Illuminating the History of the Bible

Peter J. Gurry

Why We Worry When Choosing a Bible Translation

The ‘paradox of choice’ explains why Christians worry so much about picking the wrong translation. What can we do?

By far the most common question I get asked about Bible translation is What’s the best one? What I’ve noticed is that, very often, the question comes with a hint of worry—worry that, depending on my answer, the person may discover they’ve been using a second-best translation. And when it’s God’s word we’re reading, no one wants to settle for second best! The anxiety is understandable.

But can anything be done about it? Are those without knowledge of Greek and Hebrew simply doomed to always second-guess their translation choice? How much should we worry that we’ve picked the wrong translation?

How much should we worry that we’ve picked the wrong translation?

So many options

Before we go further, we need to consider the historical conditions that lead to our question. For much of history, the ordinary Christian couldn’t ask it at all since he either had no direct access to the Bible, couldn’t read it, or couldn’t afford to own one. One further reason is that for many, in the past and still for some today, their native language only has a single Bible translation.

Of course, for those of us living in the modern West, things are quite different. We can download Bible apps at no cost and then choose between any number of translations.

At Biblegateway.com you can, right now, choose among over 60 English translations. There are twenty for Spanish, five for German, and four for French. Given the size of the Bible and the amount of work required to make a translation, this is a huge abundance and a remarkable testament to our Christian heritage.

The reign of the King

There was a time when each of these languages was dominated by a single Bible translation. In English, there was a period of over 250 years when the King James Bible reigned as the Bible of the English-speaking world. In Spanish, the Reina-Valera had an even longer run and, in German, the Luther Bible had an equal or greater effect in German than the King James had in English.

Related

The long reign of these translations makes us wonder: is it good to have so many? Were we better off when we all read the same Bible? There can be little doubt that having a single, shared translation comes with significant benefits. In his book Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, Mark Ward discusses five of them, and I’m sure his list could be expanded.

He notes how even the late atheist Christopher Hitchens saw the problem. Writing in Vanity Fair for the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Hitchens complained that the proliferation of Bibles means “there will no longer be a culture of the kind which instantly recognized what Lincoln meant when he spoke of ‘a house divided.’ The gradual eclipse of a single structure has led, not to a new clarity, but to a new Babel.”

One of the biggest losses when translations proliferate is the loss of a shared reference point.

He’s not wrong. One of the biggest losses when translations proliferate is the loss of a shared reference point across an entire language. When we all share the same Bible all our theological debates have to be hammered out on the same anvil. There’s simply no option to object, “But my Bible says…” Sectarianism isn’t impossible, but it is harder when we all use the same Bible.

The blessing of abundance

But for all the benefits of a single translation, there are also drawbacks. Without anything else to compare it to, readers of a single translation are left in the dark about difficult translation decisions where differing interpretations of the original are possible. Marginal notes can alleviate some of this, and the King James translators certainly used them. But notes are a limited tool, and most readers in my experience blissfully ignore them.

One of the benefits of multiple translations is that it makes Bible readers more aware that what they are reading is a translation.

For all the problems that come with “but my Bible says,” one of the benefits of multiple translations is that it makes Bible readers more aware that what they are reading is a translation and not the original. They may then be further inclined to compare translations and become more discerning readers.

The fourth-century church father Augustine (354–430 AD), whose own ability in the original languages was limited, realized some of the benefits of using multiple Bible translations. In his classic book on Christian interpretation he wrote this:

In this matter [of learning unknown idioms], too, the great number of the translators proves a very great assistance, if they are examined and discussed with a careful comparison of their texts.

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 2.14 [21]

Augustine is saying that having multiple translations can help the reader who’s tripping over an unknown idiom. That’s still the case today. Where one translation is opaque another may come to the rescue with clarity. This is especially true for first-time Bible readers who may stumble over any number of unfamiliar terms in a verse like Romans 3:21. In the NASB it reads:

But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets.

A turn to the NLT offers clear interpretations—and they are interpretations—for each of the key terms:

But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago.

For some readers, the NLT will prove to be, as Augustine said, “a very great assistance” in understanding these biblical idioms.

The precedent for plurality

Besides noting the benefits and drawbacks of multiple translations, there is also the importance of precedent. This is especially the case in English where Christians sometimes think that our modern proliferation of translations is completely new. It isn’t. English has had multiple translations before. Miles Coverdale (1488–1569) was one of the great heroes of the English Bible and he knew this well.

Coverdale is the unsung hero of the English Bible. He produced several important translations in his lifetime. Image source

His most famous Bible was his first. Finished in 1535, it has the distinction of being the first complete, printed English Bible. Given that he based it on the work of William Tyndale and made use of other Bibles in German and Latin, it’s not surprising that he felt the need to defend the value of multiple translations in his preface. In doing so, he appealed to precedent. And he had plenty of it to appeal to. He wrote:

Whereas some men think now that many translations make division in the faith and in the people of God, that is not so: for it was never better with the congregation of God, than when every church almost had the Bible of a sundry [= different] translation.1Taken from Alfred W. Pollard, Records of the English Bible (Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1902), 203 (spelling updated). Also available in updated spelling in Gerald Bray, Translating the Bible from William Tyndale to King James (London: Latimer Trust, 2010), 69.

Coverdale goes on to cite examples from both Greek and Latin, drawing special attention to the case of the Greek Septuagint, which was revised three separate times.

For Coverdale, the existence of multiple translations was a blessing. It was evidence that God “hath opened unto his church the gift of interpretation [= translation] and of printing.” He praises God that there are so many capable of doing the work of translation. If only such eagerness for new translation hadn’t died with Augustine, Coverdale says, the church in his day might not be in such need of reform.

In all this, Coverdale was frank about his own limits as a translator (he did not know Greek and Hebrew). As a result, he offers a refreshing call for teamwork in the task of translating. Not every translator will hit the bullseye every time, he says, but we shoot better when we shoot together. Where one misses, the others should encourage rather than criticize out of envy or spite.

