Transcription
So there are numerous English translations of the Bible, and these can generally be assigned to categories having different objectives. Would you explain these categories?
The categories in terms of the objectives of these English New Testaments are of various sorts. There's different ways to look at it. One way is actually to look at it through the history of English translations, and I think the history involves three different objectives. Although they might not all say this is their objective, we have elegance, accuracy, and readability—elegance, accuracy, and readability.
From about 1534 to 1885, I would call that the period of elegance. From Tyndale's second translation of the New Testament, which really stood behind—I'm not talking about the Greek text, but I'm talking about his translation—really stood behind the King James New Testament. Ninety percent of his New Testament was just dumped into the King James. So the King James is an amazing translation, but a large part of the amazingness is due to Tyndale himself.
Elegant English—this was the King James, and it was done during the era of Shakespeare. Tyndale was prior to that by about a century. Then you have, starting in 1881 for the New Testament and 1885 for the whole Bible, a period of accuracy that I would say reigned until 1984 perhaps. That period of accuracy starts with the Revised Version of 1881. It's the first translation done in English by a committee since the King James Version of 1611. So we were waiting 270 years to get another committee-done translation. They claimed it was the conquest of King Truth over King James.
What the Revised Version was, was absolutely unpalatable English. It may be more accurate than the King James, but the English is as wooden and stiff and not natural as you could ever possibly want, except for one other translation which is still in print: the New World Translation. That is far and away the most wooden, unpalatable English translation I've ever seen. It's just not English, and it's also pretty bad at points. I mean, anyone who's even taken more than one year of Greek can see that there are serious problems with some texts where they just translate according to their theology, with no basis from the Greek text in it.
The New World Translation, just as a quick side note, is the most slavishly literal word-for-word translation there is, except when it disagrees with their theology, and then it's so paraphrastic it doesn't even represent the original. An accurate translation depends on what you're trying to accomplish in your accuracy. Are you trying to get the connotations of the meaning across to the modern reader or the denotations? If you want something that's more of a formal equivalence and get the denotations, then you're going to go for something like the ESV or even the NRSV to some degree. If you want something that's more of a functional equivalent, I think you're going to be looking at some different translations.
I'd say not even functional equivalent; the NET Bible and the NIV are really trying to be faithful to the original meaning, but not necessarily the original form. I think it's a myth to say we can translate word-for-word. When someone says, "I want the most accurate translation," I've been asked this hundreds of times: "Tell me what the most accurate translation is." I want the most word-for-word translation—there are two separate questions; they're not the same thing. Because between two languages, you can't translate idioms and make it the same.
Like compassion—they don't use that, that's like bowels for compassion, right? Or how do you say a woman was pregnant in Greek? You don't say she was heavy with child, as the King James has, which is far removed from an accurate translation. You say she was having it in the belly. Now, every woman who's had a child knows what it means to feel like that way, but that's not how we translate it.
Well, I remember George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life said, "You on the nest!" That's right. But the fact is, you've got idioms. Two languages simply don't map the same. Anyone who's ever studied a second language realizes you can't map them the same. You can't do it even in the same word order. It's very difficult to find even one word in one language that has exactly the same meaning as a word in another language unless it's a technical meaning.
Yet you get the fundamentalist, right-wing kind of Christianity that says, "I want word for word," and they really just don't have a clue what a good translation looks like.
So what would you call the ESV, the English Standard Version? How do you categorize that?
Well, there are other ways to look at this. There are translations that are reactionary. The Douay-Rheims was reactionary to Protestant translations. The New American Standard Bible was reactionary—an overreaction originally—to the RSV because the RSV at Isaiah 7:14 spoke of a young maiden instead of a virgin as the one who would bear a child that we read as a messianic verse. That came out September 1, 1952. The RSV spawned the New American Standard as a reaction.
The ESV is, in many respects, a reaction—not to one woman, but to all women—because you've got now these other translations that are gender-inclusive, and the ESV doesn't like that. So they're taking, I think, a more conservative stance than what the Greek and Hebrew really is saying, where they're translating a number of passages still in a gender-exclusive way.
I'd still say it's a good translation. It's not as strong as the older translations that were gender-exclusive. By gender-exclusive, I mean when you use the word "anthropos" or "anthropoid," that's the Greek word that means mankind, human being, and in the plural, it's going to be people. The older gender-exclusive translations would simply translate that as men, but there's a different word for men in Greek: it's "andres" or "anera" in the singular, and that does mean adult males. The older gender-exclusive translations make no distinction. Modern translations are going to read the "anthropos" as people, like the NET Bible does, the NIV and some are going to read the "anera" as now people instead of man. So that's gender-inclusive; it goes too far.
