What’s the Big Deal about a New Papyrus with Sayings of Jesus? A second-century date for a new Greek fragment with gospel material makes it unique among papyri. Michael W. HolmesOn August 31st, the Egypt Exploration Society published the latest volume (LXXXVII) in its long-running series on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri (volume 1 appeared in 1898). The volume presents many interesting papyri, including a collection of short biographies of eminent Romans and a fragment of the book of Revelation. Thanks to an article in the Daily Beast, however, the spotlight has fallen on a small fragment (about 1.3ʺ wide × 3.6ʺ high) that contains sayings of Jesus in a form similar to the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and Thomas. Why is this such a big deal? Let’s find out. What Are the Oxyrhynchus Papyri? The Oxyrhynchus Papyri are a massive trove of papyri (estimates range upwards of half a million) excavated near Oxyrhynchus, Egypt (modern el-Bahnasa) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a team organized by Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt. The site is an ancient trash dump, where public and private documents of all sorts were discarded. These included tax assessments, court records, business letters, private letters (even one written by a student at school writing home to ask his parents to send more money), and literary documents. Most were written in Greek, but also Coptic, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and other languages are represented. Grenfell and Hunt in Egypt. Wikipedia The papyri—mostly in small fragments—range in date from the third century BC (the Ptolemaic era) to 640 AD (the end of the Roman period). When one of these papyri is published, it is given a standard prefix and a reference number. For example, the very first one published is P.Oxy. 1; the one that is catching so much interest now is P.Oxy. 5575. The literary papyri (perhaps 10% or so of the total) encompass a wide range of Classical and Hellenistic literature. They also include a fair number of Christian writings of all sorts, including prayers (e.g., P.Oxy. 407, 4010), hymns (e.g., P.Oxy. 1786), letters, amulets (e.g., P.Oxy. 1077), homilies, and literary documents. This last category includes fragments of Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, several Pauline letters, some Catholic letters, and Revelation, as well as fragments of the Gospel of Thomas (P.Oxy. 1, 654, 655),1These fragments were not recognized as fragments of the Gospel of Thomas until after the discovery of a complete Coptic translation of Thomas near Nag Hammadi in 1945. Gospel of Mary (P.Oxy. 3525), perhaps (but not likely) Gospel of Peter (P.Oxy. 2949, 4009), some unidentified “gospel” fragments (P.Oxy. 210, 840, 1224), several fragments of the Shepherd of Hermas, and one of the Didache (P.Oxy. 1782). So, P.Oxy. 5575 is one of the latest additions to this relatively large category of Christian literary texts from Oxyrhynchus. Why is it attracting so much attention? There are two reasons: first, its content, and second, its (probable) date. What’s in the New Fragment? While it’s not possible to represent accurately the form and layout of the Greek text in English translation, the following layout is an attempt to give an impression of the layout of the content of the fragment. (References in the following discussion to line numbers apply to this English presentation only—they do not correspond to the lines of the Greek fragment.) Recto (→)Verso (↑)… he died (?). [I tell] you: [do not] worry [about] your [life,] what you will eat, [or] about the body, what [you will wear.] For I tell you: [unless] you fast [from the world,] you will never find [the Kingdom,] and unless you … the world, you [will never …] the Father … the birds, how … and [your (?)] heavenly Father [feeds them (?).] You therefore …[Consider the lilies,] how they grow … Solomon … in [his] glory … [if] the Father [clothes] grass which dries up and is thrown into the oven, [he will clothe (?)] you … You [also (?)] therefore … for [your] Father [knows what (?)] … need you have. [Instead (?)] seek [his kingdom (?),] and [all these things (?)] will be given [to you (?)] … An English translation of P.Oxy. 5575 The recto (left) and verso (right) of P.Oxy. 5575 as photographed in 2012 before another small piece of the fragment was identified. Photos by Ardon Bar-Hama The first decipherable letters on the recto side (corresponding to the “odd number” page) of 5575 may be part of the last word of the main saying in Gospel of Thomas 63.1–3 (a saying similar to Luke 12:16–21). Gospel of Thomas, 63: “Jesus said: There was a rich man who had much money. He said: ‘I will use my money so that I may sow and reap and plant and fill my storehouses with produce, so that I lack nothing.’ This was what he thought in his heart. And that night he died.” The saying then continues: “Whoever has ears let him hear.” (This saying survives only in Coptic.) Then follows a saying similar to Luke 12:22/Matt 6:25a (lines 1–5). Next comes a saying similar to Gospel of Thomas 27 (lines 6–10), followed by words similar to Luke 12:24/Matt 6:25b–26 (lines 11–14). Gospel of Thomas, 27: “Jesus said, ‘If you do not fast to the world, you will not find the kingdom of God; if you do not keep the Sabbath as Sabbath, you will not see the Father.’” This is from the only Greek fragment that preserves saying 27 (P.Oxy. 1). The Coptic version is similar, but it lacks “Jesus said” and “of God.” One interesting difference involves the Greek word for “birds”: in line 11, 5575 has ornea, instead of korakas (Luke) or peteina (Matthew). Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: On the verso (“even number page” side) the text is similar to Luke 12:27–28, 30b–31/Matt 6:28b–30, 32b–33, with some differences, larger and smaller. An example of a larger difference: whereas Luke 12:30 and Matt 6:32 end with two “reminders” (i.e., that gentiles seek after such things, and that the heavenly father knows that we need them), 5575—like Justin Martyr, who also quotes this passage (1 Apol. 15.15)—mentions only the second. Why is it important? What makes this a big deal? This is the first known occurrence of the weaving together of material similar to Luke and Matthew, on the one hand, and material similar to—and otherwise known only from—the Gospel of Thomas, on the other. In this significant respect, 5575 is unique among all known papyri. If the proposed date is right, then 5575 would be … one of the earliest witnesses to any Christian document. As for the date: if the proposed date—probably “second century”—is right, then 5575 