Recently in Bible Translation Category

There are those who think there's something immoral about translating the measurements in the Bible into contemporary units (e.g. miles or gallons). They claim that it's anachronistic, because the writer of the passage wouldn't have had a clue what a pound or an inch is. I can accept this argument with respect to passages where the numeric values are clearly symbolic, as in the temple measurements in Revelation. Translations that remove that by using contemporary units and thus different numbers are removing a key enough feature of the text that it's worth keeping the original values and units. But some people think it's changing the Bible to use contemporary units anywhere.

When I was reading Andrew Hill's commentary on Chronicles, it occurred to me that the Chronicler does exactly the thing such people spend so much effort calling evil. He translates units used in the early Kings text into the Persian units of his own day. People who make this claim are almost all inerrantists. If they were to remain consistent, they would have to admit that the Chronicler was inspired by God to do something they think is immoral, and thus they'd have to give up inerrancy, at least about Chronicles, or give up their view that this kind of translation is always bad.

I came across an oblique reference to this while scanning my file of unblogged things that I've thought about blogging, but I don't have any references. I thought it was an interesting enough point that I figured it deserved a blog entry, even if I couldn't remember what part of the book this occurred in.

Kenny Pearce looks at the famous statement in James 2:20, usually translated as "faith without works is dead". He suggests a better translation, because 'faith' means a lot of different things, often something very different from what the biblical authors meant by 'pistis', and because 'works' isn't exactly ordinary English among those not raised with church language. (Neal Morse, formerly of Spock's Beard, expresses in one song that his response to this statement was that it was good, because he hadn't worked in a year.)

Kenny's translation: "Trust without action is dead." That does seem to me to be a lot better than the traditional translation.

Some might push replacing "is dead" with something more clear, and that might be fine according to a dynamic-enough translation principle, but I don't think this is a case where that's needed. The metaphor of something accomplishing nothing or being worthless because it's dead isn't exactly unclear in English, and I doubt it's less clear in English than it would have been to Greek-speaking people in the first century. This is one place where I'd argue for retaining the metaphor rather than translating it to what it's a metaphor for. It's things like that that lead me to avoid the more dynamic translations, even though I've got problems with the more formally-equivalent translations being too formally-equivalent. I'd rather not lose metaphors in general. But you can still translate clearly with contemporary English without translating away all the metaphors that do translate well into English metaphors, as Kenny shows. This is what I'd really like to see in a contemporary translation, and I don't think anyone has really done that at this point.

I was struck by the HCSB translation of Matthew 5:

But I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. And whoever says to his brother, 'Fool!' will be subject to the • Sanhedrin. But whoever says, 'You moron!' will be subject to • hellfire.

There's a footnote after "Fool!" that says:

Lit Raca, an Aram term of abuse similar to "airhead"

On the one hand, I don't generally approve of translating words that in the Greek are foreign (in this case Aramaic) into English translations as English. It's not a Greek word, so translating it into English should involve keeping the foreign word as a foreign word, other things being equal. But Matthew's readers would have know the word, or he wouldn't have used it. English-speakers generally don't. So other things might not be equal in this case.

That issue aside, I think the HCSB has it right with "moron" and "airhead". Those words have much more force than the typical "fool" used in this passage. The downside is that Jesus may well have intended a connection with the fool of Proverbs, who usually is called a fool in English translations. But the English "fool" doesn't exactly capture that either. The term "moron" really does capture the anger element Jesus is getting at, and "airhead" isn't bad for "Raca".

It would be fun to ask people where the word "moron" is in the Bible and see what they come up with. It would be interesting seeing how certain people respond to Jesus saying that calling someone a moron is sufficient for deserving to burn in hell (I'm thinking of people who see Jesus as all mercy as a revision from the wrath of God in the Old Testament). All it takes is calling someone a moron. I know the Sermon on the Mount has pretty high standards, but think about that for a little bit.

A colleague of mine where I teach is sort of a stickler for assigning grades according to the traditional but now completely obsolete approach whereby a C is average. He seeks to have the median student in the class earning grades in the C range, with an equal number of people in the D range as in the B range and as many failing as earning an A. His argument is that this is what these grades have always meant, and grade inflation is a violation of the meaning of the grades.

It struck me today that this argument is very similar to the argument language conservatives give against gender-inclusive language. The English language has changed since the time the ordinary English speaker could hear a sentence like "Surely every moral man must be appalled at the judicial execution of the innocent or at the punishment, torture, and killing of the innocent" and not wonder what the author thinks about moral women and children. (The sentence is from Kai Nielsen's "Against Moral Conservatism" from Ethics 82 (1972), which my students had to read this week.) Gone are the days when a sentence like that could make it into publication in a top philosophy journal.

So too have the standards changed when it comes to what letter grades mean. A grade of a C just doesn't indicate merely satisfactory anymore. Students know this. Most faculty know this. You can pound your fists and complain about this sorry state of affairs, and maybe you're right that it's regrettable (although I see no reason why we should have to stick with any particular arbitrary assignment of letters to standards). What I don't think will ultimately pass muster is sticking to your guns and giving people grades in a way that's wholly inconsistent with what the standards in fact are by basing it on some system of giving grades that hardly anyone follows anymore. Doing so means you're not giving people the grades you think you're giving them. This is why I can't in good conscience follow my colleague's policy.

This is not to say that college students today are as competent as in the past, which may well not be the case. It doesn't mean the work that now counts as satisfactory is what should count as satisfactory. Those are completely separate issues. All I'm saying is that the meaning of the letter grades has changed in a way that those who hold onto the traditianal system of assigning grades have been resisting to the point where the grades they assign are dishonest, even if not deliberately so. Grade inflation may be a problem in other ways, but one element of grade inflation is simply a fact, and resisting it in the way my colleague does seems to me to count as academic dishonesty.

Rick Mansfield finished his top ten Bible translations series about a month ago, and I never got around to linking to his last few posts:

The Modern Language Bible: New Berkeley Version: This was my mom's favorite translation while I was growing up. The Honorable Mentions: KJV, NET (i.e. New English Translation, i.e. NET Bible), Cotton Patch Version, NRSV. Final Thoughts. For links to the rest of the series, see here.