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Coverdale has hit on an important point. Today, the proliferation of English Bible translation can, at times, encourage competition rather than collaboration. This can happen whenever Bible readers—or Bible publishers—exaggerate the differences between translations in their effort to identify “the best” one. This can also lead us to needlessly denigrate other translations.

This hardly means endorsing every crackpot translation. There really are bad translations. But our mainstream, evangelical translations are good. Where they differ, it is usually a matter of legitimate difference in how to interpret the original or in the audience they are trying to reach or in their translation philosophy. To be sure, not every difference in translation is inconsequential. Some really do matter. But, on the whole, we benefit from having multiple archers shooting at the same target.

The paradox of choice

But, if Coverdale is right about the benefits of multiple translations, why do many of us feel so much angst when choosing a translation? Why is there so much pressure to have the best one?

One reason is what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the paradox of choice, and it’s one that Coverdale did not anticipate. The paradox, as Schwartz explains it, is simple: “Though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don’t seem to be benefiting from it psychologically.”2Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, rev. ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2016), 103. Instead, the explosion of choice, he argues, often leads to dissatisfaction, regret, and paralysis. More becomes less.

Every car shopper has felt the problem. When you leave the house, you are content to find a good, reliable car to get you to and from work. But when you arrive at the lot and look out across the sea of endless options, you quickly begin to feel that you absolutely must get THE BEST car. Details you weren’t even thinking about before—color, trim, electronics—suddenly become deciding factors.

The smaller the differences are between options, the more anxiety we feel in choosing between them.

What’s true of cars is true of translations. The more choices we have, the more we feel compelled to get the absolute best one. And just like with cars, it’s sometimes the case that the smaller the differences are between options, the more anxiety we feel in choosing between them. It’s no longer enough to have a literal translation; we must have the most literal. But then we wonder if what we really need is the most accurate. Or, should we get the most accurate and most readable? As the options grow, so does the fear of picking the wrong one.

To solve the problem, we might even exaggerate the differences in order to help make the decision easier. After all, a choice between good and bad is much easier to make than one between good and good-in-a-slightly-different-way. It certainly doesn’t help that publishers sometimes leverage this anxiety in their marketing. The website for the recent NRSVue, for example, calls it “the most meticulously researched, rigorously reviewed, and faithfully accurate translation on the market.” (I’ve yet to see a new translation marketed as “accurate enough” or “pretty readable”!)

How to avoid paralysis

So, what can we do? Of the suggestions that Schwartz offers, I think the ones that apply most readily to choosing a Bible translation are these: reduce your options, be content with “good enough,” and be grateful.

1. Reduce your options

When you reduce your options, it makes the decision feel less momentous. There are any number of ways to do this with translations. The simplest is to adopt the translation your church or denomination uses. If you trust your church or denomination enough to be a member, it makes sense that you would also trust their choice in translation. So, pick theirs and be done.

Another way to narrow your choices is to pick a translation that descends from a trusted tradition—that of the KJV, for instance. These include the NKJV, ESV, NASB, and NRSV. If readability is most important to you, then pick one with a focus on that like the NLT, NIV, or maybe the CSB. If you preach regularly, you probably want something more literal like the ESV or NASB that lets you, as the preacher, explain the text.

2. Be content with good enough

If this still leaves too many options, ask yourself if you’re making perfection the enemy of the good. I think many Christians who are worried about choosing the “wrong” translation need to hear that any mainstream, evangelical translation is going to serve them very well. They are all very good—even if they are good in different ways.

If you already use the NIV or the NASB, ask yourself why you feel the need to switch. Is there really something wrong with your current translation? Or, have you fallen prey to the comparison trap? If so, it may help to remember that you can always supplement your main translation with others by using any number of free online resources. I highly recommend it.

3. Be grateful

Finally, I think the best way to overcome the paradox of choice is to turn angst into gratitude. Behind the problem is a blessing: we have so many good English translations to choose from! Most Christians in history, and many Christians around the world still today, do not have the rich legacy of Bible translation we have in English. We should be enormously grateful for this heritage. Instead of worrying about choosing the wrong translation, most of us should just be grateful we have a choice at all.

As Coverdale realized, we should not take it for granted when those with gifts in the biblical languages use them to produce good translations. “Ye ought rather,” he writes, “to give God high thanks therefore, who through his Spirit stirreth up men’s minds, so to exercise themselves therein.” Today, we have more reason than ever to give God such “high thanks.”

Notes

Our Year in Review

As the year closes, we take look back at our work in 2023 and cast a glimpse ahead to 2024.

As we close the books on another year at the Text & Canon Institute, we’re grateful that readers like you found our website by the hundreds of thousands through Google searches, social media posts, and of course, by subscribing to our email list. To give you a sense of our growth, this past year, our website received more views than in the previous two years combined! We’ve especially loved meeting you at conferences, getting your emails, and hearing about your passion for the Bible’s rich history. So, here’s a look back at our work in 2023 and a glimpse of the year ahead.

New articles

This year, we published fifteen new articles. Readers learned about Erasmus and the search for the original text of the New Testament, a Hebrew manuscript that sold for over $38M at auction, bad Bible translations, a new papyrus with sayings of Jesus, the Bible in Jesus’ own language, and more. We enlisted scholars to write accessible articles from their expertise, and we’re happy to see their work received so positively.

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We especially love it when we hear from readers about how our articles have helped in their own ministry. From Kentucky, Hannah sent us this encouraging note:

I teach Apologetics to High School Seniors. As a part of the course, I always give a couple of lectures on biblical manuscripts and canon. The website has been very helpful in my own preparation and as a resource to give my students. I’ve had several students and alumni ask questions about issues of text and canon, and I have been so thankful to know that I can direct them to the TCI for information that is honest, scholarly, and trustworthy. Just a few weeks ago, I had a student asking where she could find reliable information on historical evidence for the Bible, and TCI was the first resource I recommended.