The ESV is pushing back against that gender inclusiveness. I don't think it pushes very hard; I think it's a good translation, I really do, but I don't think it's the best translation. So it's kind of like the New American Standard was reacting to one woman, and other modern translations are now reacting to all women; women are always the cause of the problems for the translation, not really.
What's the difference between, let's say, the NIV and the New Living Translation?
Well, the New Living started out as a paraphrase, not as an actual translation. That was the Living Bible. Yes, I remember that from the '70s. It had a green padded cover—I had one!
That's right, yeah, that's padded, it's right and green! I'm not sure—maybe it was meant to be the first airbag or something.
But the New Living is much more of a functional equivalence. It's the kind of Bible like the Phillips or like The Message that you would not want to read verse by verse for study purposes; you would want to read it passage by passage to get the connotative feel of what that original audience experienced.
So those translations have great value. Translations or paraphrases—if you want a study Bible though, then you need to get something that's accurate. The NET Bible, I think, in terms of its footnotes and to a large extent the translation is an extremely accurate translation.
I love the NET. I picked up one of these at SBL last year. I guess this is the second edition, or the revised one, because I've got the original one here that I got years ago.
Yeah, but here's the whole Bible, and boy, I'm just so impressed. When I saw it, you open this thing up, and it's got just all these textual notes—it's just amazing! I mean, that's why I got it, especially for the textual notes, to see why you got. And you were really heavily involved in this one, right?
I was the New Testament editor and the textual critic for the New Testament as well. So here's the text, and then—all the other stuff—these are the textual notes on why you translated it in a certain way.
Right, right. Sixty thousand notes in that translation. Others who have worked on other translations have told us this is the first place they turn when they do their translations. We've even gotten endorsements from them, and so, in many respects, the NET Bible is the translator's translation.
The best way to sell it, though, is simply to ask a person to look at their favorite verse and then see what the note is on there, because those that have different interpretations, the NET Bible will lay out: Here are the three different interpretations on this passage; this is why we went with this one. Other translations just give you what their interpretation is, and by the way, it's impossible to really translate unless you're also interpreting. All translation is interpretation.
What do you think of the Christian Standard Bible?
I think it's a good translation; it's denominationally driven though by the Southern Baptist. But it's not a Southern Baptist-only translation. There are some decent scholars who worked on it. It was originally Art Farstad's New King James Version, where he wanted to do the majority text. He was one of the editors of the New King James, one of the translators. He was the editor for the New King James Bible, and I actually worked for him.
That was the first translation I worked on. I didn't agree with the theory—the majority text theory or the TR—but I still did a lot of work for Farstad, met with him at his home for many, many hours over the years. But that was started by him. When he died, then Ed Blum, another Dallas Seminary faculty member, took over for the HCSB, and it was published by Lifeway. It's a Southern Baptist translation. I think it's the HCSB that stands for Hardcore Southern Baptist!
Right, that's right! Or Homeland Christian Standard. The "Homeland" is now dropped, but it's the Christian Standard Bible. As I say, it's denominationally driven, but it's broad-based scholarship. I think it's good; I don't think it's the best.
Alright, so I'm going to ask you what you think is the best in a moment here, but you were talking about how there's beauty and there's accuracy, and I forgot what the third one was.
Readability.
Readability! Like, what do you think the best ones are in each of those categories? Well, and who are they for? I've often been asked what's my favorite English translation, and I can't give just one answer. And you're asking a much more nuanced question—I appreciate that.
I would like to start off by saying if you are a native English speaker, then most likely you have a heritage that is strongly linked to the Christian faith—not necessarily that you're a Christian or that your family is Christian, but you've grown up in a culture where Christianity was known and a large part of the culture. For those who are native English speakers, I think it would be a shame to own only one translation—they serve different functions.
So I would say for study and accuracy, that combination—the NET Bible, hands down, is the best. For readability and accuracy, the NIV I think is the best, and I want to stress the accuracy of the NIV. It tries to follow natural English, but the work that has gone into this translation, the work that is still going into it, is by highly rated scholars. The scholarship is—there's really nothing else quite like it; nothing else that has all the manpower and "women power" behind it to really produce a terrific translation. There's just no thought in the NIV that was done in a corner; it's been examined, re-examined, and re-re-examined over the decades.
For a translation that is what I’d call understated elegance, I think the ESV is probably the best. It's a little bit more updated than the RSV, which was an understated elegance translation.