would be the earliest extant witness to sayings associated with the Gospel of Thomas, and one of the earliest witnesses to any Christian document. Now, put the two issues together—a relatively early date, and a unique interweaving of sayings known from Luke and Matthew with a saying known only from the Gospel of Thomas—and the questions and possibilities overflow. As the editors observe, 5575 may be from a sayings collection, or, given the flow from one saying to another, perhaps a discourse. One possibility is that it represents, or is closely related to, a work which was not dependent upon Gos. Thom. but rather served as a source for it. Or, alternatively, the Gospel of Thomas may be a source for the saying in this fragment—a view that would, in light of the fragment’s early date, require a major re-assessment for the composition of Gospel of Thomas (of these last two possibilities, the former seems far more likely). Remaining questions More questions include: who wrote it, and why? What was his major concern? What does this fragment tell us about second-century Christianity that we didn’t already know? These are all excellent questions, but unfortunately for us, the fragment is so brief and so lacking in any larger context that we simply don’t have the information to answer them. We can speculate, but it is important to keep in mind the difference between speculation and evidence—and to enjoy the thrill of a new discovery. Several papyrus fragments of Revelation have been found at Oxyrhynchus. An earlier version of this article suggested otherwise.Notes1These fragments were not recognized as fragments of the Gospel of Thomas until after the discovery of a complete Coptic translation of Thomas near Nag Hammadi in 1945.
How Was the Divine Name Translated in the Reformation? Part 4 Translators have wrestled with the divine name for centuries. Some have used it only to reverse course later. Andrew CaseThe previous articles in this series considered God’s desire for us to use his name, how the pronunciation was lost, and how the New Testament writers handled the matter. It remains, finally, to consider how it has been handled by translators since the Reformation. In that time there have been various departures from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, which rendered the divine name as Dominus (“Lord/Master”), while others have maintained the tradition, which goes back to the Septuagint. The Reformers’ view Luther and Calvin were not in agreement on this. Luther followed the tradition of the Septuagint and used the German title “Herr” (Lord) in all caps, while Calvin’s choice was to use “Jehovah” for his French translation of the Psalms. Calvin explained his decision as follows: It would be tedious to recount the various opinions as to the name “Jehovah.” It is certainly a foul superstition of the Jews that they dare not speak, or write it, but substitute the name “adonai;” nor do I any more approve of their teaching, who say that it is ineffable, because it is not written according to grammatical rule … Nor do I agree with the grammarians, who will not have it pronounced, because its inflection is irregular; because its etymology, of which all confess that God is the author, is more to me than an hundred rules.1John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony by John Calvin, trans. Charles W. Bingham (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843), 127. The Wycliffe version of the Bible in English used “the Lord,” as did Tyndale’s unfinished translation of the Old Testament, but in a few places, like Exodus 6:3, he rendered “Iehouah.” This set a precedent for all early Protestant bibles, except Coverdale’s translation (1535). The King James Bible printed “Lord” in all caps when it represented YHWH, except in four places (Exod. 6:3, Ps. 83:18, Isa. 12:2; 26:4) where the translators felt the need to render it as a proper name, and in these places the name “Iehouah” appeared in the first printing (spelled as “Jehova” in later editions). Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: Casiodoro de Reina, the first translator of the most famous Spanish version of the Bible (the Reina-Valera), took particular interest in avoiding the substitution of a title for the divine name. In the prologue to the 1569 publication of his work, he wrote the following: We have retained the name (Iehovah), not without serious reasons. First of all, because wherever it will be found in our version, it is in the Hebrew text, and it seemed to us that we could not leave it, nor change it for another without infidelity and singular sacrilege against the law of God, in which it is commanded “Do not take away from it, or add to it” (Deut. 4:4 and Prov. 30:5) … It also seemed to us that this mutation cannot be made without contravening God’s advice, and in a certain way wanting to amend it, as if He had done wrong all the times that his Spirit in Scripture declared this name, and it was to be another. And it is true, that not without particular and very serious advice, God revealed it to the world, and wanted his servants to know and invoke him; it would be a reckless thing to abandon it, and reckless superstition to neglect it, on the pretext of reverence. Someone could argue to us here that neither Christ nor the Apostles in their writings made amends for this error, etc. To this we answer, that they were never in charge of making versions, or correcting the facts, but attentive to a greater and more central matter, which was the announcement of the advent of the Messiah, and of his glorious Kingdom. They used the common version, which was then in use, which seems to have been that of the Seventy [the Septuagint], because they had plenty of it for their main purpose. Casiodoro De Reina’s 1569 Spanish translation used “Iehoua” throughout as seen here in Exodus 3. Modern translations By the nineteenth century, German scholars began to point out that the name “Jehovah” was a mistaken pronunciation, but many scholarly works in England continued to use “Jehovah.” In spite of these trends, English Christians did not see the necessity to produce an altered version of the Bible. By the nineteenth century, German scholars began to point out that the name “Jehovah” was a mistaken pronunciation. It wasn’t until the 1880s that “Yahweh” became a more frequently used pronunciation among scholars and students. Then, in 1901, American scholars prepared their own edition of the Revised Version (a revision of the KJV) for publication in the USA, known as the American Standard Version (ASV). In this version they decided to use “Jehovah” consistently. Even though they were aware that Jehovah