It took Rick over a year to finish the series, and he put a lot of work into it over that time. I highly recommend it to those interested in Bible translations who haven't looked at it as I've linked to it over the past year-plus.

Rick Mansfield has finally come back to his top ten Bible translations series. He'd gotten through eight translations by November, and he has now posted his review of his ninth, the Wycliffe New Testament. See my discussion of his Good News Translation review for links to previous entries in his series. Rick's post is a good read and provides an interesting discussion of one of the earliest English translations of the Bible (1388), which unusually include the Epistle to Laodicea, all of which (it's very short) is included in Rick's post, along with several samples of other passages, with such cool words as 'anents', 'parfit', and 'advowtry', along with some no less interesting turns of phrase that you wouldn't hear anymore.

Kenny Pearce has a thoughtful post on the continuum between what some might call more literal and what they would call less literal Bible translations. I wish I had time to comment on it myself, but I thought some readers of this blog might appreciate it.

Leland Ryken's Choosing a Bible: Understanding Bible Translation Differences is not really a guide to different Bible translations, as a the title might suggest, but a very short polemic against popular Bible translations that fall under the category commonly known as dynamic equivalence translations (e.g. the New Living Translation and to a lesser degree the New International Version) and in favor of what he calls essentially literal translations (e.g. the New American Standard Bible or Ryken's preferred translation, the English Standard Version). Dynamic equivalence translations are less concerned about matching every word with a word in English (or some smaller unit of meaning) and more interested in capturing the sense or basic meaning of each sentence (or some larger unit of meaning).

I'm generally in agreement with Ryken on some of the issues that drive his arguments in this book, but I think he way overstates his case far too often to give this book a good recommendation. Here is where I agree with Ryken. We ought to be more careful in translating the Bible than some of the more dynamic translations often are. When there is an ambiguity in the text that scholars do not tend to agree on, we should seek to preserve the ambiguity in the translation. When translators can avoid working too much interpretation into their text without sacrificing genuine English language grammar and semantics, they should do so.

However, Ryken does not stop at such moderated claims. He argues that it is always wrong to interpret the text when translating, which is impossible. English words are usually not exactly equivalent in meaning to Greek or Hebrew words, and any translation will be inexact. Sometimes inexactness in one way is better than inexactness in another, but Ryken seems to disallow any interpretation at all, which strikes me as ignoring the fact that translators must interpret before figuring out how to translate. How do you know which words to translate in which ways unless you know what they mean in the particular context? That takes interpretation.

Compare the following two translations:

1 "Whoever steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it must pay back five head of cattle for the ox and four sheep for the sheep. 2 "If a thief is caught breaking in and is struck a fatal blow, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed; 3 but if it happens after sunrise, the defender is guilty of bloodshed."Anyone who steals must certainly make restitution, but if they have nothing, they must be sold to pay for their theft. 4 If the stolen animal is found alive in their possession—whether ox or donkey or sheep—they must pay back double. [Exodus 22:1-4, TNIV]

1 When someone steals an ox or a sheep, and slaughters it or sells it, the thief shall pay five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. The thief shall make restitution, but if unable to do so, shall be sold for the theft. 4 When the animal, whether ox or donkey or sheep, is found alive in the thief’s possession, the thief shall pay double. 2 If a thief is found breaking in, and is beaten to death, no bloodguilt is incurred; 3 but if it happens after sunrise, bloodguilt is incurred.[Exodus 22:1-4, NRSV]

Do you notice anything funny about the NRSV translation? They've transposed the order of the verses because verses 1 and 4 are about a similar subject matter, while verses 2 and 3 are about another subject matter. They've assumed that some copyist or editor was too stupid to notice that they'd moved the verses out of the original order and thus split up the original unit of verses 1 and 4. (Technically, they've also made what the NIV has as v.3b into part of v.1 as well, but it's more complicated to describe it if you factor that in.)

A more likely explanation for the only order we have in any Hebrew text (or any ancient translation) is that it's deliberately ordered the way it is as a chiasm, a common literary device in Hebrew literature. In this case, the chiastic structure is a simple ABA, with the A laws as bookends around the B law. Simple chiasms are common in this section of Exodus. Two of the more obvious examples include Exodus 21:12-14 and Exodus 21:15-17, both ABA structures. It seems, then, that the NRSV order is just a premature disordering of an already ordered text out of a complete lack of sensitivity to the kind of literary structure Hebrew literature regularly displays. It's an interesting example of cultural insensitivity leading to a sense of cultural superiority, i.e. the attitude a modern, western ordering would be superior.

Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog argues that the Greek phrase usually translated "in Christ" in the New Testament would better be rendered in other ways. His main reason is that the English expression "in Christ" just doesn't mean very much to most English speakers who aren't thoroughly steeped in this expression from English translations of the Bible. I generally agree with this sort of argument when it applies to things that would have been very clear in the original language but are not at all clear in contemporary English, but I think there are sometimes other factors that count against such a translation, and this case may well have several of them.

My first thought on reading his post was to ask whether this have sounded like natural Greek grammar to its original audience. I've always gotten the sense that it wouldn't have. If that's right, then we do Paul a disservice by translating the unnatural form out of it. But I don't have good information on this. The only extra-biblical case I can think of is Epimenides' "in him we live and move and have our being", which Paul quotes in Acts 17 when speaking to the Epicureans and Stoics in their own terms. But was this a normal way of speaking in religious contexts in the Greco-Roman world, or was is strange to Epimenides' context and still strange when the NT authors used it?

It's also worth pointing out that this isn't just "in Christ". Paul regularly says "in him" and "in whom", and John has a lot of similar expressions, e.g. "in me", "in the Father", "in the Son". I believe we get expressions like "in God", "in Jesus", "in the Lord", and even "in the Beloved" in various places, and then there are the compounds like "in the Lord Jesus" or "in Christ Jesus".

