Are Our Current Bible Translations Reliable?

When attempting to answer the question about whether modern Bible translations are reliable or trustworthy, I think it's helpful to break "reliable" down into two subquestions:

"Has the Bible been transmitted faithfully in the past?", and
"Are modern Bibles translated correctly?"

Both aspects are crucial, for if transmission of the biblical text has not been faithful over time, it doesn't matter if modern translations are accurate because we'd be building on a foundation of sand. But if transmission over time has been faithful, that does not necessarily mean that our modern translations have been handled with the same degree of care.

What I'm Not Going to Do

Textual Criticism

Right up front, I want to note that I'm not going to dive down the rabbit hole of which manuscript family is superior to the others (Textus Receptus vs. Majority Text vs. Eclectic Text, for you textual critics out there)--that's a whole other debate. If you're interested in such things, there are entire books written on this subject.

The New World Translation

I'm also not going to talk about the New World Translation, published by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society (the Jehovah's Witnesses). If the NWT interests you, see:

"Other" Translations

I'm not going to be spending any time on fringe translations that have an obvious political or social agenda behind them.

With that said, let's get into it.

What I Am Going to Do

With this blog post, I hope to give you a leg up on some key concepts and provide some evidence that should bolster your confidence that, while none are perfect in and of themselves, the major modern Bible translations are indeed reliable and are generally faithful to the extant manuscripts.

Has the Bible Been Transmitted Faithfully In the Past?

The Old Testament

Josh McDowell has written and spoken much on the pains that the Hebrew scribes took to ensure that the Torah (our Old Testament) was copied faithfully. He gives a summary of that information in the video next to this paragraph.

The New Testament

The New Testament is a bit different than the Old. It wasn't always copied by careful scribes with such amazing attention to detail. Rather, it was often copied under duress (remember, Christians were intensely persecuted in the Roman Empire during the first few centuries of the faith). So, God preserved His word through rampant copying and redistribution of the writings of the apostles. We come to an understanding of what the autographs said through the discipline and science of "textual criticism." James R. White does a really good job of explaining this whole process in Chapter 3 of his book The King James Only Controversy.

The Bible as a Whole

This is something that I've addressed in my book, "Jesus" Is Not the Answer to Every Sunday School Question, Book 1: Foundations as well as in my presentation entitled "Why Should Anyone Believe the Bible?" which you can watch here.

I'd also recommend you watch Voddie Baucham's presentation Why I Choose to Believe the Bible upon which my presenation is based. He talks more about the transmission of the text than I do.

Are Modern Bibles Translated Correctly?

Without a doubt, this can be an emotionally-charged discussion. People are passionate about their favorite translations, sometimes to the point where other translations are maligned. In my experience, this is often because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of translation.

But what does "translated correctly" even mean? To get an answer to this question, we're going to need to go down the rabbit hole a bit and talk about the nature of translation and translation philosophies.

The Nature of Translation

“Translation is not about replacing words, it’s about reproducing meaning.”

— Mark Strauss, Professor of New Testament, Bethel Seminary

Have you ever heard of the phrase "lost in translation"? It's a real thing. The problem with translation is that it's really, really hard--translating words can be difficult, translating idioms can be perplexing, and translating collocations can be an absolute nightmare.

Translating Words

What makes translation of words difficult is that there's often more than one way to translate something because words don't have just one meaning--they have a "semantic range"--and the meaning that is to be assigned at any given instance cannot be arbitrarily chosen. As Mark Strauss explains in "Choosing the Right Bible Translation for Your Church," instead of Mark 1:1 reading "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ" you could get "The source of the news about Josh who was smeared with oil."

Translating Idioms

Things get really interesting when idioms are involved. Idioms require not only an understanding of the technicalities of the language itself, but also of the culture in which those idioms were/are used. Strauss gives a couple of examples:

Spanish: ser pan comido, "to be bread eaten," means "to be easy" ("a piece of cake" would be the equivalent English idiom).
French: Avoir le cafard, "to have the cockroach," means "to be depressed."

Translating Collocations

A collocation is a word that gets its meaning from its relationship to other words in a sentence. Strauss lists a few examples using the word "make":

make pancakes
make trouble
make up
make sense
make friends
make a flight (i.e. "catch a plane")
make a deal
make Paris in one day

Imagine being a non-native speaker of English trying to do a word study on the English word "make"!

Translation Philosophies

There are two broad philosophies about how to translate from a source language into a receptor language: formal equivalence and functional equivalance. But one thing that's important to keep in mind is that though any given translation will tend towards one end of the spectrum or the other, there are no pure formal equivalent translations, nor are there any pure functional equivalent translations--all Bible translations necessarily blend the two approaches where appropriate, else the resulting English would be nigh onto unintelligible.

Formal Equivalence

When seeking a formal equivalent, the translators' aim is to preserve the form of the original text--they try very hard to keep the words in the same order as in the original text, and they seek to translate in a word-for-word fashion (i.e. "logos" --> "word").

The difficulty here, though, is that Greek, for example, is a much more nuanced language than is English--we have one word for "love" but Greek has four (agape, eros, phileo, storge). So when Jesus restores Peter in John 21:15-17, we don't really get the full sense of why Peter was grieved when Jesus asked him three times if Peter loved him. Here's how the conversation really went:

"Peter, do you agape me?"

"Yes, Lord. You know that I phileo you."

"Peter, do you agape me?"

"Yes, Lord. You know that I phileo you."

"Peter, do you [even] phileo me?"