was not an accurate pronunciation, they decided it would be received better because it was still more well-known than Yahweh. They explained in their preface: The American Revisers, after a careful consideration were brought to the unanimous conviction that a Jewish superstition, which regarded the Divine Name as too sacred to be uttered, ought no longer to dominate in the English or any other version of the Old Testament, as it fortunately does not in the numerous versions made by modern missionaries.2Preface to the ASV, 1901, accessed January 16, 2021, https://biblia.com/books/asv/offset/389. Benjamin B. Warfield, who was influential at the time of the publication, expressed strong approval of this decision. But the public had a harder time accepting the change. As the Princeton Seminary Bulletin later remarked, “However correct this practice might be in scholarly theory—for the word in Hebrew is indeed a proper name, not a title—it was disastrous from the point of view of the liturgical, homiletical, and devotional use of the Bible, and was almost universally disliked.”3Robert C. Dentan, “The Story of the New Revised Standard Version,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin vol 11, no. 3 (Nov 1990): 212. Thus, when it came time to revise the ASV, the committee decided to revert to using “the Lord” instead of Jehovah. The resulting RSV was published in 1952. This would not be the last time modern versions flipflopped on the divine name. The Catholic NJB version (1966) used “Yahweh,” but the revision switched to “the Lord” in 2019. The Holman Christian Standard Bible (2004) used “Yahweh” (albeit inconsistently), and then decided to reverse their decision only five years later with the Christian Standard Bible revision. To date, only one mainstream English Bible is committed to translating God’s name as a name: the Legacy Standard Version (2021), which is a revision of the NASB. The revisers write: “The effect of revealing God’s name is His distinction from other gods and His expression of intimacy with the nation of Israel. Such a dynamic is a prevalent characteristic of the Scriptures.” That said, since 1960 there are other (not mainstream) bibles that have arisen specifically to restore the translation of God’s name (more about that here). It should also be mentioned that the World English Bible (public domain) uses “Yahweh” consistently. Conclusion History shows us how the winds of market forces, fickle human opinions, ignorance, and tradition can toss modern versions to and fro and blow them about, especially regarding the translation of God’s name. Will translations like the LSB suddenly fall out of vogue and turn course as others have done? My hope is that the English Bible publishers rise to the task of taking a clear, systematic, robustly biblical stand on what they are going to do with the divine name and why. It is not an issue that can be resolved in a few paragraphs of a version’s preface or a few pages on a website. Rather, it calls for a decision based solidly on Scripture’s teaching that leaves no stone unturned, documented exhaustively, and open to the public.Notes1John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony by John Calvin, trans. Charles W. Bingham (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1843), 127.2Preface to the ASV, 1901, accessed January 16, 2021, https://biblia.com/books/asv/offset/389.3Robert C. Dentan, “The Story of the New Revised Standard Version,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin vol 11, no. 3 (Nov 1990): 212.
Why Didn’t the New Testament Authors Use God’s Name? Part 3 The use of “Lord” for the divine name probably helped identify Jesus with the God of the Old Testament. Andrew CaseWe know that the inhibition for pronouncing God’s name came before Christianity, although we don’t know how widespread it was. It’s possible that rendering the divine name as “Lord” (kurios) had already been a strong tradition for centuries by the time we get to Jesus and the apostles. What’s clear is that the New Testament manuscripts we have all follow the tradition that the Septuagint set, which was to substitute the title “Lord” (kurios) for God’s name (YHWH). So, the fact that the New Testament never uses God’s personal name as revealed in the Old Testament, or even an approximation of it, is crucial. Why did the New Testament authors choose to do this? Was it because they thought God’s name was too sacred to write out in Greek transliteration and feared that God might strike them down if they did so? Or, had its pronunciation already been forgotten to history? Were they afraid that the Jews might be angry about it? Or, was it some other reason(s)? The writers never tell us why, so everything that follows here is speculation. Nevertheless, it’s an honest attempt to grapple with the issue. The New Testament authors knew the Old Testament Because the New Testament authors knew their Hebrew Bible better than we do, it’s highly unlikely that they were ignorant of God’s desire expressed in Exodus 3:15, the way David and the prophets freely spoke to God, calling him by name, and other passages we looked at in part 1 of this series. So, it’s safe to say that they didn’t consider God’s name too sacred to use in transliteration. Finally, we can eliminate the idea that they did so out of fear of the Jews, since they consciously did many other things that infuriated the Jews and brought persecution on them. So, let’s explore some other possibilities. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: The influence of the Septuagint First, it should be understood that the Septuagint became the standard for Jewish communities that were forgetting Hebrew in the midst of a world increasingly dominated by other languages like Greek, Aramaic, and Latin. The New Testament writers quoted from the Septuagint extensively, and it was a beloved text to the early Church. When a text is used as a standard for centuries like the Septuagint was, many things become ingrained in tradition. So it’s highly probable that the Septuagint’s use of the title kurios in the place of God’s name came to be a strong tradition in many circles. And because of this, it’s also probable that kurios came to be treated as a proper name, even though it’s not technically or lexically accurate to call it a name. (A modern example of a proper name would be “Joe,” and his title is “Mr. President”) If a community treats a title like a proper name for long enough, it will inevitably begin to feel like a proper name. Subsequent generations will continue to use it, not because they believe it’s wrong to pronounce the actual name, but simply because it feels like