Update: I hadn't read the article very carefully and was taking the ESV blog's tying together of the Tickle quote with the issue the post was raising, which was functional equivalence. My brother pointed this out to me, and I looked again at the article itself, and he's right. The ESV blog (they don't indicate who is responsible for the post in question) has tied Tickle's quote to something that it's not even close to being about. [Update: They have now added some clarificatory words, and some of my criticism here no longer applies. I have removed some of it.] This post has now been edited several times to correct several errors and to focus on the main issue rather than the original portrayal of Tickle's words. The comment thread may not be as understandable now, but I want the post itself to represent the argument I had originally intended to give, without distractions from things that turned out to be mistakes that aren't really relevant to begin with.

The ESV Blog points to an article by Daniel Radosh in The New Yorker that discusses Bible translations. The ESV blogger's presentation of the quotes from the article was originally confusing. They quoted an argument from Phyllis Tickle against adding all sorts of commercialized nonsense to Bibles to attract younger readers but placed it in a context about functional equivalence that seemed to indicate that Tickle was against functional equivalence translations. They have since partially fixed that problem (but not good enough for me), so I will focus mostly on the post's argument and not that other issue in what follows. The rest of this post is therefore an argument why I think functional equivalence translations can be very good (even if there are plenty of circumstances in which I would rather have a formally equivalent translation, of which the ESV is the one I use the most, for the record).

Rick Mansfield continues his series reviewing Bible translations, this time with the Good News Translation, otherwise known as The Good News Bible, Today's English Version, Good News for Modern Man, and various other names. (Rick explains the name issue in the post, by the way.)

For other entries in the series, see the entries on the HCSB, NASB, NLT (with an addendum), TNIV, Message, REB, and NJB.

I have three observations about the examples Rick chose to highlight this translation and one picky comment about his choice of language in one a side point. First, look at the Proverbs example he gives and his comment below. I actually noticed the parallelism issue before I got to his comments on it, and I have to say that it bothers me much more than it bothers him. The structural features of Hebrew poetry often do give clues to meaning, and this is a case where the loss of the structure is entirely unnecessary. Exactly why do you need to lose the parallelism to keep the meaning and to put it into modern English? That strikes me as just unnecessary. It's one thing to give up the form reluctantly in order to preserve some aspect of the meaning, as dynamic translations often do, but here I'm guessing they give it up because they think it makes the content clearer. I fail to see how.

At Better Bibles Blog, Wayne Leman and several others often complain about inverted negatives in the ESV. [See Wayne's comment here, for instance.] Inverted negatives are a kind of construction that you find regularly in the KJV and some of its heirs that do not ever appear in contemporary English unless someone is deliberately trying to sound archaic. Yet the ESV continues it, largely out of respect for the KJV tradition and a desire to avoid changing the language many of the biblically literature find familiar to them and expect in a Bible translation.

Matthew 6:13 is an example. The ESV translates it "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." The normal English way of saying this in our day would be "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil." The archaic reversal of the negative is simply not contemporary English, and it's contrary to the purpose of translating into contemporary English (to be understandable to ordinary readers not familiar with Biblese) to translate with inverted negatives.

Contemporary translations not in the Tyndale tradition tend not to translate with inverted negatives, however. The HCSB, a translation similar in many ways to the ESV, translates Matthew 6:13 as "And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." The NET gives exactly the same translation. This rendering is much better as contemporary English than the ESV translation. The GNB (TEV) says, "Do not bring us to hard testing, but keep us safe from the Evil One." The ISV has "And never bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." The NRSV translates it as "And do not bring us to the fiery trial, but rescue us from the evil one." I think this is more likely referring to temptation than to trial, and there's no indication of anything fiery in this verse, but the structure of the sentence here is correct (and "rescue" is far better in contemporary English than the old-fashioned sounding "deliver").

This morning I was reading the TNIV of the Luke parallel (Luke 11:4), and I discovered that it uses the inverted negative. In fact, it's exactly the same translation as in the ESV. This is also true of Matthew 6:13, and it's true of the NIV renderings of both verses. That led me to check several translations, and the other one that struck me as interesting was the NLT: "And don't let us yield to temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." That raises an interesting translation issue that I think is worth spending some time thinking about.

Three members of the ESV Bible translation committee are very vocal against the use of inclusive language for human beings when it means using different forms in English than the original language has. That's why the ESV tends to translate 'adelphoi' as "brothers" rather than as "brothers and sisters" or "dear friends" as some of the inclusive language translations are now doing (cf. the NRSV, NLT, TNIV, and CEV). The inclusive language translations tend to avoid using masculine pronouns when the group they refer to includes women or girls, and thus some of the inclusive language translations will use the singular 'they', which is pretty much standard in contemporary English but is not really new to English in recent years anyway, despite the claims of those who have resisted it. It's recognized in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

So it is indeed a great irony that the ESV itself contains an unambiguous example of the singular 'they'. Peter Kirk discovered it, and Rick Mansfield has some further thoughts on it. I agree with their general assessment that this is a problem for a translation that explicitly states in its translation policy that it does not translate in this sort of way. That suggests that someone in the editing process did not notice that a translator had done this, either out of a rushed job or because the editor in question, like the translator in question, is so familiar with the singular 'they' that they did not notice. So I'm in full agreement that this is in itself evidence against the view that the singular 'they' is bad English. I do, however, have some reservations about how we might frame our criticism of the ESV on this. In particular, I think we need to be careful not to treat the Grudem-Poythress-Ryken view as representative of the ESV translation committee in general.

Suzanne McCarthy posts about 'human' as a noun. I'm not sure if I've ever encountered anyone saying that 'human' is not a noun. I consider it to be a strange enough view, given that the word 'human' clearly does gets used as a noun in all sorts of contexts. That's just a fact about the English language, and any dictionary that fails to acknowledge that is simply displaying ignorance. But then people who think some arbitrarily selected body of people can arbitrate prescriptions for what counts as English will come up with all sorts of features of common English that they will declare to be wrong.

While I do think it's a mistake to think 'human' is not a noun in English, I also think there are times when people use it as a noun that sound very unnatural to me. Sometimes it sounds much more natural to say 'person' or 'human being' or to change the syntax so the noun is 'anyone' or 'someone'. This is not because 'human' cannot be a noun but because using it as a noun suggests a contrast with other sorts of creatures. We can talk about what's true of a human as opposed to an ape. It seems strange to say that you went to answer your doorbell, and you discovered a human there. When you say that, it sounds as if you were expecting the neighbor's dog, an ogre, or aliens from another galaxy. Since Suzanne's post was about Bible translations rather than just good English grammar or style, I have to suggest that contemporary translations that use 'human' as a noun need to be careful to do so when it's natural to do so. Since that isn't always the case, other methods might be preferable so as not to give the wrong sense.

