIV rendering, which made the true sense of the phrase virtually inaccessible to the class; and it would not have been hard to answer if a less interpretive rendering were given in the margin.

Sometimes we find in modern versions “dynamic” renderings that are exegetically impossible, without any alternative renderings given in the margin. An example of this is Matthew 12:33 in the NIV, “Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit.” The Greek verb translated “make” here is an imperative (ποιησατε), and so it cannot be interpreted as if it were merely posing a hypothetical condition, meaning “if you make ... then.” The Greek imperative cannot function like that. It is difficult to imagine how a group of conscientious scholars could have decided to put this in the text without a marginal note. ⁽⁹²⁾ The rendering usually found in more literal versions — “Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or else make the tree bad and its fruit bad” — is indeed not very helpful, and likely to be misunderstood; but at least it allows a teacher to bring out the meaning clearly and deftly by explaining the word “make” in the sense of “consider.” The NIV’s very loose rendering, on the other hand, is so unlike the Greek that it cannot even be used as a starting point for the explanation of the verse. It is necessary to reject the whole sentence as a mistranslation, and offer in its place a rendering quite unlike it in form. Again, this would not be so bad if the version had included a footnote that could be used as the basis for the explanation.

All of which goes to show how empty is Nida’s statement that a translator can always “provide in marginal notes the appropriate alternatives.” The whole ethos of dynamic equivalence frowns at the kind of carefulness that would supply details and alternatives in the margin, while encouraging translators to take unprecedented liberties with the text.

11. Needless Limitations of the Vocabulary

In one of the examples cited above, I used the word “reproach” to translate the Greek ονειδισμος. This English word, “reproach,” is today rarely heard in conversation. In colloquial speech its use is practically confined to the phrase “above reproach,” and the word has a distinctly literary if not biblical flavor to it. For some time now, many translators who adhere to principles of “dynamic equivalence” have been avoiding words like this, because they suppose that words rarely used in conversation are liable to be misunderstood. Therefore instead of “reproach,” we see “disgrace” in several modern versions, in places like Hebrews 11:26 and 13:13. But the word “disgrace” does not have quite the same meaning as “reproach.” The two words are very close in meaning, but “disgrace” implies some fault, giving sufficient cause for dishonor, whereas “reproach” does not. “Reproach” has reference to public reputation only. A righteous man might be said to suffer “reproach” (e.g. by public insults and ridicule for his unpopular views), but we do not speak of a man’s “disgrace” without implying that his reputation is deserved. This illustrates one of the great advantages of the English language: its relatively large stock of words, which puts at our disposal many synonyms that enable us to make such fine distinctions. If, however, we choose to artificially limit this vocabulary, using only those words which are commonly used in conversation, our ability to express ourselves is greatly diminished. Translators who avoid words rarely used in conversation, though they are generally understood by English speakers, are limiting their own ability to convey shades of meaning in the original, and for no good reason.

In Acts 9:22 it seems impossible to express the meaning of συνέχυννεν concisely in English without using either the word “confounded” or “discomfited.” Both words combine the sense “defeat” with “throw into confusion,” and that is just what the Greek word means here. Paul confounded the Jews of Damascus with his powerful arguments. The rendering “confounded” goes back to Wycliffe, and its fitness is so obvious that it was used by all subsequent translators up to the twentieth century. It continues to be used in several recent versions. If it is rejected now as being too unusual for the modern reader, what equivalent can be found in “common English”? We end up with such renderings as the NIV’s “baffled” and the CEV’s “confused,” which express only half the meaning; or the NEB’s “silenced,” or such paraphrastic treatments as the NLT’s “the Jews in Damascus couldn’t refute his proofs,” which expresses only the other half of the meaning. This is what happens when translators are prevented from using all the resources of the language. When the range of words allowed in a translation decreases, inaccuracy must increase.

In this connection, we are told that the use of archaic language in the older Bible versions presents problems for many people, and this is true to some extent. I once met a man who had been reading the KJV Bible nearly every day for more than 30 years, but he did not know that “meat” in that version means “food.” We can do without confusion like that. And who today would want to keep the unfortunate “superfluity of naughtiness” in James 1:21? But in my experience as a teacher, archaic words and expressions are much less of a problem than some would have us believe. It is claimed, for instance, that people will have difficulty with the word “begat” in the genealogies, and so we must have “was the father of” instead. But it so happens that “begat” is a more accurate translation of εγεννησεν, and in twenty years of teaching I have never encountered anyone who did not understand the word. The same is true of “behold,” and “thou,” and many other old-fashioned words. If for any reason a translator or reader prefers these words, there is no harm in it.

Is the purpose of accurate translation met when Hebrew and Greek words for which the “dynamic” translator can find no modern-sounding equivalent are left untranslated? This has been the case with the Hebrew interjections הֵן and הִנֵּה (“behold, lo”), and the corresponding ιδου in the New Testament, in many recent versions. A translator who cannot bear to use any biblical-sounding word like “behold” sometimes ventures to use “see” or “look” as an equivalent, but with results that are even less natural to spoken English than “behold.” For example, the NIV in Matthew 24:15 reads “See, I have told you,” and in 26:45, “Look, the hour is near.” Is Jesus pointing to a clock here? When there is nothing to look at or see with the eyes, English-speaking people do not naturally use the words “look” and “see” as emphasizing interjections, in the same way that the biblical authors use הִנֵּה and ιδου. The NIV translators evidently felt the oddity of using “see” and “look” like this in most places, but having ruled out “behold,” they found no way of conveying the meaning at all; and so they simply left the Greek and Hebrew words untranslated in hundreds of places (e.g., 1 Sam. 30:3, Luke 1:48). We grant that, all other things being equal, it is usually good to use words of the common sort, rather than needlessly archaic ones. But translators should not reject words that are understood by virtually everyone just because they are not currently popular in colloquial speech. A translator who needlessly hobbles himself with such a stylistic principle will often find that he simply cannot express the meaning. ⁽⁹³⁾

Sometimes the advocates of “dynamic equivalence” exaggerate the supposed need for common language so much that it seems they think ordinary people are stupid. For instance, Nida in one of his books explained that in Psalm 23 the old-fashioned rendering, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” was unacceptable because “many persons understand this traditional rendering to mean: ‘The Lord is my shepherd whom I shall not want.’” ⁽⁹⁴⁾ This is the kind of ridiculous misunderstanding that “many” people fall into when the language of colloquial speech is not used, we are told. But perhaps we are entitled to a higher opinion of people’s intelligence. As for those few who really do have such problems, we wonder if it would be wise to encourage them to think they could understand much of anything in the Bible without constant help from teachers.

12. Needless Limitations of the Grammar

The ability of translators to express the meaning of the original is hindered not only by limitations of the vocabulary but also by restrictions of English grammar. The most obvious example of this is the reluctance of some modern versions to employ the third-person imperative, as in Revelation 2:7, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” In this sentence “let him hear” does not, of course, mean “allow him to hear.” When “let” is placed at the beginning of the clause like this, it is not the verb; it is an auxiliary word used with the third-person imperative verb that follows. Its function is modal. The imperative force belongs to the verb (in this case “hear”) not to the auxiliary “let.” No one is being addressed in the second person in this statement, either expressly or by implication. It is a command, given indirectly, in which the one who is being commanded is referred to in the third person. In our language, this manner of speaking has an especially authoritative and impersonal connotation; we would associate it with something like a royal edict. It is not often used in casual conversation. I do not say to my sons, “Whoever made this mess, let him clean it up.” Instead I say, “Whoever made this mess had better clean it up.” In line with this less formal manner of speaking, then, the New Living Translation avoids the formality of the third-person imperative and transforms Revelation 2:7 into a statement about the obligations of the listeners: “Anyone who is willing to hear should listen to the Spirit and understand what the Spirit is saying to the churches.” The formality and force of the saying is scaled down considerably here. It can be called the “closest equivalent” only if we are working under the assumption that it must be an equivalent expression in daily household talk; but the trouble is, Revelation 2:7 is not household talk: it is a command issued from heaven. The connotations of a royal edict are quite appropriate here, because in fact it is a royal edict.

In defense of the NLT rendering it might be claimed that some people who have never heard anyone use a third-person imperative in conversation will think that “let him hear” in this context means “allow him to hear,” and so the rendering prevents a misunderstanding. But I think that is hardly likely. This construction is not rare in Scripture: “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour” (Ephesians 4:28); “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 11:15); “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself” (Matt. 16:24); “whoever reads, let him understand” (Matt. 24:15); “let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord” (James 1:7); “Let not then your good be evil spoken of” (Rom. 14:16); “Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (John 14:27); “let him glory in the Lord” (1 Cor. 1:31); “let her be covered” (1 Cor. 11:6); “let him be accursed” (1 Cor. 16:22); and so forth. It just isn’t true that people fail to understand the third-person imperatives in these renderings. In the NLT we still read in Genesis 1:2, “Let there be light.” In Hebrew the verb here is a jussive, which has the same function as our third-person imperative with “let.” The command is not addressed to any second person, it is rather a performative speech act in which the light is indirectly commanded to “be.” As Paul says, “he calleth the things that are not, as though they were” (Romans 4:17), and thus the light is summoned into being by the word of his command. This is not difficult. No one will think that God is telling someone to “allow” light to shine.

Nevertheless, we find in modern versions some really desperate attempts to avoid the third-person imperative. In Galatians 6:17 Pauls says, “Let no man trouble me,” but the NLT says, “don’t let anyone trouble me” — as if the sentence contained a second-person imperative of “let” as the main verb. This rendering is obviously wrong, and I can only suppose that it is here because some editor was going through the text and trying to eliminate “let not” expressions for stylistic reasons.

The restriction of English grammar even causes some confusion about this in Daniel Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. In a section on prohibitive imperatives, Wallace translates 1 Timothy 5:16 “Do no let the church be burdened.” He does recognize, however, that in such an English sentence the “let” can only mean “allow,” and so he explains that this is not the sense of the Greek: “In English this looks as if the author is saying ‘I don’t permit the church to be burdened.’ But the Greek is stronger: it is as if he is saying ‘I order the church not to be burdened.’” ⁽⁹⁵⁾ Strangely, he gives the reader no idea of what is really wrong with the rendering. It is not that the Greek is “stronger,” it is just that the Greek verb βαρείσθω “be burdened” is a passive imperative in the third person, and there is nothing in the Greek that corrresponds in meaning with the active second-person imperative “let” that we have in the mistaken English rendering. All the confusion is dispelled, however, if we only translate it correctly: put the auxiliary “let” in its proper position and leave out the “do” which makes it into a verb. “Let not the church be burdened.” There is no need to paraphrase it as Wallace does in his explanation. I suppose that Wallace has avoided “let not the church be burdened” as a rendering because it is archaic-sounding, and he wants to give renderings in modern colloquial style, so as to help translators who are doing the same. But this restriction is totally unnecessary; and evidently he cannot find another way to express the sense accurately in English translation. The self-imposed restriction even prevents him from giving a clear and accurate explanation of the grammatical facts here. It is impossible for us even to talk about a third-person imperative without using the English construction that has always expressed it in the past.

A “dynamic” theorist at this point may protest that not all languages can do this, and so the elimination of third-person imperatives is justifiable in theory. They should say, rather, that it is justifiable when it is necessary. For it is not justifiable when a language does have a third-person imperative in its grammar.

13. A False View of Linguistic Development

One should not underestimate the abilities of ordinary people to learn words, or new meanings for existing words. This was brought home to me in an interesting way recently, when one of my children asked me to get a “thing of pop” at the grocery store. Without even thinking about it, I knew that he meant a two-litre bottle, because not long ago I had heard my wife casually refer to one of those large bottles as a “thing” of pop. My son had immediately picked up the usage, and he correctly perceived that this was her way of indicating a large bottle, as distinguished from the smaller ones we usually think of when we say “bottle.” So now in my family the word “thing” has acquired a new and highly specific sense when referring to liquid containers. By the age of eight all my children knew the usual English words for liquid containers in our house: cups, glasses, mugs, bottles, cans, cartons, jugs, canteens, pitchers, etc. Their knowledge of what these words specifically refer to was gained without effort, merely by example and inference, without anyone stating definitions.

One word they all knew by the age of five was “ark,” as in “Noah’s Ark.” I don’t remember ever being asked what an “ark” is. It was just accepted as the name of that huge vessel that Noah built. The word is not common in speech, and, like “tabernacle,” it is one of those biblical words that people must learn from the contexts in which it is used. But this is no different from my son’s learning that when his mother says a “thing of pop” she means a two-litre bottle—it is no trouble at all. And it turns out that this unusual word “ark” is worth learning, because it represents an unusual Hebrew word: תֵּבָה (teivah), which means not really a “boat” but a box-like container or vessel. Interestingly enough, this Hebrew word occurs in only one other place in the Bible: in the infancy narrative of Moses, where his mother builds an “ark” to float him on the Nile. Like a second Noah, Moses is thus preserved from death by means of an “ark” on the water. Probably Moses used the word תֵּבָה here, in the story of his own deliverance, with Noah’s ark in mind. Of course this allusion, like all the others mentioned above, is lost in some modern versions, because they will not use such an unusual word as “ark.”

It is true that some words that children may hear every day need to be explained to them. Recently I found that my sons (who are 11 and 9 years old) did not know the meaning of the word “allegiance,” despite the fact that they had recited the “pledge of allegiance” hundreds of times at school and at Boy Scouts. The meanings of the words “republic” and “indivisible” were also unclear to them. They told me that no one had ever explained to them what these words meant. Words like this need explanation because they refer to concepts rather than objects. “Republic” even requires a little history lesson to be understood; but the word often appears in newspapers and magazines, and it is really indispensible for any worthwhile discussion of political history and ideology. I would expect any decent school to teach its students the meaning of this word by the ninth grade. The case is similar with conceptual terms like righteousness and redemption in the Bible. Children should not be expected to just pick up the meaning of these words without instruction. But I would expect any Christian Education program to provide such instruction for children before they reach the age of 15, and I would not expect children younger than that to do any independent Bible reading. In any case, trying to explain Christian theology without the use of such words is like trying to explain American political ideology while avoiding the word “republic.” We do not get very far into the subject before the need for such terms becomes obvious.

Another false notion promoted by “common language” advocates is that words of Latin origin must be avoided. We get the impression that they think these words do not really belong in the English language. They claim that words derived from Latin are somehow exotic, unduly formal, and lack the force of native Anglo-Saxon words. This assertion is usually made without argument, as if it were self-evident. But is it really true? Is it true, for instance, that the word “disciple” (from the Latin discipulus, “pupil,” “apprentice”) is just a fancy Latinate way of saying “follower”? We rather think that “disciple” is the stronger word, more definite in meaning. A “follower” does not always know his leader personally, or necessarily learn much from him; but the word “disciple” suggests a closer relationship, and also conveys the idea that the relationship is that of a learner with his teacher. Probably the word “disciple” has this stronger meaning in English because it is less common, being especially associated with the Bible and religion, and having acquired from its biblical usage all the meaning of the Greek μαθητης. Below I will elaborate more on this point, and argue that the most common words in a language do not in fact have more meaning or force than uncommon words, but less. Here I am only concerned with the unreasonable prejudice against English words inherited from Latin.

Barclay Newman, translator of the Contemporary English Version, solemnly informs us that the word grace—which we have defended above—“comes from the Latin word gratia,” and that “the expression ‘grace of God’ did not enter the English language until A.D. 1175.” ⁽⁹⁶⁾ The assumption here seems to be that words or phrases unattested in English before the twelfth century are somehow illegitimate. He complains that grace, like most of the other words he finds objectionable (e.g. righteousness and repentance), was brought into English versions “from the Latin Bible” by John Wycliffe — “a Latin scholar who knew little Greek.” And so we are urged to reject the word, because it came from Latin. Again, if we had hoped that the word grace, after eight centuries of use in English-speaking churches, and a million choruses of “Amazing Grace,” might have gained a secure place in the English language by now, we were mistaken.

This reminds me of the patriotic encomiums to Tyndale found in some nineteenth-century British authors, who praise his New Testament for its “pure Saxon” vocabulary, drawn from “the well of English undefiled,” and so on. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ Statements like this are so far from the truth, they can only be understood as expressions of the French-hating “blood and soil” romanticism of their authors. They seriously misrepresent not only Tyndale’s vocabulary, but also the very nature and history of the English language. The truth is, from the fourteenth century onward it has not been possible for a speaker of English to avoid Latin-derived words. Modern English is not merely a development of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) in which a few expendable inkhorn terms have been borrowed from Latin along the way. It is the outcome of a hybrid of Old English and Old French formed in the centuries following the Norman conquest of Britain, in which much of the vocabulary of Old French was thoroughly naturalized. The Latin-based French words came to the British Isles in such a flood that probably more than half the words of Modern English can be traced to them. Not only that, but many native Anglo-Saxon words have acquired meanings from their Latin equivalents. An example of this is the word “thing.” Originally in Anglo-Saxon a “thing” was an “assembly,” but under the steady and pervasive influence of Latin during the Middle Ages it gradually acquired all the senses of its Latin equivalent, res, and finally its old Anglo-Saxon meaning became obsolete. ⁽⁹⁸⁾ It has been estimated that Modern English “has appropriated a full quarter of the Latin vocabulary, besides what it has gained by transferring Latin meanings to native words.” ⁽⁹⁹⁾ This momentous change in the language might be forgotten, but it cannot be reversed. We cannot go back to a “pure Saxon” vocabulary by avoiding Latin derivatives, because Latinate words have displaced much of the old Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. There is nothing “foreign” about Latinate words that have been in our language continuously for 800 years; but many of the Anglo-Saxon equivalents, if they ever existed, have become as foreign to us as German. This may be illustrated by the fate of the Old English word for “savior.” That word was hælend (comp. German heiland), and in Anglo-Saxon translations of scripture hælend was also used to represent the name of Jesus. But by the time of Wycliffe this familiar Saxon word had been pushed aside by the French sauveour, descended from the Latin salvator. A descendant of the word hælend did survive the Norman invasion, with a more restricted meaning, in the form of our word “healer;” but the sense of “savior” has been taken from it and given to the adopted French word. And this is how it went with many common Anglo-Saxon words during the Middle English period. We are far beyond the point when anyone might refrain from the use of Latin-derived words like this, which long ago became an integral part of our language. And if it were possible, it would still not be desirable, because the great versatility and precision of the English language is mostly due to this infusion of Latin vocabulary; as one German grammarian has said: “The Blending of the Germanic [Anglo-Saxon] with the Romance [Latin and French] imparts to English in general a richness of expression for all shades of thought, possessed by no other modern language.” ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

Even in languages which have not undergone the kind of transformation that English went through in the Middle Ages, the borrowing of words from other languages is not uncommon. In fact the Hebrew word תֵּבָה (“ark”), mentioned above, is probably a loan-word from Egyptian (see the etymology in the Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon). In the Greek New Testament, we find a number of loan-words from Hebrew and Aramaic. All the European languages have borrowed words from Hebrew, Greek, and Latin; and many of these borrowed words are now household words in our language: the words “Christ” and “Bible” are anglicized Greek (χριστος and βιβλια), “Amen” is Hebrew (אמן), and these words came into our language through ecclesiastical Latin (Christus, Biblia, Amen). The idea that words borrowed long ago from the ancient languages should not be used in a Bible version is unreasonable; it involves a false view of language development, and it ignores the fact that many words have entered our language by means of Bible translations in the past.