God’s name. This has happened in English and many other languages with the title “the Lord.” So it’s plausible that the New Testament authors upheld the tradition of kurios as a centuries-old tradition that people were accustomed to using to refer to God in a personal way. Since they were trying to communicate clearly to a wide range of listeners, some of whom didn’t speak Hebrew and were already familiar with calling the God of Israel kurios, they kept it as a convention for avoiding confusion in their message. At the same time, they were interested in heralding a new covenant in which a new name came to be exalted: Jesus. In Philippians 2:9–11 Paul writes: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” I am convinced, along with many other scholars, that bestowing on Jesus the name/title “Lord,” as the equivalent of Yahweh, is how Jesus has been exalted to the highest place. The twofold result clause that makes up verses 10 and 11 is a direct borrowing of language from Isaiah 45:23, where Yahweh (the Lord) says that “before me every knee shall bow, and every tongue will swear [Septuagint has ‘confess’]” that “in the Lord alone are righteousness and strength.” This emphasis on “the Lord” (YHWH) as the one unto whom all shall give obeisance, seems to certify that what Paul has in mind is none other than the name, YHWH itself, but in its Greek form of “the Lord,” which has now been “given” to Jesus. So, “the name that is above every name” is Yahweh. And this probably has another layer of significance: the name Jesus, Yeshua (in Hebrew) means “Yahweh is salvation.” The divine name is historically embedded within Jesus’ name, and this is evident to those who understand Hebrew. But most of the people the New Testament authors were trying to reach were more familiar with Greek, so kurios served as a better way to show the relationship between Jesus/Yeshua and Yahweh. Intertestamental hyperlinks It seems that Martin Luther understood that the New Testament authors upheld this tradition of using kurios so that people could “draw the strong conclusion that Christ is the true God,”1Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 248–249. by associating Christ the kurios with the kurios of the Old Testament instead of having two different proper names Yahweh and Yeshua. In other words, the Septuagint’s use of kurios was paving the way for a seamless, convenient, intelligible way to connect Jesus with Yahweh. The ability to use the same title for both Yahweh and Jesus throughout the New Testament made the overlap natural and more apparent to a Greek-speaking world. It facilitated a high Christology, and effortlessly infused the statement “Jesus is Lord” (Rom. 10:9) with a double meaning (see how this convention made Paul’s teaching possible in 1 Cor. 8:5–6). Just as Jesus saw himself all throughout the Old Testament (Luke 24:44), and just as the apostles consistently identified Jesus with Yahweh through allusion and direct quotation of Old Testament passages, the use of kurios allowed early Christians to see and hear that continuity between the testaments, identifying Christ as the God of Israel with a hyperlink across covenants (see another example in Rom. 10:13). So, it would seem that the apostles saw a few advantages in using kurios/Lord in place of God’s name: (1) it preserved an old tradition spread by the loved and respected Septuagint; (2) most probably treated kurios as a name; (3) it may have served to make extra clear that Jesus is Yahweh, the God of Israel. Does this mean that they ignored God’s desire in Exodus 3:15? Not at all. Does this mean that they ignored God’s desire in Exodus 3:15? Not at all. Since they were Jews and could read the scriptures in Hebrew, they were probably satisfied that God’s name was preserved there, in its natural habitat. They weren’t trying to publish a new translation of the Old Testament at the time. If they had, they may have made some different decisions than the original translators had concerning God’s name. Likewise, if they had written the New Testament in Hebrew, they probably would have used YHWH for God’s name. It’s important to approach this issue with humility. There are some people who would disagree with my hypothesis. Some believe that much of the New Testament was originally written in Hebrew (which is what multiple Church Fathers claimed), and therefore contained the divine name. Others believe that early Christian scribes changed what the original authors wrote to kurios/Lord for reasons unknown to us. There is no physical evidence for either of these claims. An idea for modern versions This brings us to the question: Is it possible to help contemporary readers enjoy the same advantages in a new translation of the whole Bible while rendering God’s name in the Old Testament as a name? Yes. God is called by the title adonai (“Lord”) over 700 times in the Old Testament, which maintains the hyperlink between both testaments. Thus, modern versions could simply translate those occurrences of adonai as “Lord” and render all 6,800+ occurrences of yhwh as “Yahweh.” The overlap the apostles enjoyed would be preserved while still honoring God’s desire in Exodus 3:15 and making clear to the reader that God actually has a name. In conclusion, the New Testament authors probably used kurios because it ended up being a naming convention that helped identify Jesus with the God of the Old Testament. Modern Bible publishers should feel at liberty to break with the Septuagint’s tradition, since the title “Lord” occurs so many times in the Hebrew Bible in reference to Yahweh. Over the centuries some English versions have chosen to render God’s name as a name in different ways, and this fascinating history is the topic of the final installment in this series. Related Illustration by David Fassett How Was the Divine Name Translated in the Reformation? Part 4Translators have wrestled with the divine name for centuries. Some have used it only to reverse course later. Andrew Case This article is in the public domain. You may freely use, share, and reproduce it. For a more in-depth treatment, see here.Notes1Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 35: Word and Sacrament I, ed. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, Hilton C. Oswald, and Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 35 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1999), 248–249.