From Colorado Christian University, Megan noted the benefit of the web articles for her undergraduate students:

I am including several links to the TCI website in my syllabus as required reading in the Spring. I’m grateful to have it as a resource for my undergrads!

We’re humbled that the website received significant traffic this year from the US, the UK, and Canada. And we’re also excited that many readers found the Spanish and Portuguese versions of the site. In fact, our second most read article this year was the Spanish article ¿Por qué son Diferentes Las Biblias Protestantes y Católicas? Many of these views came from Mexico, Colombia, and Spain to name only the top three Spanish-speaking countries.

Speaking

In addition to publishing articles, our team traveled and spoke to churches and parachurch groups around the USA about how we got our Bible through the Scribes & Scripture conference. In the spring, we spoke at the Young Life Mountain West leaders conference in Spokane, WA; Desert Springs Church in Albuquerque, NM; and three other churches in our home state of Arizona. Interest in these events continues to increase. (Keep reading to see if we’re speaking near you next year.)

John Meade speaking on the canon of Scripture at TGC23. Image source

In the fall, we spoke at The Gospel Coalition national conference in Indianapolis to an audience of 1,300 people. We gave talks on the canon of Scripture and the history of the English Bible, and Dr. Michael Kruger spoke on some misconceptions about the New Testament canon. With attendees standing and sitting on the floor in the back of the room, the session was a complete success.

Scribes & Scripture videos

Routinely, when we announce we’re speaking somewhere, we receive several questions from our followers about whether the talks will be recorded and made available. We listened. And we did something about it. This year, we recorded our Scribes & Scripture conference talks in a world-class studio with a live audience. As much as we would like to travel and speak to every group, we simply can’t. We recorded our talks this summer and hope to make them available to individuals and groups next year. Stay tuned!

This year, we recorded our Scribes & Scripture conference in a world-class studio with a live audience.

Publications

Published just last year, our book Scribes and Scripture: The Amazing Story of How We Got the Bible (Crossway) was a finalist for the 2023 Christian Book Awards in the category of Bible reference works. Plans are already in the works for several translations. If you’ve read the book, consider leaving us a review on Amazon. It really helps.

In addition to speaking and producing digital resources, we also published a number of more academic works. Dr. Meade, along with his coeditors, published a special volume known as a Festschrift in honor of Dr. Peter J. Gentry, Like Nails Firmly Fixed (Qoh 12:11): Essays on the Text and Language of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, Presented to Peter J. Gentry on the Occasion of His Retirement (Peeters). Dr. Meade also published several chapters in edited volumes including “The Canonical Shape of the Greek Old Testament” (T&T Clark) and “Septuagint: Thematic Parallels to the New Testament” (Baker).

Dr. Gurry had several articles and chapters published, including “Inerrancy and the Initial Text” (in the journal Presbyterion), the entry on textual criticism in the new second edition of the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters (IVP), a chapter on textual variants in early Protestant Bibles in Pen, Print, and Pixels: Advances in Textual Criticism in the Digital Era (Hendrickson), and, finally, a chapter arguing for reasoned eclecticism in Can We Recover the Original Text of the New Testament? (Wipf & Stock).

Looking to 2024

Looking forward to the New Year, we eagerly anticipate serving you with more of our digital articles about the history of the Bible for the church and public. Make sure you’ve subscribed so you don’t miss an article. Also, consider a donation to the TCI so that we can enter the New Year fiscally strong. We depend on generous supporters to accomplish our mission of illuminating the history of the Bible.

We depend on generous supporters to accomplish our mission of illuminating the history of the Bible.

Next year, we plan to speak in Houston, TX; Kansas City, MO; Snohomish, WA; New Hyde Park, NY; and Phoenix, AZ. See if we’re speaking near you. John also plans to speak at the Apologetics Canada conference, “Can I Trust the Bible?” on March 2–3.

We will send out an announcement on the Scribes & Scripture videos once those are ready for distribution and we hope to announce some exciting updates on our academic colloquia in the first half of next year. You will not want to miss these.

Finally, as we sign off on 2023, we thank our Lord Jesus for his faithfulness to the TCI as we celebrate his miraculous birth this time of year. We are fully committing our plans to him, recognizing his goodness to us in all the work we get to do.

From all of us at the TCI, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Peter Gurry
John D. Meade

The Life and Legacy of William Tyndale

Tyndale’s work to translate the Bible into English reminds us that the Bible has a history written in blood.

It’s fair to say that no single individual has left a more indelible mark on the language of the English Bible than William Tyndale (ca. 1494–1536). He was the first to translate the Bible into English from the original languages (the Wycliffe Bible was from Latin). He completed two editions of the New Testament and got as far as 2 Chronicles (and Jonah) in the Old Testament. By one estimate, as much as 80 percent of the wording of the King James Version is Tyndale’s. He was, by all accounts, a superb translator and his concern was always to give the Bible to the people. As one biographer says, “One key to Tyndale’s genius is that his ear for how people spoke was so good. The English he was using was not the language of the scribe or lawyer or schoolmaster; it really was, at base, the spoken language of the people.”1David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 356.

But he was also not afraid to innovate. He coined many English words including “anathema,” “godly,” “Passover,” and “fisherman.” He is also responsible for such famous biblical lines as “let there be light” (Gen. 1:3) and “fight the good fight” (1 Tim. 6:12) and he gave us “Jehovah” for the personal name of God in the Old Testament.