A lot of people complain loudly and frequently about what they call "interpretive translation". Most of these people are criticizing what is commonly called dynamic translation, which includes translations that tend to translate the sense of an expression as opposed to favoring the formal properties of the sentence. Either favoring can obscure the other, and good translators will know how to find the right balance to express the original meaning best. But the complainers don't understand the complexities of translation very well, or they would realize that sometimes capturing the sense of the original means sacrificing the ability to capture its form. Thus translations such as the NIV, TNIV, or NLT will come under their wrath, and they will favor translations such as the ESV, NASB, or NKJV.

One deep irony of this is that lots of interpretive translation goes on in those translations that people are, following the ESV translators, now calling "essentially literal". Wayne Leman points out one example. A lot of these translations that are supposed to avoid interpretive translation do exactly that all the time in ways that their supporters consider the right way to translate those passages. Wayne's example is in capitalizing words like 'son' or 'man' when the translators interpret them to be referring messianically to Jesus. But this is indeed an interpretation, even if the interpretation is based on other scriptural passages that quote it and apply it to Jesus.

Someone wanting to translate this way might defend it on the grounds that interpretations based on other parts of the Bible are infallible and thus can serve as the good kind of interpretation. After all, if Hebrews or Acts quotes Psalm 2 about Jesus, then can't we be 100% sure that it's simply talking about Jesus? If we believe the Bible to be infallible in its quotations, then this kind of interpretation is God's own interpretation, and thus it's true. Whats right about this is that someone who takes the Bible to be infallible should see the Bible's quotation of itself as infallible, i.e. it couldn't be an error in quotation. What's wrong about this argument, however, is that our interpretation of what the quotation is doing might be wrong. If Acts 13 applies Psalm 2 to Jesus, that doesn't mean its original referent is Jesus. It might be referring to the Davidic line in general in most of what it says, with Jesus representing the ideal Davidic king and thus fitting into its reference but not encompassing the entirety of its reference. Those who capitalize the pronouns about Jesus or the word 'son' are thus engaging in the bad kind of interpretive translation in this case, because it might actually give the wrong result.

I'm way behind on my Language Log reading, but I just noticed Wayne Leman blogging about this Mark Liberman post about an instance of the singular 'they' in the KJV. I know there are manby older instances, but this is the KJV.

This isn't new to me (see here), but one counterargument in the comments on Wayne's post is worth responding to. The anonymous commenter argues that it couldn't be a singular 'they' but must instead be some roundabout form (particular to this example and not usable in other singular 'they' examples from the same period), and the only real argument for this is that the verb seems to be plural. It's 'have', not the singular 'has' that would be expected if you had a singular subject.

There's one major problem with this. Singular 'they' (in the newer dialects of English that have it as a regular feature nowadays) does not take a 'has' but a 'have'. It's a singular 'have' as well. The following sentence clearly has a singular subject and verb in the second clause: "Someone took my pencil, and they have it on their person." So why couldn't we read 'have' in the KJV as singular, just as it is in today's English?

I've been busy enough lately that I've lost touch with several blogs I've been trying to maintain connections with, and one of the things I've let slip is checking for Rick Mansfield's Bible translation reviews. He's now done the REB and the NJB, two translations I've spent a lot less time in.

I have little to say about these reviews, since I don't know either translation very well, but I did notice something interesting in the comments on the second piece, which arose from the NJB's use of 'Yahweh' to transliterate God's name in Hebrew rather than the standard English translation policy of using 'the LORD' for that name. Since orthodox Jews can't use such a translation because of that, it led to a discussion of the practice some Jewish people have of writing out 'G-d' so they don't use God's name. Apparently that very practice is viewed as sacrilege by many orthodox Jews, despite its opposite intent. This makes sense, though, because 'God' is not the name of God to an orthodox Jew. The tetragrammaton is, i.e. what would be transliterated as 'YHWH'. The fact that 'God' is used in English as a name for God is irrelevant, since it's not the name God revealed himself as having. Thus orthodox Jews see this practice of leaving out the vowel in 'God' as sacrilege, because it raises the status of this English word to the level of the Hebrew name that God used to reveal himself. That's an interesting irony.

A common urban legend in evangelical circles (and probably elsewhere too) is that 'ekklesia' in the New Testament (the word usually translated as "church") means "called out ones". This is simply false. It means "assembly" or "congregation". Its etymology derives from the sense that you can call together or call forth a group of people to gather for a purpose, but its meaning in the time of the Hellenistic period, when the NT was written, is simply a group of people gathered together. The literal translation should be "gathering" rather than "called out ones". See Jollyblogger's recent post on this for more information, with some careful nuance about various ways this etymological fallacy can occur. Note carefully his point that this has some relevance to George Barna's "assembly that never assembles" movement. He also makes several other nice little points in the process.

Rick Mansfield's latest Bible translation review is up, this time for The Message.

For earlier posts in the series, see the NASB, TNIV, HSCB, and NLT reviews. Next up is the Revised English Bible.

Rick Mansfield posted his review of the NLT last week. I hadn't heard much about the second edition. It sounds pretty good to me. See also his addendum.

For earlier posts in the series, see the NASB, TNIV, and HSCB reviews. I'm curious what he'll say about the Message, which is next up.

Rick Mansfield's series reviewing Bible translations has another entry, this time on the New American Standard Bible. See also his earlier reviews of the HCSB and TNIV, which I linked to here.

Rick Mansfield has started what looks to be an excellent series on his favorite Bible translations. So far he's done the HCSB and the TNIV. I have to say that I agree with him in the main, with some disagreements expressed in the comments. I'm especially appreciative to see him liking the TNIV for what it is and seeing what it's good for (enough for it to come in second place) while preferring a more formally equivalent translation for his own primary use, because that's exactly my own attitude.