For rich wording, for elegance, just really a beautiful piece of literature, the King James Bible and the Revised English Bible is kind of the 20th century sort of equivalent to the King James in terms of elegance. I would have to say no English-speaking Christian should be without a King James Bible. Half of our idioms today are from either the King James Bible or Shakespeare. There are words that were created by Tyndale that are created by the King James translators that are part of English.
If you read anything by Alan Bloom where he talks about cultural literacy—not Edlum; this is a professor of political science, I believe—and he talks about cultural literacy, and he has an appendix on the kinds of terms that any literate English speaker should know. Most of them, a very large proportion of them, are out of the King James or Shakespeare. I used to read a page out of that appendix to my kids every night at the dinner table and say, "Okay, do you know what this means? Do you know what this means?" Just to get them to be literate with things.
For ecumenical reading and for cross-checking scholarly opinion, I think this is very important: is the NRSV.
I was going to ask you about that one; what do you think?
Okay, I was the first evangelical to publicly endorse it. I did it when it came out in Christianity Today—they asked me to endorse it. I think it's a great translation. It's being revised now, done in 1989, although it moved in the direction of gender inclusiveness too much.
Let me just read a verse from the NRSV. As you're looking at that, the RSV—the Revised Standard Version—that was sold, right? And then they revised that, maybe updated with manuscripts; that’s what the ESV is kind of based on, right?
That's correct. The ESV—they got the rights to the RSV and so they bypassed the NRSV and just tried to update the RSV and also to make it fit into their particular viewpoint of things.
Let's see—by the way, what the American Standard Version is, the New American Standard Version is update of that. Where does the American Standard Version fit within those three? Readability, accuracy, and elegance?
It's not elegant; it's not readable. It's the first passable English translation. It was done in 1901 by the members of the revised version that came out in 1881 for the New Testament and 1885 for the Old, and they were told they had to wait 14 years at least before they produced their own translation.
So they produced the American Standard, which is more accurate and far more readable than the revised version done 16 years earlier, but it's still partly a readable translation. Now the revised version is a revision of the King James, which itself is a revision of other translations going all the way back to Tyndale. I think the RSV, which is a revision of the revised version as well, and the NRSV—now it's a revision of the RSV.
I think we've got something like seven generations, so you've got all these translations, including the New American Standard Bible, including the ESV, including the NRSV that are all going back to the King James and ultimately going back to Tyndale.
It was the New English Bible I think that came out in 1960.
Remember that one? The New English Bible? F. F. Bruce was involved in that, right?
I don't know if he was. It was Anglican. I know C. H. God had a heavy role in it, but I had one of those when I was a kid; I had a paperback version.
And then the REB came out a year after the NRSV, and they wanted to be gender-inclusive too. But one of the things they said, the Revised English Bible, was that we want to be gender-inclusive unless it hurts good English style, which apparently was not a concern for the NRSV.
Let me read to you from Matthew 18:15 from the NRSV: "If another member of the church sins against you..." The original says, "If a brother sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone." Well, that's okay. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. You go, "What? It just—it's just harsh English; it's not good style."
First of all, by not using 'brother,' they don't want to use that because that was gender-exclusive, but the problem is if you call somebody a member of the church without calling that person a brother or a sister, you lose a powerful connotation of what it means to be in the family of God—a family. So you've lost one of the major commentated values of the statement: "Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone"—between you and that brother, I think is what it actually says.
"If the member listens to you..." They just—they want to avoid the word brother at all costs. "You have regained that one" rather than "you've regained that brother." They're not going to say what the Greek says because it sounds gender-exclusive. I think at times the English is just stuffy and it's agenda-driven, but it's still nevertheless a very accurate translation.
Okay, okay, so yeah, I'd say the NRSV. Let me just mention real quickly a comment about the NRSV that I think would be interesting. That is, Bruce Metzger was the chairman of the NRSV. He took over the job from Luther Weigle, I think, who was at Yale, who was the chair of the RSV. It was an ecumenical group of scholars that worked out, including rabbis, including non-Christians.
When they were looking at some of this language, when they were looking at the Lord's Prayer, I believe, a woman on the committee said, "Dr. Metzger, I think it's high time for us to call God mother instead of father. Our Father in Heaven—we're going to call him our Mother who's in Heaven!"
And so Bruce Metzger, who knew how to sell ice to Eskimos, was such a diplomat. He could tell you to go to hell and make you look forward to the trip. It's just amazing, this guy. He said, "All the rest of the scholars—they were just shocked at this. This is going way too far."
