Yesterday, I responded to Tim Challies’ review of Leland Ryken’s book defending the “essentially literal” translation methods, and the idea of a “word-for-word” translation. While no one made these comments, I want to make it clear that this isn’t simply a theoretical discussion for me, but that there are pastoral concerns as well:

Brothers and sisters, trust your translations!

Challies says, reflecting (I assume) the shared thoughts of Ryken, that “in the end I hope, I trust, you will have greater confidence in the Bible you read.”

However, when they say it, they mean “those of you who are using (so-called) word-for-word translations should have confidence.”

Here’s my concern: people are throwing out the work of experts for the opinions of hobbyists (at best). What about those who simply cannot read their (Ryken et al.) preferred translations? Let’s face it, the NASB’s grammar is anything but English—with fractured sentences that can actually obscure the point of a passage for anyone not familiar with the original languages—and the ESV is academic at best and archaic at worst. If Seminary professors struggle over their wording sometimes, what chance do those who have reading difficulties have?

So what should we do? If you ask some people, their response seems to be throw out that easy-to-read translation and go with something unnecessarily hard. Sure, the KJV and the ESV might be excellent literary translations, but not everyone is a literary enthusiast. The vast majority of people couldn’t care less about how much meter and rhyme they have.

They want the word of God, and they want it in language they can understand.

Now, at this point, someone will bring up 2 Peter 3:15—even Peter thought Scripture was hard to understand!

True. Not the same point. The argument is not that Paul’s Greek was so literary that it made it hard to understand, but that his concepts were difficult to understand. If the concepts are hard—and they are!—then why should we make it harder for people to wrestle with them?

Translation teams are made up of people who have trained in the technicalities of translation and linguistics. They are also primarily comprised of confessing Christians who hold Scripture very highly.¹ For example, would critics who claim that NLT translators are changing the word of God want to bring that charge up face to face with Tom Schriener? Alan Ross? Paul House? Eugene Merrill? Raymond Ortlund, Jr.? Craig Blomberg? Robert Stein? D.A. Carson? Doug Moo? Moises Silva? That was just a sampling of the conservative scholars who worked on the NLT who all affirm the doctrine of inerrancy. They are hardly the liberals that Ryken and others have charged with tampering with the Word of God.

Are they perfect? Of course not. No translation is. That’s why we should employ several types from across the spectrum of translation method.
Brothers and Sisters, we can trust these experts with not wanting to tamper with the word of God. We may disagree with some of their decisions, but we cannot demonize them, spreading false information to win a theological battle.

Christianity has a weird affinity for not wanting to trust the experts. We trust them in everything else—from the engineers who put our cars together to the pharmacists who mix our medicines. Why such a priori doubt about the qualifications of the experts behind our translations?

Brothers and sisters, trust your translations!

(Note: The following does not use words in their technical linguistic sense. If you see anything that is used in a way other than their technical sense, feel free to let me know and I’ll make the necessary substitution.)

Let me start out that I enjoy reading the so-called “essentially literal” translations, though the title itself is a misnomer. I think that every translation type has it’s place and use. I probably own more ESVs than any other translation with the KJV and NLT coming up close behind. I am not anti-ESV. I am, however, anti- the new notion of KJV- ESV-onlyism “literalism” that has crept onto the scene.

I also admire the desire and presuppositions that most of these advocates hold. I held them myself. I still hold them, just with more nuance having dealt with translation issues, and even just the bare basic (and I do mean BASIC) understanding of linguistics, primarily remedial ideas of how words and meanings collide. Their desire is to have access to God’s very Word (inscripturate) in the english language. As someone who has benefited from having the Scriptures in english (most notably eternally benefited), I have this same desire. Their presupposition is that there is a very specific way that we get to have God’s very Word in English—1 to 1 correspondence between the original language and the receptor language. This is where we differ.

In his recent review of Leland Ryken’s new book, Tim Challies shows his lack of knowledge in how translation works. He says:

“[Ryken] wants Christians to have before them a Bible that accurately conveys the words that God has spoken—not a paraphrase of those words, not an interpretation of them, but simply a translation that, as much as possible, takes the exact words of the original and carries them over to English. One would think that this would not be difficult to come by, but the modern history of English Bible translation shows few versions that adhere to this philosophy.”

Italics and bold text are mine. Listen to what Challies is saying—it shouldn’t be difficult? It is, in fact, impossible. No translation can live up to these standards. That just simply isn’t how words, and therefore translation, works.

Words live their lives inbetween modernism and postmodernism it seems. For example, you can’t say that a word means (A). Just given a simple word, it is, in a sense, meaningless without a referent. However, we can’t go full out deconstructionism and say that a word means whatever we want either. While a word has no one definition (A), it has a range of possible meanings (A) to n. As an example, take the english word “board.” What does it mean? A plank of wood? A group of people who supervise something? The side of a ship? A circuit board? What if I said I served on a board of directors? Or that a I stepped on the nail that was sticking out of a board? Here, we know what each use of the word “board” refers too, because we have a given context for each word. But notice that this is true of every word in the sentence; they each have a range of meaning that we derive from the context of the other words with their own ranges of meaning.