What Makes a Bible Translation Really Bad? No translation is perfect. But really bad translations are idiosyncratic and mislead innocent Bible readers. Mark WardIf you find an English Bible translation on your Christian bookstore shelf, it’s almost certainly good. Buy it. Read it. Trust it. But there are some “bad Bibles” out there, Bibles you won’t find careful evangelical biblical scholars recommending. In my last article I discussed Bible translations that give in to sectarian impulses. In this article, I discuss the second major category of bad Bibles: crackpot translations. I’ll drastically qualify that word “bad” for some of these; and “crackpot” is about as nice a thing to say as “sectarian,” I’m afraid. Perhaps I should say instead, “idiosyncratic.” Some Bibles are indeed just odd; they rely on ideas about Scripture that are just weird—the kinds of ideas that make you purse your lips and glance from side to side, looking for a way out of this conversation ASAP, the kinds of ideas that get weeded out when translators must have accredited degrees and work in a group with checks and balances. I have a soft spot in my heart for idiosyncratic evangelical Bible translations. I think they are, from one perspective, a great problem to have. The Bible is such an absorbing interest of American evangelicals that we produce extraneous Bible study resources. (I don’t see Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox doing this, though I admit I may simply be ignorant here.) And I assume these idiosyncratic projects usually don’t do much harm. But if they’re not “bad” in the consequentialist sense, they’re not good either. And they merit our attention here. I will give, again, four examples. The Bible is such an absorbing interest of American evangelicals that we produce extraneous Bible study resources. 1. The Amplified Bible I hope I don’t offend anyone, but the Amplified Bible is a good example of what I’m talking about. When I first encountered this Bible edition as an 18-year-old, I was intrigued to have provided for me in such a convenient format the “fuller meaning” of the Hebrew and Greek I hadn’t yet studied at the time. It was as a young college student that I bought the Comparative Study Bible, a four-version parallel Bible including the KJV, the NIV, the NASB, and the Amplified. But I didn’t end up using that last one much; it came to feel like the editors were just piling on English synonyms in all those many brackets that fill (and clutter) the Amplified Bible. Who possibly is helped by adding that parenthetical to the following sentence? We ourselves (you and I) are Jews by birth. (Gal. 2:15a AMP) And how many readers will understand that systematic theology, and not “the true meaning of the Greek,” has been inserted in a bracket into this statement? If, in our desire and endeavor to be justified in Christ [to be declared righteous and put in right standing with God wholly and solely through Christ] … (Gal. 2:17 AMP) (I chose the first two examples my eyes fell upon when I opened the Amplified at random.) What I came to like about the Amplified was actually that, because its interpolations made it so much longer than the other Bible translations, it opened up margin space at the bottom of pages for me to take notes in. My purposes would have been better served, however, if the column taken up by the Amplified had simply been left blank. The Amplified Bible was published in 1965 to provide “clarifying shades of meaning” to Hebrew and Greek words. Source After I learned Hebrew and Greek, I came to feel that the Amplified was mostly harmless but that it raised false expectations among readers—readers who thought they were getting deeper insight than they really were. This isn’t entirely its fault, but the Amplified Bible inserts interpretation into the text in a way that, I discovered, misleads lay readers into thinking that they’re being told something from the Hebrew or Greek that traditional English translations obscure. 2. את Cepher Cepher is an English Bible translation far weirder than the Amplified. The progenitor of Cepher—whose name I don’t care to give but who, I note, claims to have a doctorate but provides no details regarding it that I could find—is fascinated with the alleged power and depth of the Hebrew language in a way that echoes the Tree of Life Version (discussed here). But he takes his fascination to a level I can only call, well, idiosyncratic—and he places his most eccentric idea on the very cover of his Bible edition. We’ll get there; first, some other oddities in Cepher. In the introduction to Cepher, we are given examples of the many Hebrew words that are transliterated rather than translated in this volume. Another wonderful [Hebrew] word we have elected to use in the text is the word yachiyd (יחיד) which in its use declares tremendous meaning. In its first use, we find it in Bere’shiyth (Genesis) with the instruction to Avraham, saying: … “Take now your son, your yachiyd Yitschaq, whom you love.” But yachid just means “only.” It does not have tremendous meaning. It should not be transliterated in an English Bible at all; it should be translated. But Cepher gets weirder as it traces this “wonderful word” throughout the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament. At the end of its discussion of the Hebrew word for “only,” Cepher’s introduction says, It is with these considerations that we have made the following change: “For Elohiym so loved the world, that he gave his yachiyd, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. So a Hebrew transliteration into Roman characters is inserted into an English translation of a Greek sentence. From the middle of this language mélange, two key ideas are dropped out: where is the word “Son”? And where is the “begottenness” that forms such an important part of the doctrine of the eternal generation of that divine Son? I’m not saying the editors in charge of Cepher undercut Trinitarianism on purpose; I doubt that, honestly. My guess is that they are so fascinated with the nifty possibilities provided by faux insights into Hebrew that they got carried away. Cepher does this with other Hebrew words that, it alleges, “carry … additional meaning” beyond what English is capable of communicating. This is why we get Hebrew transliterations elsewhere in the Cepher New Testament. In John 17, for example, Cepher has Jesus praying that his disciples “all may be yachad,” the Hebrew word for “one.” Exactly whom or how this helps is to me very much unclear. Cepher also “restores” many Hebrew names by making more tortuous transliterations of them than we already possess in the English Bible tradition (is Avraham really more deep or accurate or even Jewish than Abraham?). Moses is Mosheh in Cepher; Joshua is Husha; Jesus is Yahushua. And Jesus’ name gets a fanciful etymology that contradicts what the angel Gabriel told Mary. Instead of “Yahweh saves,” Cepher says