Translation of the Bible

The Bible was given in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, and most of the people who have ever read it have read it in some other tongue. Every English Bible is a translation, and every reader of an English Bible depends on the labors of translators. The men who made the King James Version put the matter vividly:

Indeed without translation into the vulgar tongue, the unlearned are but like children at Jacob’s well (which was deep) without a bucket or something to draw with: or as that person mentioned by Esay, to whom when a sealed book was delivered with this motion, Read this, I pray thee, he was fain to make this answer, I cannot, for it is sealed.¹ Preface, 1611

This page considers why the Bible must be translated, how the Reformation recovered that conviction, what the work of translation involves, and how a Christian may choose wisely among the many English versions now available. The history of the Bible’s writing, canon, and preservation is told on History of the Bible, and the story of the English versions from Wycliffe to 1611 on History of the English Bible.

Why the Bible Must Be Translated

The Christian faith is a translating faith. Timothy George observes that “the translatability of the Bible is inherent in the nature of the Christian faith. In this respect Christianity differs from other religious traditions, most notably Islam in which the language of revelation is restricted to the privileged tongue of Arabic. But the Christian faith teaches on principle that God’s written Word can be—and should be—translated into any language humans can speak.”²

Scripture itself shows the way. When Ezra read the law to the returned exiles, the Levites “read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading” (Neh. 8:8). The Gospels translate as they go: “Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise” (Mark 5:41); “We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ” (John 1:41). The apostles themselves preached from a translation. When the New Testament quotes the Old, Bruce Metzger notes, “it is almost always from the Septuagint version,” the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures.³ And at Pentecost the Spirit Himself overturned the curse of Babel, so that every man heard “in our tongues the wonderful works of God” (Acts 2:11).

George draws the deepest conclusion. To privilege any one language or any one version, he writes, “contradicts the fact of the incarnation, God’s supreme translation deed, as well as the miracle of Pentecost, in which the gospel shattered the language barrier in a spectacular way.”⁴ The eternal Word was made flesh and spoke Aramaic in Galilee. A God who so condescended to be understood will have His written Word understood by “all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” (Rev. 7:9).

The Reformation Conviction

Bruce Metzger divides the history of Bible translation into four great periods: the ancient versions; the Reformation, “when renderings were no longer made from the Latin Vulgate translation but from the original Hebrew and Greek text into the vernaculars of Europe”; the age of missionary translation; and the present age, in which native speakers increasingly translate into their own tongues.⁵ The second period was the decisive one. For a thousand years the Western church had read a translation of the Scriptures in a language the people no longer spoke. The Reformers went back to the fountains and then carried the water to the people.

The Westminster Confession summarizes the Reformed conviction with care. The Hebrew Old Testament and Greek New Testament, “being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical; so as in all controversies of religion, the Church is finally to appeal unto them.” But because “these original tongues are not known to all the people of God, who have right unto and interest in the scriptures, and are commanded, in the fear of God, to read and search them, therefore they are to be translated into the vulgar language of every nation unto which they come, that the word of God dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship him in an acceptable manner, and, through patience and comfort of the scriptures, may have hope.”⁶ Two truths are held together: the originals are the final court of appeal, and the people have a right to the Word in their own tongue.

Even before the Reformation, the Wycliffite translators had stated a translator’s creed that still deserves a hearing: “the best way of translating out of Latin into English is to translate according to the meaning, and not merely according to the words, so that the meaning might be as plain, or even more plain, in English as in Latin, while not straying any further from the literal translation than is necessary.”⁷ Tyndale, a century and a half later, had “perceived by experience how that it was impossible to establish the lay-people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order, and meaning of the text.”⁸ He was a humble translator. In his revised New Testament of 1534 he promised the reader that if anything had escaped him, “or might be more plainly translated, I will shortly after cause it to be mended,” and he explained that “in many places me thinketh it better to put a declaration in the margin, than to run too far from the text.”⁹

Luther labored the same way in German. He translated the New Testament at the Wartburg in a matter of weeks and then revised it until the last proof sheet he ever saw. He went to the butcher to learn the names of the inward parts of the sacrificial animals, and he insisted that a Hebrew idiom must be rendered by a living German idiom, not a word-for-word curiosity: “I endeavored to make Moses so German that no one would suspect he was a Jew.”¹⁰ Bainton notes the cost of that boldness as well as its glory: in Luther’s hands “Judea was transplanted to Saxony.”¹¹ The tension between faithfulness to the words and clarity for the reader was present from the beginning.

