Image from United Church of God
[First posted in 2014. The Sinaite’s Library is full of every translation available of the book that claims to be “the very words of God.” Understandably such a claim draws the skepticism and scrutiny of those who challenge that claim. Religionists simply swallow it and consider the challengers as irreverent, irreligious, blasphemous, anti-Christs, etc. And to their credit, publishers and sincere translators specially of the Christian 2-part bible keep improving their product as new “truths” and discoveries arise that clarify our understanding of . . . well, “the very words of God”! Here is one more of many attempts on our part to explain ourselves to our former Christian colleagues as well as to the unbelievers out there who simply won’t accept any book as God’s words. Indeed, too many human hands have been involved and possibly the original has undergone through much tampering over six millennia of passing on the Message which has not been a simple message because . . . in our view, translators with a religious agenda have made it so complicated!—Admin1]
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“Languages are said to mirror the character of the peoples who speak them . . . .” – P.A. Bien, translator of Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ.
He is reflecting not only his own difficulty in translating the original Greek language of the said novel into English, but also the experience of Kazantzakis himself in translating the great works of antiquity (Homer’s Odyssey and Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Comedia) into English. Bien explains “demotic Greek shows us a race to whom imagination and audacity come before precision and efficiency.” Presumably, demotic Greek is what New Testament teachers call Koine or the Greek of the marketplace, the Greek spoken by ordinary people, used in everyday speech and writing. Lucky for Bien, he only has to translate once; this is not so in the case of translators of the Bible.
Bible publishers continue to issue updated editions: from ASB to NASB, KJV to NKJVNIV, NRSV. After updating to a “new,” in the case of the KJV, it is said the publishers realized their “new” did not sit well with majority of KJV readers plus, the new was not a better translation and consequently went through further revisions.
If bible publishers keep updating (which is good), at some point they will exhaust the comparative and superlative adjectives and resort to a totally different marketing label. Let us not suspect all their efforts are simply part of normal business tactics, as in hi-tech toys in the market that keep upgrading to the newer version, convincing the consumer to suddenly become discontented with his perfectly working simple cellphone or computer and get hooked, believe the line, and sink their hard-earned money into a gadget only the truly hi-tech can use to its full working capability.
Let us think nothing of hidden motives, bible translators really do keep upgrading because that is the nature of language, that translations do not and can never reflect the original 100% and there will never be a perfect translation. With new discoveries in biblical archeology, it is only natural to keep up with new information. There was a time our translations were 3-times divorced from the original Hebrew, what does that mean? The Hebrew TNK was translated into the Greek Septuagint which was translated to the Latin Vulgate on which the English translations were based. The updated versions have gone back to the original Hebrew. But just think about how truth can change from translation to translation, much like the whispering game or actual rumor-mongering, where the end-message differs from the beginning message. If this could happen in current or on-the-spot transmission of information among people who speak the same language, think of what has transpired through centuries or millennia from the original TNK. And translating from Hebrew to Greek is not a mere matter of linguistics but of culture and mores and ethics and national character; indeed Bien said it right, “Languages are said to mirror the character of the peoples who speak them . . . .
For the curious, here’s an interesting link :[www.apbrown2.net/web/TranslationComparisonChart.htm] which gives you a word-for-word/thought-for-thought chart of bible translations, the differences in each, sample verses, etc. Publishers have even issued bibles with 4 versions side by side.
An interesting bible is the red-letter edition where the words of Jesus are printed in red; if you have such a bible, be curious enough to check if there are any red-lettered texts in the ‘Old’ testament portion; if there are none, then what conclusion should you reach? If yours does happen to have it, leave a note in the reader’s reply box below, as we would like to know how far Trinitarians have gone into claiming the very words of YHWH as that of the Jesus of Christianity. As far as we know, this has not been done.
Only bilinguals or people who can speak multiple languages can relate to translators because definitely, much is lost in translation. That is how we feel as truth-seekers journeying through the unfamiliar territory of the Hebrew Scriptures, dependent on translators to interpret the map (text) for us.
Why is it so? Aside from obvious differences in word meanings plus many synonyms to choose from, there is frame of reference —
- first of the biblical figures,
- then of the modern day Hebrew (or Christian) translator,
- and then our own.
All that and more add to the haziness in understanding because some words have different connotations when used not only in different time frames but also in different cultures. For example: if you use the word “salvage” in the USA, it means ‘save whatever you can’; if you use it in the Philippines, it’s criminal lingo for ‘kill off the s.o.b’, total opposites, just like the word “cleave” (stick to and sever). These days you can no longer say ‘I’m happy and gay’ if you’re not in fact . . . you know.
Context greatly helps to clear up the foggiest idea but the best resort is of course to learn Hebrew. There are Jewish websites that offer online courses in Biblical Hebrew. Ultimately, we simply have to trust that The Divine Revelator Who is most interested in getting His message across gets it through to receptive hearts and open minds despite the limitations of human languages.
This particular series “Lost in Translation” will be a continuing feature on this website, dealing with specific texts in the Christian Old Testament that appear to have been mistranslated from the original Hebrew text. (For this, we depend on information provided by anti-missionary Jewish websites which have already done extensive research and best explain the meaning of the original texts under scrutiny.) We originally presumed these texts were mistranslated innocently, but some appear to be intentionally translated to turn them into messianic prooftexts.
Postscript: You might want to continue reading the sequels to this first post:
And, guess what?
YET a new translation will be added to our original choice, Everette Fox’s translation: this is Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses with Commentary. We will feature his INTRODUCTION explaining why all the previous translations and versions have been faulty. He considers only one other translation of the TORAH/Pentateuch/Five Books of Moses as worthy and closest to its original Hebrew—Everett Fox’s 1995 version of the TORAH.
Obsessive as we are in getting to the best and most accurate English translation of the TORAH, would that we have many more years in our lifetime to explore all these in our effort to get a handle on the original Hebrew text! You might say ‘wouldn’t it be better to just learn biblical Hebrew’? . . . oh well, yes, if we were in the spring of our lifetime instead of winter; wish we had done that over half a century ago!