that Yahushua means “Yah is He who makes equal.” The Cepher translation claims to “restores the Hebrew את” for English readers. Source The Cepher intro also finds impossible phonemic connections between Hebrew and English, connections that aren’t really there—like seeing the English word “hell” in the Hebrew word the KJV translates as “Lucifer.” This is a game a clever person could play all day long in every language of the world. It is crackpottery. My last complaint about Cepher (though I could go on, I assure you) regards a Hebrew word on its cover. It’s just two characters long; you could pronounce it “et.” But it’s actually not a word, per se; it’s a grammatical marker indicating that what follows is a direct object. It’s kind of like the practice in German of capitalizing nouns. It’s rare that this is truly needed; it’s just something biblical Hebrew does. But Cepher’s introduction finds great importance in this little non-word—and by doing so it falls into a very, very old Bible translation trap. Cepher’s intro says that this Hebrew word “has escaped translation in all English texts.” I regard that as a very misleading claim. English just doesn’t need the direct object marker to communicate which element of the sentence is the direct object. The word is “translated” properly by simply making good English sentences with proper Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. In “God created the heavens and the earth,” the direct objects are utterly clear. We don’t have—because we don’t need—a direct object marker in English. But there is an almost superstitious idea abroad—and I’ve seen it among Christians who ought to know better, I’m afraid—that if there’s a “word” in the Hebrew or Greek, there needs to be at least one word reflecting it in any English translation that wishes to regard itself as faithful. This is an old trap because a Jewish Bible translator, Aquila, did almost exactly the same thing twenty centuries ago while moving from Hebrew to Greek, producing impossible sentences.1See William A. Ross and Gregory R. Lanier, The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 90–91. Cepher dials this tendency up to 11. The Cepher intro alleges that the first letter of this two-letter “word” is “a symbol of strength and is often construed as a crown of leadership.” The second letter allegedly “means the mark, or sign, or covenant.” Put all these tea leaves and animal entrails together into a pot with a crack in it, and this is what you get: meaningless untranslated and even untransliterated Hebrew in the middle of English Bible verses: In the beginning Elohiym created את the heavens and את the earth. (Bere’shiyth 1:1) This is beyond bizarre. And it is double beyond bizarre—like, actually setting up shop in a real-live bazaar—that Cepher does this even in the New Testament: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with את Elohiym, and Elohiym was the Word. (Yochanon 1:1) I feel rather confident that no plow boys will understand this, because there’s nothing there to understand. I, for one, cannot make any sense of it: “God” is not the direct object in that sentence, so why does it need a direct object marker? Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: At the foundation of the Cepher superstructure, lying underneath the stratigraphic levels archaeologists have excavated so far, are thousands of cracked pots. I deny flatly—and I actually find this to be theologically important—that Hebrew carries “tremendous additional meaning” that English or Russian or Sara Kaba Dem or Lamogai or Urdu cannot. There is not—there is not—something you can know about onlyness or oneness or Jesus or hell or Paul or direct objects (!) that you have to know Hebrew to really understand. And hear me, brothers and sisters: you don’t have to say any name in Hebrew, including the name of God, to get the full power of that name. That’s Harry Potterism, not Christianity. The God who knows what you need before you ask does not demand that you pronounce everything right before he’ll listen. He’s not telling us, “You said, ‘Wingardium leviosa,’ and your prayer will not work until you say, ‘Wingardium levioSA.’ ” You can relate to God in your heart language without fear that you’re missing something essential. Projects like Cepher don’t exactly prey on this fear; they are manifestations of it. You can relate to God in your heart language without fear that you’re missing something essential. The things you’ll miss in Scripture if you don’t know Hebrew or Greek are almost always minor grammatical niceties—or, perhaps, technical details that help interpretation mainly at that technical level. You can know God and love him and obey him and have good theology without direct reference to the biblical languages—though, of course, I’m not discouraging you at all from learning them! I’m just trying to encourage those who haven’t had the opportunity not to enter a rabbit trail full of traps. 3. Pure Word Now to the third crackpot/idiosyncratic Bible: the Pure Word New Testament. This one is so odd that I think it has to be pretty harmless. But I think it has something to teach us, as sort of a reductio ad crackpottem. The Pure Word is endorsed by the president of One Path Publishing, who said, There are over 450 English New Testament translations, all containing inaccuracies that never fully reference the original Koine Greek definitions and each word’s original parsings. The Pure Word research project did just that. And what is One Path Publishing? It’s not a publisher; it’s a website for the Pure Word New Testament. And who is the president of One Path? The same man who made the Pure Word New Testament—and who just claimed that all the other English New Testaments contain “inaccuracies” and “never fully reference the original Koine Greek definitions.” The progenitor of the Pure Word—itself an arrogant title, I must say—speaks with deep gravity in his promo video, insisting that “English is a very imprecise language” and that “only recently, with breakthroughs in monadic-based translation” can we really understand the Bible “exactly the way the early church understood it 2,000 years ago.” This is all uncomfortably close to rhetoric I’ve heard among more responsible Christians; let this be a warning to us. None of this is true. And yet he sings the same note all idiosyncratic translations love to play so loudly: if we study his translation, he says, we will “receive the full meaning and blessing that Christ always meant for us to have.” But when you actually look at the Pure Word, searching for the incredible insight its marketing materials promise (or for any kind of serious definition