14. The Shallowness of Ordinary Language

Nothing is more characteristic of life in the modern age than its shallowness. For many who have turned to Christ in recent years, the first prompting of the Spirit was an overwhelming sense of the sheer emptiness and superficiality of their lives. They come to a church looking for something deep and permanent enough to give meaning to their lives. But at the same time many churches have fallen victim to the shallowness of our age, and what visitors too often find in them, instead of depth, is an inane and faddish “pop Christianity.” Seekers may even find that the very Word of God has been rendered insipid and shallow by our modern translators.

“Dynamic equivalence” versions seem to have a genius for trivialization that prevails even against some basic principles of their method. An example of this is the use of “happy” instead of “blessed” as a translation for אַשְׁרֵי and μακαριος in the context of blessings. J.B. Phillips was the first to use this rendering for μακαριοι in the beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:3-12), though he used the more appropriate “fortunate” in some other places. His “happy” has been copied by the Good News Bible and the New Century Version. In the latter we find the ludicrous rendering, “Those who are sad now are happy” for Matt. 5:4. The translators of the King James version used “happy” in the old sense of “fortunate” in a few places where these words refer to the enjoyment of favorable circumstances, but presumably the poor readers of the Good News Bible and New Century Version will understand “happy” only in its ordinary modern sense, as denoting an emotion. Clearly μακαριος in the beatitudes refers to something more spiritual in nature — a “blessed” state of being under divine favor. ⁽¹⁰¹⁾ Nevertheless, it seems that Phillips and the others preferred “happy” to “blessed” here just because it sounds more colloquial and contemporary. “Blessed” is one of those stilted and old-fashioned words that the modernizing translators shun, as belonging to the stained-glass vocabulary of yesteryear. Modern youngsters and non-Christians just don’t say that people are “blessed.” So we have “happy” instead.

In front of me is a recently-published book called A User’s Guide to Bible Translations, whose author strongly recommends the use of dynamic equivalence versions, which he calls “meaning-driven” versions. ⁽¹⁰²⁾ He writes:

This writer—said to be a “Baptist minister in England” on the back cover of the book—seems to think that the Greek word traditionally translated Repentance (μετανοια) in the New Testament means nothing other than “turning away from sin, and turning toward God.” But this technical definition leaves out the remorse, the sorrow for sin, the hearty determination to change, that are also denoted by the word. Thayer in his Lexicon explains that μετανοια denotes “the change of mind of those who have begun to abhor their errors and misdeeds, and have determined to enter upon a better course of life, so that it embraces both the recognition of sin and sorrow for it and hearty amendment, the tokens and effects of which are good deeds.” (2nd ed., p. 406.) All of this is implicit in our word “repentance.” ⁽¹⁰³⁾ We are aware of the fact that this stern old word, so charged with religious meaning and emotional depth, is rarely heard outside of church. But the claim that it may not “make sense” to Bible readers is implausible. The same writer also states that the word sin “may not be understood properly” (p. 46), and worries that salvation may also be too hard for some readers to understand, because it is “a long word with an abstract meaning” (p. 69).

In the New Living Translation’s rendering of Mark 1:4 we notice also that “to show that they had turned to God” construes the repentance connected with John’s baptism as a previous or contemporaneous action to be “shown” by the baptism. This is apparently the translator’s attempt to explain what is meant by βαπτισμα μετανοιας “baptism of repentance” in the original. But Scripture itself does not explain the relationship of baptism to repentance in this way. This same baptism “of repentance” is elsewhere called a baptism unto or for repentance (εις μετανοιαν) in Matthew 3:11, and from that we gather that the “baptism of repentance” is the sacred inauguration or pledge of a life-long repentance, as Luther said, ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ and not the seal upon a completed act, as others have represented it. For this reason Thayer and others have explained the genitive phrase βαπτισμα μετανοιας in Mark 1:4 as “a baptism binding its subjects to repentance.” Predictably enough, the New Living Translation not only gets this wrong, but also glosses over the expression in Matthew 3:11, where it has “baptize ... those who turn from their sins and turn to God” instead of “baptize ... unto repentance.” And it does this without a marginal note. We would expect someone with a theological education to notice how the New Living Translation pushes a particular view of repentance and baptism here with its paraphrastic renderings; but the only problem that our Guide sees is “a long and wordy sentence.”

How could such faults escape the notice of a minister who is focusing on the rendering of the New Living Translation here for the purpose of discussing its merits and shortcomings? What has happened to theological education in England, that the only problem he would see here is that the rendering is “long and wordy” in comparison with the other versions he quotes? One gets the impression that advocates of “dynamic equivalence” are so enamored with the idea that everything should be recast in some simple and colloquial way, that they fail to see even the most obvious problems in versions that attempt it.

Quite aside from any theological qualms we may have about the wording used in modern versions, we often sense that the “everyday” language that replaces the richer vocabulary traditionally used in Bible translations makes the text mean less than it should. Words like “blessedness,” “grief,” “remorse” and “sorrow” are rarely used in conversation, but they cannot be replaced with everyday expressions like “be happy” or “feel bad” without trivializing the thoughts and feelings that the sacred authors want to convey. We “feel sorry” about small things that are soon forgotten; but “remorse” denotes a deeper and more enduring emotion. This is practically a law of language — words and expressions that are common in everyday speech are associated with things that happen every day; but for things that do not happen every day, we require other words. If those who claim that everyday English needs to be used in order for the text to be understandable were really consistent, they would not use words like “sorrow” or “remorse,” as does the New Living Translation in 2 Corinthians 7:9. The error of the “everyday language” principle becomes evident, however, when it is actually adhered to and consistently put into practice, as in the CEV.

It is not only the discriminating littérateur who will feel that something is wrong with the CEV here. By using such expressions as “hurt feelings” and “feel bad” the translators have substituted paltry and commonplace emotions for those that are great and rare. They have trivialized it, and have violated a well-established rule of language. One cannot use such ordinary household expressions in reference to powerful spiritual convictions and awakenings.

One might as well replace the expression “they were cut to the heart” in Acts 2:37 with “their feelings were hurt.” This would be ridiculous, but the rendering of the CEV there is not far different: its says, “they were very upset.”

Professor Ryken of Wheaton College, in his valuable book The Word of God in English, ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ criticizes many renderings like this from the standpoint of a literary critic, and he very aptly describes them under such headings as “Impoverishment of language,” “How to lower the Bible’s voltage,” and “The importance of getting the tone right.” But I wonder how many of his readers understand what is really at stake in matters of style and tone. The difference here is not just a superficial matter of “form,” without consequences for the “content” of the message. A real distortion of meaning occurs when everyday household language is used to describe extraordinary things. When we speak of “hurt feelings” and being “upset” we are referring to relatively minor agitations — the average teenage girl gets “upset” and has “hurt feelings” several times a month — but these words cannot refer to the kind of anguish that can change a man’s life.

Ryken emphasizes the fact that the style of the Bible in its original languages is largely poetic. The Psalms are all written in poetic style. The Prophetic books are mostly poetry. Job and the Song of Solomon are poetry. There are also some long poetic portions in the books that are mostly prose, such as the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy chapter 32. In the New Testament, the sayings and discourses of Christ often exhibit poetic features, especially the parallelism of clauses which is the distinguishing mark of Hebrew poetry. There is good reason to think that most of his preaching was delivered in this rhetorical form, which was associated with inspiration and prophetic speech. ⁽¹⁰⁶⁾

Nida not only acknowledges this, he even states that the Jews “placed high value on the poetic language of the prophets,” and felt that “its very distinctiveness marked it as somehow inspired.” Among the Jews, he says, “something in poetic form achieved greater authority because of its distinctive vocabulary, structure, and rhythm.” ⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Evidently the prophets also felt that formal and poetic language was most suitable for the communication of the Word of God, or else they would not have spoken as they did. This feeling is by no means confined to Israelite prophets and their Jewish readers. People throughout the world have connected inspiration with impressive, unusual, and even mysterious language. The speech of sages and oracles is expected to be figurative. The book of Proverbs is full of figures, word-plays and other clever and interesting turns of phrase, in line with the conventions of wisdom literature. And it is a universal tendency of human beings to associate authority with a formal and impressive style of language. As a linguist Nida surely knows this, but as an apologist for the Good News Bible he is constrained to minimize the importance of any stylistic considerations.

If he were speaking as a disinterested linguist here, Nida would not be trying to downplay the common association of authority and inspiration with impressive forms of speech, by dismissing it as a “mistake.” It is not the part of a linguist to reject as “mistaken” any common linguistic tendency or expectation. He and his followers know full well that it is not only “some” people who would expect divine revelations and commands to be more impressive than the newspaper. They are aware of the fact that much of the Bible is poetic, and that most of the prose sections are written in an elevated style. They must also know how unlikely it is that “common language” versions will ever command the same respect as versions that imitate the formal style of the original. But the high place occupied by demands for “naturalness” and “common language” in their hierarchy of concerns really dictates a simple conversational style in all circumstances. The versions most favored by Nida, the Good News Bible and the Contemporary English Version, do not even rise to the stylistic level of most newspaper articles. The tendency in these versions is to reduce the text to a uniformly bland, prosaic, and even childish manner of speaking throughout the Bible.

The Guide to Bible Translations quoted above tries to forestall any recognition of this by portraying as bombastic any diction that rises above the kindergarten level:

But this example does not illustrate what the author thinks it does. It does not demonstrate that polysyllabic words are especially hard to understand. In fact they are not hard to understand. The word “refrigerator” is not more difficult to understand than “ice box.” The words “electricity,” “unsympathetic,” and “elementary” are not hard to understand, though each of them has five syllables. There is no necessary connection between the number of syllables in a word and the ability of people to understand it. The simple truth is, the words that people do not understand are the words that they have not learned. What the example really demonstrates is the semantic cloudiness that results from the avoidance of familiar words, and from the unnecessary use of definitions or abstract and general terms in their place. It also illustrates rather comically the pretentiousness of trying very hard to sound learned or official in one’s speech when simpler words would serve the purpose of communication much better. This might be a warning to us, that we should not use vague abstract words and periphrastic expressions when concrete and precise equivalents are available in our language. But it gives us no reason to avoid righteousness as a translation for δικαιοσυνη, repentance for μετανοια, and salvation for σωτηριον. These English words are exact equivalents for the Greek words. Their degree of abstraction mirrors that of the Greek words precisely. These terms will seem foggy and indefinite in meaning only to people who have not spent much time reading the Bible.

Before I put our Guide to Bible Translations back on the shelf, I would add one more example that illustrates what is wrong with its advice.

Here we see the hermeneutical consequences of the demand for “ordinary language.” For it does not even occur to the Guide that Jesus is not talking about ordinary love in an ordinary way. He assumes that Jesus is saying something that we might say, and tries to understand the expression μείνατε ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ τῇ ἐμῇ (lit. “abide in the love that is mine”) in terms of what a man might say to his wife. But the αγαπη of God in Christ is not the same as human love. Like χαρις, the divine αγαπη denotes a life-giving power that flows from the throne of grace. It is the life of the vine, the bond of the vital union with Christ. It is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5). It moves us and constrains us (2 Cor. 5:14). To abide in this divine love is to remain under its influence, to be mindful of it at all times, to keep receiving it by faith, in an attitude of entire dependence. The fruit of this love is grateful obedience, and love for others. ⁽¹¹⁰⁾

The more literal versions leave all this unexplained. One must read John’s Gospel and epistles, and the epistles of Paul, in order to learn what is meant by the αγαπη of God in these writings. But the literal versions at least make it possible for a reader to do this. The observation that “abide in my love” is “not natural English,” as the Guide complains, is the kind of observation that will first indicate to the reader that there is something unusual about this “love.” But unfortunately, the “meaning-driven” CEV only illustrates how much damage can be done to the meaning of the text when we bring the wrong questions to it. The wrong question in this case is, “how would we say this?” When Christ says “abide in my love,” he is saying something that we cannot say.

This is the kind of exegetical shallowness that one often finds in modern versions of the Bible. The “ordinary language” requirement constantly drives the interpretation down to a mundane level, where the biblical authors are forced to say only the things that we might say in our ordinary lives.

Another example of this exegetical shallowness may be seen in the translation of John 2:4. Here Christ responds to the request implicit in Mary’s observation “they have no wine” by saying to her, Τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι — literally “what (pertains) to me and to you, woman?” The words τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί here are a literal reproduction of the Hebrew idiom מַה־ לִּי וָלָךְ meaning “what do we have between us” (as in Judges 11:12 and 1 Kings 17:18) or “what do we have in common?” (as in 2 Sam. 16:10 and 2 Kings 3:13), and it must be said that this is not very polite. Someone who uses this expression is saying, in effect, that he does not have anything in common with the person to whom it is said, or does not want to have anything to do with him, his concerns, or his requests. The use of γυναι “O woman” as a form of address is not in itself impolite, but it is a strangely impersonal way for a son to address his own mother. Jesus is definitely putting some distance between himself and Mary here, and between his concerns and hers. ⁽¹¹¹⁾ After this statement we would not expect him to do anything about the wine at the feast, but on the contrary, he immediately afterwards provides wine for the wedding guests, by a miracle which John calls a “sign.” What is going on here?

Although Jesus appears to treat Mary with contempt if this story is read merely as the record of an ordinary human interaction, Augustine in his exposition of it points out that the purpose of Christ’s saying cannot be understood at that level. We cannot suppose that it was designed merely to show a gratuitous disrespect for his mother. And so he observes, Certi sacramenti gratia, videtur matrem ... non agnoscere ... procul dubio, fratres, latet ibi aliquid. “Certainly it is for the sake of a mystery that he appears not to acknowledge his mother ... beyond a doubt, brethren, something is hidden in it.”

In short, he speaks thus as God. This serves one of the primary purposes of John’s Gospel, to emphasize the divinity of Christ. Though according to the flesh he is her son, he must now be shown to be her Lord. Furthermore, his answer to Mary is designed to indicate that he makes the water into wine on his own initiative and for symbolical reasons of his own, which have nothing to do with the ordinary desire for wine at a wedding feast. His interaction with Mary cannot be understood in terms of normal human attitudes and motives when it is accurately translated. His abnormal way of speaking to his mother, as if she were a stranger to him, signifies that his agenda has little to do with her mundane concern about the wine running out. But the “dynamic” versions try to make it into something that will be seen as inoffensive and normal. The primary concern of the “dynamic equivalence” translators is that Jesus should be presented as a well-mannered son, speaking politely to his mother. And so we have in the TNIV “mother” instead of “woman,” and the NLT eliminates the rebuff by falsely translating it “How does that concern you and me?” This transforms the saying into a gentle and polite one, which fulfills conventional expectations, but it happens to be the exact opposite of what he said. The “dynamic” translators who came up with these renderings were clearly more interested in making Jesus sound normal and polite to modern readers than in conveying the intimation of divinity that we find in the original.

I am not unaware of the negative effect that Christ’s reply has on some readers. I once had a conversation with a young woman who asserted that Jesus must not have been sinless, because he evidently sinned against his mother in speaking thus. She happened to be nominally Catholic, and I suppose she must have thought more of Mary than of Jesus in order to come to that conclusion. But I think the problem here stems not so much from Roman Catholic Mariology as from ordinary feminine demands for politeness which are really foreign to the purpose of the narrative. The narrative deliberately violates the ordinary expectations of those who would see Jesus as merely human. Indeed, “no man ever spoke like this man” (John 7:46). But like “the Jews” in chapter 8 of John’s Gospel, this poor woman could not escape the mundane sphere of interpretation. Her low-level response to Christ’s words fastened on their impoliteness as a human utterance, and she could not see beyond that to the real meaning.

15. ‘An Indescribable Something More’

It is sometimes hard for us to say what is lost in loose translations, though we intuitively sense that something is missing. As Calvin says, one feels that “an indescribable something more is expressed” in the Hebrew idioms. When “My soul doth magnify the Lord” in Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46) is reduced to “Oh, how I praise the Lord,” as it is in the New Living Translation, something has definitely dropped out. The NLT has tried to make the expression emphatic by adding “Oh how,” but it fails to convey the full force of Mary’s praise. By “my soul” she means that vital essence which causes her to live, from which the deepest feelings and impulses of her heart originate. We have discussed the meaning of the Hebrew expression נפשי “my soul” above, and the fact that the NIV in some places interprets it as just another way of saying “I.” We are glad to see that in Psalm 103:1, 104:1, and Luke 1: 46 the NIV gives a literal reproduction of the phrase. But the NLT consistently eliminates everyone’s “soul.” In Psalm 103 and 104 we find “Praise the Lord, I tell myself”! Who does not see the inadequacy of this? The distortion and loss of meaning is great, though it may be hard to describe to someone who does not acknowledge it.

Joseph Addison, the famous English poet and literary critic, speaks of the peculiar “Force and Energy” of the Hebrew idioms in Scripture:

The rhetorical force and pathos of the Hebrew idioms that Addison speaks of here can be illustrated with 1 Sam. 30:3-4.

The “behold” adds something that can hardly be described. It causes us to stop and behold the ruined city with David and his men. It somehow brings us into the scene. The pleonastic “burned with fire” has a peculiar force that “destroyed by fire” does not. The failure of the NIV to put a mark of punctuation after “fire” causes us to glide through the sentence instead of pausing, to be appalled at what had happened. The literal “lifted up their voice and wept” of the KJV far surpasses the NIV’s “wept aloud” in pathetic force. This is what happens when the text is purged of its Hebrew idioms: it is systematically weakened. Anyone can see that the effect is far from “equivalent” to a literal translation of the Hebrew. And what principle of translation is responsible for this systematic weakening of the text? It is the ill-conceived notion that everything must be reduced to the prosaic conversational style of Common English — “just the way we would say it.”

The “way we would say it” in colloquial English tends to reflect the Stoic temper and values of our Anglo-Saxon culture. There is a preference for cool understatement, matter-of-fact objectivity, and calmness among Teutonic peoples, which is not shared by people of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures in which the Bible originated. The Bible reflects their habitual way of talking and their experience of things. The “ardent and intense phrases” that Addison notices in the style of the biblical authors are not just a way of speaking, but a way of experiencing life.

16. A Science Falsely So Called

“Science” as a rendering of gnosis in 1 Tim. 6:20 may not be as obsolete as some modern people think. Tyndale used this rendering because he perceived that Paul was referring not to “knowledge” in general, but to a formal system of teachings which pretended to confer knowledge — a system now commonly known by the name of “gnosticism.” Many people in ancient times were fascinated by speculative philosophies like this, especially if they were couched in enough mumbo-jumbo to give them an air of profundity and authority. Our modern “science” is supposed to be different, being founded on an empirical method, in which directly observable facts replace mythopoetic speculation; but some things that vaunt themselves as “science” in our time are not much more empirical than ancient gnosticism.

During the twentieth century many academic disciplines re-invented themselves as “sciences.” Political philosophy gave birth to political science. Epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) was narrowed down and refashioned as cognitive psychology. Philology (the study of languages) gave rise to linguistics. In these disciplines the study of human qualities and behaviors was supposed to be based on observable phenomena, and pursued with modern scientific methods. But in some cases, the new “sciences” turned out to be less helpful than their predecessors, and certainly less helpful than the physical sciences after which they had been modeled. One prominent American sociologist, Robert Nisbet, has said that after World War II the social sciences came to be dominated by people promoting liberal ideology under the guise of science, and have been characterized by “scientific posturing” and a “pretentious and unconvincing scientism” ever since. ⁽¹¹⁵⁾ My own experience as a college student in the 70’s tends to confirm Nisbet’s estimate of the “social sciences.” Fields like sociology are so thoroughly infected with political ideology that undergraduates are not likely to hear anything that is not calculated to serve some political purpose.