Preparation

Not much is known about Tyndale’s youth. Our first real record of him comes from his time at Oxford, where he began his training at age fourteen. This was on the younger side, but also not especially unusual for the time. The university was still small by today’s standards with only several thousand students, but it was growing in influence. The printing press was still new and printed textbooks were available but rare. Students typically borrowed, bought, or had a new copy made of their textbooks. Importantly, the memory of John Wycliffe still loomed large at Oxford. More than that, the tide of the Reformation was just beginning to hit the English shores. A German monk named Martin Luther would soon make a deep impression on Tyndale’s theology.

Painting of William Tyndale. Wikimedia

It was said of Tyndale’s time in Oxford that he was “brought up from a child in the university of Oxford, where he, by long continuance, grew up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts as especially in the knowledge of the scriptures, whereunto his mind was singularly addicted.” Along with this devotion, he was intellectually gifted. He would later be praised by another scholar for mastering eight languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, and, of course, English.

A series of events that would shape his future occurred just as the young Tyndale finished his master’s degree. The first was the publication of Erasmus’s Greek-Latin New Testament that came off the press in 1516. This new edition met a growing interest in the Bible in its original languages. Nowhere would that interest be more significant than in Germany where, a year later, Luther nailed his 95 theses in a challenge to the Catholic church’s teaching on indulgences (1517). Five years after that, in 1522, Luther published his German New Testament—the first translated from the Greek and an edition that would become Tyndale’s model for an English counterpart.

After finishing school, Tyndale returned to his home in Gloucestershire, England to become a tutor. It was during this time that he was ordained as a priest and began to preach in the surrounding churches. What marked his preaching was his emphasis on the Scriptures. But the people were not used to this, nor were they well acquainted with the Bible. His preaching was so unusual that he was warned that, if he kept it up, it would eventually cost him his life—a prescient warning in hindsight.

But Tyndale persisted for, as he wrote later, he “perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to [es]stablish 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 … which thing only moved me to translate the New Testament.” Already, he began to see the need for the Bible in the language of the people.

It was also during this time that he had his most famous encounter. He met a “learned man” who told him that “we were better without God’s law than the pope’s” to which he famously replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws” and “If God spare my life ere many year, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”

Rejection in London

As predicted, not everyone liked Tyndale’s preaching and he soon found himself with enemies who began to threaten his patron. So, he left Gloucestershire for London with hopes of securing the support and necessary license-to-print from the Bishop of London to publish a Bible in English from the original languages. By this time, he had already produced several translations of Greek classical works as a sort of proof-of-concept and he probably began his New Testament while in London. But it was to no avail.

After a year of failed attempts to secure a meeting with the bishop, Tyndale came to see that England was not welcome to his ideas. As he would say later, he came to see “not only that there was no room in my lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England.” He left for Europe in 1524.

The time in London was not a waste, however. While there, he established crucial connections with a group of merchants who supported him and would continue to do so.2David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 143. They would prove key to his success. As one writer says of them,

The merchants of London, mainly in the cloth and tailoring industries, were firmly entrenched in the Lollard movement first set in motion by John Wycliffe 150 years earlier, a movement which now was in touch with the German Lutherans and which, in defiance of English Church law, was crying out for a new translation of the Scriptures. Such men as these were to provide the finance and shipping that were crucial to the success of the enterprise, and that is how, in 1525, Tyndale found himself in Cologne and in the printing house of Peter Quentell.3W. R. Cooper, “Introduction,” The New Testament: 1526 Tyndale Bible, Original Spelling Edition (London: British Library, 2020), ix.

It is in Cologne that he first begins to print his New Testament.

The First Print Run

Printing began in 1525, but was interrupted when the printshop was raided by authorities. He seems to have reached only to Mark and, today, only part of Matthew survives in a single copy. But the door had cracked. For the first time in English, Matthew 7:7 read, “Ask and it shall be given you: Seek and ye shall find: Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”

Tyndale did not give up. He fled up the Rhine River to Worms—the same city where Luther had defended his own theology just five years before. There Tyndale started again, and this time succeeded. His second edition stands as the first complete English New Testament translated from Greek. Besides this, several features helped make it a success: it was small, attractive, and affordable.

It was half the size of his first attempt and a bound copy might cost just five days’ wages for a skilled laborer.4At 3s. 4d. using the the National Archives currency converter Contrast that with a few centuries before, when a complete Latin Bible might cost fifteen years’ salary for the same man. A century before Tyndale, a copy of Wycliffe’s English Bible might still cost around two year’s wages.5For these prices, see Cooper, “Introduction,” xiv–xv. For the first time, the ordinary Englishman had a Bible he could understand—and afford.

Matthew 1 in Tyndale’s 1525 (left) and 1526 (right) editions. The color was added by the owner. Images are not to scale. British Library G.12179 and C.188.a.17.

Thousands were smuggled to England and sold and it was immediately condemned by the Bishop of London, Cuthbert Tunstall—the same bishop who had previously refused to host him. In October, Tunstall sent out a prohibition of the book, calling it “that pestiferous and most pernicious poison dispersed throughout all our dioceses of London in great number.” He had it burned at St. Paul’s Cathedral, an occasion at which he preached the sermon. Today, only three copies survive.

Capture

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible. In 1531 he spoke to a friend of his poverty, his exile, his hunger, thirst, cold, danger, and absence from friends—all which he did with the hope to “do honour to God, true service to my prince, and pleasure to his command.”6Daniell, Tyndale, 213.

Despite the instant interest, Tyndale did not benefit financially from his new Bible.

But he remained undeterred. During this time, he published several theological works and finished his translation of the Pentateuch, published in 1530. But the opposition only grew. His most famous critic was Sir Thomas More who wrote no less than nine volumes against Tyndale, totaling nearly half a million words!7Daniell, Bible, 149.

By November 1534, Tyndale had finished a second edition of his New Testament in Antwerp where he was then living—still in exile from England. Like most Bible translators, especially in this new era of vernacular translations, revision started almost before finishing. Work on his Old Testament continued as well. He was, by this point, very Lutheran in his theology and is on record attacking the Catholic church’s theology, which he saw as nullifying the role of grace in salvation.