of “monadic hermeneutics”), you get not even a cracked pot, which maybe you could piece together with superglue, but instead one of the potsherds with which Job scraped his skin. Because, God has Loved in such a manner the satan’s world, so that He Gave His Son, the Only Begotten Risen Christ, in order that whoever is Continuously by his choice Committing for the Result and Purpose of Him, should not perish, but definitely should, by his choice, be Continuously Having Eternal Life. (John 3:16 The Pure Word) This is ham-handed bunkum, from the awkward capitalization to the first-year-Greek-student over-specificity to the unexpected appearance of Satan in a verse where he actually wasn’t prowling for once. The search for the holy grail of literalness, the translation that has no errors or even that can’t be misunderstood—these are all understandable impulses, but they run aground on reality. God made translation a usually straightforward but sometimes vexingly difficult and imperfect science. And he’s still good. We don’t have to—and we can’t—step in to solve problems God does not regard as problems. 4. The Passion Translation But we’re not done. I’ve got a fourth idiosyncratic Bible to mention. It’s time to examine The Passion Translation. YouTuber Mike Winger has already done an excellent job critiquing this English Bible translation, even hiring major evangelical biblical scholars to help him. I myself have made some effort at describing the eccentric and impracticable linguistic ideas that were used to create TPT. I’ll add only a few thoughts here. I could probably have placed this version in the “sectarian” category; it does come from a portion of Pentecostalism considered extreme even by other continuationists. But I think that one of the points I’m slowly making inductively in this long article is that good Bible translations will demonstrate that they have paid attention to the way God’s gift of language actually works. They won’t propose impossible linguistic ideas or promise special insight into “what God really meant” in the originals, insight no other translations provide. They won’t baptize one language as specially divine. TPT does all these things. Briefly: TPT translator Brian Simmons’ idea of Hebrew homonymy is simply linguistically impossible. To say that Hebrew words that sound the same can mean both things is somewhat like my joke about “bizarre” and “bazaar” earlier. Ha ha. Dad joke. It’s like going to the Pe’e Pe’e (peh’-ay peh’-ay) Falls in Hawaii—literally around the corner from my sister’s house—and giggling because it “also means” Pee-Pee falls. Simmons claims special insight into the “passionate heart of God,” insight he allegedly placed into his translation. But anytime I’ve actually looked at real verses Simmons wrote down in TPT, the passion of God is not something he pulls out of the text but something he adds in. Even the simple “Greet one another with a holy kiss” becomes, “Greet each other with a holy kiss of God’s love” (Rom 16:16 TPT). I’m not quite sure what that means, but I am sure that “of God’s love” is not in the Greek (nor in the Aramaic—I checked). Simmons did us the favor of italicizing these words, and there’s nothing wrong with commentary as long as people know it’s commentary—but Simmons has repeatedly claimed that these insights were actually divinely given to him and/or found in the “original Aramaic.” Simmons at least chose a new candidate for the most holy and insightful and theologically accurate language. He chose not Hebrew, not Greek, but Aramaic, a relative of Hebrew. He is no more successful in this effort than anyone else has been. We have no good reasons to believe that the New Testament was originally written in Aramaic, as Simmons alleges. Conclusion I recently saw a funny meme that showed pictures from old TV shows I grew up watching. In the picture from each show, our hero is buried waist-deep in sand, struggling and in deadly peril. The caption read, “When I was a kid I thought quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem on a daily basis than it really is.” This word is truth. In like manner: for all the terrible warnings people make about the perfidy and error of other people’s Bible translations, I’ve literally never once encountered a Bible-believing Christian who was misled in the ways predicted by the discernment gurus. I’ve never seen someone go soft on sexual sin, or on the exclusivity of Christ’s atonement, or even on dispensationalism or the rapture or whatever the fear-mongers might be concerned to protect—simply because that someone read an allegedly erroneous rendering in a Bible translation. When it comes to Bible translation: never have so many complained so much about so little. I’ve literally never once encountered a Bible-believing Christian who was misled in the ways predicted by the discernment gurus. But that doesn’t mean that everything out there is completely hunky or dory. There are some problems to spot. And I think those who are best equipped to spot erroneous or even simply idiosyncratic renderings in modern Bible translations are those who have come to appreciate, positively, why multiple Bible translations exist, and how they can help sincere students of Scripture. To such people, the “bad” Bibles out there will not pose a serious threat. Those who have the best discernment exercise that discernment as part of an overall positive vision. They don’t live in fear or believe all the conspiracy theories they hear. So I think it’s important now to say something positive about all of the Bibles I’ve called “bad” in this and my last article. Not a single one of them is completely bad. Some of the more fruitcakey ones are mostly harmless; they’re so obviously impossible that I don’t think very many people will take them seriously. And I can often make myself believe that they arise from a good but misguided impulse, an impulse to really know God’s word. Related Illustration by Peter Gurry. Photo from iStock What Makes a Bible Translation Bad?Sectarian translations go too far beyond the natural bias inherent in something as complex as translating the Bible. Mark Ward And even the more dangerous translations are still chock full of truth. Justin Taylor once gave the gospel from the New World Translation. I do not personally think that people are often led astray by “bad Bibles”; I suggest instead that it’s teachers who lead people astray. I try to keep a taciturn, academic exterior while evaluating Bible translations. But sometimes my righteous soul is qatsared nearly unto death by the kind of linguistic silliness people perpetrate upon the Bible. I feel defensive for the sheep who are distressed and confused by some of the ideas that give rise to the “bad” Bibles I’ve surveyed in this article on crackpot Bibles and my previous one on sectarian ones. Sometimes I just want to nakah some Pilishtim. I do just want to see regular Christians reading and trusting all the good English Bible translations we have. You can watch this as a video.Notes1See William A. Ross and Gregory R. Lanier, The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 90–91.