Although the field of linguistics (the science of language) might at first sight seem to be an unpromising one for ideological agendas, this field also has its share of them. Those who take courses in linguistics will first of all be taught that a linguist must never make any value judgments about languages and dialects. If one were to say, for example, that classical Greek is a more precise language than Hebrew, and hence better for scientific purposes, or that modern English is better than Romanian in some other respect, a professor of linguistics would not let it go unpunished. Students are not allowed to say things like that, because they involve value judgments. They are supposed to think (or at least say) that all languages are equal. But obviously this principle is itself a value judgment, and has nothing to do with “science.” It is an ideological fiction, designed to discourage cultural chauvinism and class-conscious attitudes of superiority. As such, it may help to put students in the proper frame of mind for disinterested inquiry and learning, but it may also interfere with their ability to say or think things that are true.

The truth is, languages are closely adapted to the mental culture of societies in which they are used, they differ greatly in their powers of expression, and the differences between literary and vulgar forms of the same language are not unimportant. There are many things that cannot be transferred from one language to another, or from literary to vulgar forms of the same language, without the need for explanations. The meaning of some words and expressions can never be fully appreciated by people who do not belong to the culture in which they are used. Moreover, a language not only reflects but also reinforces the mentality of its culture; it not only conveys thoughts from one mind to another, but also serves as a channel or instrument of thought, which tends to shape thinking along the contours of the culture. (I explain this aspect of language more fully in another article.) A “science” of translation cannot afford to ignore these things.

In the 1950’s and 1960’s the field of linguistics was dominated by thinkers who were more interested in emphasizing things which all languages had in common. Language per se, and its universal characteristics, was the focus of research. The most dominant figure in linguistics at that time was Noam Chomsky, who formulated his theories of language in deliberate opposition to behaviorist and cultural-environmental accounts. One historian writes:

It was during this time that Eugene Nida published his book Toward a Science of Translating. Nida aimed to make Bible translating more scientific by using principles of this universalistic “linguistics.”

In his book, Nida explains human language in much the same way that a modern physicist understands atoms and molecules. He theorizes that people “generate” sentences by unconsciously transforming and combining basic psycho-linguistic elements called “kernels,” which he defines thus:

The importance of “kernels” for translation theory is explained on page 39, in this manner:

All of this seems very scientific, until one realizes that the elementary “kernels” to which everything is reduced, and upon which everything is based, are only figments of the kind of grammatical analysis peculiar to generative grammar. And despite the use of the “kernel” metaphor, in which these postulated entities are compared to physical objects, they are not at all like physical objects, whose existence can be observed or demonstrated. They refer to unobservable processes of the subconscious mind. The existence of these kernels can no more be proven by empirical methods than can the æons of gnosticism. So here we are in the realm of unverifiable speculations, not empirical science. Nor does this theory have much explanatory power. The reductionistic account of language put forth here is quite incapable of explaining how human language works to create and convey complex thoughts and feelings. It brings to mind the lines in Goethe’s Faust about logicians who have tried to analyze human thought by reducing it to a few mechanical processes.

What Goethe calls the spirit-band (geistige Band) of the original web of thought (Gedankenfabrik) cannot survive all the methodical dismemberment it must suffer when reduced to a series of syllogisms, nor can it survive the similar treatment it receives in Nida’s “science of translation.”

17. Recent Developments in Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics is now in the midst of a paradigm shift, in which the basic ways of thinking about language which Nida and his followers have taken for granted are coming to be seen as obsolete. The old way of thinking — if anything less than sixty years old can be called that — represented language as a kind of code which somehow carried thoughts from one mind to another. This “code model” served well enough to describe what happens in a some very simple linguistic events (e.g. informing someone that “the cat sat on the mat”), but it cannot serve very well as a model of language in general. Words are not really like vessels that conduct culturally-disembodied “messages” from one mind to another; they are more like activating signals that invoke, vivify, combine, and modify various elements of a pre-existing and shared body of knowledge. Trying to transfer the elaborately ramified “message” of the Bible apart from the body of knowledge it presupposes is like trying to transplant a full-grown tree by cutting it off at the roots and sticking it into the ground in another place.

There is something absurd about the situation in which such obvious things need to be stated, against the writings of “linguists,” who, of all people, should not need to be told how closely language is connected to culture. But recently some linguists who have written on the subject of Bible translation have begun to show some awareness of what is really involved in Biblical interpretation. Ernst-August Gutt, for instance, has written several articles on this subject, in which he takes advantage of a new development in linguistics known as “relevance theory” to promote more adequate ideas about translation.

Biblical scholars have always emphasized the importance of background knowledge, and have never felt a need for any formal theory of communication to justify this emphasis. To them it is perfectly obvious that the biblical text cannot be fully understood by those who have not studied the language and religious culture of the authors. A theory of translation that pretends to make exegetical comment unnecessary would be seen as simply foolish and irrelevant. But a formal linguistic theory that recognizes this fact is at least a welcome corrective to the more naive ideas that have been promoted in the field of translation theory after Nida. One biblical scholar, C. John Collins, has therefore criticized Nida’s simplistic code model of communication along the same lines as Gutt:

Evidently Collins has been reading about the recent contributions of “relevance theory” to theoretical linguistics, which emphasizes the wealth of “implicatures” (things implied or taken for granted by the author, which must be understood by the reader to get the meaning) in almost any communicative act.

Not everyone in the wide field of linguistics appreciates this new emphasis on the importance of “shared background” in communication. Translation theorists who have always sat at the feet of Nida can be expected to resist any fundamental change in their theoretical orientation. But we hope it will eventually dawn upon them that a translator can never succeed in conveying what the author of the epistle to the Hebrews meant by “the prophets” if the reader is not acquainted with the prophetic writings. Nor can a translation make readers understand why the New Testament begins with a genealogy, in which our Lord is introduced as a son of Abraham, if they are ignorant of the Old Testament. There is no magical science of translation that can make this historical and cultural preparation for the gospel unnecessary.

18. The Overworked Translator

There are innumerable small inaccuracies in modern translations that appear to have arisen by a general lack of carefulness. But I suspect that, as translators are pushed out of the habit of giving literal renderings, and are expected to give more attention to stylistic matters, the work just becomes too complex and difficult for many of them to handle. There is certainly an increase in the demands put upon translators when they are expected to make everything not only accurate but also fluent and clear to every reader. Probably many of them are not skillful enough in English, or are not given enough time to do the job well. It is like a business owner asking his accountant to answer the phone, which rings every 30 seconds. We should not be surprised to find a number of errors in the account books at the end of the day.

In Hebrews 3:12 the Greek reads, Βλέπετε, ἀδελφοί, μήποτε ἔσται ἔν τινι ὑμῶν καρδία πονηρὰ ἀπιστίας ἐν τῷ ἀποστῆναι ἀπὸ θεοῦ ζῶντος. Literally this says, “Take care, brethren, that there will not be in any one of you an evil heart of unbelief, in apostasy from the Living God.” We would expect a careful scholar to notice here the emphatic expression “in any one of you” (ἔν τινι ὑμῶν ). This is not the same as saying “in you” (ἐν ὑμῖν). The readers are urged, collectively, to take care that no one in their congregation, insofar as they can prevent it, should have such an unbelieving heart as to apostasize. And so in the following verse it continues, “encourage one another ... lest any of you be hardened.” Evidently the purpose here is not to urge self-examination, but to enjoin the brethren to care for one another’s souls. ⁽¹²⁰⁾ But the NLT says “Be careful then, dear brothers and sisters. Make sure that your own hearts are not evil and unbelieving, turning you away from the living God.” Thus the focus is turned inward, with each caring for himself. The RSV and ESV also distort the sense in this direction by adding “you” in the last clause: “Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.” This is an error.

I do not doubt that the RSV translators knew the difference between ἔν τινι ὑμῶν and ἐν ὑμῖν. It only goes to show that even the most competent scholars will produce slipshod work when they are distracted and burdened by stylistic requirements. It is sometimes not easy, even for the most expert scholar, to give an accurate translation while making sure the style is fluent and clear. In the present case, the problem originated with a feeling that the last phrase must be made more fluent in English than a literal rendering would permit. The literal rendering in the ASV (“in falling away ...”) was thought to be too awkward. ⁽¹²¹⁾ Therefore the translators made a limited use of the “dynamic” approach to translation, recasting the phrase and adding “you,” mainly for the sake of a fluent and clear expression; but in the process of making this little stylistic adjustment at the end, it escaped their notice that the meaning of the whole sentence was retroactively altered by it. The ESV revisers have in many places improved the accuracy of the RSV, but they failed to correct the inaccuracy here.

In the NLT we see what happens when there is no full-time accountant, and the books are being kept by the company’s switchboard operators (“editors”). Actually, in this case, the books were first done by the company’s receptionist (Ken Taylor), and the switchboard operators have been asked to make some corrections, after an alarming report was received from auditors (“reviewers”).

19. The Editorial Sausage Factory

An old saying goes, “Laws are like sausages — it is best not to see them being made.” The same thing could be said about some versions of the Bible. People who know how they were made are not likely to have much respect for them.

It should be made known to readers of some modern versions that not everything in them can be attributed to the biblical scholars who are employed by the publisher as members of the “translation team.” People tend to assume that the scholars were the actual translators of the version, and that they are responsible for whatever is finally published. We have this picture of several expert scholars sitting around a table and hammering out the version together, over a period of years, with very learned discussions, followed by voting. And when all is finished, people imagine that the manuscript goes straight from the scholars’ conference table to the printer. This is a substantially true picture of how some versions in the past came into being. The King James Version, the English Revised Version, and the Revised Standard Version were created by such a confidence-inspiring process. But in the case of many modern versions, the picture is substantially false. The more usual procedure now is for a publisher to enlist various scholars as “reviewers” or “consultants” who send suggestions for portions of a version that is being revised by the publisher’s editorial staff. The scholars never sit down at a table together, and there is no voting. It is really the editors who create the version, although they are usually not scholars of any great reputation.

The rationale for this way of doing things was provided by Nida in his book The Theory and Practice of Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1969), in which he states that “too much knowledge of the subject matter” of the Bible is undesirable in a translator, because “theologically trained persons have special problems in learning how to translate for a level other than the one on which they habitually operate.” So it is better for the first draft to be produced by a “stylist” who “has some grasp of the source language but is not a scholar in it,” and afterwards a real scholar can review it, “bringing to the attention of the stylist errors of various kinds.” He claims that “experience has shown that it is much easier to achieve the proper combination of accuracy and adequate style in this manner than in the more traditional approach in which the scholar translated and the stylist corrected.” Moreover, the final draft should be submitted to “a stylist who is not a Christian, or at least who is not familiar with the Bible.” (pp. 99-104.) In an appendix to the same book, Nida admits that “not all reviewers will give as much time to this work as they should” (p. 185), but he seems more interested in emphasizing that their role should be limited: “From time to time the reviewers may be called together to discuss a specific agenda covering points on which the translators need guidance, but they should not meet as a committee to discuss in detail all that the translators have done. It should be emphasized that their function is supplementary and advisory. They do not constitute a committee of censors.” (pp. 179-80.) And again: “In some projects the reviewers have insisted on meeting together as a committee and going over the whole draft verse by verse. This is rarely a desirable approach. Not only can such a committee spend endless hours debating over details, but the end results are rarely as good as the work of the translators which was the basis of the discussion. The reviewers and the consultative group ⁽¹²²⁾ should remember that it is not their work to be censors.” (p. 186.)

Now, it is certainly true that a committee of scholars is likely to produce a more literal version, and one that requires more from the reader. But we observe here, how the corrections that might have been made by a committee of careful scholars are disparaged as “censorship,” and how their deliberations are dismissed as nitpicking — “endless hours debating over details.”

Under this kind of arrangement, where scholars are merely asked to make suggestions by mail, one can never be sure whether at any given point the translation really represents the consensus of scholarly opinion, or even the opinion of anyone who was paid to “review” the version for accuracy. The first draft and the final decisions are made not by scholars, but by people who do not have “too much knowledge” of the Bible to produce the kind of “dynamic equivalence” that is desired by the publisher.

English versions that have been produced by such a process include some well-known ones, including the New Living Translation, the Good News Bible, the Contemporary English Version, and the New Century Version. The publishers of these versions have been less than frank about it in their prefaces and in their advertising, and for obvious reasons. They would not want the public to see their sausage-factory in operation. The Bible version that emerges from this process is not even primarily the work of professional scholars. The publishers have even rejected the whole concept that a Bible translation should be made by professional scholars.

20. Dynamic Theology

In another passage of Faust, Goethe gives us a scene full of irony, as Faust sits down to translate a passage of the New Testament.

As we noted above, the word λογος in the prologue of John’s Gospel presents a problem for translators. Faust begins to tackle the problem sincerely enough, but in the end he wanders far from the meaning of the Greek word, and sees in it only a reflection of his own ruminations on the need to turn away from mere words to the essence of things, and to deeds. The irony is that he imagines the Spirit is helping him, but what spirit is really present? In the room with him is Mephistopheles, the demon to whom he will turn for help at the peril of his soul.

A translator must indeed be careful. Weighty theological lessons sometimes depend upon having a strictly accurate translation of the Bible. A good example of this may be seen when we compare Bible versions at Genesis 50:20. Here as Joseph comforts his brethren he makes a statement full of theological implications. The ESV gives us a literal rendering of the verse: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.” This is truly an interesting statement, often quoted by theologians in the context of explaining the sovereignty and providence of God behind even those events which seem to be evil. As John Calvin explains in his Genesis commentary here,

Yet what does the user of the New Living Translation read here? “As far as I am concerned, God turned into good what you meant for evil. He brought me to the high position I have today so I could save the lives of many people.” Here there are several things that might be pointed out which vitiate the theology implicit in Joseph’s words. We wonder how the phrase “As far as I am concerned” can be justified here, because it corresponds to nothing in the Hebrew text and it makes the statement merely an opinion rather than a statement of fact. This in itself is an important change in the meaning of the verse. We notice that the phrase “He brought me to the high position I have today” has been inserted. So instead of the bald statement that God planned the harmful action of the brothers for the good of many (this is even clearer in the Hebrew than in the literal English), a good thing is inserted, namely Joseph’s prosperity, as the thing that God used as the means of saving people. We see that “so I could save the lives of many people” attributes the good outcome to the will of Joseph rather than attributing it to the will of God alone, as in the Hebrew. But we notice especially the paraphrastic rendering “God turned.” Gone from the verse is the mysterious secret providence of God, expressed in the words “God meant it,” which required Calvin’s explanation, and in its place we see that the New Living Translation has substituted the idea that God afterwards “turned” evil actions to his use. So in at least four ways in this one little verse the use of “dynamic equivalence” has obscured an important theological lesson which shines through in the literal rendering. Probably the NLT translator believed that he was helping the reader to understand the verse with these adjustments, but for all the good intentions we may attribute to the translator we perceive in this officious meddling with the text the hand of someone who is attempting to change not only the verbal form but the very teaching of the verse into something that is easier to understand and accept. ⁽¹²⁴⁾

Someone might object to this criticism by saying that the method of dynamic equivalence itself cannot be blamed for misinterpretations. It is the fault of the translator not the theory, because the translator must understand the original text before he can recast it in equivalent English expressions. Yet does it surprise anyone that when so much emphasis is placed upon the ease of the reader, we find not only easy language but also easy theology? Moreover, it is an impractical theory which requires the translator to interpret the text so thoroughly while avoiding interpretations that flow naturally from his own intellectual presuppositions. It expects something that we cannot reasonably expect from a human being. In his book The Text of the Old Testament, Ernst Würthwein emphasizes the importance of taking a psychologically realistic view of Bible versions:

Here Würthwein is speaking of ancient versions of the Old Testament, such as the Greek Septuagint, the Aramaic Targums, and the Latin Vulgate; but what he says concerning these ancient versions must also be said about modern English versions. And if it is “especially true of the versions of the Bible which were produced to meet the practical needs of a community” — i.e., versions like the Targums, which have their contemporary readers very much in mind, and which aim to make the text highly accessible and pertinent to them — then it is also especially true of modern English versions that are of this same character. This warning about the use of highly interpretive versions does not lose its relevance when the versions are modern, and it pertains just as much to simple questions about the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew words as it does to the specialized text-critical research of scholars like Würthwein.

Scholars never trust ‘dynamic’ translations, because they know from experience the strength of the tendencies which lead even learned men to accommodate any admired author to their own mentality. At one time the prestige of Aristotle was such that philosophers, at least, could hardly be trusted to quote him accurately! In 1813 one complained “how easy it is for a translator of Aristotle (in consequence of the unparalleled brevity which he sometimes effects) to accommodate the sense of the original, by the help of paraphrastical clauses, expressed in the phraseology of modern science, to every progressive step in the history of human knowledge. In truth, there is not one philosopher of antiquity, whose opinions, when they are stated in any terms but his own, are to be received with so great distrust.” ⁽¹²⁶⁾ This is even more true of St. Paul, whose rapid style gives many occasions to interpreters.

We might as well notice here the role that Nida’s theories have played in recent controversies about missionary “contextualization” of the Christian religion, reconceptualizations of biblical theology according to the worldview and thought-forms of various cultures. In the 1970’s Charles Kraft of Fuller Theological Seminary even used the phrase “dynamic equivalence” in reference to this, urging the creation of “dynamic equivalence churches” in which principles of “dynamic theology” would allow the development of indigenous “ethnotheologies.” ⁽¹²⁷⁾ Various things which are being done under the banner of contextualization and “ethnotheology” are clearly syncretistic. For example, missionaries may explain the efficacy of prayer in line with Voodoo concepts about magical utterances, or Jesus could be described as being the son of the most powerful deity already being worshiped by a tribe. “Contextualizations” like this are now common on the mission field, even among missionaries associated with reputedly conservative mission agencies such as the Wycliffe Bible Translators. ⁽¹²⁸⁾

This kind of thinking is not confined to missionary theorists and translators in primitive places. Recently one of Nida’s disciples wrote:

It might be argued that this goes beyond what Nida himself had in mind for Bible versions, but there are many programmatic statements in favor of cultural contextualization in Nida’s published works, with extensive discussion of examples, and it is difficult to say where he might draw the line between dynamic equivalence and contextualization. In his books he mixes these things together so much that it is sometimes hard to tell which of the two subjects is under discussion. In any case Nida himself clearly wished to convey the idea that dynamic equivalence and contextualization are intrinsically related, being two aspects of the same principle of immediate “equivalent effect” in communication, and so it is not unfair for us to connect these things also. At bottom they are related, and our attitude toward contextualization will have implications for our evaluation of dynamic equivalence. The root of both is the idea that everything important in the Bible can be so thoroughly naturalized that it does not seem to be foreign to the language and culture into which it is introduced, and that if there is anything that cannot be so naturalized, it must not be “essential” to the message or “pertinent” to modern readers of the Bible.

In the pursuit of contemporary relevance, the Bible translator had better beware of what spirit is helping him.