But his work would soon be interrupted for good. In 1535, a young man named Henry Phillips, who had left England in disgrace after gambling away his father’s money, feigned friendship and interest in Tyndale and his work. In a turn eerily reminiscent of Judas’s betrayal, he turned him over to the authorities for money. On May 21, 1531 Phillips tricked Tyndale into leaving his house and Tyndale was seized in an alleyway. He was taken to the castle of Vilvoorde near Brussels. The charge was being a Lutheran. The sentence was death. During his year in prison, Tyndale was interrogated by the local Catholic theological experts, the goal being to solicit a confession to save his soul from hell.

Vilvoorde Castle from an early engraving. Image source

As winter approached, he wrote what is his last and only surviving letter. Today, it is all that remains in his own handwriting. He writes,

I beg your lordship, and that of the Lord Jesus, that if I am to remain here through the winter, you will request the commissary to have the kindness to send me, from the goods of mine which he has, a warmer cap; for I suffer greatly from cold in the head, and am afflicted by a perpetual catarrh [nasal inflammation], which is much increased in this cell; a warmer coat also, for this which I have is very thin; a piece of cloth too to patch my leggings.

My overcoat is worn out; my shirts are also worn out. He has a woolen shirt, if he will be good enough to send it. I have also with him leggings of thicker cloth to put on above; he has also warmer night-caps. And I ask to be allowed to have a lamp in the evening; it is indeed wearisome sitting alone in the dark.

But most of all I beg and beseech your clemency to be urgent with the commissary, that he will kindly permit me to have the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that I may pass the time in that study. In return may you obtain what you most desire, so only that it be for the salvation of your soul. But if any other decision has been taken concerning me, to be carried out before winter, I will be patient, abiding the will of God, to the glory of the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ: whose spirit (I pray) may ever direct your heart. Amen

As he prepares for death, Tyndale’s chief desire was still to get the Bible into English. What is especially remarkable about this letter is that, at the time he wrote it, he had no reason from the circumstances to be hopeful about his life’s work. His books were being burned, his house had been raided, the new Bishop of London was harsher than Tunstall. David Daniell says of this time that a “heavy curtain hung before him, through which he could see little or nothing.”8Daniell, Bible, 156.

One can’t help but think of the heroes of faith in the book of Hebrews of whom it is said, in Tyndale’s own version, “They all died in faith, and received not the promises: but saw them afar off, and believed them, and saluted them: and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Heb. 11:13).

Early in October, he was brought out, a chain placed on his neck. He was strangled first and then burned, but not before crying out his final prayer, “Lord! Open the King of England’s eyes.”

The depiction of Tyndale’s death from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Wikimedia

Legacy

His legacy was immense. We have already noted his contribution to the English language and to subsequent English translations. But perhaps most remarkably, it was within months of is death that his friend John Rogers printed, for the first time, a complete English Bible with all of Tyndale’s translation work: not only his New Testament and Pentateuch, but also his work through 2 Chronicles that many thought was lost during his arrest.

The initials “W.T.” at the end of the Old Testament in the “Matthew Bible” (1537). Image source

More remarkable still is that a copy of Rogers’s Bible, printed under the pseudonym “Thomas Matthew,” was sent to the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer sent it on to King Henry VIII’s viceregent, Thomas Cromwell, with an endorsement saying, “I like it better than any other translation heretofore made.” From there, it was shown to the king and, amazingly, approved for use in England. Cromwell wanted a copy in every English parish.

In less than a year after his death, Tyndale’s dying words were answered. His own translation would be in the hands of the people in a Bible with his own initials stamped in large letters at the end of the Old Testament. The Lord had indeed opened the king’s eyes.

Conclusion

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible. Even listening to a copy being read could be punished by death in the flames. Today, our easy access to dozens of English translations can lead us to take the English Bible for granted. We can argue so much about the “best” translation that we fail to appreciate the fact that we have any at all. But, if the lesson of Tyndale’s life needs to be learned today, it is not the first time.

Tyndale’s life and work is a reminder of the cost that has been paid to have the Bible.

In 1570, John Foxe made the same point. He wrote in his Book of Martyrs about how the zeal for the Bible in the time before Tyndale should be a spur to Christians in his. “The fervent zeal of those Christian days seemed much superior to these our days and times, as manifestly may appear by their sitting up all night in reading and hearing; also by their expenses and charges in buying of books in English … some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. James or of St. Paul in English.” The lesson then is the same as today: “To see their travails, their earnest seekings, their burning zeal, their readings, their watching, their sweet assemblies … may make us now in these days of free possession, to blush for shame.”

If the “free possession” of the Scriptures was a reason to appreciate the Bible in Foxe’s day, how much more should it be one in ours?

The content of this article is also available as a video lecture. King Henry’s viceregent was Thomas Cromwell not Oliver Cromwell as an earlier version of this article said.

Notes

Five Decisions Every Bible Translator Must Make

Knowing the hard decisions Bible translators face inspires gratitude for our Bibles and encourages us to read them.

A Bible translation is a major undertaking. A good one can take more than ten years to finish even when a full team is involved. Besides the translators, there is often a team of editors, proofreaders, publishers, printers, marketers, and more. Along the way, a translation committee has thousands of decisions to make, many of which go beyond the most obvious one of deciding how to translate any given word or phrase. Here are five decisions that every translator has to decide—whether their readers know it or not.

1. Who’s the audience?

The first decision is arguably the most important because it will determine many other decisions along the way. The first way to define a translation’s audience is, of course, based on what’s called the target language. A translation into German will have a German-speaking audience; a French translation will have French speakers, etc. Though target language is the most obvious form of this question, there is much more to it. Since some language groups like English are so vast and have so many translations already, translation teams often aim their work at a narrower set of readers.