In the comments on the TNIV post, I challenged one of Rick's statements. He says, "From a grammatical standpoint, one of the most controversial aspects of the TNIV's implementation of inclusive language is the use of plural pronouns for singular antecedents. This is in keeping with the way we informally speak, but technically it's a grammatical error." I responded that this use of 'they' is actually singular and pointed him to the linguists at the Language Log blog. He replied that he's never seen it in a grammar book and thus won't believe it until he does. I tried to respond, but Haloscan wouldn't let me leave a comment with lots of links, so I'm just posting it here instead.

Well, it is in a grammar book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Here is an interview where one of the authors of that book, Geoff Pullum, explains and defends the view on this issue taken in the book. Pullum also blogs at Language Log, and several posts there argue for this view. I managed to dig up a few posts on this here, here, and here.

There's also a strong history of the singular 'they', including a number of the finest writers of the English language and the KJV translators.

The ESV Bible Blog discusses the literal rendering of the term for knowledge in sexual contexts. Some contemporary translations treat this as a mere euphemism for the physical act of sex. Since we don't use the word 'know' in English in this way, he argument goes, we should use an expression that says what really took place, a physical act of sex. I think this loses not just a connotation of what the original expression says. I think it loses the very reason that word was used to begin with. I do note that the ESV doesn't always keep the original word, as the post admits. It just treats this argument as presumptive, as I think it should be treated. Other factors might turn out to be more important in any given passage. I don't know if I'd always agree in particular cases, but I think that's the right approach.

However, I think one argument the post discusses but does not endorse seems to me to be too far, and I think what it shows is a deeper problem in translation to begin with. The argument is that translating the Hebrew word for knowledge in these contexts as "have relations with" is banal and does not capture the element of knowing in the original. Is this true? Maybe so, but if so then I wish it were not true. Has the sense of relationship and relating to someone completely gone out of expression "to have sexual relations"? If so, this is a further slide down a path we've already seen in the past. Intercourse was once a close sharing, of human interaction on a deep level. Now it's sex, and it's used in he clinical, banal way that "have relations with" is claimed to be used. Consider also the word 'intimacy'. We can say that two people were intimate, and we might just mean that they did the nasty in exactly the sense of performing the physical act, with no sense that they were close in any other way.

Tyler Williams' Love Poetry for Biblical Literalists is hilarious. I just can't get over that picture.

For an encapsulation of the Song that does transfer nicely into a contemporary context, see Michael Card's "Arise My Love", which I sang to Sam at our wedding.

From last week's Christian Carnival, Bruce Alderman has one of the funniest posts I've seen in a long time.

Bruce Meyer left the following comment:

Hi Jeremy (and others, is that right?). I was reading some parts of the Bible today that caught my eye, and I wondered what's going on here. Since you're the resident expert on All Things Commentaried, I thought I would run them by you.

Proverb 25:23 says, a backbiting tongue brings forth angry looks. My reaction is, ooh, I'm scared, not. What else is going on here? Maybe it's the Evil Eye, a virtually effective curse?

The other one is Revelation 3:18, Jesus says "I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich..." OK, it's not literal. Assuming it's not trivial, perhaps Christ is urging the comfortably lukewarm to dig deeper, and get the real thing, not the minimally acceptable qualities that a baptized Christian needs to not get kicked out. But is there more here, do you think? Thanks.

I responded in the same comment thread, but I've moved my response now to this post.

As I was catching up on some old posts that I'd saved in my RSS reader to come back to later, I stumbled upon a fun and informative post by Tyler Williams called Dogs, Urine, and Bible Translations: On the Importance of Translating Connotative Meaning. It involves Jesus giving attitude to his mother, dentistry in Amos, and pissing in the KJV. See also his earlier post Going Potty in Ancient Times that isn't about language.

(For those unfamiliar with the reference, the title of this post comes straight out of the KJV. Read Tyler's post for the context and for what it amounts to. I have to wonder what KJV-onlies who think 'piss' is a dirty word think about this one. Or maybe they just aren't reading their Bibles.)

Better Bibles Blog has three recent posts worth reading. Wayne Leman tackles the singular 'they' and 'them' in contemporary English with respect to inclusive-language translation. Read the comments, too. At one point he lists some very old uses of the singular 'they', including one going back to Chaucer in the 14th Century. This isn't some recent innovation.

Also, Peter Kirk decided to look into whether J.I. Packer's support for the ESV and criticisms of the TNIV amount to the kind of ideological rage that others who have criticized the TNIV have engaged in. He finds that Packer is much more balanced and simply doesn't like the way the TNIV does things but hasn't been calling it inaccurate or some of the other nonsense that has passed for a concern for purity in Bible translation. I hadn't looked into Packer's particular role in this discussion, so I'm relieved to hear this. He does soften his conclusion a bit in the comments, but I think where Packer is on this is much healthier than the position of some notable others.

Suzanne McCarthy isolates an interesting translation issue that has spawned a whole translation, the use of language that assumes knowledge of church history and current church practice, in A Non-Ecclesiastical Bible.

Also, not at the Better Bibles Blog, Kenny Pearce discusses the theological significance of linguistic facts. I agree with those who dismiss the idea, defended by Wayne Grudem and Vern Poythress, that facts about inclusive language in any particular language should be taken to illustrate a theological truth. But some of the issues Kenny points out soften the more general claim that some people use to support the dismissal of the Grudem-Poythress view.

The ESV blog posts some statistics (with nice graphics) of which passages have gotten the most searches and views at their site. Some of it's pretty interesting. What's sad is that Jeremiah 29, a wonderful chapter, gets viewed pretty much only when people read Jer 29:11 out of context.

My brother responded to my post about Ben Witherington and the ESV via email, saying that the ESV most definitely arose from an agenda, and I thought it might be worth clearing up what I'm saying and what I'm not saying. I was aware of the ESV agenda he refers to. He's right. They had a deliberate agenda in initiating the work that led to the creation of the ESV. That agenda had nothing to do with inclusive language translations, however. I wasn't thinking in that direction, because my focus was on gender translation. The ESV agenda was to make a more conservative-friendly RSV. They wanted a translation much like the RSV but without some of what they viewed as liberalizing tendencies in the RSV. The two most notable of those were the Isaiah 7 "virgin/young woman" issue and the removal of any reference to propitiation, which the ESV was designed to fix. By the time they had a translation, though, it had ended up being much more than a straightforward conservatizing of the RSV with updates in style. As I noted in my previous post, they paid a good deal of attention to recent developments in text criticism, comparative linguistics, and all the usual factors that would influence a new translation to improve upon an older one. It became a new translation in its own right because of the work of some very good scholars who insisted on revising a lot more in the RSV than the original agenda had in mind.