21. The Bible for Children

Much of the support for paraphrastic Bible versions has been due to the desire of some to provide a version which children might be able to understand. This is well-meant, but I think it should be obvious to anyone who is really familiar with the Bible that it was not written for children. Let us be realistic. We have always had catechisms and Bible story books for the children, and anyone who has been involved in teaching the children knows very well that these supply more than enough material for young minds; and they are far better suited for the education of children than any simplified version of the Bible can be. There is only so much one can do with the Bible to make it clear or interesting to children, and in the end a selection of passages is going to be made anyway—which, if it is a good selection, will differ little from the selection in the old Bible Story books. I remember that when I was a child in Sunday school we did have copies of the “Good News for Modern Man” New Testament on hand (I still have the copy that was presented to me one “promotion Sunday”), but I also remember that we did not use it. The catechism took up all of our time. The truth is, there is no good reason why the Bible should be adapted for this purpose. And there is a danger in it. The danger is, the Bible simplified for children will become the Bible of adults. I have seen “Good News” Bibles in the pews of mainline churches. The American Bible Society had removed the cartoons for this “pew bible” edition. And then there is the case of the Living Bible, which Ken Taylor originally meant for children, and yet Billy Graham quickly made it into one of the most popular versions for adults. This was bound to happen, given the mental laziness of so many people, both in the pew and in the pulpit.

The publishers of the “dynamic equivalence” versions have at any rate been very aggressive in promoting these versions as if they were suitable for everyone, young and old, Christian or non-Christian. The New Living Translation now is making much headway in our churches as a version for the whole congregation, being used in the pulpit and in Bible study classes. I wonder how superficial the preaching and teaching must be in such churches, where this simplified version is thought to be adequate or necessary. What if a man who has been under such a steady diet of pablum happens to open an exegetical commentary and read there the comments of a scholar, or visits a church where the Bible is explained in some detail? He will not be long in seeing what a false impression has been given by his easy-reading version. It is not at all as he was led to suppose. The main ideas of the Bible are indeed simple enough, in any version; but it is very far from being true that every verse of the Bible is simple. Moreover, if he reads any moderately detailed treatise of theology he will find that the great theologians of Protestantism habitually call attention to linguistic details that are simply absent from his Bible version. If a man knows the Bible only through such a version, and has been encouraged to think that it is just as accurate as any other, how well has he been served? He has been treated like a child or a simpleton. Is it any wonder that many educated people scoff at Christianity when even our Bibles have been so dumbed down that they offer nothing above the level of a ten-year-old child? Is it any wonder that we have such problems getting the interest of the men (who ought to be the spiritual leaders of their households) when everything is designed for children? In regards to this, perhaps the words of the old Scottish preacher, James Stalker, bear repeating.

Stalker’s counsel here is to preachers, who in their sermons must engage the attention of grown men and educated people as well as the simple. He takes it for granted that the reader will agree with him that the Bible itself is not always simple, and is itself “meat for men.”

22. Bible Babel

In the late 1950’s F.F. Bruce wrote a book on the history of English Bible versions in which he expressed some appreciation of versions in modern English that had appeared up to that time, saying, “may their number go on increasing!” ⁽¹³¹⁾ And increase they did! This was before the great proliferation of versions that began in the 1960’s, and before the appearance of any of the modern versions that are now to be found on the shelves of Christian bookstores. In an enlarged edition of his book published in 1978 we detect a note of concern, however, when Bruce complains that the number of new translations of the Bible “keeps on increasing to a point where it becomes more and more difficult to keep up with them all.” ⁽¹³²⁾ And yet they continue to increase. Turning out new versions and revisions of the Bible has become an established industry, with interests of its own, and we can no longer extend a magnanimous welcome to everything that the Bible publishing industry churns out.

The problem lies not only the number of versions, but also in their mutability. Publishers are continually making changes in their versions, so that they do not remain the same for more than a dozen years or so. The situation with the NIV is typical. Its New Testament was originally published in 1973. Changes were made in 1978, and in 1984. By 1997 the people who control the NIV were revising it with “inclusive language.” Apparently they thought this revision would be accepted in the same way that the previous revisions had been. As it turned out, however, many church leaders objected to this last revision as frivolous, and as a capitulation to “political correctness.” Now, the NIV is not really owned by a publisher. It is owned by a non-profit organization called Biblica (formerly called the International Bible Society). But this organization has a very close relationship with Zondervan Publishers, and it was reported that Zondervan executives had requested the revision. ⁽¹³³⁾ The pressure brought against the project by ministry leaders prevented the revision from replacing the current NIV, but Zondervan got what it asked for anyway, because the revision was published under another name: Today’s New International Version (published in 2002). The version was marketed as being one that was adapted to the language of “consumers” between eighteen and thirty-four years old. Prior to this, Zondervan had also caused the International Bible Society to produce a New International Reader’s Version (1995) adapted to the language of children. So at the present time there are three different “New International” versions being published in America. And changes have also been made in the TNIV and NIRV versions since they were first published. But there is more: if we include the British editions (which are not identical to the American editions), there are at least five “New International” versions. Yet another revision of the NIV is now in the works, and it is scheduled to appear in 2011.

This instability and variety within the NIV brand itself is not in line with the intentions of the original NIV committee. When they began work on the version in 1967 they stated their goals in a document which emphasized the importance of having “one version in common use.”

The prospects for “one version in common use” are not good. Although the NIV has become the best-selling brand in America (according to statistics compiled by the Christian Booksellers Association), it has not become the version most often read by people who do much Bible-reading. That honor still belongs to the King James Version—a version which has not changed in hundreds of years. In 1998 the Barna Research Group found that among Americans who “read the Bible during a typical week, not including when they are at church ... the King James Version is more likely to be the Bible read during the week than is the NIV by a 5:1 ratio.” ⁽¹³⁵⁾ This might seem incredible to some people in the Bible business, but it agrees with my own observations over the years. For whatever reason, people who use the KJV tend to know their Bibles much better than those who use the NIV, despite the fact that the NIV (in any of its forms) is much easier to understand. I have also met people who say that although they sometimes use the NIV for casual reading, they prefer to use the KJV for memorization. And I do not know anyone who uses the NIV for “word by word and phrase by phrase” exposition. People who study the Bible closely have generally preferred the New American Standard or the New King James Version over the NIV. The New Living Translation is now being used in the worship services of many congregations that had formerly used the NIV.

In 1998 the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention launched a translation project of its own. At that time the President of the SBC (Paige Patterson) was asked to comment on the situation. His reply indicated the failure of the NIV translators’ hopes: “If the Sunday School Board did something really good, there’s enough dissatisfaction with the NIV that it might sell,” and he added, “We have over-translated and we have ruined Bible memorization and congregational reading. We have translation pandemonium out there. How it’s going to work out, I don’t know.” ⁽¹³⁶⁾ When the New Testament of this new version (the Holman Christian Standard Bible) appeared in 2001, its preface claimed that “Each generation needs a fresh translation of the Bible in its own language.” In the same year, the English Standard Version (a revision of the RSV) appeared under the marketing rubric “Truth. Unchanged.” Six years later a revised edition appeared, with 360 changes.

In 2003 the situation reached a high point of absurdity when the New Century Version (the least accurate one of all) soared to the top of the sales charts in an edition called Revolve, “bringing the Bible to teen girls in a format they’re comfortable with.” Designed to resemble the “glamour” magazines sold at supermarket checkouts, this edition “shows them that the Bible is fun and applicable to life today.” I don’t doubt that the publishers had fun making money on this travesty. They have certainly learned how to apply the Bible to their lives.

In the meantime—what has happened to the Holy Bible? It has become a piece of merchandise. Bible publishing has become like the popular music industry, in which the songs are given only so much air time before they are replaced by newer ones. The Bible racks at the Christian bookstore have become like the toothpaste isle at the grocery store—ten brand names, with several “new and improved” formulas, available in four varieties each. The resemblance is not accidental. In both cases the same principles of product development and brand marketing are in operation.

Regarding the contribution of “dynamic equivalence” to this situation, we will not say that Nida is responsible for the Revolve edition. We might connect it with the emphasis on cultural relevance and formal accommodation that figure so prominently in his theories, but even if the publisher of such an edition presented it as an application of “dynamic equivalence,” we should rather see it as something wholly inspired by commercial interests. Nevertheless, the philosophy of “dynamic equivalence” has obviously contributed to the current flood of popular versions and editions, not only by directly inspiring many of them, but also by subverting the traditional view that continuity and uniformity are important in the ministry of the Word. Under the new regime of dynamic equivalence, there can be no continuity or uniformity in Bible versions, and no “standard” translation.

The theory of dynamic equivalence actually demands multiple versions and frequent revisions. Because people differ so much in their linguistic preferences and capacities, and because colloquial speech changes with every generation, Nida maintained that every language ought to have several different Bible versions designed for different constituencies. In Toward a Science of Translating (1964) he wrote:

I have quoted so extensively from Toward a Science of Translating here because I want the reader to notice not only what is said but also what is not said by Nida in his discussion of the subject. The thing missing is any admission of the fact that meaning is lost in the versions that have a low “communication load.” By “communication load” Nida does not mean the total amount of information conveyed by the translation, but rather the rate at which information is conveyed, as he explains very carefully in the same chapter. To put it very simply and in my own terms, he maintains that the amount of information can be made equivalent by paraphrastic expansion of the translation. A low communication load conveys the same information at a low rate by extending its length. The only downside is, a version that does this “will appear insipid and boring” to educated people. In the passage quoted from The Theory and Practice of Translation he sends us to chapter 7 for an explanation of the need for “three types of Scriptures.” But there we find that the only reason for this is that different classes of people tend to prefer different styles of writing. It is only a matter of taste. (No explanation is given for the threefold division, but this seems rather arbitrary. Human beings do not just naturally fall into three classes. Why not four or five?) The reason for a traditional “ecclesiastical translation” is not explained, and we get the impression that it is merely a concession to the benighted people who insist upon having one. (Of course this is the one that causes “serious problems for revisers,” as Nida complains, because people will not allow it to be changed lightly; but by the same token it is the one most diligently read and studied by Christians.) Nida gives no attention to the question of exegetical accuracy, the value of theological terms, or indeed any of the considerations I have raised in this book. Even the “literary” translations are to be judged purely “in terms of the response of the audience.”

Nida constantly focuses on the need for versions in “common” or “popular” language. The very notion of a “common” language becomes rather problematic, however, when we find that Nida believes that “no word ever has precisely the same meaning twice.”

He further states that “no two persons ever mean exactly the same thing by the use of the same language symbols.”

Here we see the foundations of our modern Bible Babel. For there is almost nothing that cannot be defended in one way or another, on the grounds that it may be convenient or pleasing to some hypothetical group of people—whose limitations are just accepted, rather than challenged and expanded by teaching.

There is something plausible about Nida’s idea that different versions are appropriate for different sociological groups and also for different levels of knowledge within each group. It puts us in mind of the textbooks designed for different grades in school. Obviously a second-grade text should be much simpler than a sixth-grade text. But in an educational setting like this, the texts are not “translations” of the same material in some other language, nor are they ever presented as such. (We note that Nida must go to the “Communist propagandists” to find a precedent for this questionable practice.) It is not just the verbal form of the material that changes from grade to grade, but also the content. There is no pretense of equality or “equivalence.” The subject matter becomes more challenging and complex. So the situation is not really comparable. And in fact a gradation of translations is not a viable option for congregational ministry. We do have Sunday-school grades, youth ministries, small-group Bible studies, and “new member” classes; but the adult members of the congregation cannot be divided into grades, like students in a school, and given different versions of the Bible that are adapted to their level of biblical knowledge. Although their knowledge is unequal, they must be treated as one body—a sociological unit—and the teachers must help everyone to understand the Bible through an accurate translation, “rightly dividing the word of Truth.”

Nida never did acknowledge the need for such a painstaking ministry of the Word. We even find in his books such disparaging remarks concerning the role of teachers as this:

An ecclesiastical setting is in view here, but Nida goes out of his way to deny any place for an “ecclesiastical translation” in it. Instead, he explains that some teachers do not want to use the new paraphrastic versions for teaching purposes in the church because they are selfish obscurantists, who do not want their jobs eliminated by translators who “make the Bible too clear.” He tries to establish this slander with an anecdote (which he no doubt heard from one of the translators he had trained) in which certain “perfectly clear” and “understandable” renderings were rejected by a church committee. We have no way of knowing what the “perfectly clear” and “understandable” renderings were in this case, but considering all the problems we have seen in English versions produced according to Nida’s recommendations, we can well imagine what sort of renderings were being rejected. Frankly, we find it hard to believe that any Christian could have said “But if all the laymen can understand the Bible, what will the preachers have to do?”—unless perhaps it were a joke, designed to make the translator of the rejected version feel better. But again, Nida presents it in all seriousness as the real reason why so many teachers prefer to use a more literal “ecclesiastical” version in ministry.

Regarding the use of an ecclesiastical translation for “liturgical purposes,” we find that Nida does not understand why it should be so. Elsewhere he argues that a version used for such a purpose must not be traditional, but should instead be especially “dynamic” and easy to understand:

Now as for the use of the Bible in study groups, it will not be necessary for me to describe to those who have much experience of it the problems which arise from different people having different versions in front of them. We all know what happens. Someone reads a passage out loud, and others follow along in their own Bibles, in whatever version they may be, and the differences between the versions sometimes give rise to difficult questions. This problem is not severe when the different versions are all essentially literal, having only minor differences which are easily taken in stride. But I have often had to explain to people why so many “dynamic” renderings are incorrect. I have been involved for many years in group Bible studies, at which various versions were being used, among them the King James, the New American Standard, the New International, the English Standard Version, and others, all of which can be read together without much trouble. But when such a version as the New Living Translation is read, it is quite impossible for people to follow along in other versions. They soon lose track and look up from their Bibles in confusion. I have seen this several times in recent Bible study meetings. A “dynamic equivalence” version can only be used very extensively if everyone uses it. But this is out of the question. Nor is it even possible, because these versions come and go, and keep changing. The people who use them also come and go. They will buy their own Bibles, of course, and they will choose between versions for their own private reading; but a teacher must use a version that is not always going its own peculiar way. Even if I enjoyed some paraphrastic version, and wanted to use it in ministry, I know it would not be practical to use it much in the context of a Bible study. There is no way around it: a version that is used in common must be a relatively literal one.

There is really no need for dumbing down the Bible in the context of the worship service, where a sermon is delivered for the very purpose of explaining the Word of God. Nor is there any reason for it in the context of a Sunday school or Bible study group, in which someone who is able to teach is doing it, as a “workman who does not need to be ashamed.”

In one paragraph quoted above, Nida states that “The ability to decode a particular type of message is constantly in process of change, not only as the result of an increase in general education, but especially through specific acquaintance with the particular type of message.” He then speaks of the desirablility of having “different grades of the same message” (Toward a Science of Translating, p. 143). Further on he acknowledges the fact that “Obviously a translation designed for children cannot be the same as one prepared for specialists, nor can a translation for children be the same as one for a newly literate adult” (p. 158). We have compared this to educational methods. But we find in his works no recognition of the need to move from one grade to the next, nor any explanation of why a literate adult should not be using a version prepared for children. He even avoids saying this outright in his discussion of “grades.” The reason is, he will not admit on a theoretical level that there must be a loss of meaning in any “dynamic equivalence” version. Obviously there can be no “equivalence” if the different “grades” of versions are not even theoretically equivalent, and so they must be regarded as equivalent. But how can that be? Only if “equivalence” is defined purely “in terms of the response of the audience,” so that “one is not so concerned with matching the receptor-language message with the source-language message, but with the dynamic relationship” (p. 159). I would emphasize this point because I think most people looking at this range of versions from a common-sense standpoint will assume that in Nida’s scheme of things the different “grades” are provided so that people can begin with something easy and progress to something more accurate. But that is precisely what he cannot say, and does not say. He cannot admit a difference in accuracy. Indeed he is compelled to redefine accuracy, so that it means nothing other than a Nidaesque equivalence:

Thus the whole concept of accuracy becomes as slippery and subjective as everything else in this body of theory. It may be thought that Nida has a point here, in saying that the accuracy of a translation must be measured by the receptors’ comprehension of it. But his point has validity only after we have accepted the assumption implicit in the phrase “decoding by individuals for which the message is intended.” The thing in view here is not translation into languages, such as German, French, English, etc., but translation into the infinitely variable idiolects of “individuals.” If this is the goal of translation, then it follows that accuracy can only be defined with reference to “decoding by individuals,” as Nida says. But if the goal of the translation is to transfer the meaning from one language to another, and the language of the receptor is defined not as his personal idiolect but as the language of his country, then we are able to speak of accuracy in a more objective way. The national language is everywhere a matter of public record. It is taught in schools, and described in dictionaries and grammars. It is embodied in the literature of the nation. When judged by that fixed standard, accuracy is not a subjective and personal matter. If an English version uses the word grace as an equivalent for the Greek χαρις, and someone does not understand the meaning of the word grace, he might after all look it up in the dictionary. It is in fact an accurate English translation of χαρις whether he understands it or not. This is how accuracy has always been understood in the past. Within the framework of Nida’s theory, from the standpoint of his individualized view of language, it might indeed be said that if a man does not understand the word grace, then the word is not part of his language. But we would insist that it is part of his language, if his language is English.

We note also that Nida propounds a rather novel view of “comprehension” when he states that “comprehension itself must be analyzed in terms of comprehending the significance of a message as related to its possible settings.” By this he apparently means that the receptor’s “comprehension” includes his understanding of the contemporary relevance of the text, or what may be called its “significance” for modern times. The translator is thus made responsible for presenting the text so that its (divinely intended?) transcultural applications may be “comprehended” by everyone straight off the page of the version. According to Nida, any talk of “accuracy” is “meaningless” apart from this definition of comprehension.

Is it necessary for us to point out that these definitions are outlandish, and that they place impossible demands upon the translation? For what version has ever done this, or ever could do such things? There is something fantastic and even and megalomaniacal about Nida’s vision of the role of translators and translations, in which the whole process of religious education is taken up into versions produced by omni-competent translators.

Nida’s refusal to admit the need for education is not strange when the theory is really understood. Linguistic education, at least, must be excluded on a theoretical level if all languages, dialects and idiolects are to be regarded as equal. In chapter 16 of this book I briefly mentioned this concept and pointed out its unscientific nature, but now it appears how important this is to Nida’s theory, and a closer look is in order. The concept originated in the 1930’s. An early example is in Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (New York, 1933), an introduction to linguistics which was used as the standard textbook on the subject in American universities for many years. Bloomfield writes:

The presence of an ideology here is plain to see. We find value judgments about several things. Instead of just stating the fact that in English we have a formal and traditional variety called “standard” English, and describing its history, features and purposes in an objective way, Bloomfield rather dismissively characterizes it as a form of language “current among people who enjoy greater privilege,” and expresses disapproval of this whole socio-linguistic system of things, on ideological and even moral grounds. He would like to encourage the sub-standard speaker to “take pride” in his non-standard colloquial language, while actually pitying him for his linguistic disability. He expresses the view that we cannot expect people to become proficient in standard English, and he even compares “acquisition of standard English” to “speaking a foreign language.” People will only make themselves ridiculous, like incompetent foreigners, by trying too hard. The whole situation is somehow a “a fault of the society,” in which educators “sin greatly,” and so forth.