Compare this passage in the NIV, NASB, and AMP at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2021%3A15-17&version=NIV;NASB;AMP and pay attention to the footnotes in the NASB.

Do you see the problem, now?

Formal Equivalence Translations

Translations that lean towards the formal, or word-for-word, end of the translation spectrum are:

NASB
KJV
NKJV
NRSV
ESV

Usage

Bibles in this camp tend to be very useful tools for doing word studies because they tend to be more consistent in their word choices across passages and books. However, this comes at a cost...and this cost is readability. I personally use the NASB as my study Bible because it's a great resource for digging in, but it is not what I would consider a pleasant read--the English is often very clunky, inelegant, and frustrating (especially for someone who enjoys writing).

Functional (or Dynamic) Equivalence

Functional equivalence strives to maintain the thoughts behind the text--focusing on what the author was trying to say rather than on how he said it. Sometimes this makes sense, for example when translating idioms like French's "I have the cockroach." If you're not familiar with the idiom, you're not going to understand what's being said--but it'd be very clear to an English-speaking reader if it were simply translated as "I'm down in the dumps," "I'm feeling blue," or simply "I'm depressed."

Of course, the tradeoff here is that while meaning can be effectively communicated, some of the character of the text is lost, and you wind up missing out on learning a colorful idiom from another culture.

Functional Equivalence Translations

Translations on this end of the spectrum include:

Usage

I would call these more "devotional" or "reading for fun" translations, or as an aid to help understand difficult passages from a formal translation; but I would not attempt to use them for word studies. They excel at putting the cookies on the bottom shelf so that the average Joe can understand the text (and even read for pleasure), but they're not ideal when you're trying to connect words and concepts across chapters and books.

Mediating Versions

While formal and functional approaches represent the poles, in the middle of the spectrum lie the mediating versions--those versions that seek to find that optimum blend of word correctness of the former with the readability and understandability of the latter.

Mediating Translations

Translations in the midst of the spectrum include:

NIV
NAB
HCSB
NET
CEB

Usage

I personally used the NIV ('84) for about 10 years for all of my Bible study, occasionally breaking out the KJV, NKJV, and NASB for diving deeper or getting a different sense of what was being said. I find the NIV to be a very enjoyable read, and when my pastor was preaching out of the KJV on Sunday, I found more often than not that his explanation of archaic language in the KJV was quite often identical to that which was printed in my Bible (which always gave me a chuckle...because that's how I'm wired).

I eventually wound up switching over to the NASB, though, because I do lots of word studies, and I'm very detail oriented; it annoyed me that I was missing out on little things like the Hebrew word for day (yom) being translated as "when" in Genesis 2:4 NIV when the more formal equivalent ("in the day") was just as understandable (to me, anyway).

Paraphrases

I won't say much here, other than that books like The Message, are not Bibles, per se, but are rather novel (see what I did there?) takes on the Bible. I think they have their place as entertaining reading, but they should not be used (nor were they intended) for use in serious Bible study.

So How Do We Know We Can Trust Modern Bible Translations?

Hopefully, you didn't just skim over everything prior to this point--it's important stuff. You have to have an appreciation for the difficulties involved in translation, and you really do have to be at least aware of translation philosophies so you can set your expectations appropriately. Picking up the NLT and expecting it to work like the NASB is a lot like expecting a pair of vice grips to usable to remove the lugnuts from your Mercedes' wheels--you're going to be sorely disappointed, no doubt with bloody knuckles to boot.

There are two main mechanisms in play that boost our confidence in modern translations:

Continual reference to the best extant source documents, and
Working in teams.

To demonstrate this, I present to you some examples from the prefaces of some popular modern translations:

NIV: “The New International Version is a completely new translation of the Holy Bible made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts. … This group, though not made up of official church representatives, was transdenominational. Its conclusion was endorsed by a large number of leaders from the many denominations who met in Chicago in 1966…. The fact that participants from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand worked together gave the project its international scope. That they were from many denominations—including Anglican, Assemblies of God, Baptist, Brethren, Christian Reformed, Church of Christ, Evangelical Free, Lutheran, Mennonite, Methodist, Nazarene, Presbyterian, Wesleyan and other churches—helped to safeguard the translation from sectarian bias.” -- NIV Preface (emphasis mine)
ESV: “…each word and phrase in the ESV has been carefully weighed against the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, to ensure the fullest accuracy and clarity and to avoid under-translating or overlooking any nuance of the original text...The ESV publishing team has included more than a hundred people. The fourteen-member Translation Oversight Committee benefited from the work of more than fifty biblical experts serving as Translation Review Scholars and from the comments of the more than fifty members of the Advisory Council, all of which was carried out under the auspices of the Crossway Board of Directors. This hundred-plus-member team shares a common commitment to the truth of God’s Word and to historic Christian orthodoxy and is international in scope, including leaders in many denominations.” -- ESV Preface (emphasis mine)
NASB: Read about their translation philosophy as well as see the list of translators at http://www.lockman.org/nasb/nasbprin.php
NKJV: There are dozens of translators listed by name in NKJV Preface.
NLT: Similarly, the NLT shows you who worked on their translation at the publisher's website.

Additional Resources

Matt Whitman's (The Ten Minute Bible Hour) series "Nuts and Bolts of the Bible" is an excellent series of videos chock full o' good stuff, with a fun delivery. I've embedded one of the videos from that series here. If you're not subscribed to his YouTube channel, you need to change that today.

The BibleDan KreftAugust 14, 2019Comment