I want to stress that, while I'm admitting that they had an agenda, this agenda was not primarily to do with gender. That's something a few people who were involved later made an issue. This was only after the TNIV issues become hotly debated, and it mostly was about how some people were promoting the ESV, not primarily about how they went about translating it. Most or all of the translation work had already been completed when the TNIV issue exploded, and the ESV people began their efforts to promote the ESV as a non-inclusive language alternative. These efforts had the immediate effect of convincing some people (including a friend of mine) that this was Grudem's own translation, and they dismissed his arguments against the TNIV on the grounds that he was saying it merely to promote his own translation. No, the arguments are to be dismissed because they are bad arguments, not because the ESV is Grudem's translation. He might have had some influence on how it came to take the form it took, but it's not his translation, not all the translators share his views, and the agenda of the ESV committee was not about this issue at all during the actual translation process. At best, that was a promotional agenda taking advantage of the irrational mass hysteria against the TNIV. A number of its translators did favor non-inclusive translation in general when they translated it, but that wasn't the initial reason for the ESV, as Witherington suggests, and that view isn't necessarily as extreme as Grudem's even on that issue. For some it is. For some on that committee it isn't. For a few on that committee, even the moderate opposition to inclusive translation is wrongheaded. So Witherington is claiming that he knows how the ESV originated, but these statements just sound to me as if he doesn't in fact know very much about how it originated. That's why I think he sounds just like those who claim that the TNIV stems from radical feminists who want to impose an ultra-feminist agenda on the Bible in their translation. Both claims are simply false.

Wayne Leman has an excellent post on why Wayne Grudem's relentless tirades against the TNIV are misguided and morally questionable. I agree that those who criticize the inclusive language translations are ignoring real changes in the English language. I've made this point numerous times in the past, and I won't belabor it. What strikes me as odd is that one of Wayne's co-bloggers Suzanne McCarthy the next day links favorably to a post by Ben Witherington that seems to me to exhibit the same sort of rhetoric as Grudem but against the ESV rather than the TNIV (with no reference whatsoever to anything negative about how Witherington makes his point). Witherington is a top-notch biblical scholar whose work I have really appreciated. I have a few theological and interpretive disagreements with him, but I have benefited from much of his work, and he's usually fairly responsible in fairly representing those who disagree with him. On this issue, however, it's as if no one on the other side could possibly be considered intelligent or reasonable. His responses to comments about this haven't completely disabused me of that perception.

I think it's just as irresponsible to criticize the ESV the way Witherington does as it is to criticize the TNIV the way Grudem does. Suzanne's post does give cases where the different ESV translators don't act consistently. I haven't checked all her examples, but I don't doubt her conclusions. That sort of inconsistency happens in translations by committee. Witherington, though, claims that the ESV has a political agenda in the same uncharitable way that the TNIV detractors claim that the TNIV has a political agenda. I think both claims fail to understand the issues, and I think the misunderstanding is fairly deep. The central issue of debate over how to translate these terms is how to balance out two legitimate concerns. One concern (Witherington's) is that the English language is in the process of changing. In some dialects it gets the semantics completely wrong to use 'man' or 'brothers' when referring to humanity or a group of people of both sexes. In others it's completely standard. In some it's frowned on but understood, and if it's semantically understood but simply viewed as morally wrong then the English language hasn't fully changed. So some dialects are still in the process of changing. These aren't entirely regional dialects either. They're generational somewhat, and educational levels affect them as well.

I realized this morning that the Greek language offers a perfect example of why you shouldn't seek to translate in a way that some people inaccurately call literally. The NASB is highly touted as a literal translation, but what it really does is focus on form rather than meaning. Sometimes it just doesn't read like English, because it keeps so much to the form of the original. Sometimes it translates inaccurately, because it prefers form to meaning (e.g. when translating 'anthropos' as "man" rather than "person" or "human being"). What it doesn't do, though, is translate according to form whenever possible. Its translators acknowledge by their actions, if notby their stated view, that form doesn't trump meaning. They just don't apply that principle consistently. A good example of when they ignore form altogether is with the definite article and proper names. In English we don't use an article when giving someone's name. We'll address someone as George or Sarah. We'll refer to them in the third person as Lisa or Tom. We use words for inanimate objects or titles with articles. We use the definite article when there's only one of the item in question, the indefinite article when there's more than one. When there's an ambiguity (e.g. there's one current President of the United States, but there are many former ones and presumably many future ones), we use the definite or indefinite article to indicate which sense we mean. We might ask for a president whose birthday is in February, or we might ask which month the president's birthday is in. But we don't use these articles with proper names. We'd ask when George W.'s birthday is. We wouldn't ask when the George's birthday is.

The Greek language that the New Testament was written in consistently uses definite articles with proper names. To translate in a way that people often mistakenly call literally, i.e. keeping to form over meaning, we would have to say that the Paul went to Athens in Acts 17, the Simeon prophesied about the Jesus, and (most humorously) the John saw a vision in Revelation. You can see immediately how this simply isn't English, and the last example shows that you even get completely the wrong meaning. In English we do call something the john, but it doesn't have visions or write them down. You could even go back to classical Greek and talk about the Socrates. If the translators who insist on form over meaning are correct, this is how we ought to translate. Yet they don't do it, which means they aren't following their own preferred strategy. They will count meaning as more important than form. They just insist on certain forms as fundamental, as if the form of the original language in that case is somehow sacrosanct rather than the content of the statement.