This may appear very noble and democratic in spirit, but the alleged problem is certainly overstated, and we are left with the impression that “Standard English” serves no other purpose than to make uneducated people feel inferior. Bloomfield should have explained that traditional standards of language serve important cultural and linguistic purposes. We might compare Standard English with a uniform system of federal law which makes it possible for people of different states to make enforceable contracts across state lines. Without such a code of law, the welfare of the whole country will suffer. Likewise the promotion of a common language will have cultural benefits, and there can be no common language without traditional standards. Even when we recognize that the established forms of a language are purely and simply a matter of custom, and ultimately arbitrary, that should not lead us to think that formal standards are dispensible. They are both arbitrary and indispensible. “Law and order” is as necessary in language as it is in the political and economic realms. It promotes continuity and community. When there are no standards held in common, the linguistic community deteriorates, and everything that depends upon our ability to communicate ideas declines.

The decomposition of the national language not only separates contemporaries from one another, but also the generations. If we might use again the analogy between language and law, the point is well made by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

We have only to change one word in that last sentence to make the application: substitute “Language” for “State.” And it brings to mind the claim made by certain persons quoted above, that “Each generation needs a fresh translation of the Bible in its own language.” I do not know what “language” is referred to here, as being the property of a generation. But my language is English, and I know that my generation did not invent it. We inherited it. It took centuries for the words “grace,” “righteousness,” “repent,” “faith,” “blessed,” and “Christ” to accumulate all the connotations that make them so meaningful to Christians. Will these words now be unceremoniously ditched and forgotten by a vain generation that prefers the “common language” of the moment? That would be to “cut off the entail,” and “commit waste on the inheritance” of our Christian language. The only Common Language that is adequate for speaking of these things is the one we have in common with our fathers.

23. Power-Point Midrash

Until recently most people who attend church were not even aware of the existence of most of these new versions. But in the past ten years, many preachers in the evangelical churches have been using canned sermon series that come with Power Point slides, and these slides often use “dynamic equivalence” versions for Scripture quotations. In this they are following the example of Rick Warren, author of the wildly popular Purpose Driven™ line of commercial products. I have seen some renderings on these slides which almost make me despair, they are so bad. (Some of the examples I have used in this book first came to my attention in this way.) But people in the congregation who are not very familiar with the Bible will have no idea how inaccurate those renderings are.

Just twenty years ago it was normal for people in most evangelical churches to bring their Bibles to church. Their pastors would ask them to open their Bibles to the passages quoted in the sermon, and would even wait for them to find the place. It might have been unnecessary when the point being made was very simple, but there are several good reasons for it. First, as Tyndale observed, “I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to stablish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.” ⁽¹³⁷⁾ People are much more likely to understand a verse if they look at the context of the verse in their Bibles. Second, it keeps their attention from wandering. Third, many people learn better when they both hear and see the words. Fourth, it encourages them to make use of their own Bibles. And last but not least, it keeps the preacher honest. But unfortunately it seems that the Power Point slides are bringing an end to this “excellent Scottish fashion, of keeping a Bible in hand during the sermon,” as John Broadus called it. ⁽¹³⁸⁾ Recently I was listening to a sermon in which the preacher wanted to quote a verse from a paraphrastic translation to make his point, but, not having a slide for it, he felt the need to say, Don’t turn to it in your Bibles, just listen to this. Whatever his reason was for saying this, I think we are in trouble when people are being told not to open their Bibles.

In another sermon I recently heard, the preacher put the following passage from the New Living Translation on the screen:

Now, of all the things that might be said about this passage, the preacher chose to focus on the supposed lack of hospitality shown by the innkeeper—a person not mentioned in the narrative. The preacher introduced this character by referring to the melodramatic form the narrative usually assumes in a Christmas pageant, in which the innkeeper behaves rudely; but he pointed out that there is a scriptural basis for it in the word “obviously” before “pregnant.” The innkeeper must have noticed Mary’s condition, he said, because it was “obvious.” The rest of the sermon was a lesson on the obligation to show hospitality to those in need, especially now during the Christmas season. It was a good sermon on that subject. However, I noticed that the one word that the preacher used as the basis of his whole exposition was a word that had been added gratuitously by the translation, without any warrant in the original. And in fact the sermon removed attention from the narrative’s focus on Christ, whose lowly birth in a stable represents the amazing condescension of our God. Blaming it on the innkeeper misses the point.

This method of handling Scripture resembles the ancient midrash of Jewish expositors, in which the biblical narrative is embellished by the invention of characters and incidents that are more convenient for the expositor’s moralizing than the narrative itself. Usually some verbal detail of the text is exploited to provide an ostensible basis for the midrash, but, as this example illustrates, the midrashic “interpretation” was often tangential or even irrelevant to the purpose of the biblical passage that was used as a springboard. In late antiquity, the Aramaic translations of the Bible commonly used in the synagogues (called Targums) tended to reflect and facilitate the most popular midrashic treatments of Scripture, by adding words that gave the traditional midrash a stronger basis in the text.

This is precisely what the editors of the New Living Translation have done in this case. Or rather, this is what Ken Taylor did in the Living Bible, and his rendering was retained by the editors of the NLT revision. Taylor inserted “obviously” here to suggest that someone’s observation of Mary’s condition was pertinent, as in the Christmas pageant version of the story. So the preacher’s inferences from the translation were natural enough.

Would a more literal version have prevented this? Perhaps not. I think true exposition of the Scriptures depends almost entirely upon the wisdom of the preacher, and a competent preacher does not depend upon any Bible version. He ought to be in the habit of applying himself to the original. But if he does depend upon versions, he would not be wise to put his trust in “dynamic equivalence.”

In one respect the example just cited is unusual, in that seven consecutive verses were put on the screen. It is more usual to see only one at a time, and I think the “dynamic” versions are often used because they lend themselves to this kind of atomistic quotation. The modern expositor, instead of having to quote a complex thirty-word sentence for the sake of just one phrase, can now find a “dynamic” version that chops the sentence up into three bite-sized pieces of only ten words each. The fragmentation of the original sentence can do wonders for the interpretation and application of its pieces. There is no more messy context to get bogged down in. One can even search in a variety of paraphrastic translations for favorite words and phrases one would like to emphasize, using a computer to find them, as Warren did for his Purpose Driven™ books. The beauty of using a computer program for this kind of work is that the search-results window will even rip the verses out of their contexts for you. Just select, copy and paste the pieces you need on a slide, and you are ready to “prove” anything. This atomistic treatment of the words of Scripture is also very much in the spirit of ancient Jewish midrash. People who do not compare the preacher’s remarks with a decent Bible translation, and have only the verses of a Targum dangled before their eyes, will be none the wiser.

24. Waning Authority of the Bible

It was no coincidence that the first English Bible was produced in a time of crisis, the period known as the Great Schism (1378-1417) during which rival “popes” strove for supremacy over Western Christendom. There was a pope in Rome, and one in Avignon. In 1409 a third pope was elected by cardinals meeting at Pisa. Christians everywhere began to wonder how the Pope could be seen as the ultimate authority in the Catholic Church when there are three of them, all duly elected by cardinals, excommunicating one another. In the midst of this crisis of authority, John Wycliffe stepped forward with a Bible, and declared that Scripture alone should be regarded as the ultimate authority, and the standard against which all teachings and practices were to be judged. He translated the Bible into English so that even laymen might be able to read what is written in “God’s Law,” as opposed to the canon law of the Roman hierarchy.

A century later Martin Luther renewed this teaching of Wycliffe, and ever since, evangelical Protestants have emphasized the supreme authority of the Bible. In 1849 one prominent evangelical minister in the Church of England wrote:

The minister was J.C. Ryle, who went on to become a bishop himself. Unfortunately, his views were not shared by many bishops in the Anglican church, but I wish to point out that when Ryle thinks of “for what the Bible was given” he thinks of an authoritative standard by which all things are weighed, judged, and tried. I wonder how many evangelicals today think of their English versions in these terms.

Today we are in the midst of a crisis of authority that goes deeper than the Great Schism of the Papacy. Now we have a schism of the Bible itself. The clash of versions has provided more than enough excuse for unstable modern people to reject teachings of the Bible here and there. It is becoming a real problem for pastors and teachers. One college course I took in English literature dealt with the translations of the Bible, and a woman in the class gave a presentation on the subject, in which she observed: “My husband keeps saying the Bible teaches this and that, but now that I know how many different versions there have been, I can say, which Bible?” She rather liked the idea that the versions disagree. That was in a secular academic setting thirty years ago, but the attitude may now be found in the churches. Not long ago in one Bible study meeting at a Presbyterian church I had occasion to mention the authority of the Bible, and one woman there immediately piped up: “Yes, but what version? And whose interpretation?” It was a very good question, but, like Pilate when he asked “what is truth?” she did not want an answer. She asked the question because she thought it was unanswerable. Many people who profess to be Christians today do not want an authoritative text, or indeed any authority over them.

Advertisement for the New Living Translation

Probably everyone who has been raised in an evangelical church has heard at one time or another the encouragment to read the Bible that goes something like this: ”Why do you not read your Bible? If someone sent you a love letter, would you leave it unread? Well, the Bible is God’s love letter to you,” and so on. I have not used this exhortation myself because, aside from the fact that it is off-putting to men and appeals only to women, it is simply false. Anyone who begins to read the Bible from the first page will find out soon enough that it is anything but a “love letter.” It is more like a combination history book and code of law; and even the prophetic books which do contain some few passages which might be compared to love letters (e.g. Hosea 2:19) are in general much more like a reading of the Riot Act than a Valentine. There is a good reason for this. The canon of Scripture was shaped by the purpose of providing an authoritative Torah and Diatheke for the people of God. The overarching purpose is to disclose the will of God, and to provide instruction in righteousness, as indicated by Paul: “whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction” (Romans 15:4) and “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete ... ” (2 Tim. 3:16).

This is obvious enough to those who have studied it. The Bible is mostly an anthology of books that are designed to instruct, warn and exhort. The whole idea of the canon was to set apart a collection of authoritative books. Many edifying books have been written, and continue to be written; but the canonical books of the New Testament were first separated from the general run of Christian literature and identified as Scripture so that they might serve as touchstone for judging doctrine. They were not selected with any other “effect” in mind. But evidently most people do not care much for authority, doctrine, or instruction in righteousness; they cannot be induced to read the Bible if it is presented in those terms. Most people would much rather enjoy a narcissistic emotional experience of the kind provided by romantic movies and sentimental songs, and so the Bible is presented as something which might also provide such an experience.

This has certainly had an effect on the music used in modern churches, and I believe that it has also influenced how the Bible is translated in some recent versions. It may be seen most clearly in the gushing language of the Living Bible and New Living Translation (e.g. Romans 1:7, “dear friends ... God loves you dearly, and he has called you to be his very own people”). One suspects also that the heavy emphasis on the supposed need for “common language” is largely caused by a desire to make the whole tone of the biblical text less formal and more intimate, let us say, if not exactly sentimental. The idea here seems to be that, if Jesus is not precisely your lover, he might at least talk like your familiar friend. I hope it is clear from what I have written earlier that I am not insensitive to emotional effects of style. My main point in chapter 15 was that the “common language” versions avoid the poetic diction of Scripture that “sets the mind in a flame, and makes our hearts burn within us,” as Addison describes it. The noble “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn” are very important to the purposes of the Bible. However, one cannot make up for the loss of truly noble and impressive language by an application of cheap semantic perfume, sprinkling words like "marvelous" and "dearly" here and there to sweeten the style. I do not think I am alone in saying that the effect of this upon me is even somewhat nauseating. But I am digressing now from the point I want to emphasize, which is this: the Bible is not a “love letter.” It is intended to be received as authoritative Torah (instruction). It is God who speaks. A generation which tries to translate the voice of the Almighty into the casual talk of friends and neighbors has lost all sense of this Book’s authority.

Theologians like to emphasize that the authority and inspiration of Scripture pertain only to the original text in Hebrew and Greek, and not to any translation. An English version of the Bible cannot be canonized and treated as fully equivalent to the originals. But as a practical matter, there is really no use talking about the Bible’s authority if you are not going to give your people a reliable translation. If the versions disagree sharply, how is anyone to know what the Word of God really says? This problem existed long before the rise of dynamic equivalence versions, and it may be illustrated even from some of the most literal versions. The difference between the KJV and the ASV in Jeremiah 8:8b is significant enough.

Most modern versions follow the ASV’s interpretation (which is no innovation, being found also in the Vulgate), but both are possible, and at least one modern version follows the KJV’s interpretation: the New JPS Translation, which reads, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and we possess the instruction of the Lord’? Assuredly, for naught has the pen labored, for naught the scribes!” The difference arises from different understandings of the Hebrew word שֶׁקֶר (sheker), which may mean either “falsehood” or “in vain,” and from different opinions of what is indicated by the literary and historical context. I believe this is one place where a marginal note should indicate the different interpretations. Unfortunately, only the KJV provides one here. But either way, Jeremiah is saying here that there is no practical difference between ignorance and neglect of the Torah. Those who fail to understand it correctly, or who depend implicitly upon those who explain it wrongly, might as well be without it. And what he says concerning the Torah here may be applied to the whole Bible.

In my experience, those who have a high view of Scripture are quite willing to put up with difficulties, and they will put considerable effort into understanding the text. They accept the fact that ministers are appointed to help them understand and apply the text correctly; but it is far better in their eyes to have a reliable translation that requires study, than to have an easy paraphrase that is not reliable. This is the attitude expressed by Leland Ryken:

This is not to say that the most literal rendering is always the best one for all readers. But people who use the most readily understandable versions must also understand that many accommodations have been made for their sake in these versions, and they cannot have it both ways. Most people understand this intuitively. In any case, the new “dynamic equivalence” versions will never be accepted as authoritative by educated people. Any intelligent person who takes even an hour to compare versions will realize soon enough that the text has been simplified and extensively processed in these new versions, and will also notice that their interpretations frequently disagree with one another — which is really fatal to any claims of accuracy that have been made for them. Although they are easy to understand, they are just as easily dismissed as illegitimate. In short, they lack authority. They were not even translated with the authority of the Bible in view.

Consequently, these version cannot be used effectively in ministries that emphasize the authority of the Bible. If a minister is going to use the Bible as an authority, by quoting it to prove his assertions in the pulpit, he had better see to it that the version he quotes is not some fun but easily-dismissed paraphrase. If he feels a need to say, “Don’t turn to it in your Bibles, just listen to this,” he had better not be trying to prove something that requires biblical support.

Even when inaccurate versions are not used by teachers for the support of doctrine, and are only used for private reading at home, they may breed serious confusion among laymen, who have no way of knowing which version is more correct. Today I happened to read the daily “Billy Graham” column that appears in my local newspaper, which gives brief answers to questions about Christian teachings. The question today was, Did people in Old Testament times go to heaven when they died? In his answer Graham says yes, and to prove it he quotes “the familiar words of King David in Psalm 23 — words of hope and confidence in God’s promise of eternal life. He wrote, ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me ... and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever’ (Psalm 23:4,6).” This precious Psalm should be stored in the heart of every Christian. But whoever reads it in the New American Bible (NAB) translation will find: “Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil, for you are at my side ... And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come.” It will be noticed that in this rendering there is no reference to death or the life beyond. Which translation is correct? I have no doubt that the traditional translation is the more accurate. In the other, “the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely.” But thanks to them, it appears now that even the final words of the twenty-third Psalm cannot be quoted without fear of contradiction.

In verse 4 the NAB translators have interpreted the Hebrew word צלמות (vocalized tsalmaveth in the Masoretic text) in a weakened sense, so that “valley of the shadow of death” becomes only “dark valley.” This is defensible if we accept a different vocalization of the word (tsalmuth), but the opinion of the NAB translators here was certainly influenced by the common liberal view that the writers of the Old Testament did not look forward to any life beyond the grave. ⁽¹⁴¹⁾ And it is for the same reason that they have interpreted the final phrase לארך ימים (lit. “to length of days”) rather minimally as “for years to come” instead of “forever more.” On the other hand, the traditional translation cited by Graham assumes that the Psalmist has in view not only this life but also the life to come.

Thus Nida’s attempt to eliminate the role of the teacher ultimately fails, because sooner or later the common people will become aware of such important variations, and they will need someone to tell them which version is correct.

The tendency of our times is to magnify the value of spontaneous feelings and subjective impressions, while belittling the need for careful study and learning. The triumph of this subjective approach to everything is nearly complete. The text has become just another medium to be used for stimulating emotions, and the whole question of its objective accuracy and authority does not even arise.

Knowledge and even rational thought become less and less important in this atmosphere, and so language as a vehical of thinking and instruction degenerates. Robert Nisbet has described the linguistic tendencies of our age very well:

The growing use of dynamic equivalence versions in “common language,” along with the whole body of theory that seeks to legitimize it, may be seen as just another manifestation of these tendencies. Behind it there are two allied spirits: on the one hand, there is the spoiled-child mentality of a people grown lazy and self-indulgent; and on the other, a Jacobin spirit—an aggressive sansculottism, that seeks to overthrow the language, culture, and dogma of the Ancien Régime.

Against these I would set the “Burkean” philosophy of language and translation proposed at the end of chapter 21. We need a principled linguistic conservatism, in which the treasures of our religious language are deliberately preserved. Against the religio-linguistic Jacobins who would change the Bible “as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions,” we need a counter-revolution, in which the value of continuity and tradition is broadly maintained. Against the sheer laziness of the crowd, who can hardly be persuaded to read the Bible at all, we need some of the ancient severity of the One who said: “the way is hard that leads to life.” Above all, we need to recover a sense of the Bible’s true purpose, which is to stand as an authority over us. A Bible translation that cannot be used for the proof of doctrine does not deserve the name of Holy Scripture.

25. Uninspired Words

Biblical authority is closely connected with the concept of plenary inspiration. History shows that these things cannot be separated. Those who believe that the text is fully inspired will insist upon its authority, as the very Word of God. Those who think it is only partly inspired have already put themselves above it. So we need to ask what view of inspiration (if any) is implied in “dynamic equivalence.”

Nida himself addressed this question in one place, and he observed that the ideology of “dynamic equivalence” is especially congenial to the so-called “neo-orthodox” view of inspiration and authority.

The truth of this can be illustrated with statements from several translators. James Moffatt, for instance, says that his attempts to give the meaning in modern English were made easier by the fact that he is "freed from the influence of the theory of verbal inspiration" (Preface to the New Testament, 1913). J.B. Phillips writes:

The logic of this argument is not entirely clear to us. But evidently Phillips takes it for granted that anyone who believes in verbal inspiration must be in favor of literal translation. Strangely, he seems to think that God could not have inspired anything that is not immediately intelligible to Eskimos.

Robert Bratcher—who was Nida’s protégé at the American Bible Society, and the principal translator of the Good News Bible—has some bitter words for those who think that the words of the Bible are inspired:

It does not surprise us that Bratcher thinks “no one seriously claims that all the words of the Bible are the very words of God.” His work as a researcher and translator at the American Bible Society would not have brought him into regular contact with anyone who espouses this view.