What Translators Face

Bruce Metzger describes four kinds of problems that confront every translator.¹²

The text. The manuscripts differ, and translators must decide which reading is original. In Mark 1:2–3, for example, the older manuscripts attribute the quotation from Malachi and Isaiah to “Isaiah the prophet,” while later ones, followed in 1611, read “in the prophets”—“an obvious amelioration of the earlier text.”

The meaning of words. Some Hebrew words occur nowhere else. The KJV translators took pim in 1 Samuel 13:21 to mean “a file”; archaeologists later found weights marked pim, and translators now know it was the price the Philistine smith charged. In the Greek New Testament the rare word epiousios in the Lord’s Prayer may mean “daily” bread or bread “for tomorrow.”

Punctuation. The ancient manuscripts have almost none. The translator must decide, for example, whether “on earth as it is in heaven” belongs only to “thy will be done” or to all three petitions before it (Matt. 6:9–10).

Grammar and vocabulary. Should adam be translated “man” or transliterated as the name Adam? Christos as “Christ” or “anointed”? Baptizō as “baptize” or “immerse”? Presbyteros as “presbyter” or “elder”? Wordplays and alphabetic acrostics resist translation altogether.

Metzger’s conclusion is honest: “no translation of the Scriptures is perfect, as anyone who has tried to make one will readily agree.” Yet he ends by quoting the 1611 translators: “the very meanest translation of the Bible in English … containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the King’s speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech.”¹³

Word for Word or Thought for Thought?

English translations are commonly described by their philosophy of translation. The preface to the New Living Translation states the two main theories clearly. The first, “formal equivalence,” “literal,” or “word-for-word” translation, attempts to render each word of the original and to preserve its syntax as far as possible. The second, “dynamic equivalence,” “functional equivalence,” or “thought-for-thought” translation, aims “to produce in English the closest natural equivalent of the message expressed by the original-language text, both in meaning and in style.” The same preface concedes that “all translations contain a mixture of these two philosophies. A purely formal-equivalence translation would be unintelligible in English, and a purely dynamic-equivalence translation would risk being unfaithful to the original.”¹⁴

The prefaces of the major versions show where each stands:

• ESV: “an ‘essentially literal’ translation that seeks as far as possible to reproduce the precise wording of the original text and the personal style of each Bible writer,” while acknowledging that “every translation is at many points a trade-off between literal precision and readability.”¹⁵
• NKJV: “complete equivalence,” which “seeks to preserve all of the information in the text, while presenting it in good literary form.”¹⁶
• CSB: “optimal equivalence,” which “recognizes that form cannot always be neatly separated from meaning and should not be changed … unless comprehension demands it.”¹⁷
• NIV: the translators “have striven for more than a word-for-word translation. Because thought patterns and syntax differ from language to language, faithful communication of the meaning of the writers of the Bible demands frequent modifications in sentence structure.”¹⁸
• NLT: a thought-for-thought translation, designed so that “the meaning of the text is readily apparent to the contemporary reader.”¹⁹

Beyond both lies paraphrase, which restates the sense freely. Of the most famous, Köstenberger and Croteau say bluntly: “The Living Bible is not a translation but a paraphrase.”²⁰ The spectrum may be pictured roughly as follows:²¹

The Case on Each Side

For an essentially literal translation. Leland Ryken has argued the case most fully. He grants that all translation involves interpretation at the level of choosing English words, but he insists that “the goal of an essentially literal translation is to keep the line of demarcation clear between translation and interpretation of meaning.”²² Kevin DeYoung, explaining why his congregation adopted the ESV, points to its transparency. In 2 Corinthians 5:14, “the love of Christ controls us” preserves the ambiguity of the Greek—Christ’s love for us, our love for Christ, or both—whereas “Christ’s love compels us” settles the question for the reader. He also values the retention of theological words such as propitiation, which some versions replace with paraphrases.²³ For preaching and close study, the advantage is considerable: the text the preacher explains is the text the people hold.

For a meaning-based translation. Douglas Moo, defending the NIV, answers that every translation changes God’s words: “‘God’s words,’ his inspired words, are in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. By definition, translations change every one of ‘God’s words’ the minute they put them into English. The real question is this: Does a given translation accurately convey the meaning of God’s words in contemporary English?”²⁴ The 1611 translators themselves refused to bind themselves to “an uniformity of phrasing, or to an identity of words,” and rendered the same Hebrew or Greek word by different English words where the sense allowed.²⁵ Even Wycliffe’s men, as we have seen, aimed to translate “according to the meaning, and not merely according to the words.”