I understand that there are cases where the form conveys something in the original that you lose when you translate the more fundamental meaning over the form. Those are harder cases. But the view I've been defending on this blog has not been that sense trumps form. It's been that sense and form both convey something, and you try to balance that out to convey the meaning as best as you can. You will lose something. You might have a more extended sentence to try to get everything, but then you're not conveying how short the original statement was. You might ignore the form for the sense, but then you lose what the form conves. You might ignore the sense for the form, but then you lose the sense any original reader would have gotten from reading it. Translation isn't perfect. My point isn't that one of these translation styles is better than any other. It's that you have to make choices to lose something when you translate, and the choices you make don't have to be based on the same overarching principle each time. Even those who act as if that's what they're doing don't do that, as the NASB's treatment of these definite articles shows. They just do it more than others, and I think it makes for a worse translation. I've long thought the NIV to focus too much on the sense for the educated adult who can use resources to study what the NIV thinks they need to put in the translation. The TNIV has actually improved on the NIV in this way, bringing it more toward form and less toward sense (except in the case of inclusive language, which just applies their already-existing sense translation philosophy to gender language that has the inclusive sense in the original language). The NLT is much more sense-translating, but I think it's done in a scholarly way, unlike most sense-favoring translations. It's my recommendation for people learning English, including children. I think the HCSB and ESV follow a much more balanced policy, translating according to sense or according to form when they think it's appropriate. I don't agree with all the instances of when they do what, but I appreciate their insistence on forming a middle ground between the NIV and NASB on this. I think the HCSB is more toward sense and the ESV more toward form, whereas I would probably be somewhere between them in many ways, but these are the kind of translation I like to read.

Christian Carnival XCIV is at Wittenberg Gate. Dory is in need of future hosts, so if you're interested follow her link at the top of the post. The Bible Archive is doing a series on Genesis. I especially want to direct your attention to his nice post on what Genesis 1 does say. All the debates about how to interpret the days and whether it's consistent with evolution easily distract from what the passage is about to begin with, and Rey brings our attention back to that. If you want to see his summary on those other issues, it's here, but why is our focus so often not what the focus of the text is? Walter Snyder has a good explanation of how it is that Bible publishers can justify charging royalties for the use of what is God's word (and thus should be free). [Hat tip: ESV Bible Blog] Belgium declares names and titles to be no longer capitalized. Well, I guess it's just politically incorrect names and titles. Actually, they've just singled out 'christ' and 'jew'* just to show how arbitrary they can be. Or is this arbitrary? [Hat tip: Sam] *Well, for 'Jew' it's only when the reference is religious rather than ethnic; if ethnic, it's still capitalized.

A friend of mine read from the preface to his KJV on 'thee' and 'thou' and 'you' in the KJV. According to that preface, 'thee' and 'thou' are used exclusively for singulars and 'you' and 'ye' exclusively for plurals. I'd always been told that 'thee' and 'thou' were the familiar second person pronouns and 'you' the formal, with 'thee' and 'ye' as the subjective and 'thou' and 'you' as the objective. Does anyone have real information on which of these accounts is correct or if somehow there's something to both of them?

As anyone who's been reading this blog for a little while knows, I think most of the venomous language from those who are more conservative about gender issues against inclusive translations is just thoroughly immoral. This includes the literature produced by the Society for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, whose worthwhile original goal of defending complementarianism has been greatly damaged by their vehement ignorance on this issue. I think the overall argument for not wanting any inclusive language is linguistically insensitive. It involves cultural reactionism against what is perceived as a new phenomenon that in reality is so entrenched that anyone resisting it now just seems 19th century. The issue is basically over linguistic facts, and some of the people involved have raised it almost to the level of a gospel issue. That's just incredibly sad.

Still, I don't think all the points against inclusive language are wrong. On some particular issues, the criticism is sound. Some decisions the NLT, TNIV, NRSV, and other translations have made in the attempt to ensure gender neutrality have disguised important theological points. Of course, all translations have that sort of thing. To preserve one element of what a text means, you end up losing another, and sometimes that's something important. The NIV, for instance, translates a word in Philemon 6 that means fellowship in a way that almost guarantees younger evangelicals to interpret it as being about evangelism. It was supposed to make one element of the meaning of that word clearer, and it ended up masking what the passage is really about. One element of the gender neutrality movement in translation does exactly that, and a thoughtful post by Carolyn Custis James at Common Grounds Online points out what that issue is.

This one is a bit tough because the Greek is a little idiomatic:

• And the sea wind great blowing was awakened. (interlinear)
• And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew. (KJV)
• The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing.(ESV)
• Soon a gale swept down upon them as they rowed, and the sea grew very rough. (NLT)
• The sea began to be stirred up because a strong wind was blowing. (NAS)
• Then the sea became choppy because a strong wind was blowing. (my translation)

I was reading through John 4 in the ESV recently, and I realized just how bad (in one sense) its translation of John is. This isn't the first chapter that I've noticed such things, but it's the first time I've seen so many in such a short space. Whoever translated John in the ESV seems to me to be more inclined to use expressions and word ordering that are simply not grammatical, or at the very least incredibly awkward sounding, in English. Consider the following examples:

Mark Heath has a nice breathtaking post about two examples from the ESV translation of II Chronicles 9. I agree with him on both points that the ESV made the wrong translation decision, but I don't want to duplicate his post, so I'll just tell you to read it yourself. One further thing that interested me about his first example is that this is yet another case of translations not lining up in the standard ways. The ESV gives the most so-called literal rendering in this case. The NIV is the least close to the so-called literal rendering. In between are the NASB, CEV, and NLT, which all translate the passage the same way. Then you find two that give the ideal translation, which is in my view a little closer to the so-called literal translation than the NASB, CEV, and NLT and much more than the NIV. Those two translations are the HCSB and the Message. Compare the standard hierarchy of tendencies from more formally equivalent to more functionally equivalent:

Verse 17 is a bit long and there are several issues that I want to discuss, so I'll look at it in three parts. I'm going to throw the KJV into the mix for comparison as well. Here we go:

[Note: edited to change my translation slightly as per Jeremy's suggestion.]

As I start this off, I want to again point out that while I obviously prefer my own translation (otherwise I would have translated it differently), I by no means think that the other translations I'm citing are bad. In the places where I differ, in most cases it is only a very small incremental improvement. At any rate, the point of this whole exercise is not to find the best translation so much as to see how the priorities of the translator affect the final translation.

(In addition to my own translation, I'll also post the currently popular ESV, the somewhat wooden NAS, and the fairly dynamic NLT, as well as a rough interlinear for comparison purposes.)