Dr. William Hull, who was a professor and Dean of the graduate school at Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, noticed the theological implications of “dynamic equivalence” in remarks delivered to a meeting of the Association of Baptist Professors of Religion (of which he was President) on February 23, 1968:

Hull seems to relish the thought that old views of inspiration will be overthrown by gradual subversion, as the implications of Nida’s new theories of translation secretly undermine the “tired cautions of an earlier era.” In his view, not only the “traditional notions of verbal inspiration,” but also “the theologies built thereon” are made obsolete by dynamic equivalence.

What could be plainer? I could add other examples. But I think this is enough to establish the point. And I think it throws some light on the question of why the translators of the Contemporary English Version found the Bible’s way of talking about inspiration so “extremely difficult” that it could not be translated literally. ⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

Nida protests that “It would be quite wrong ... to assume that all those who emphasize fully meaningful translations necessarily hold to a neo-orthodox view of inspiration; for those who have combined orthodox theology with deep evangelistic or missionary convictions have been equally concerned with the need for making translations entirely meaningful.” ⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ Nida’s use of the word “meaningful” here is very misleading, because our main objection to “dynamic” versions is that they fail to represent the meaning. But leaving that main point on one side for the moment, we gather that he means that some persons who have advocated the use of “idiomatic” or “modern English” versions have also held to the orthodox view of inspiration. That we freely concede. We think of William F. Beck, for example, whose version of the New Testament is paraphrastic but whose opinions on inspiration seem impeccable. But Beck’s version swarms with errors of interpretation, and we can only suppose that he was unable to distinguish between his interpretations and the actual words of Truth. The same is true of Kenneth Taylor, whose Living Bible is a monument of “evangelical” audacity. We also observe that not everyone who has favored literal translation believes in verbal inspiration. Some of the translators of the exceedingly literal American Standard Version (1901) did not believe in verbal inspiration. ⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ Even a non-Christian might favor a literal translation of the New Testament simply because he needs an accurate translation of it for academic purposes. Nevertheless, it remains true that “those who espouse the traditional, orthodox view of inspiration ... tend to favor quite close, literal renderings as the best way of preserving the inspiration of the writer by the Holy Spirit,” as Nida says, and it is surely significant that he described the neo-orthodox opinion in terms that link it with his own theory (“the response of the receptor” being the really important thing). The ideological affinities are clear enough, the connection is enthusiastically asserted by people who are promoting the theory, and the widespread rejection of orthodox views of inspiration does help explain why so many translators and editors in our generation have cared so little about accuracy or traditional exegesis, while professing to make the real meaning of the Bible clear to “the masses.”

26. Dynamic Textual Criticism

Textual Criticism refers to the efforts of scholars to establish the original text of the Bible from the evidence of manuscripts, early versions, patristic citations, and rules of transcriptional probability. Scholars who specialize in this field do not take notice of English versions, which arose after the invention of printing. They use the ancient versions only as witnesses for the form of the original text upon which they are based. A modern ideology of translation has no relevance for their work. However, most translators today do not leave such questions to the specialists. They use critical editions prepared by the specialists, but they commonly reserve the right to disagree with the specialists and decide for themselves what the original form of the text said. Most versions of the New Testament produced in the past forty years or so have been based upon the Greek text prepared by a committee of scholars convened by the United Bible Societies. But none of the versions follow this text invariably. Most versions of the Old Testament are based upon the edition of the Hebrew text prepared by specialists at the German Bible Society in Stuttgart, but the translators very often decline the recommendations given in the footnotes of this edition.

We have therefore a situation in which the aims of translators and editors might come into play while deciding text-critical matters, in ways that would be considered illegitimate by specialists in the field of textual criticism. For instance, a translator who aims to produce a very easily-understood English version might favor the Greek and Hebrew variants that are easy to translate, while avoiding the more difficult ones preferred by the specialists. Or he might prefer a variant because he knows it would be more acceptable to his readers. And as a matter of fact, this is what Nida and his colleague Jan de Waard advise translators to do. In a discussion of the goal of “acceptability” they write:

This principle opens the door to some possibilities which we would not like to think about. Perhaps the reading of the Sinaitic Syriac manuscript at Matthew 1:16, “Joseph ... begat Jesus,” will also be more acceptable to some contituency. But can considerations of “acceptability” really be allowed to determine such questions?

27. Conclusion

We have shown that the dynamic equivalence method represents a departure from tradition, and from the principles of translation used by the Biblical authors themselves. Its pretensions to “scientific” principles of linguistics are dubious, as has been pointed out by numerous linguists and biblical scholars. It results in a simplification of the text in which important features of the Bible are erased. It proceeds from false assumptions about the relationship of Scripture to the Church and to the reader. Finally, as a practical matter, we have seen that the versions produced with this method cannot “get along” with other versions already in use.

Notes

1. ESV margin, “or, with interpretation, or, paragraph by paragraph. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon says the word מפרש (mephorash) here most probably means “distinctly” (which may mean either “clearly” or “in sections”) though it mentions the sense “interpreted” favored by some (page 831). C.F. Keil in his commentary favors “explaining” but rejects “translating” as the meaning here. He writes, “It is more correct to suppose a paraphrastic exposition and application.” (Hendrickson edition, vol.4, p. 145). The Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti libros (KBL) of Koehler and Baumgartner (Leiden, 1953) favors “divided into parts.” The latest English edition of the revised KBL (Leiden, 2001) favors “making an extempore translation,” so that the meaning of the Hebrew word corresponds to the Aramaic mepharash (Ezra 4:18). But this understanding of the word seems to depend upon a redactional analysis which treats the statement in verse 8 as anachronistic. It seems unlikely that the books of Ezra and Nehemiah themselves would have been written in Hebrew if this language could no longer be understood by most Jews at the time.

2. The BDB Lexicon says that the phrase ושום שכל (wesom sekel) means simply “set forth (the) understanding.” (p. 968).

3. See Nehemiah 13:23-25. Hebrew, and not Aramaic, is meant by “the Jews’ language” here and elsewhere in Scripture. See Loring Woard Batten, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Ezra and Nehemia (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T and T Clark, 1913). Gesenius also (Hebrew Grammar, ed. Kautzsch, §2.t) concludes that “the supplanting of Hebrew by Aramaic proceeded only very gradually” and that Hebrew was still understood by the common people as late as 170 B.C., centuries after the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. W. Robertson Smith agrees: “The fall of the Jewish kingdom accelerated the decay of Hebrew as a spoken language. Not indeed that those of the people who were transported forgot their own tongue in their new home, as older scholars supposed on the basis of Jewish tradition: the exilic and post-exilic prophets do not write in a lifeless tongue. Hebrew was still the language of Jerusalem in the time of Nehemiah in the middle of the fifth century B.C.,” and in a footnote he adds, “An argument to the contrary drawn by Jewish interpreters from Neh. 8:8 rests on false exegesis.” (W. Robertson Smith, “Hebrew Language,” Encyclopaedia Biblica; a Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religious History, the Archaeology, Geography, and Natural History of the Bible, Volume II, ed. T. K. Cheyne and J. Sutherland Black [New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Adam and Charles Black, 1899], column 1988.) Likewise Gustaf Dalman concludes that “in the time of Nehemiah the Law could still be understood in the original Hebrew in Jerusalem,” but he suggests that its language needed some occasional explanations: “Nevertheless, it required interpretation when read at public services, probably not merely as to the contents (Neh. 8:7f.). Later a full translation into Aramaic was considered to be absolutely necessary, so that the ‘clear and understandable’ reading (Neh. 8:8) was interpreted as meaning the addition of a full translation.” (Jesus-Jeshua: Studies in the Gospels [New York: MacMillan Co., 1929], p. 9.) D. Winton Thomas also concludes that “Hebrew continued to be the normal vehicle of expression” for some time after the return of the exiles (“The Language of the Old Testament,” in Record and Revelation, edited by H. Wheeler Robinson [Oxford, 1938], p. 387). If this is not the case, and if in fact Hebrew was not understood by most Jews in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah, this means that the post-exilic parts of the Hebrew Old Testament (1st and 2nd Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah, Haggai, and Malachi) were written in a scholarly language that could not be understood by the people.

4. In this I agree with Jerome, who translates it eruditus in the Vulgate, and with modern scholars who have maintained that κατηχέω always refers to teaching. H.A.W. Meyer takes a hard line on this: “κατηχήθης ist von wirklicher Unterweisung (auch Act. 21, 21) zu verstehen, nich von Hörensagen, wovon auch die Stellen bei Kypke nicht zu erklären sind.” [“κατηχήθης is to be understood as actual instruction (in Acts 21:21 also), not of hearsay, of which, moreover, the passages in Kypke are not to be explained,” Kritisch exegetisches Handbuch über die Evangelien des Markus und Lukas, ad loc.] Towards the beginning of the twentieth century, the modern view that Luke’s Gospel was written mainly for apologetic purposes led some scholars to argue that the Theophilus addressed by Luke was not a Christian, and had only “received some information” about Christianity. Thus Theodor Zahn: “Durch diese erst soll Theophilus zu der Erkenntnis, zu der gründlichen Einsicht und Überzeugung von ‘der Zuverlässigkeit der Reden, von welchen er Kunde bekommen hat,’ geführt werden.” (Einleitung in das neue Testament, 3rd ed., vol. 2 [Leipzig, 1907], p. 366.) It is for this reason alone that Zahn argues that κατηχήθης means only “you were told” in Luke 1:4. For the same reason Hermann Beyer in his TDNT article (vol. 3, pp. 638-40) argues that κατηχέω does not always imply religious instruction in the New Testament, and that the passive is used in a weakened and general sense of “informed” in both Acts 21:21 and Luke 1:4. Bauer’s Wörterbuch more cautiously maintains that the word is used in this sense only in Acts 21:21, and lists Luke 1:4 under the stronger sense unterweisen, belehren (teach, instruct). The extra-biblical evidence adduced for the weakened sense is not very strong. For example, Beyer cites a short letter of Agrippa II quoted in the Autobiography of Josephus, 366: “Jos. Vit., 366 quotes a letter from Agrippa II in which the king writes after reading the Jewish War that, while the author obviously needs no further instruction, on a visit he will tell him many things that happened to him: καὶ αὐτός σε πολλὰ κατηχήσω τῶν ἀγνοουμένων.” But the precariousness of this proof is evident when the whole letter is seen: Βασιλεὺς Ἀγρίππας Ἰωσήπῳ τῷ φιλτάτῳ χαίρειν. Ἐξ ὧν ἔγραψας οὐδεμιᾶς ἔοικας χρῄζειν διδασκαλίας ὑπὲρ τοῦ μαθεῖν ἡμᾶς ὅλους ἀρχῆθεν. Ὅταν μέντοι συντύχῃς μοι, καὶ αὐτός σε πολλὰ κατηχήσω τῶν ἀγνοουμένων. Thackeray (Selections from Josephus, London, 1919) calls this “rather slipshod Greek” (p. 15) and translates it: “King Agrippa to dearest Josephus greeting. From what you have written you appear to stand in no need of instruction, to enable us all to learn (everything from you) from the beginning. But when you meet me, I will myself instruct you in many things of which you are ignorant.” (p. 37.) Thackeray notes that the phrase ὑπὲρ τοῦ μαθεῖν ἡμᾶς ὅλους ἀρχῆθεν is “vulgar and obscure,” but the meaning of the whole sentence depends upon what this phrase means. And it seems to me that Agrippa is saying that Josephus does not need to be instructed in those matters that Josephus has written about, but that there is more for him to be instructed in, concerning other matters which might be added to the history. The collocation with διδασκαλίας and μαθεῖν surely suggests that κατηχήσω means “I will instruct” here. But however this may be understood—and whatever support elsewhere might be cited for a meaning of “inform”—it must be admitted that “instruct” is the ordinary sense of the word.

5. See Nida’s books Message and Mission: The Communication of the Christian Faith (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960); Toward a Science of Translating, with Special Reference to Principles and Procedures Involved in Bible Translating (Leiden: Brill, 1964); The Theory and Practice of Translation (Leiden: Brill, 1969); and also the book he later co-authored with Jan de Waard, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1986). I should mention that much of what Nida wrote on the subject does not square very well with the translations which have been produced under the banner of “dynamic equivalence.” Nida himself coined this phrase in an effort to distinguish his method from unrestrained “paraphrase.” Later he complained of abuses of the method he outlined, and for this reason in his later writings he distanced himself from the term “dynamic equivalence,” preferring instead “functional equivalence.” (On this, see the preface of his book, From One Language to Another, in which he says, “Some Bible translators have seriously violated the principle of dynamic equivalence as described in Theory and Practice of Translating [sic] and Toward a Science of Translating.”) Recently some others have preferred to call it “meaning-based translation,” or “closest natural equivalence” — a phrase which Nida also sometimes used in his writings. These shifts in terminology do not represent changes in the method. I use the term “dynamic equivalence” because it continues to be the one most widely used. For an explanation of Nida’s own use of this term see my article Dynamic Equivalence Defined.

6. Toward a Science of Translating (1964), p. 1. A perusal of the essays collected in Douglas Robinson’s Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 1997) will reveal just how commonplace the basic ideas about translation usually associated with Nida were, long before his birth. The need for “idiomatic” renderings was emphasized by writers in ancient times, and the desirability and possibility of producing an “equivalent effect” was thoroughly discussed by translators in the middle of the nineteenth century. Nida adds nothing substantial to these old discussions, which were quite sophisticated, and he does not even interact with them in such a way that the difficult problems raised in them are addressed. Other more technical aspects of his theoretical writings are little more than ad hoc applications of various concepts developed by other linguists. See for example chapter four of his book Toward a Science of Translating, in which the special concepts and terminology of Chomsky’s generative grammar are pressed into service in some very questionable ways. For Nida’s dependence on Chomsky see Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 44. Gentzler writes, “Despite claims to the contrary, Nida’s theory crystallized with the addition of Chomsky’s transformational component—Nida read Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in mimeograph form two years before it was published. With the adoption of Chomsky’s theoretical premise, his transformational rules, and his terminology, Nida’s theory solidified ...” Gentzler also points out that it was the acceptance of Chomsky’s ideas among linguists that set the stage for the favorable reception of Nida’s theories of translation: “Generative transformational grammar, along with its legitimacy within the field of linguistics, lent credence and influence to Nida’s ‘science’ of translation.” For an extended critique of Nida’s use of Chomsky’s ideas see V.S. Poythress, “Truth and Fullness of Meaning: Fullness versus Reductionistic Semantics in Biblical Interpretation,” in Translating Truth: The Case for Essentially Literal Bible Translation (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2005). Nida himself contributed nothing new to a general theory of language, and his use of concepts developed by others is often facile. In short, it seems to me that his contributions to translation theory have been overstated.

7. Eugene Nida, Message and Mission (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 221.

8. Eugene Nida, Bible Translating: An Analysis of Principles and Procedures, with Special Reference to Aboriginal Languages (New York: American Bible Society, 1947), p. 21. The criteria laid down here are so extreme, one might be inclined to regard them as overstatements, written in the heat of enthusiasm; but Nida often made assertions like this in academic contexts, where one would expect to find a more sober and judicious statement of principles. In 1969 he wrote that translators who rightly discern the “needs of the audience” will see that “Non-Christians have priority over Christians. That is to say, the Scriptures must be intelligible to non-Christians, and if they are, they will also be intelligible to Christians. Not only is this principle important in making the translation of the Bible effective as an instrument of evangelism, but it is also necessary if the language of the church is to be kept from becoming an esoteric dialect ...” (Theory and Practice of Translation [1969], pp. 31-2). For many years he was apparently unconscious of how impractical his ideas were. Only after his retirement did he begin to acknowledge the failure of this whole approach. For the article on “Translations” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993) he contributed a sub-section on “Native American Languages” in which he wrote: “For a variety of reasons the publication of the scriptures in some Indian languages has not been a success, but where there have been missionaries or leaders of national churches who have encouraged literacy, instructed people in the meaning and relevance of the Bible message, and trained local leadership, the response has been remarkable” (p. 778, emphasis added). Experience shows that devotional Bible reading cannot be expected outside the context of a church with a sustained teaching ministry.

9. The words are not found in any writing of Tyndale, nor do they resemble anything found in his writings; but they were attributed to him in a report of a conversation in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: “Master Tyndale happened to be in the company of a learned man and, in disputing with him ... the man said, ‘We are better to be without God’s laws than the pope’s.’ Master Tyndale, hearing this, replied, ‘I defy the pope and all his laws;’ and added, ‘If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’” Although the report may well be true, it is misleading to quote this riposte as if it constituted some “theory of translation.”

11. E.C. Hoskyns, The Riddle of the New Testament (1931), pp. 19-20. This opinion of the language of the New Testament is shared by many linguists and other scholars, and in fact there is none who denies that the language of the New Testament often mimics the Hebraistic “translation Greek” of the Septuagint. Even Nida was compelled to acknowledge the obvious fact: “Bible translators ... have often made quite a point of the fact that the language of the New Testament was Koine Greek, the language of the ‘man in the street,’ and hence a translation should speak to the man in the street. The truth of the matter is that many New Testament messages are not directed primarily to the man in the street, but to the man in the congregation. For this reason, such expressions as ‘Abba Father,’ Maranatha, and ‘baptized into Christ’ could be used with reasonable expectation that they would be understood.” (Toward a Science of Translating [Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1964], p. 170). Yet, as Stanley E. Porter observes, “there is no place in Nida’s framework for the language of the New Testament being anything other than the common language that was in use in the Mediterranean world of the first century. Theories regarding the special nature of the Greek ... have no place in his analysis” (Porter, “Eugene Nida and Translation,” The Bible Translator 56/1 [January 2005], p. 10).

12. The scholarly literature on the meaning of the expressions εν Χριστω Ιησου, εν Κυριω, etc., is very extensive. Adolf Deissmann in his Die neutestamentliche Formel “in Christo Jesu” (Marburg, 1892) explained the εν as a spatial metaphor expressing incorporation by mystical union with Christ. Moulton likewise relates it to “the idea of the mystic indwelling” (A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 1 [Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1906], p. 103). J. Dick Fleming concludes that the “thought of vital union is the central and original conception of the phrase [εν Χριστω] used by St. Paul.” (Art. “In” in vol. 1 of Hastings’ Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels [Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1906], p. 795). For a review of others up to 1955 see E. Best, One Body in Christ, 1955. In Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Oepke explains that the εν in εν Χριστω Ιησου, εν Κυριω, and related formulae expresses inclusion within “Christ as a universal personality.” (English edition [Eerdmans, 1964], vol. 2, pp. 541-2.) Though Deissmann compared εν Χριστω with Hellenistic parallels, obviously it does not belong to the realm of secular and “popular” Greek. To claim that the English word “Christian” adequately conveys the meaning would be to dismiss all that has been written on the subject by scholars.