American Bible readers are sometimes surprised to learn that major English translations usually result in an American edition and a separate British edition that has British spelling and, in some cases, different word choices. The ESV, for example, has both an Anglicized version and an American version. There is now even a Catholic edition that includes the Apocrypha.

In other cases, the choice is not about geography or theology, but reading level. The original NIV was designed to be especially readable, and so was designed for a seventh-grade reading level. But even that audience could be narrowed. That’s why it was revised in a special edition published in 1996 called the New International Reader’s Version or NIrV. It was aimed at a third-grade reading level with the hope of reaching children and readers whose first language isn’t English. This was accomplished by using smaller words and shorter sentences whenever possible.

Psalm 23:2 was changed from the NIV’s “He makes me lie down in green pastures” to “He lets me lie down in fields of green grass.” The Lord’s prayer became “Our Father in heaven, may your name be honored. May your kingdom come. May what you want to happen be done on earth as it is done in heaven” (Matt. 6:9–10). These small translation choices add up, but they are all the result of a much larger decision about who the audience is. It’s a choice every translator needs to make.

2. Will it be a fresh translation or a revision?

The example of the NIrV illustrates another question that translators have to answer and that is whether their work will be a new translation from the original languages or will instead use the originals to revise an existing translation. The original NIV, for example, was a fresh translation. It was not based on any prior English Bible. The NIrV, as we just saw, started with the NIV and then revised it. It was revised again in 2014.

English Bible readers are often surprised to learn that it’s this second approach that is by far the more common one historically. Completely new translations are a relative rarity. The reason is obvious to translators but probably not to most readers. It’s simple: translating the entire Bible is a massive undertaking. Starting from scratch increases the work exponentially. It’s much faster to start from something and change it than to work with nothing. Besides that, revising a well-known translation often gives the new one a much-needed boost in respect and authority.

The translators of the most famous English Bible—the King James—knew this well. That’s why in the original preface, they make clear that their work is a revision of previous English Bibles. Their expressed goal was not to “make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one,” but only “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” That tradition of revision continues right up to the present.

A special insert in the Chicago Tribune on May 22, 1881 printed the entire New Testament of the Revised Version. It took 92 compositors working 12 hours to produce all 118,000 words from a telegram from New York City.

In 1885, the King James itself was finally revised for the first time since 1611 in a major translation.1Dates given in this section are the date when the entire Bible was first published. In many cases, the publication of the New Testament preceded the Old by several years. The result was published to great fanfare as the Revised Version. This was then further revised by a team of scholars in North America and published as the American Standard Version in 1901. The Revised Version was again revised in 1952 as the Revised Standard Version and that, in turn, became the New Revised Standard Version of 1990. Even now, an update to the NRSV is set for release in 2022. A separate translation team went back to the Revised Standard Version in 2001, producing the English Standard Version.

Even this doesn’t tell the full story of revisions in the KJV lineage. Objections to translation choices in the RSV (like “young girl” instead of “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14) led to the revision of the ASV known as the New American Standard Bible published in 1971. The NASB itself received a major update in 1995 and now exists in two further revisions known as the NASB 2020 and the Legacy Standard Bible. So, the cycle continues with revision upon revision, each one claiming to improve on its predecessors. Only rarely does an English translation team start from scratch.

3. What text will it translate?

Mark 1:41 in Codex Bezae (5th c.), showing the reading with Jesus becoming indignant. British Library

Another question that follows closely on the last one is which Hebrew and Greek texts the translators will work from. Because our manuscripts of the Bible have differences and because some of these differences affect translation, translators must sometimes decide what text to translate. Does Jesus become “indignant” before healing a man in Mark 1:41 as the NIV 2011 has it, or does he have “compassion” as virtually all other English Bibles have? In this case, the NIV has (unwisely, in my opinion) chosen to follow the text found in a single Greek manuscript from the fifth century known as Codex Bezae. (The NIV does footnote the alternative reading.)

In Genesis 4:8, the English Standard Version, following the standard Hebrew text, says that “Cain spoke to Abel his brother” before killing him in the field but does not tell us what he said. But the Christian Standard Bible, follows the evidence of several ancient translations, including the Septuagint, so that Cain says to his brother, “Let’s go out to the field.”

In both Mark 1:41 and Genesis 4:8, the differences are not matters of translation philosophy but of text. In places where textual differences affect translation, translators must decide which text they think is the original and then translate that. Sometimes the choices are difficult, and these are places where Bibles will often alert the reader with a footnote. These decisions illustrate why the finely tuned skill of textual scholars is so important.

4. How will it handle culturally specific terms?

A fourth question that translators must wrestle with is how to handle terms that are specific to the time and culture of the Bible. Some of the most common ones are terms for weights and units of measurement. No English speaker knows what an ephah of flour is without help or how much a denarius could buy. And how long is a cubit or a span or a stadion? These are all terms found in the original languages, but translations handle them differently. In some cases, a translation may include a table of weights, measures, and monetary units at the back. The NIV and ESV have one after Revelation, for example. A translation may also explain these terms in footnotes. The ESV footnotes often tell the reader that a denarius is about a day’s wage in the first century.

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Another solution is to try to convert these terms into their closest modern equivalent. Paraphrases often take this route. The Living Bible, for example, starts the parable of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18:23 with a debtor who owes his master, not 10 thousand talents, but 10 million dollars. Later, he reveals his unforgiving heart by trying to collect on $2,000 instead of 100 denarii. The New Living Translation, the successor to the Living Bible, is less specific with “millions of dollars” and then later “thousands of dollars.” Both do a great job conveying the vast difference in amounts, but they must do so by sacrificing something from the original culture in the process.

