What About Bible Translations?
Many Christians are (rightly) concerned about the purity of our Scriptures. After all, they are final authority for faith and practice for the church. And this concern manifests itself it many ways. Some Christians go to seminary, study the biblical languages, and then become textual scholars. Men like Bruce Metzger, Daniel B. Wallace, Mark Ward, Wesley Huff and other individuals have undertaken the task to become textual critics (I’ll explain what that means shortly). Education is not an end all for every single aspect of the Christian faith. Some things must be taken on authority from God and his word, regardless of whether or not our senses agree with this belief. However, that is the goal of this article: to educate. Part of my passion is to help Christians understand the Bible better, and to help non-Christians come to Jesus so that they may begin to undertake the task to try and understand God’s direct revelation to humanity.
- Textual Criticism -
What is textual criticism? Simply put, it is the study of the documents of a written work. Nothing more, nothing less. Think of it less as “criticizing” a written work and more like applying critical thinking—the examination of evidence, the dating of the document, etc.— to a handwritten document so that a historical analysis can be performed on that document. Biblical textual criticism has a controversial role within the church as a whole. Most people do not really understand what it means. To be quite honest, I never really understood what it meant until the last few years when I actually took time educate myself on it.
Some have unfortunately succumbed to “Christian” propaganda seeking to disparage faithful men who translate and engage in textual criticism (a fringe minority, thankfully). Others simply may have not taken the time to educate themselves on what textual criticism actually is (the most likely culprit in the skepticism). After all, textual “criticism” sounds quite negative. Here’s a great course, taught by leading American textual critic Daniel B. Wallace, on biblicaltraining.org entitled “Introduction to New Testament Textual Criticism.” I am not a textual criticism expert, so I will bow out of this conversation here. Dr. Wallace is a highly respected textual critic and I would recommend taking this course for a clearer picture of what textual criticism is. Keep an open mind and remember, we do not know everything, so we should never be so sure of ourselves as to think we cannot learn something new.
- Which Bible Can I Trust? -
Now that we’ve established what textual criticism is, and I’ve given you a resource that I’m sure will be helpful in your understanding of it, let’s turn our attention to Bible translations. There is a necessity to define our terms here. What is a “Bible translation”? A Bible translation, simply put, is a collection of the biblical texts that has been translated from the original Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic of the original authors of Scripture so that we may have and read God’s Word in an accessible and easy-to-understand English (or whatever language you may speak).
The next question is, undoubtedly, which one should you trust? Some Christians, who no doubt have a well-meaning zeal for the purity of the Word of God, insist that only one translation—typically it’s the King James Bible—is faithful and that all others—like the NIV, ESV, CSB, and NKJV—should be thrown out or at least viewed with a high degree of skepticism. Now, my goal is not to disparage our brothers and sisters and their convictions about God’s Word. Thank God for people like them who are willing to defend the purity of God’s Word. However, the beliefs that they hold are not always rooted in factual evidence, and it is by no fault of their own. There are strikingly large volumes of literature written to “expose the men, message, and manuscripts” behind modern Bible “perversions.” However, this sort of thing is based on much fear-mongering and sensational language. I’m sad to say it based on a fair amount of deception as well. Whether it is intentional or not, many of these works are based on incorrect, unverified, or blatantly false claims. Many of the quotes they claim to have from modern Bible translation committees (or the men/women on them) are riddled with out-of-context, edited quotes. I’ve personally dug into some of their literature; unintentional deception is still deception. They are building a narrative to convince you of a belief, not presenting you with a set of facts and all the evidence to go with it. If they did this, they wouldn’t have anything write about!
The reason for this skepticism, many have been told, is that the manuscript basis for these translations is corrupted. Let me ease your mind a little: most of the manuscripts are “corrupted,” including the ones that the King James Bible is based on! Doesn’t that give you some sort of peace of mind? I’m only half kidding. In all reality though, that is true...to an extent. By “corruption,” I simply mean that they were all written by humans and will have a some amount of error or fault within them that is characteristic of human translation of ancient documents. Humans are corrupt, so their works and efforts will be imperfect. That’s all there is to it. This does not in any way diminish their value or worth as the Word of God, nor does it cause them to lose credibility in the scholarly community. Granted, this may be an oversimplification for a textual critic. I am not a textual critic; my role here is education for everyone to clearly understand it, even if imperfectly.
Just think if you were sitting in a darkened room, the only lighting is the ambience from a couple of candles beside you and quill ink pen on vellum paper—or papyrus, if you’re in the early days of the ancient church. You’ve translating in this room for hours. You’re eyes are getting heavy, you’re probably ready for your dinner and to go to bed, yet you keep going because you have undertaken one of the most important tasks of your millennia: translating the literal words of God into a language that millions and billions will read for centuries to come. Do you see what I am doing here? I am trying to get us to put ourselves into the shoes of the translators of Scripture.