13. The significance of this has often been noticed by theologians. For example, Geerhardus Vos: “In a very striking way God regularly appears as the speaking subject in the quotations made from the Old Testament. Where Paul contents himself with the formula, ‘as it is written,’ or ‘as the Scripture says,’ Hebrews prefers to make the affirmation of the divine authorship explicit and employs the formula ‘God says.’ That this is not the result of meaningless habit, but possesses doctrinal significance, appears from the cases, where, rhetorically considered, it would be unnatural to introduce God as the speaking subject, since in the passage quoted He is the Person spoken of. Even in such cases the author insists upon emphasizing that the statement about God came from the mouth of God Himself. It is God who said ‘the Lord shall judge His people’ (x. 30). And so vivid is the realisation of this supreme fact of the direct divine authorship of Scripture that what we call the secondary authors, that is, the writers of the Biblical books, are, again in distinction from Paul’s custom, scarcely ever mentioned. The only case where the name of a Bible writer is introduced is chap. iv. 7, and even here the phrase is not ‘David saying’ but ‘God saying in David.’ There are even passages where pains seem to have been taken to bring out the relative unimportance of the secondary authorship by more positive means than the mere omission of the writer’s name. In a couple of instances use seems to have been made for this purpose of the indefinite pronoun ‘some one’ and the indefinite adverb ‘somewhere’: ‘One has somewhere testified saying’ (ii. 6); ‘For He hath spoken somewhere of the seventh day on this wise’ (iv. 4). By this manner of statement the impression is conveyed that in view of the authority wherewith God invests every word of Scripture the human instrumentality through which the divine word was mediated becomes a matter of little or no importance. As a matter of fact the word of revelation is so literally to the writer’s mind the word of God that it is represented as having been spoken by God being locally present in His messengers: ‘God of old times spoke unto the fathers in the prophets’; ‘God said in David.’ The conception is not instrumental, as if ‘in’ were a Hebraizing construction for ‘by means of’; it should rather be compared with the similar form of statement by our Lord to the disciples: ‘it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father that speaketh in you’ (Mat. x. 20), and by Paul who offers to the Corinthians a proof of Christ speaking in him (2 Cor. xiii. 3).” (“Hebrews, the Epistle of the Diatheke,” Princeton Theological Review 13/4 [1915], pp. 626-27). Even if it be regarded as a metaphor it cannot be dismissed as insignificant. See Michael Reddy, “The Conduit Metaphor,” in A. Ortony, ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge University Press, 1979.

14. Barclay M. Newman, Creating and Crafting the Contemporary English Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1996), p. 17.

15. Brooke Foss Westcott, The Gospel According to St. John: the Greek Text with Introduction and Notes, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 124. Likewise Hermann Olshausen explains, “the words, ‘are wrought in God’ ... represent God, the source of truth, as the ground of all truth and sincerity in a creature, so far as they are manifested in him. Hence εν, in, retains its proper meaning; and the expression may be explained by εν δυναμει θεου, in the power of God. (Biblical Commentary on the New Testament, by Dr. Hermann Olshausen, Translated from the German for Clark’s Foreign and Theological Library, First American Edition, revised after the fourth German edition, by A.C. Kendrick, vol. 2 [New York: Sheldon & Co., 1860], p. 364.) The kind of semantic reductionism that interprets this expression merely as “wrought with God’s approval” (Hendriksen) is naturally favored by those who are trying to make the text easier to understand. But if εν θεω receives this treatment, one might as well also translate εν Χριστω as “pleasing to Christ.”

16. C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature (4th edition; Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1980), p. 12. Holman further writes, “Complex literary allusion is characteristic of much modern writing, and discovering the meaning and value of the allusions is frequently essential to understanding the work.” But literary allusions are not less frequent and important in ancient and medieval works.

17. See also Isaiah 49:1, which seems equally pertinent. I chose this example quite at random from the “Index of Allusions and Verbal Parallels” appended to the third edition of the Greek New Testament published by the United Bible Societies (Stuttgart, 1983), which lists over two thousand allusions. Some of those listed may be seen as questionable, but regarding this one, Herman Ridderbos says “Paul is obviously alluding to” Jeremiah 1:5. (The Epistle of Paul to the Churches of Galatia [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1953], p. 63).

18. I leave open the question of whether ἐκ κοιλίας μητρός μου means “from the time that I was in my mother’s womb” or “when I came from my mother’s womb” here. But the former rendering seems preferable to me, especially if we are right in seeing it as an allusion to Jeremiah 1:5 or Isaiah 49:1.

19. In this article “New Living Translation” refers to the first edition of the version, published in 1996. The second edition (published in 2004) makes some improvements. In Acts 5:30 it reads “killed him by hanging him on a cross,” and it gives a literal translation in a footnote: “Greek, on a tree.” Other differences between the editions will not be noticed in this article.

20. J.H.A. Hart, in The Expositor’s Greek Testament vol. 5 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), p. 48. The connection with the words of Exodus is not just literary decoration here. Hart observes that in this epistle Peter “is engrossed with the conception of the Church as the new Israel which has been delivered from idolatry—the spiritual Egypt—by a far more excellent sacrifice.” Nevertheless, in his book Toward a Science of Translating, Nida mentions this Semitic idiom as an example of a “semantically exocentric” phrase which is “meaningless or misleading if translated literally” (p. 170). We grant that the meaning of “gird up your loins” is not obvious to many people in our day, and that it requires an explanation.

21. Identification with the redeemed of the Passover has always been an important element of Jewish religion, as may be seen in the traditional הגדה של פסח (Haggadah shel pesach): “In every generation each one of us should regard himself as though he himself had gone forth from Egypt, as it is said (Ex. xiii. 8), ‘And thou shalt shew thy son in that day, saying, This is done because of that which the Lord did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt.’ Not our ancestors alone did God redeem then, but he did us redeem with them, as it is said (Deut. vi. 23), ‘And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.’” (Translation from The Revised Haggada ... Translated, Edited, and Annotated by Rev. A.A. Green [London: Areenbeg & Co., 1897], p. 27.) On which see further W.D. Davies, Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (revised edition; London: S.P.C.K., 1955), pp. 102-106. Regarding the significance of the Passover in the epistles of Paul, Davies writes: “it is highly significant that in several places in the Epistles ... the Apostle compares the Christian life to the Passover Festival: he obviously regards the great deliverance at the Exodus and its accompaniments as the prototype of the mighty act of God in Christ.” (cf. 1 Cor. 5:6-8; 10:1-11.)

22. Dennis E. Johnson, “Fire In God’s House: Imagery From Malachi 3 In Peter’s Theology of Suffering (1 Pet 4:12-19),” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 29/3 (September 1986) p. 285. In criticizing the NIV along with the other versions mentioned in this book I do not mean to put the NIV on the same level as the others with respect to “dynamic equivalence.” The NIV is ordinarily more literal. However, many Bible teachers will agree with me when I say that the NIV does too often give paraphrastic renderings. It is not so much a problem of “accuracy” (narrowly defined) as a regrettable loss of imagery, vividness, and allusiveness in this version. As Daniel Wallace has said, the NIV “is so readable that it has no memorable expressions, nothing that lingers in the mind. This is a serious problem for the NIV that is not always acknowledged.” (The History of the English Bible Part IV: Why So Many Versions?) Leland Ryken, who focuses on literary qualities, includes many criticisms of the NIV along with criticism of more paraphrastic versions in his recent book, The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2003).

23. Toward a Science of Translating, pp. 211, 231. Nida also advises translators to eliminate repetition in From One Language to Another, pp. 87, 96, 119. The translators of the Good News Bible frequently eliminate or combine clauses that are seen as repetitious. Another good example may be seen in Hosea 2:4-5, where parallel lines of the prophet’s poetic discourse are reduced to non-repetitious prose.

24. As R.B.Y. Scott observes, the KJV’s “passing over is better than he will spare, because it preserves the allusion to the deliverance commemorated by the Pesach (Passover) festival; the verb appears in the O.T. only here and in Exod. 12.” (Interpreter’s Bible, volume 5 [New York, 1956], p. 340.) The NEB’s rendering, “standing over her,” is in accordance with a newly proposed sense for the word פסח in this place. Likewise the New JPS version’s “protecting.” Baruch Levine in his article on “Feasts and Festivals” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible (1993), p. 226, continues to assert that the word “properly means ‘to straddle, stand over,’ hence ‘protect’ (Isa. 31.5).” But most scholars have rejected this proposal, there being no sufficient evidence that in Isaiah 31:5 the word means something other than what it has always been understood to mean—and clearly it does mean “pass over” in Exodus. The REB revision of the NEB substitutes “sparing her” for “standing over her” in Isaiah 31:5.

25. Thus St. Augustine writes concerning God’s omniscience, Quid est praescientia nisi scientia futurorum? Quid autem futurum est Deo, qui omnia supergreditur tempora? Si enim in scientia res ipsas habet, non sunt ei futurae, sed praesentes, ac per hoc non jam praescientia, sed tantum scientia dici potest. “What is foreknowledge except a knowledge of future events? What, however, is future in the sight of God, who transcends all concepts of time? For if he has the events themselves in the scope of his knowledge, they are not future as far as he is concerned but present; and by this very fact it can no longer be called foreknowledge but only knowledge.” (De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, II. ii. 2., cited in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, vol. 1, p. 401.) Some commentators have doubted whether Isaiah could have intended such an idea of transcendence. Franz Delitzsch assets that this thought is “quite outside the biblical range of ideas,” and so he thinks the expression must mean only “the eternally dwelling one” (Commentary on the Old Testament by C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, vol. 7, Isaiah, translated by James Martin, Hendriksen reprint, 2001, p. 549). Yet the Hebrew text says plainly, “he who inhabits eternity,” and so it is translated thus in essentially literal versions (KJV, ASV, RSV, NASB, ESV, etc.). We reject the notion that the mind of this great prophet could not have received such an idea of God’s transcendence, and we think it is only a low view of inspiration which will put it “outside the biblical range of ideas.”

26. D. A. Carson, “God’s Love and God’s Sovereignty,” Bibliotheca Sacra 156/623 (July 1999), p. 262. It should be noted that in the current controversies about “Open Theism,” in which some people are even denying that God transcends time, this phrase in Isaiah 57:15 becomes more than a “fine expression” that stretches the mind: it becomes a point of reference for the teaching and defense of orthodox theology.

27. “I can remember times when working on Mark in Cincinnati that the committee spent a half an hour or more deciding on the meaning of one word in a verse. For example, in Mark 1:12 the King James Version says that ‘the spirit driveth (ekballei) him into the wilderness,’ using the first meaning of ekballo given in the lexicons. I can still remember some of our participants facetiously wondering what kind of a car the Spirit used to transport him into the wilderness.” Wesley L. Gerig, “Translating the New International Version,” Reflections, official publication of the Missionary Church Historical Society, vol. 5/2 (Fall 2001), p. 6.

28. It is maintained by some that in the first century the sense of the word ekballo was weakened so much that it meant merely “sent,” without a connotation of command or compulsion, and so this has been given as a meaning of the word in some Greek Lexicons. But the NT citations offered in support of this opinion (Matt. 9:38, John 10:4, Acts 16:37, etc.) fail to establish it, and it is not acknowledged in Lust’s Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (2003). In the Septuagint and in the New Testament the word is nearly always associated with commands or the use of force. Probably the NIV translators favored a weakened sense here, against the weight of the evidence, because they feared that ordinary readers would think “impelled him to go out” meant that Jesus was compelled against his own will.

29. Strangely enough, Wyclif chose this excellent equivalent for the Greek word while translating, not directly from the Greek, but from the Latin Vulgate, which has verecundia here. “Shamefastness” was used by the KJV translators also (though corrupted to “shamefacedness” in later printings), and retained in the ERV and ASV revisions. That αιδως and its cognates denoted a sense of shame appears clearly in the following quotations from Epictetus, a moralist of the first century: πεφύκαμεν δὲ πῶς; ὡς ἐλεύθεροι, ὡς γενναῖοι, ὡς αἰδήμονες. ποῖον γὰρ ἄλλο ζῷον ἐρυθριᾷ, ποῖον αἰσχροῦ φαντασίαν λαμβάνει; τὴν ἡδονὴν δ' ὑπόταξαι τούτοις ὡς διάκονον, ὡς ὑπηρέτιν, ἵνα προθυμίας ἐκκαλέσηται, ἵν' ἐν τοῖς κατὰ φύσιν ἔργοις παρακρατῇ. “And how are we constituted by nature? Free, noble, modest: for what other animal blushes? what other is capable of receiving the appearance (the impression) of shame? and we are so constituted by nature as to subject pleasure to these things, as a minister, a servant, in order that it may call forth our activity, in order that it may keep us constant in acts which are conformable to nature.” (Discourses, book 3, chap. 7). καίτοι καὶ δέδωκέ μοι ἡ φύσις αἰδῶ καὶ πολλὰ ὑπερυθριῶ, ὅταν τι ὑπολάβω αἰσχρὸν λέγειν. τοῦτό με τὸ κίνημα οὐκ ἐᾷ τὴν ἡδονὴν θέσθαι ἀγαθὸν καὶ τέλος τοῦ βίου. “And indeed nature has given to me modesty, and I blush much when I think of saying any thing base (indecent). This motion (feeling) does not permit me to make (consider) pleasure the good and the end (purpose) of life.” (Fragments, 52. English translation from The Discourses of Epictetus, with the Encheridion and Fragments, translated by George Long [London: George Bell and Sons, 1877]; Greek text according to the edition of Heinrich Schenkl [Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1916]).

30. Cf. the monograph by Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford University Press, 1993). A good introduction to the subject as it relates to the New Testament is in Jerome H. Neyrey’s Honor and Shame in the Gospel of Matthew (Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1998).

31. The NIV translation here is so uncommonly bad that I was prompted to look for an explanation for it in works written by the original NIV committee members. I found one in a book by Ralph Earle, Word Meanings in the New Testament (Baker, 1986). Earle quotes J.H. Bernard’s opinion that “aidos here signifies that modesty which shrinks from overstepping the limits of womanly reserve,” and says “in our opinion, that states the case with accuracy and relevance” (p. 338). We can agree with that judgment. But Earle does not clearly explain why we should think the NIV’s “decency” is an accurate rendering. He seems most interested in contrasting the NIV’s rendering with the KJV’s “shamefacedness.” Speaking of women “in this day,” he says that “something between shamefacedness and boldfacedness” should be sought, and so he recommends the NIV’s rendering because it expresses a “golden mean.” This is unacceptable, if we are being asked to think that αιδως denotes some state of mental poise equally distant from shyness and boldness (!) — but it does indicate that the NIV translators knew what the word αιδως means. Bernard, whom Earle quotes in part, even says in his commentary that “shamefastness and sobriety ... is as near to the Greek as we can go in English.” (The Pastoral Epistles, edited with Introduction and Notes [Cambridge, 1906], p. 45.)

32. Johann David Michaelis, A Dissertation on the Influence of Opinions on Language and of Language on Opinions. Second edition. (London: W. Owen, 1771), p. 28. English translation of Beantwortung der Frage von dem Einfluß der Meinungen in die Sprache und der Sprache in die Meinungen (1760).

34. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, 1949), pp. 426-27. No scholar will deny that the word χαρις commonly has this meaning in the New Testament.

35. See the parallel in Gal. 5:18, in which “Spirit” stands where “grace” is used here. This is no sectarian understanding of “grace” that I insist on. On Romans 6:14 John Calvin writes “by the word grace we are to understand both parts of redemption—the remission of sins, by which God imputes righteousness to us—and the sanctification of the Spirit, by whom he forms us anew unto good works.... it is hence impossible that we should be subject to sin, when the grace of God reigns in us; for we have before stated, that under this term grace, is included the spirit of regeneration.” Likewise the Lutheran commentator R. C. H. Lenski writes concerning “grace” here, that it “includes all that comes to us from the favor Dei through Christ: justification, baptism, the new life and newness of life... grace removes the curse of sin, breaks its dominion, joins us to Christ and God, fills us with spiritual power to trample unrighteousness under foot and to work righteousness. Gratia non solum peccata diluit, sed ut non peccemus facit [‘Grace not only remits sins, but brings it about that we might not sin’]. Augustine. ‘Under grace’ still regards us as being subjects. Man is or can never be independent. But being subjects to grace is pure blessedness for sinners, for while law comes with threatening demands which we are helpless to fulfill, grace showers upon us not only what we need but all that it possibly can bestow, even the capacity to receive.” The failure to understand χαρις as a divine power was one of the features of the ancient Pelagian heresy, against which Augustine wrote, Tu vestro more, qui de vestro descendit errore, non agnoscis gratiam, nisi in dimissione peccatorum; ut iam de cetero per liberum arbitrium ipse homo se ipsum fabricet justum. “You, according to your custom, which stems from your error, do not acknowledge grace except in the remission of sins, that now from henceforth a man by his own freedom of will might make himself righteous.” (Contra Julianum, ed. Migne, § CCXXVII.) Some who have defended the use of “favor” have falsely claimed that Tyndale used it instead of “grace” in his translation of the New Testament. This impression was probably created by a sentence in his Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, in which he defends an occasional use of “favour” where it seemed best to him, and says that “grace” was one of “juggling terms” of Roman Catholics, who “were wont to make many divisions, distinctions, and sorts of grace.” But the fact is, he used the word “grace” in the great majority of places where χαρις occurs in the New Testament. In his edition of 1526, he used “grace” in 106 of the 148 verses where it occurs; and in the revision of 1534 he increased it to 116. (The King James version adds only ten more, using “grace” in 126.) Evidently Tyndale knew that in most cases the word “favor” could not express the meaning of χαρις, and felt that “grace” was the better word.

36. Gerald Hammond puts it well: “While the Renaissance Bible translator saw half of his task as reshaping English so that it could adapt itself to Hebraic idiom the modern translator wants to make no demands on the language he translates into ... The basic distinction between the Renaissance and the modern translators is one of fidelity to their original. Partly the loss of faith in the Hebrew and Greek as the definitive word of God has led to the translators’ loss of contact with it, but more responsibility lies in the belief that a modern Bible should aim not to tax its reader’s linguistic or interpretive abilities one bit.” (Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible [Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1982] pp. 212-13).

37. Review of “The Message” in The Bible Translator 46/1 (January 1995), p. 155.

38. Ludwig Köhler, Hebrew Man, translated from the German Der Hebräische Mensch by Peter R. Ackroyd (London, 1956), p. 43. This little book gives much useful information about the cultural setting of the Old Testament.

39. See other references to the hair-cutting custom in Jeremiah 16:6; 47:5: 48:37; Job 1:20; Isaiah 3:24; 15:2; 22:12; Ezekiel 7:18; Micah 1:16.

40. See the BDB lexicon, p. 634. C.F. Keil in his commentary on Jeremiah gives an excellent exposition of the double sense of נזר here: “In these verses the judgment of ver. 20 is depicted in all its horror, and the description is introduced by a call upon Zion to mourn and lament for the evil awaiting Jerusalem and the whole land. It is not any particular woman that is addressed in ver. 29, but the daughter of Zion (cf. vi. 23), i.e. the capital city personified as a woman, as the mother of the whole people. Cut off נזרך, thy diadem. There can be no doubt that we are by this to understand the hair of the woman; but the current opinion, that the word simply and directly means the hair, is without foundation. It means crown, originally the diadem of the high priest, Ex. xxix. 6; and the transference of the same word to the hair of the head is explained by the practice of the Nazarites, to wear the hair uncut as a mark of consecration to the Lord, Num. vi. 5. The hair of the Nazarite is called in Num. vi. 7 the consecration (נזר) of his God upon his head, as was the anointing oil on the head of the high priest, Lev. xxi. 12. In this sense the long hair of the daughter of Zion is called her diadem, to mark her out as a virgin consecrated to the Lord. Cutting off this hair is not only in token of mourning, as in Job i. 20, Mic. i. 16, but in token of the loss of the consecrated character. The Nazarite, defiled by the sudden occurrence of death near to his person, was bound to cut off his long hair, because by this defilement his consecrated hair had been defiled ; and just so must the daughter of Zion cut off her hair and cast it from her, because by her sins she had defiled herself, and must be held as unconsecrate. Venema and Ros. object to this reference of the idea to the consecrated hair of the Nazarite: quod huc non quadrat, nec in faeminis adeo suetum erat [because it does not fit in this context, and moreover it was not customary among women]; but this objection is grounded on defective apprehension of the meaning of the Nazarite’s vow, and on misunderstanding of the figurative style here employed. The allusion to the Nazarite order, for the purpose of representing the daughter of Zion as a virgin consecrated to the Lord, does not imply that the Nazarite vow was very common amongst women. Deprived of her holy ornament, Zion is to set up a lament upon bare hill-tops (cf. iii. 21), since the Lord has rejected or cast out (ver. 30) the generation that has drawn His wrath down on it, because they have set idols in the temple in which He has revealed His glory, to profane it.” (English translation by David Patrick.)