And this is just the tip of the cultural iceberg. Beyond such ancient units of measurement, translators must deal with terms like “Leviathan,” “kinsman-redeemer,” “legion,” “centurion,” not to mention difficult terms for diseases, animals, plants, peoples, and places. Sometimes, translators are at a loss because the precise meaning of the original term is lost to us. At other times, they need to avoid anachronism as with biblical terms for skin ailments that do not actually refer to what we know as “leprosy” or Hansen’s disease. Perhaps future discoveries will clarify, but translators must work with what they have. So, they do the best they can. Their solution is often determined largely by the first question we mentioned: who is the audience?

5. How (much) will the translation explain itself?

Finally, many of these questions give rise to this last one which is how and how much the translators will try to explain their decisions to the reader. Most often, this happens through footnotes, but we have already seen other ways that translations can explain their work such as the table of weights and measures. There is also the introduction—but who reads that? (You should!)

Translators also have at their disposal features like headings, book introductions, maps, concordances, cross references, appendices and, of course, sometimes study notes. Such aids to the reader can be quite helpful and are found as far back as Bible translations go. It’s little wonder that the first English Bibles, produced by John Wycliffe and his followers in the 14th century, have them too.

The Wycliffe Bible oriented its readers with prologues, here showing the one for Mark (left) in Egerton MS 618 (c. 1390–1397), ff. 21v–22r. British Library.

The modern Bible that goes the furthest to explain itself is certainly the New English Translation or NET Bible. It was novel at the time, not only because it was provided freely online, but because the translators received mountains of online feedback from its first readers. Today, the NET Bible has over 60,000 translators’ notes, explaining virtually every decision made. The result is a Bible that “explains itself,” pulling the curtain back so to speak. Because of this, it has become something of a favorite among an unexpected audience: other Bible translators.

Appreciating Translators

These are just five decisions translators must make. There are also many decisions that translators don’t have to make because of the long history of the Bible in English. Things like the names and order of the biblical books as well as their division into chapters and verses are well established by tradition.

But that still leaves plenty of work to do besides the most important one which is actually putting Hebrew and Greek into another language. In some cases, one decision affects the others (such as audience) and at other times, decisions cause tension. If you revise a beloved translation too much, for example, you may lose your intended audience.

Our judgment of which translation is “best” should always take into account who the audience is.

Knowing this leaves us with two important lessons. The first is that our judgment of which translation is “best” should always take into account who the audience is. So many translation decisions are affected by this decision that any fair assessment of a new translation must begin by understanding that. Sometimes, your dislike for a given translation may reflect more the fact that you aren’t the intended audience than it does any failure on the translators’ part.

Second, the multitude of decisions translators face should give us a deep appreciation for good translations—and we have many in English. What we’ve covered here are just some of those that have to be made. We haven’t touched on matters like idioms, word order, word plays and other figures of speech, and more. But considering just these five decisions should make us very thankful for the Bibles we have and encourage us to do what every good translator wants us to do with the Bible and that’s to read it.

The ESV is a revision of the RSV not the RV as an earlier version of this article stated. It also wrongly called the New Living Translation the New Living Bible and the NET Bible the New English Bible.

Notes

  • 1
    Dates given in this section are the date when the entire Bible was first published. In many cases, the publication of the New Testament preceded the Old by several years.

Welcome to Our Brand-New Website

With this new website, we plan to tell the story of how we got the Bible for those at all levels of understanding.

As the directors of the Text & Canon Institute at Phoenix Seminary, it’s our pleasure to welcome you to our brand-new website. In line with our mission, we’ve designed it to be a place with engaging content that illuminates the history of the world’s most amazing book, the Bible.

Here you’ll find new articles every month on subjects covering the textual history of the Bible, its canonization, translation, and more—all written by those with expertise in their fields. To help readers with different levels of knowledge, we’ve further organized articles as either beginner, intermediate, or advanced. So, whether you’re a layperson, a student, pastor, or teacher, you should be able to find what you need.

You can also learn about our upcoming events like Academic Colloquia and our Scribes & Scripture conferences. If you’re a student, you may also be interested in our TCI Fellowship, which mentors aspiring Christian academics and provides a generous scholarship for Phoenix Seminary’s ThM program.

Finally, if you want to receive new articles in your inbox and keep up to date with news and events, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.

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We hope this new resource inspires you to read and treasure the greatest book ever written.

Two Reasons There Are Variants in Our Copies of the Bible

For historical and theological reasons, we shouldn’t be surprised that the Bible’s manuscripts have differences.

To err is human; to forgive, divine” is surely the most famous line of the English poet Alexander Pope. Written when he was only 23, the first line presents a truism that explains why our English Bibles have notes about differences in our copies of the Bible.

We can take an example from the venerable King James Bible. At James 2:18, the text says, “shew me thy faith without thy works” but the margin records that “some copies read, by thy works.”1Thanks to the discovery and study of older manuscripts than were available in 1611, most translations today print “without works” with enough confidence not to give a note. For more textual notes in the KJV, see here. These same types of textual notes were found before the King James and, of course, they have been used by all major translations since.

But why do we have variants at all? There are essentially two answers to this question. The first answer is historical and tends to be one that Bible translators need to think the most about. The second is theological and tends to be one that regular Bible readers are most interested in.

Historical

The historical reason for variants goes back to Pope’s quote. Humans make mistakes. And, until the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, all copies of the Bible had to be made by human hands.

Copying by hand is hard. It takes not just hand-eye coordination but something more like hand-eye-mind-finger-pen-ink-and-parchment coordination. And the Bible is a BIG book. In the original languages, it consists of about 300,000 words in the Old Testament and 140,000 in the New Testament. New Testament scribes were sometimes paid by the line and one early copy of Paul’s letters required 1,000 lines just for Romans. With so much to copy, it’s no wonder scribes made mistakes.

We might be tempted to think that the printing press eliminated human error in Bible production. But it didn’t. The “Wicked Bible,” for example, is a printing of the King James Bible from 1631 where a typesetter’s error changed the sixth commandment to “thou shalt commit adultery.” (The result did not go over well with the powers-that-be.) The arrival of the printing press did mean, however, that, for the first time, you could have hundreds of copies that all preserved the same mistakes at exactly the same place on the page. In this way, mistakes were easier to contain.