Translation seems to be a hot topic right now, so I decided to do a series of posts on a translation that I did for class. The passage that I chose for my translation/exegesis paper was John 6:16-21. I'll go through each verse, giving my translation and a couple of others and discuss why I made the calls that I did and the various issues involved in those decisions.

Last semester I took my fourth semester of Greek. And this summer I took my first class in preaching. I did better than I expected in both classes, doing as well or better than any of my classmates. This surprised me because 1)I'm not very good at Greek, and 2)Many of my classmates preach on a semi-regular basis while I had never preached before. So why did I do better than my classmates?

Preaching and translation are about communication. Thus, as a preacher or a translator, my job is to communicate a message (that I did not create) to a recipient. That is to say, I have a dual job: to determine what the passage of scripture means, and then to convey that meaning to someone else. The reason why I did better than my classmates is that I spent roughly equal amounts of time on each task.

Most of my classmates spent 90% (or more) on the first task of exegesis. Figuring out how to convey the meaning that they had uncovered was either an afterthought, or it was very rushed as deadlines approached. Our school places a high emphasis on "What does the text say", which is an admirable focus. But that message seems to have been internalized at the expense of other valuable messages. As a result, my classmates spend endless amounts of time in exegesis trying to grok all the levels of meaning in a passage before they will do anything with it. There is a feeling that if you haven't grasped all the layers of meaning, then you haven't gotten it at all, which is paralyzing (not to mention false). Some of my classmates in the preaching class were still trying to figure out the main idea of the passage they were preaching less than half an hour before they were supposed to preach. Obviously, that left little time for the actual preparation of the sermon.

In contrast, I was very disciplined about spending equal amounts of time in both exegesis and conveyance. This required "cutting short" my exegesis (since time was a limiting factor), but I took solace in the fact that while the full meaning of the text may be richer and deeper than I had yet fathomed, it was not fundamentally different that what I had seen. I then took additional solace in the fact that I wouldn't be able to convey even half of the depth that I had penetrated to; thus if I had done more exegesis, then I probably wouldn't have the time/space to convey any of that additional info anyway.

Because I spent much more time determining how to convey the meaning of a passage, I ended up being a better communicator, even if I did a less thorough job in my exegesis.

Wayne Leman at Better Bibles Blog has a good response to the common claim that Bibles should shoot for unreadability because Bibles have in the past helped foster literacy. (For a real example of this argument, see the comments on this post.) The key idea is that our translations should imitate how the original books of the Bible were written, rather than imitating how English translators have historically translated, as if the latter model is better than the scriptural one.

Then Jephthah fled from his brothers and lived in the land of Tob, and worthless fellows collected around Jephthah and went out with him. (Judges 11:3, ESV)

Some people think of the ESV as a more literal translation, though it's really just more willing to preserve the form of the original over the meaning of the original, and it's less willing to do that than some translations. Sometimes it's still too formal, as here. One thing that's just pretty stupid is to use an expression that's formally equivalent to the original term but that in the language you're translating into usually means something else. Translating something about close interaction among friends as "intercourse" nowadays is just stupid. You're altering the meaning by using a word that most of the time means sexual intercourse.

The same is true of the English expression 'going out with'. If someone had translated this verse this way seventy years ago, there would clearly have been no problem. Nowadays, if you say someone went out with someone else, we tend to hear it as a dating relationship unless contextual clues force us to do a double-take and lead us to try to hear it another way. In this case, that isn't immediate. These worthless fellows collected around Jephtah and went out with him. It first sounds funny to me, because it gives me the image of these guys trying to take Jephthah out for dinner and a movie, and finally I think about what it was supposed to convey nearly immediately afterward. An intelligent reader won't really assume he was having a romantic relationship with these worthless fellows, but the fact that it will strike some readers as an odd way to say it shows that it's a bad translation.

The NIV and NLT translate this as something like "they followed him", which is a little beyond the original meaning. The NKJV, one of the most formally equivalent English translations (though it uses a less reliable textual tradition as its basis in the NT) amazingly says "went out raiding with him", supplying a participial verb to clarify. The HCSB seems better than the NIV and NLT, saying they "traveled with him", but I think the sense of the NKJV is probably right, that it was more than just traveling. Believe it or not, the best of all the translations I looked at was The Message, which says "they went around with him". That gives enough of the sense of the original without overinterpreting it.

The Bible translations that call themselves the literal translations have a funny way of defining 'literal'. What they really mean is that the number of words in a sentence in the original is as close as possible to the number of words in the translation. At least that's what's going on in I Corinthians 3:16-17. There is a difference in translation philosophy between preserving the form of the original and preserving the sense of the original. Those are different elements, and erring on either side means preserving a different element of the meaning of the original.

That's not what's going on in the differences between the translations that say they're more literal amd the ones that say they're more dynamic in I Corinthians 3:16-17. The main difference with this passage is not about preserving the form vs. preserving the sense. It's about preserving one aspect of the form (and therefore one element of the meaning) vs. preserving a different aspect of the form (and therefore a different element of the meaning). First consider the following translations of the two verses in question:

David Heddle has a nice post up giving a synopsis of five key Christian figures from the mid-fourth to mid-fifth centuries: John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Leo the Great, and Augustine. This is part of a larger series on church history that's been very good overall, much worth checking out. Two things in this post caught my attention as worth saying something about. (There's much more in the post that caught my attention, but not to the point of wanting to flag it.)

1. David ends the post with a very nice discussion of Augustine's theology as a systematic development of what was later called Calvinism, leading into an especially good treatment of limited atonement as a theological issue independent of Augustine himself.

2. In the section on Jerome, we see a precursor of contemporay translation debates, though David doesn't mention it as such:

In 382 he returned to Rome and was charged by Damasus, bishop of Rome, with the job of revising the Latin New Testament. Jerome was reluctant, knowing that he would be "blamed" by those who found their favorite translations altered, and this time with the Church’s authority. (Indeed, "I think the original must be wrong," said one such malcontent when told that his favorite translation had been undone by an appeal to the earliest manuscripts.)

Hmm. Haven't I heard that exact claim about the earliest manuscripts before?