41. BDB p. 1046; Koehler-Baumgartner p. 1628. The basic meaning seems to be “bare place,” but the most barren spots in Judea are the eroded hill-tops.

42. Cf. Nigel Turner, Christian Words (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1981), p. 65; Konrad Weiss, “χρηστος,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament vol. 9 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), pp. 488-9; Walter Grundmann, “χριω, χριστος,” in idem, p. 495. Grundmann writes, “χριστος is never related to persons outside the LXX, the NT, and dependent writings.” J.B. Lightfoot writes, “‘the anointed’ would convey no idea at all to a heathen ignorant of the Old Testament and unacquainted with Hebrew customs.” (St. Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians [third ed; London, 1873], p. 16, n. 1.)

43. See the interesting discussion of the Jewish interpretation of the Sabbath commandment in James Kugel’s The Bible As It Was (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 389-91.

44. On the import of the expression in Job see Franz Delitzsch, The Book of Job, translated by Francis Bolton, on Job 14:1 and 4. “Woman is weak, with pain she brings forth children; she is impure during her lying-in, therefore weakness, suffering, and impurity is the portion of man even from the birth (ch. 15:14, 25:4) ... he acknowledges an hereditary proneness to sin.” Similarly Marvin Pope, Job (Anchor Bible series; Doubleday & Co., 1973), pp. 105-106. “Birth with its blood and messiness gives man a taint of uncleanness from the start ... from an unclean thing (woman) no clean thing can be expected.” A note in the Jerusalem Bible (1966) at Job 14:4 explains, “The emphasis is laid on the physical (and therefore ritual) uncleanness which man contracts from the moment of his conception, cf. Lv 15:19f, and birth, cf. Lv 12:2f, since he is born of a woman, Jb 14:1, cf. Ps 51:5. But this ritual uncleanness involves a corresponding moral weakness, a tendency to sin, and Christian interpretation has seen in this passage at least an allusion to what was later recognised as ‘original sin’ passed on from parent to child. Cf. Rm 5:12.” On the γεννητοις γυναικων in Matt. 11:11, see Heinrich Meyer, Critical and Exegetical Hand-Book to the Gospel of Matthew, trans. P. Christie (New York, 1884), p. 223. “Among those born of women” is “intended to denote the category of men according to that nature which is peculiar to the whole race in virtue of its origin (mortality, weakness, sinfulness, and so on).”

45. A moment’s reflection will find the difference between “grandsons” and “sons’ sons.” The two expressions are not fully equivalent, and the difference between them does have some cultural significance. Today even some of the most literal versions put “grandsons” here, because it is possible to interpret בני as including daughters. But to those who are familiar with the ancient patriarchal culture, it is by no means clear that בני here is meant to include daughters, so that בני בנים would include the sons of daughters also.

46. In the Septuagint עשה אמת is literally translated with ποιεω and αληθεια. See also Isaiah 26:10 in the Septuagint, where the expression has been inserted by the translator. But I am still not convinced that αληθεια in John’s Gospel should be understood as אמת in this sense. If the meaning is connected with the Hebrew word, the usage of אמת in Daniel (“divine instruction” and “body of religious knowledge,” cf. BDB, p. 54), seems more pertinent, and both עשה and ποιεω are flexible enough to yield the meaning “act in accordance with the Truth.” An analogous Semitic expression is ποιει τον νομον “do (i.e. act in accordance with) the Law” in John 7:19.

47. C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge, 1953), p. 176. We note that most of the versions that aim for “dynamic equivalence” still refrain from altering such expressions as “true light” (John 1:9) “true bread” (John 6:32) “true vine” (John 15:1) and “true tabernacle” (Hebrews 8:2), but the meaning of “true” in these expressions will not be understood by readers who are unfamiliar with the eternal archetype concept denoted by αληθινος in John’s Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews. A “dynamic” equivalent for “I am the true vine” eludes us, but it would have to be something like: “I am what the grapevine symbolizes; I embody the everlasting Vine-Idea in the mind of God, from which all earthly vines have derived their imperfect and temporary existence, as symbols and shadows of what is truly real in heaven.”

48. “Translating Hoi Ioudaioi in the New Testament,” TIC Talk 24 (1993).

50. See the detailed discussion of "etymology and exegesis" in Moises Silva’s Biblical Words and their Meaning (2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), pp. 44-51.

51. There is, however, some cultural significance in the fact that the same word is used for “bride” and “daughter-in-law.” The same word is used for “bride” and “daughter-in-law” in ancient Hebrew and Greek because both languages are dominated by the perspective of the patriarchal father in a patrilocal society, where the “daughter-in-law” is a “bride” acquired for his son, and brought into his extended household. To use a single word in reference to “bride” and “daughter-in-law” is to see things from the standpoint of the ancient pater familias.

52. “The two words must be distinguished or the sentence is meaningless. λαλια is audible speech, the spoken word (not, of course, ‘chatter’ or ‘loquacity’ as often in earlier Greek): the Jews fail to understand the sayings they hear (cf. their frequent misunderstandings, e.g. in this chapter vv. 19, 22, 25, 33, etc.). This is because they cannot grasp and obey (for this use of ακουειν see on 5.24) Jesus’ message, the divine Word which he bears (and indeed is). ου δυνασθε must be given full weight; cf. 12.39.” — C.K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John (London: S.P.C.K., 1965), pp. 288-9.

53. Simon Kistemaker, in the continuation of Hendriksen’s New Testament Commentary, ad loc. See also the translation and comments of Bo Reicke, The Epistles of James, Peter, and Jude (Anchor Bible series, 1964), pp. 88-90.

54. Bindley translation, p. 52. The Greek is as follows. οὐχ ἁπλῶς, ὥσπερ πάντα τὰ ἐπὶ γῆς ἄλογα ζῷα, ἔκτισε τοὺς ἀνθρώπους, ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὴν ἑαυτοῦ εἰκόνα ἐποίησεν αὐτούς, µεταδοὺς αὐτοῖς καὶ τῆς τοῦ ἰδίου Λόγου δυνάµεως, ἵνα ὥσπερ σκιάς τινας ἔχοντες τοῦ Λόγου καὶ γενόµενοι λογικοὶ διαµένειν ἐν µακαριότητι δυνηθῶσι, ζῶντες τὸν ἀληθινὸν καὶ ὄντως τῶν ἁγίων ἐν παραδείσῳ βίον.

55. It may be said that our word ‘soul’ combines the senses of נֶפֶש and רוּחַ, or that it corresponds more with the Greek conception of the ψυχη than with the Hebrew נֶפֶש. There is some truth in this. But נֶפֶש and רוּחַ (and their Greek counterparts ψυχη and πνευμα) so overlap in meaning, and are so closely associated in Scripture, that many scholars have treated them as virtually interchangeable. For a close analysis I recommend the helpful book on this subject by Franz Delitzsch, A System of Biblical Psychology, translated from the 2nd German edition by the rev. Robert E. Wallis (2nd ed. Edinburgh, 1885). The article “Soul” by Colin Brown in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978) is very helpful in some respects, but unfortunately it includes some statements which I think are misleading. For example: “A clear indication of how unfamiliar the OT is with the concept of a soul separate from the body, or a soul which becomes separated from the body at death, is the fact that it can speak of a dead person as the soul of that person, and mean by this phrase the dead person in his corporeality (Num. 6:6).” It is by no means clear to me that in Numbers 6:6 נֶפֶש refers to the dead body. Rather, it seems to me that here נֶפֶש refers somewhat loosely to the person as recently living. And the writers of the Old Testament certainly did think of man as having a soul which departs from the body at death and continues to exist in the spirit world. This concept was universal in the ancient world, and is taken for granted in the New Testament.

56. Gordon Wenham in his commentary on Genesis (vol. 2; Nashville, 1994) agrees: “Isaac does not say simply, ‘So that I may bless you.’ The use of ‘my soul’ rather than ‘I’ seems to express Isaac’s strong desire to bless Esau (cf. Deut 12:20; 14:26; Ps 84:3[2]; Cant 1:7; 3:1-4).” He further notes that in verse 7 when Rebekah tells Jacob what Isaac said, she “seems to be playing down the strength of Isaac’s desire to bless Esau” when she changes “my soul” to “I.” (p. 206)

57. Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, translated by D.M.G. Stalker, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 153.

58. Ronald Youngblood, quoted in Kenneth L. Barker, Accuracy Defined and Illustrated: An NIV Translator Answers your Questions (International Bible Society, 1995), p. 54. See also the brief explanation by Herbet M. Wolf, “When ‘Literal’ Is Not Accurate,” in The NIV: The Making of a Contemporary Translation, edited by Kenneth L. Barker (Colorado Springs: International Bible Society, 1991), p. 130.

59. Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974), p. 95. “This relationship of identity of sin and flesh is one of the most distinctive and radical data of Pauline anthropology. What is important for our present context is that there is here a new indication of the universality of sin, in that flesh on the one hand is a description of all that is man, and on the other of the sinful in man.” For a good discussion of other aspects of this issue see Robert P. Martin, Accuracy of Translation (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Banner of Truth, 1989), pp. 32-37. I want to make it plain here that I do not endorse any criticism brought against the NIV’s rendering “sinful nature” by those who refuse to accept the teaching that fallen man is inherently sinful. I am sure that James D. G. Dunn is quite wrong when he contends that “Flesh for Paul was neither unspiritual nor sinful. The term simply indicated and characterized the weakness of a humanity constituted as flesh and always vulnerable to the manipulation of its desires and needs as flesh.” (The Theology of Paul The Apostle [Eerdmans, 2006], p. 70.) He is correct, however, in his observation that “the range of translations for the same term destroys any sense that Paul had an integrated concept of sarx, whose spectrum of meaning might have a coherence and integration which helped explain that spectrum.” (ibid., p. 70.) I contend that the interpretive rendering “sinful nature” is not necessary, because where “flesh” is used in this sense it is obvious.

60. Douglas J, Moo, “‘Flesh’ in Romans: A Challenge for the Translator,” in The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World. Essays in Honor of Ronald F. Youngblood, ed. Glen S. Scorgie, Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003), p. 374.

62. In his Large Catechism, commenting on the phrase “the resurrection of the flesh” in the Apostles’ Creed, Luther writes: “Dass aber hier steht ‘Auferstehung des Fleisches,’ ist auch nicht wohl deutsch geredet. Denn wo wir Fleisch hören, denken wir nicht weiter denn an die Scharren. Auf recht deutsch aber würden wir also reden: Auferstehung des Leibes oder Leichnams, doch liegt nicht große Macht daran, so man nur die Worte recht versteht.” (“The term ‘resurrection of the flesh,’ however, is not well chosen. When we Germans hear the word Fleisch [flesh], we think no farther than the butcher shop. Idiomatically we would say ‘resurrection of the body.’ However, this is not of great importance, as long as the words are rightly understood.”) In his commentary on Galatians (1519) he writes at 5:17, “Just as ‘spirit’ in this passage does not signify chastity alone, so it follows necessarily that ‘flesh’ does not signify lust alone. I have had to say this because it has become an established usage almost among all to understand ‘desires of the flesh’ only in the sense of ‘lust.’ According to this usage, it would be impossible for the apostle to be understood.” And on verse 21: “Here most plainly of all it is evident that flesh is understood, not only in the sense of lustful desires but as absolutely everything that is contrary to the spirit of grace.” (English translation from Luther’s Works, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 27 [St Louis: Concordia, 1964], pp. 362, 7.)

63. cf. Siegfried Raeder, “The Exegetical and Hermeneutical Work of Martin Luther,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation. II: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, edited by Magne Sæbø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), pp. 401-2. Raeder explains that Luther used a literal rendering of “flesh” even though it was foreign to the German idiom, because the word was so expressive of a “humble anthropology”:

64. Luther was well aware of the ignorance of the common people. In the Preface to his Small Catechism (1531) he wrote: “Diesen Katechismum oder christliche Lehre in solche kleine, schlechte, einfältige Form zu stellen hat mich gezwungen und gedrungen die klägliche, elende Not, so ich neulich erfahren habe, da ich auch ein Visitator war. Hilf, lieber Gott! wie manchen Jammer habe ich gesehen, daß der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts weiß von der christlichen Lehre, sonderlich auf den Dörfern, und leider viel Pfarrherren fast ungeschickt und untüchtig sind zu lehren ...” (“The deplorable conditions I found during a recent tour of inspection has impelled me to publish this catechism, or statement of Christian doctrine, after having prepared it in very brief and simple terms. May God help us! what a pathetic state of affairs I saw! The common men know nothing at all about Christian doctrine, especially those who live in the villages; and unfortunately many pastors are very inept, and unfit to teach.”) Again I would point out that he did not choose to address the problem by simplifying the Bible. Instead he provided a catechism, and demanded a more effective teaching ministry.

66. Bruce M. Metzger, The New Testament: Its Background, Growth, and Content (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1965), 131.

67. Arthur Capey also notices this in a review of the Jerusalem Bible: “In Acts i.9-11, where the disciples witness the Ascension, the incremental repetition of ‘into heaven’ is dismembered: the sky is substituted for the heaven they look towards, ‘heaven’ being retained for the Lord’s destination only. (It wouldn’t do, would it? to ask the modern reader to believe that heaven is ‘up there’.— All right for St Luke, of course, and for first-century fishermen).” (Translation vs Paraphrase [Herefordshire: Edgeways Books, 2010], p. 36.)

68. Any argument that the two senses would have had no semantic interaction founders on John 11:11, 13, where the ambiguity of the words is exploited.

69. Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1958), p. 689. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that this metaphor supports the doctrine of “soul sleep” put forth by some sectarians.

70. In this connection I would also draw attention to the remarks of Leland Ryken, in The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2003), p. 179.

71. The Koehler-Baumgartner lexicon uses some rather sloppy reasoning to justify its statement that one of the senses of the word is “repeatedly.” It seems to me that the editors have attributed this meaning to the word merely because in a few places where the word occurs there is also some repeated action implied by other words the context. This only give us more reason to think that the idea of repetition does not belong to the word הַשְׁכֵּם itself. The editors should have refrained from inventing a new sense for the word in Jeremiah, because “rising up early” does not really present a problem. As one lexicographer states: “A constant problem to guard against is the proliferation of meanings. It might be possible to defend the thesis that every time a word is used its meaning is minimally different; but even if true, this would hardly be helpful to the users of a dictionary. In practice many examples of a word's use are so much alike as to be virtually identical, and it is this which enables the lexicographer to group the examples under mutually exclusive definitions. It is often tempting to create a new sense to accommodate a difficult example, but we must always ask first, if there is any other way of taking the word which would allow us to assign the example to an already established sense. We need the lexicographic equivalent of Occam's razor: sensus non sunt multiplicandi praeter necessitatem. As I have remarked in several of my notes, there may be no reason why a proposed sense should not exist, but is there any reason why it must exist?” (John Chadwick, Lexicographica Graeca: Contributions to the Lexicography of Ancient Greek [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], pp. 23-24.)

72. Mark L. Strauss, “Form, Function, and the ‘Literal Meaning’ fallacy in English Bible Translation.” Address at the 2003 annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. Accessed online. (Later published in The Bible Translator, Vol. 56, No. 3 [July 2005] pp. 153-168.)

74. The same point may be made from the common Hebrew word for sin. Robert Girdlestone in his Synonyms of the Old Testament (2nd ed., 1897) says that the Hebrew verb חָטָא, the ordinary word for “to sin” in the Old Testament, also “originally signifies to miss the mark,” and in a footnote he points to the occurrence in Judges 20:26 where “the word is used in its original sense” (pp. 76-77). However, I would point out that in Judges 20:26 it is the hiphil (causal) form of the verb that occurs, not the uninflected qal form, and so it is not actually the same morpheme. And what I have said concerning ἁμαρτάνω also applies in the case of חָטָא. The sense “miss the mark” should be seen not as a basic sense but as a specialized and rarely used sense (perhaps archaic) which has little to do with the common sense of the word. William Vine in his Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words rightly says in connection with the noun hamartia that “a missing of the mark” is an “etymological” sense which is “largely lost sight of in the N.T.” Girdlestone thinks this sense is intended in Romans 3:23 (“the sinner is one who has missed or come short of the mark,” p. 85), because of the collocation with the passive of ὑστερέω, which might be understood in the sense “fall short.” But I think ὑστεροῦνται probably means “they are deprived” here, rather than “they fall short,” and I doubt very much that Paul had any archery metaphor in mind.

75. He objects to this note because he thinks it implies that “flesh” is a more accurate rendering, and because he thinks the primary sense “flesh” has no relevance for the interpretation of Paul’s usage of the word. He fears that the rendering “flesh” will be “susceptible to an inappropriate Platonic or Gnostic dichotomy between mind/spirit and matter.” Nevertheless, “Because the English lexeme ‘flesh’ has — through centuries of use — become for Christian readers a technical term with most of the same connotations as Greek sarx, translations produced primarily for Christian readers may choose to retain this term.”

76. ibid. Strauss will not tolerate any indication at all that the primary meaning of αδελφοι is “brothers” because he has been one of the most vehement advocates for gender-neutralization of the biblical text. He claims that the meaning “brothers” is excluded by the context and that “brothers and sisters” is “well attested” for αδελφοι “both in secular Greek and in the New Testament.” But against these claims see my article, The Translation of Αδελφος and Αδελφοι

77. Eugene Nida, “Implications of Contemporary Linguistics for Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91/1 (March 1972), p. 86.

78. Dan McCartney and Charles Clayton, Let the Reader Understand: A Guide to Interpreting and Applying the Bible (2nd ed. Phi

TEV	“John ... preaching, Turn away from your sins and be baptized ... and God will forgive your sins.”
CEV	“John ... told everyone, Turn back to God and be baptized! Then your sins will be forgiven.”
NLT	“John .... preached that people should be baptized to show that they had turned to God to receive forgiveness for their sins.

NLT	CEV
“...the pain caused you to have remorse and change your ways. It was the kind of sorrow God wants his people to have, so you were not harmed by us in any way.”	“God used your hurt feelings to make you turn back to him ... when God make you feel sorry enough to turn to him and be saved, you don’t have anything to feel bad about.”

KJV	ASV
8 How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us? Lo, certainly in vain made he it; the pen of the scribes is in vain. 9 The wise men are ashamed, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of the Lord; and what wisdom is in them?	8 How do ye say, We are wise, and the law of Jehovah is with us? But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath wrought falsely. 9 The wise men are put to shame, they are dismayed and taken: lo, they have rejected the word of Jehovah; and what manner of wisdom is in them?

Against the Theory of ‘Dynamic Equivalence’