Two things are important to know about the mistakes that scribes made. The first is that the majority were accidental—a slip of the pen, a confusion of letters, an accidental omission—things like that. Not all were, of course. Some differences show clear signs of deliberation. Certainly, in the case of larger differences like the longer ending of Mark or the additions to the book of Esther, we are dealing with something much different than a slip of the pen. But many mistakes are ordinary and easy enough to find and fix.

The second thing to know is that the copying of the Bible was not a long process of introducing more and more errors so that by the end we couldn’t hope to get back to the original. In other words, it was not like the telephone game we played as kids. The reason is that scribes not only made mistakes, they also corrected them. They knew firsthand that copying was hard, and they could check their own work and even the work of their predecessors. This is why some of our most important Bible manuscripts—especially on the New Testament side of things—often have corrections.

Near the start of Romans 4, the original scribe of Codex Vaticanus (4th c.) accidentally wrote verses 4b–5a twice because of the repetition of words. A later scribe caught the problem and fixed it by not re-inking the duplicated text. (Image: Vat.gr.1209, f. 1448)

They didn’t always get it right, of course. Sometimes a scribe’s “fix” made the problem worse. One scribe using Codex Vaticanus certainly thought so. The exasperated note he left at Hebrews 1:3 reads, “You untrained and unskilled man—leave the old reading, don’t change it!”2ἀμαθέστατε καὶ κακέ, ἂφες τὸν παλαιόν, μὴ μεταποίει. The note is found on folio 1512. But, overall, scribes worked hard to do a faithful job with the task at hand—even if they didn’t always succeed.

So, the first reason we have differences in our manuscripts is because copying by hand is hard.

Theological

This historical answer is simple enough. It’s also true of all works published before the printing press, not just the Bible. But Christians often wonder if the Bible shouldn’t be different. After all, if God violated Alexander Pope’s famous principle with the Bible’s authors (so they didn’t err) why didn’t he do it with the scribes who copied them (so that they too didn’t err)?

The answer can’t be because he wasn’t able to. Surely God could have if he had wanted to. (Although we should admit that keeping thousands of copyists from error over thousands of years would be an even more impressive miracle than keeping the authors from them.)

The simple answer is that we have errors in our manuscripts because God never promised to keep them out. The Bible teaches that its authors were inspired (e.g., 2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:21); it nowhere teaches that scribes who copied them were. This is actually right in line with God’s normal way of working. He usually seems to follow up his extraordinary acts (what we call miracles) with his ordinary ones (what we call providence).

Take the feeding of the 5,000. Jesus miraculously feeds thousands of people from just five loaves and a few fish. That’s extraordinary. But we can be confident that the way that this miraculous food was ingested and then digested was anything but miraculous. Likewise, Mary’s conception of Jesus was certainly extraordinary; her actual pregnancy and delivery of the baby were presumably ordinary. In the same way, we shouldn’t be surprised that God’s extraordinary work of inspiring the Scriptures was followed by the ordinary process of copying it—variants and all.3This point comes from C.S. Lewis who writes, “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.” Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 95; emphasis added.

What about when Jesus says, in Matthew 5:18, that “not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished”? Isn’t that a promise that the text would be perfectly preserved even down to the letterstroke? From the context, the answer is clearly no. We know the metaphor is about Scripture’s full authority and not about copying because the next thing he says is a rebuke, not to scribes, but to anyone who “relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same” (Matt. 5:19; cf. Luke 16:17). The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority.

The authority of Scripture is certainly one reason why Christians care about differences in the manuscripts, but that doesn’t mean the differences invalidate Scripture’s authority.

One reason they don’t is because, despite our use of the term “error” when talking about scribes, we should not confuse scribal error with theological error. It is rare that scribal error results in something approaching a theological error. In James 2:18, for example, the difference in the KJV text and the KJV margin affects how James makes his point about faith and works but it doesn’t change his point that faith without works is dead. As Christians, we certainly care about Scripture even in the details, but we would be wrong to conclude that because there are variants in some details, the Scriptures have no authority as a result.

In fact, because scribes did such a faithful job overall; because they left us so many manuscripts; and because we have careful principles for identifying scribal mistakes, our confidence in the text as we have it is remarkably high. That’s why the differences in modern English translations are far more often due to differences in translation philosophy than they are to textual differences. Many important variants can be found in the notes of our modern Bibles—just like they were in the King James Bible.

Conclusion

In the end, we have two reasons why there are differences in the manuscripts of the Bible, one historical and one theological. The historical reason is the same as for all other ancient literature: copying by hand is hard and scribes made mistakes. The theological reason is because God never promised to keep scribes completely free from error. We should not commit God to promises he never made.

In the end, we can be extremely thankful for the countless unnamed scribes who did their work—not always perfectly—but, overall, faithfully. We can also be thankful for God’s ordinary providence at work in their copying so that we can have confidence in God’s enduring word.

Notes

  • 1
    Thanks to the discovery and study of older manuscripts than were available in 1611, most translations today print “without works” with enough confidence not to give a note. For more textual notes in the KJV, see here.
  • 2
    ἀμαθέστατε καὶ κακέ, ἂφες τὸν παλαιόν, μὴ μεταποίει. The note is found on folio 1512.
  • 3
    This point comes from C.S. Lewis who writes, “Miraculous wine will intoxicate, miraculous conception will lead to pregnancy, inspired books will suffer all the ordinary processes of textual corruption, miraculous bread will be digested. The divine art of miracle is not an art of suspending the pattern to which events conform but of feeding new events into that pattern.” Miracles (New York: HarperCollins, 1974), 95; emphasis added.

The Text & Canon Institute illuminates the history of the Bible through church resources, research, and mentoring.

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