Metzger said, "I agree with you," and they said, "And we should call the devil a she!" Also, end of discussions. So the NRSV is good because you've got a mix of scholars. It's approved by the National Council of Churches; it's approved by the Vatican, and you've got a mix of these scholars from several different denominations, non-denominations, Catholics, Protestants, others working on this.
If it says the same thing as one of these evangelical translations, you can take it to the bank. That's some really good authority behind it, and it's not an evangelical bias—like RSV John 1:1 or Romans 9:5 on the deity of Christ.
Now let me tell you one of these popular translations—well, two that I really don't care for very much. I don't care a whole lot for the NKJV.
The reason I don't—let me preface this by saying all of these translations, except for the really out there sectarian ones like the New World Translation, are valuable and helpful for someone to grow in grace, to know Jesus Christ better, to grow in the faith. It helps the community of God, so I don't want anybody to hear what I'm saying and say, "Oh, I'm going to get rid of this Bible!" Don't do that!
You're basically saying, except for the New World Translation, you could be pretty safe with any English translation?
Yeah, I think the Mormons are coming out with one. I think they're probably going to be not nearly as caustic in their viewpoints; I think they'll try to be integrated, so you could still find grace there.
I've actually used the New World Translation with Jehovah's Witnesses to point them to the deity of Christ, so they couldn't hide it all together as much as they tried.
So the New King James is one of my least favorites because it keeps all of the worst features of the King James Bible and none of the best. They try to be a literal translation, which is not what the King James' explicit goal was. Their goal was not to be literal; they say in the preface, "We're going to vary the wording for English style; we're not going to translate the same Greek or Hebrew word the same in English."
The Revised Version said, "Yes, we are." So that was a translation that just looked awful, but it was accurate. The King James was much more elegant, so the New King James loses a lot of that. But what they retain is the Textus Receptus, the Greek text behind the original King James. The worst of all possible worlds, as far as I'm concerned, because that's based on essentially eight manuscripts, the oldest of which is a thousand years removed from the original. We’ve got somewhere between nine and fifteen that are within 150 years or so.
Now the other one that I would say I’m not a big fan of—and a lot of evangelicals do like this one—is the New American Standard Bible. I think originally their objective was reactionary to the RSV, and they are trying to make a very accurate translation. But by doing so, they are making it formally accurate but not functionally accurate.
I'll give just one example. In the Greek New Testament, we have the word "polus," which is translated either as city or town (P-O-L-I-S). It occurs 162 times, I believe, in the Nestle text. Now there was no Greek word that was used in the first century, or at least in the New Testament, that meant town. "Polis," city or town; but when you look at the New American Standard Version of 1977, and even the '95, I believe for the most part follows this; every time you see "polus," it's translated as "city."
But it's not always a city; they often went with the first gloss in the lexicon rather than nuanced it by the context. For the NET Bible, we had some principles on even how to translate a word like that. If you had more than 30,000 people, we call it a city. A city or if it's a free city that doesn't have to pay taxes to the Roman Empire or the Emperor, like Philippi, whether it had 30,000 people or not—it would be considered a city.
But otherwise, if we didn't have that kind of evidence, we’d call it a town. There is a word for village in the Greek New Testament, but not a word for town that is separate from the word cities. So translators have to make a decision. You can't just go with that one translation; it's not always accurate.
Well, that makes sense, Dan. I do remember, though, when I was learning Greek in grad school, that I would consult the NASB when I was having problems because it was so—I mean, can we say literal in that sense? It was—
It's called a pony! You're riding that to get into the Greek!
Yeah, that's called a—what? A pony transformation?
That's what you ride to figure out what the original's saying!
Yeah, I mean it's closer—if we want to talk in literal terms and use that—it's closer to word-for-word than, let's say, the NIV in some of those.
Yes, yeah, it's closer. But it's got problems, as you say.
Yeah, I'd say it's a good first-pass translation, but it's not a good final-pass translation.
Oh, that's a good way to put it! I like that.
So what's your favorite translation?
Favorite English translation?
Well, it depends what the purpose is. If it's readability, I'm going to go with the NIV. If it's accuracy, it's split between the NIV and the NET Bible. For elegance, understated, I like the ESV, rich wording, King James, Revised English Bible. I'll look at the NRSV for ecumenical, but the others I'll look forward to just because I want to get irritated.
Okay, so let's wrap it up then. Tell us a little about your organization. You founded the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts. Tell us what you do and why it's important.