If you were in their shoes, you would have likely made mistakes as well. This would result in you “corrupting” your manuscript. However, you may not catch all of them and they might end up making it into Bibles that are four, five, six, or seven centuries removed from your time period. This “corruption” would end up being passed on, all because you missed a letter in a particular word of a passage because your stomach was growling for dinner. It wasn’t intentional and it certainly was not intended to invalidate the Bible, yet some folks from 600 years later decide to throw you under the bus because you made a mistake when you were just a little hangry.
This is where the job of the modern textual critic is: to identify these errors in translation, point them out, figure out where they came from and why they’re there, and how to best remedy them to give us the most faithful and accurate translation of what the original authors had to say. Modern textual criticism is bridging the gap between the original languages of the Bible, the translators and writers of specific manuscripts, and our modern Bible translations. Sometimes that means removing something that should never have been there in the first place, other times it means adding something that should have been there all along. Still yet, other times, it means merely rewording a particular passage to more accurately reflect the original intent of the author. They are not a part of some satanic ploy to destroy God’s Word, nor are they sitting in the ivory towers of academia writhing their hands together plotting to destroy the Bible like Voldemort consulting with his death-eaters trying to figure out the best way to destroy Harry Potter.
This is why it is vitally important to, above any Bible translation that you use, trust that GOD has preserved his word. He does not need conspiracy theorists writing sinister-looking books with red dragons on them attempting to instill fear and doubt into Christians about God’s Word. All that does is stir up fear, division, and unnecessary conflict among Christ’s church. As a matter of fact, God does not need any human intervention to preserve his word. God could have caused the ancient papyrus scrolls and stone tablets to never whither away, thus preserving the original words of the authors of Scripture. However, he chose not to do this. He chose to work through the imperfection of human translators. I think that instead of viewing this as a blight on biblical transmission history, Christians ought to view this as another sign of the sovereignty of God in preserving his word, even amidst the imperfections that resulted from human error in translation.
Who knows why God chose to do it this way? Consider what God told Isaiah in chapter 55 of his text:
“8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and your ways are not my ways.” This is the Lord’s declaration. 9 “For as heaven is higher than earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. 10 For just as rain and snow fall from heaven and do not return there without saturating the earth and making it germinate and sprout, and providing seed to sow and food to eat, 11 so my word that comes from my mouth will not return to me empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.””
God does not operate according to our understanding. This means that his way of preserving His word should not be discounted because it is not the correct format for our denominational loyalties or theological persuasions. This is what you need to know: God has preserved his word, and we do not need to be scared about how he has chosen to do it. We should trust that he has chosen the right people at the right time to do the right things to preserve his word for us. The multiplicity of modern Bible translations in English and various other international languages in proof of that. Don’t let anyone scare into thinking your Bible is corrupt because of some minor differences in the English or manuscript variants.
- Personal Recommendations -
That was quite a bit, I know. Now we are getting to the part I’ve been looking forward to: recommending Bible translations. Why am I writing this article? Because there are so many translations out there, and so many misconceptions about them. Hopefully this article will give you some peace of mind as to some good recommendations. My first recommendation, assuming you are not a scholar who is fluent in Koine Greek or Ancient Hebrew, is the English Standard Version. I personally like this version for formal study and making outlines for articles. For almost 100 years, Crossway Publishers (originally called Good News Publications in 1938) has had a commitment to upholding the Gospel going to the world, and in 2001, took that seriously by releasing this translation of the Bible. It is a faithful translation based on the decisions of Crossways intelligent team of translators who used the best and most accurate manuscripts in the possession of the Christian community as the basis for their text. It is a “formal equivalent,” which just means word for word. Essentially, the form of the text was priority in their translation. They sought to ensure that, of the manuscripts they used, every word where it was possible to have an English equivalent had an English equivalent.
My next recommendation would be the Christian Standard Bible, by Holman Bible Publishers. This is the official Bible translation put out by the editing team at Broadman and Holman Bible publishers. For almost 150 years, Broadman and Holman Bible publishers have published Bibles for the masses. Today they have a currently published Bible that is easy to read and understand, in modern English, and is a good balance of form and function. Formal in the sense that it stays faithful to the original languages; functional in the sense that it is less formal than the ESV on the word and grammar structure, seeking to communicate the meaning of the text through its translation.
More Helpful Resources on Textual Criticism and Choosing a Bible Translation
Tim Wildsmith’s YouTube Channel
Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible
The King James Version Debate: A Plea for Realism
The King James Only Controversy