Both sides agree on more than their debates suggest. Both believe the Bible is God’s inspired Word; both seek accuracy and clarity; and both acknowledge that every translation is a trade-off. As Köstenberger and Croteau conclude after setting four versions side by side, the Bible “is God’s Word, and God’s revelation is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. But, despite their best efforts, translators are not.”²⁶

Which Text? The King James Only Question

Translations also differ because they are made from different Greek texts. The King James New Testament was translated from the printed Greek text that descended from Erasmus (1516) through Stephanus and Beza, which came to be called the Textus Receptus. Most modern versions are made from critical editions that draw on the older manuscripts discovered since. Some Christians conclude that only the King James Version, or only the Received Text, is the preserved Word of God.²⁷

That conclusion should be weighed carefully and charitably. Three considerations deserve attention.

First, the difference is not doctrinal. Geisler and Nix judge that between the Received Text and the critical text “there is no substantial difference,” for “the textual variants are doctrinally inconsequential. … For all practical purposes, both texts convey the content of the autographs.”²⁸

Second, the King James translators did not hold the King James Only view. They placed alternative renderings in the margin and quoted Augustine that “variety of Translations is profitable for the finding out of the sense of the Scriptures.”²⁹ They described their work not as a new translation but an effort “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one.”³⁰

Third, the language has changed. Mark Ward, who loves the King James Version, shows that its greatest difficulty for modern readers is not archaic words but “false friends,” words still in use whose meanings have shifted, so that a reader thinks he understands what he does not. He is careful to add that the fault is not the translators’: “I don’t blame them for failing to be prophets.”³¹ The Reformation principle that the Bible must be in the people’s own tongue applies to the English of every generation, including our own.

The King James Version remains a noble translation, and many believers read it with great profit; see The King James Version. The error lies not in loving it but in treating it as the one translation through which God may speak. George’s warning applies here as it applied to the Vulgate: such “linguistic privileging” contradicts the incarnation and Pentecost.³²

Choosing a Translation

Robert L. Thomas suggests that versions be compared category by category rather than all at once: their historical background (whether they stand in the main Tyndale tradition of English Bibles), their textual basis, their translation technique, any theological bias, and the type of English they use.³³ Drawing these sources together, a few principles may help.

• Prefer a committee translation from the original languages. Geisler and Nix conclude that “the committee translations of the English Bible are careful renditions of the Hebrew and Greek texts that accurately transmit the infallible and inerrant Word of God.”³⁴
• Read the preface. Every responsible version explains its text and its philosophy. A reader who knows how his Bible was made will use it better.
• Use a more literal version for close study. When the aim is to see the structure of an argument, to trace a word, or to follow a preacher’s exposition, a formal or essentially literal translation keeps the reader closest to the words.
• Compare. As the 1611 translators said, variety of translations is profitable. Reading a passage in two or three good versions often opens it.
• Do not make a paraphrase your Bible. A paraphrase may illuminate, but it should not be the text one studies, memorizes, or preaches.
• Above all, read it. “The most important thing is that you have a good English Bible and that you read it regularly and frequently because God’s Word is your life, your light, and your spiritual food.”³⁵

Cautions

No translation is inerrant. Inspiration belongs to the original writings. That is not a reason for doubt. Fallible translations do not make inerrancy invalid. On the contrary a belief in inerrancy makes our endeavor to produce accurate translations more expedient.³⁶ The 1611 translators said the same in their own idiom: the meanest translation still “is the word of God.”

“All translation is interpretation” is true and also too simple. Every rendering involves judgment about meaning, as Moo rightly insists. But Ryken is also right that there is a difference between translating the words and explaining what the words mean, and that the difference matters most where Scripture is ambiguous or dense. Readers should neither dismiss the debate nor turn it into a party badge.

Avoid tribalism. Godly scholars defend the ESV, the NIV, the NASB, the CSB, the NKJV, and the KJV, and they have reasons. The question of translation is important, but it is not a test of orthodoxy.

The numbers. Counts of English translations vary with what is counted. Metzger reports lists of “nearly sixty more or less different English versions of the whole Bible; plus another seventy-five of the New Testament,” and another tally of 291 translations between 1611 and 1991; other counts, including Bibles, Testaments, and paraphrases, reach well beyond four hundred.³⁷

A Gift, Not a Curse

We live in what Stephen Nichols calls “a time of unprecedented access to God’s Word.”³⁸ The plowboy has his Bible in a dozen versions. The abundance can confuse, but it is first of all a mercy, bought by the labors of Jerome and Wycliffe and Tyndale and Luther and the unnamed thousands who have rendered the Word into the tongues of the earth. Many still wait for it.

The purpose of every translation is that men and women might hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in words they understand. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Ps. 119:105). The translator only lifts the lamp; the light is God’s. Soli Deo gloria.

Bible History of the Bible History of the English Bible