That's a mouthful! Let me give a way for your viewers to see what we're talking about. If you can remember the website, it's csntm.org. Now the way to remember that is: the first two letters—we know who C.S. Lewis is, so you got the "CS" down. And you've all seen The Wizard of Oz, so you know who Auntie M is: CS Auntie M! And now it's memorable!
So csntm.org—I founded it in 2002 as a non-profit organization with the initial goal of trying to digitize every single Greek New Testament manuscript in the world and post those images online. Now I realized with about two and a half million pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts to digitize and about 5,500 manuscripts, it’s going to take a lot longer than my lifetime to get those manuscripts done. I felt that once we could stimulate others to do this, then other institutes—especially institutes that own their own manuscripts—would begin doing it, and that's exactly what's happened.
CSNTM was the initial institute; they're the first institute to digitize Greek New Testament manuscripts. We started at the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Munster, Germany, digitizing their 22 manuscripts—they let us do that. That's the world's leading institute for text-critical studies. They have microfilms of about 90% of all the New Testament manuscripts, but they only have 22 actual manuscripts they let us digitize. Those got posted on our website, and since that time, we've been to nearly 50 sites throughout the world.
I've been in 35 countries now; we've discovered over 90 manuscripts, and we have digitized some of the oldest. This is probably a great time to announce that we have a book coming out at the end of this year published by Hendrickson Publishing House on the early papyri, P-45, P-46, and P-47. It's images that we took in 2013 and 2014 with high-resolution photographic equipment. They are actual size images, and it's all three papyri in one volume with a white background, all three papyri, and then another volume with a black background.
Then we have a third volume that's a transcription of one of these papyri; the other two papyri will be done in the next few years, where we're actually reading what's there, and we're giving a new transcription letter by letter of what we found in these images. We’ve photographed, for example, all the Greek New Testament manuscripts at the National Library of Greece—one of the five largest repositories—and we put those images online.
So we're going all over the world! We've photographed all the manuscripts in Australia and New Zealand—all the Greek New Testament manuscripts—six grand total between those two countries. We’ve been everywhere to do this, and we still have a long way to go.
How many would you say—if there's an estimated 5,500, how many have you done?
We have done, I think, about 800.
Okay, that's a fair size, but I knew it would take us a few years to establish our reputation where it’s squeaky clean. We don't want anybody to ever think that we're there to steal their manuscripts. Sometimes people like to compare us to Indiana Jones, and my response is: Indiana Jones was an American imperialist thief! All we take is pictures—photographs! To the library, they get the high-resolution images themselves, and the only thing we ask for is that we get to post them on our site. They own the copyright; we don't even own the copyright on those images.
So even though by law we could, we give that up for them because we want to have doors open for us to help all these libraries, universities, museums, institutes throughout the world—individuals. We'll go anywhere in the world to photograph these manuscripts.
How many of the 800 or so that you have photographed are up on the csntm.org website?
I think about 700 plus.
Wow, most of them! Yeah! There are a few sites that have said, "Only post a few of our images," and some that have said, "You can't post them at all." These ancient manuscripts—they're not going to last forever, and once they're gone, they're gone; they're forever lost. And you're taking these high-res photographs so that even if those manuscripts ever get lost or destroyed, we still have the high-resolution photographs of them.
That must be pretty costly to get around the world and do this. How is this being funded?
Can I hire you as a marketing director?
It is not cheap to do this. The equipment is very expensive, as you might guess. We're trying to keep state-of-the-art equipment, and I think it costs us about $16 or $17 to digitize one page. We never charge these libraries; we do it for free, and we give them the images. When I say $16 or $17, that includes all the costs—the pre-production, post-production, the trip there, the airfare, meals, what we’re paying the staff to do the work, this kind of thing.
But if people want to support CSNTM, it's tax-deductible, and they just go to csntm.org/donate. There are lots of different ways to give, and we just opened up this last year—or earlier this year—ways for people to give stock. So if some folks would like to do that while the stock market for some of the stocks is still doing well, this might be a great opportunity to give some stock to CSNTM.
Well, that's fantastic, Dan! What a great cause—preserve our ancient New Testament manuscripts! It's wonderful.
Hey, thanks for the wording too! It's getting us back to the wording—more data to look at!
Wow! Well, thanks for taking some time and sharing some of the stuff that you're doing and enlightening us on the Greek New Testament that we have today, Greek manuscripts, and our English translations. I'm sure this is just going to be very helpful to a lot of the viewers here, and I appreciate your friendship, brother.
Thanks so much! I appreciate being on the show and always good chatting with you, Mike!