The situation is complicated enough already. Now, throw in the whole aspect of translation, which includes all of the above for each word in the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic originals, then determining which english words best convey the sense of the context of the original with the same shared referents in meanings. Then, we must factor in the organic nature of languages. The English language is always changing.

Challies shows his lack of understanding of how translation works in two ways. First, when he says “takes the exact words of the original and carries them over to English” he shows that he is ignorant of the fact that this is impossible. We cannot take the “exact words of the original” because that would simply leave us with the originals themselves. Greek cannot be “carried over into English,” because it is not English. Translation is necessarily much more than “carrying over.” As Mike Aubrey has said aner means aner. Aner doesn’t mean “man,” they just happen to have the same referent. A perfect example is the Hebrew word hesed. We have no English word that conveys the concept of hesed, which is why we have some translations that say loving-kindness, or longsuffering, or steadfast love, or covenant loyalty. We just don’t have an exact word for this, or many other words. Another example is shalom. Quite frankly, our word “peace” doesn’t cut it.

Second, he shows his misunderstanding when he says, “one would think that this would not be difficult to come by,” but that was the gist of what I mentioned previously, after the quote, so I’ll just refer back to it.

The problem is that many of the advocates of a so-called “essentially literal” translation have the same set of presuppositions. Tim is obviously not the only one making these arguments. In fact, I hear them pretty often. They don’t get it, but then again, neither did I not too long ago.

See Mike Aubrey’s review of Leland Ryken’s first book, The Word of God in English, and his other review on amazon with different content here.

[Author's Note: Apparently, when the server crashed at the beginning of June, one of the posts that went missing was my book review of James White's book "The King James Controversy." I have found where I added my review on amazon, and am putting it back here again.]
The King James Only Controversy
James R. White
Paperback: 368 pages
Publisher: Bethany House; 2 Upd Exp edition (June 1, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0764206052
ISBN-13: 978-0764206054
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
Buy Here: Amazon.com

Thanks to Jim Hart and Bethany House Publishers for sending a copy of the book to review!

The “King James Controversy”–the debate on whether the KJV Bible is the only true Bible or not–is on that is very interesting to me for several reasons. First, I grew up in an area where many churches “favor” the KJV, and are functionally KJV Onlyists. Second, I am a bit of a translating geek if you haven’t been able to tell. I have been wanting to read James White’s book for awhile now, and was excited to receive the new second edition in the mail. I haven’t read the first edition, so unfortunately, I cannot compare the two, though it seems that a couple of sections were added, and James added the ESV to most of the translations lists throughout the text.

White has written an excellent book defending modern translations, such as the T/NIV, ESV, NLT, etc. His arguments are thorough, easy to understand, and devastating to the King James Only (henceforth KJVO) position. He shows, primarily, that the KJVO position is built on circular logic, and that if they were to apply their critiques of translations to the KJV itself, it would fail their tests horrible. Their logic is circular, because they set out to prove what they already assume to be true–the KJV is the only true Bible, therefore all other translations must be false because they disagree with the KJV. There are some major problems here, not the least of which is why should we accept the KJV as the standard? KJVOists can’t answer this, outside of “because it is.”
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A few blog posts have come up on my reader recently about translation, specifically the method of translation. The first link, from Accordance developer David Lang, is an excellent article on fighting “Strongnosticism.” By this he means the tendency to look up a word in a dictionary like Strong’s, find a english gloss, and insert it into the text in such a way that they find a “deeper meaning”- all while ignoring the many factors that should be taken into consideration. Some of these factors include context (ex: should logos be translated as “word” “message,” “logic,” or any of the other glosses found in its semantic range?), author’s usage (Does Paul use “worship” the same way it’s used by Matthew?), etc. His first response to this (he promises more to come) is simply “[r]ealize that Greek and Hebrew are merely languages, and think about how you use language every day.”
You can check out David’s post here: Contra “Strongnosticism”

The second link is for the better bibles blog, where Wayne Leman takes a recent ESV article that included a chart dividing translations up between whether they are “word-for-word” and whether they are based on the “best manuscripts.” Wayne’s point of contention, and mine, is over the idea of a translation being “word-for-word.” There are no translations, other than an interlinear Bible, that can be called word-for-word. Wayne uses John 3:16 as an example of why the translations in the chart cannot be considered word-for-word. Another example that I like to use is in 2 John 12, where John uses a phrase: στόμα πρὸς στόμα λαλῆσαι which literally means “mouth to mouth to speak.” No translation would render it in such a “word-for-word” fashion. Most would translate it idiomatically as “talk face to face” because the idea behind the idioms (mouth to mouth in Greek, face to face in English) match.
Wayne, who is a far better linguist and translator than I, speaks to the issue here: comparing the five leading versions.