What Makes a Bible Translation Bad? Sectarian translations go too far beyond the natural bias inherent in something as complex as translating the Bible. Mark WardIf you find an English Bible translation on your Christian bookstore shelf, it’s almost certainly good. Buy it. Read it. Trust it. But there are some “bad Bibles” out there, Bibles you won’t find careful evangelical biblical scholars recommending. Consider this article to be like the list of possible adverse side effects that are rattled off in monotone at the end of drug commercials on TV. Hopefully you’ll never need this information. But if you accidentally buy a bad Bible at Goodwill and you develop an odd tic, you’ll know what happened. More seriously, I don’t think most of my readers will ever hold in their hands a truly “bad Bible.” But by seeing Bible translation done badly, you will gain better understanding and appreciation for the many good Bibles we have in English. What, indeed, makes a Bible translation bad? Bibles are bad—when, on rare occasions, they are bad—for two major reasons: sectarianism and crackpottery. In this article: sectarian translations. In my next article: crackpot translations. Sectarian translations are those that have more than the natural bias inherent in the effort of any person or group to do something as complex as translating the Bible. Escaping all bias whatsoever is impossible; it’s not even desirable. I have a bias toward seeing the Bible as coherent, for example. I think that’s good. But some biases merit the label “sectarian.” I won’t cover all of them, just four. 1. The New World Translation I have a regular YouTube commenter who is a courteous and intelligent Jehovah’s Witness (JW). He frequently points out places where his New World Translation, produced by the Watchtower Society in the 1950s, makes a fine rendering of a Bible word or phrase I’ve just discussed in a video. Numerous times he has done this, and I don’t remember ever having to disagree with the NWT in these instances. But the NWT earns the sectarian badge because of the classic complaints evangelicals have made about it since its release 60-plus years ago. The New World Translation is used worldwide by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Source First, the NWT manipulates John 1:1 to support the JW’s anti-trinitarian bias, turning “the Word was God” into “the Word was a God.” I’ve heard this charge my entire life, and I tried again to listen to the JW’s counterarguments as I wrote this article. I remain unconvinced. It appears to me that the argument between Christian orthodoxy and the JWs—modern Arians—over John 1:1 has never made any real advances, because they haven’t needed to. The matter is reasonably straightforward.1I say this despite the now twenty-year-old book by Jason BeDuhn, Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003). See Robert H. Countess, The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New Testament. A Critical Analysis of the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1982). There’s nothing more to say: the NWT mistranslates a text that teaches the deity of Christ, and not only here.2See Kenneth J. Baumgarten and Kevin Gary Smith, “An Examination of the Consistency of the New World Translation with the Stated Philosophy of the Translators,”Conspectus Volume 6 (2008). As with the Son, so with the Spirit: the NWT regularly turns what should properly be “the Holy Spirit” into “a holy spirit” (Acts 8:15, 17–19; 10:38; 19:2; Luke 2:25; 11:13; John 20:22).3See N. E. Barry Hofstetter, “Review of Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament by Jason BeDuhn,” Westminster Theological Journal 66, no. 2 (2004): 448. The KJV translators, in their justly famous preface, urge their readers to judge Bible translations by their predominant character. A man may be counted a virtuous man though he have made many slips in his life (else there were none virtuous, for, “in many things we offend all”), also a comely man and lovely, though he have some warts upon his hand.4David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition., vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxviii. I find myself continually quoting this portion of the KJV preface as I work to smother the flames of the never-ending social media Bible wars. Some people are ready—no, eager—to distrust whole Bible translations based on the tiniest of alleged blemishes.5One KJV-Only Facebook commenter, for example, recently insisted that English Bibles must “retain the distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns”; if they don’t, “that’s a deal killer for me.” Never mind that many other grammatical features—such as the distinction between singular and plural relative pronouns—are “lost” on the trip from Greek to English. Actually: context is nearly always sufficient to communicate this distinction. But intentionally and repeatedly subverting the deity of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity are rather large warts for a Bible translation to have protruding from its genuine leather cover. The NWT is a bad Bible because it is openly sectarian in multiple places that matter. The New World Translation is a bad Bible because it is openly sectarian in multiple places that matter. 2. The New Revised Standard Version (Updated Edition) I wouldn’t quite say the same of the second sectarian translation, the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition (NRSVue). Consensus so far among people I trust is that this revision does not have a bad predominant character (I have not read the whole thing, I confess; I am merely reporting on the buzz). The one wart that has received real attention since its recent release is in the NRSVue’s rendering of 1 Corinthians 6:9–10: Do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived! The sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, men who engage in illicit sex, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers, swindlers—none of these will inherit the kingdom of God. It is true that the two Greek words at issue here require translators to make some judgments. But into a crack of minor uncertainty the NRSVue has wedged a whale-sized obfuscation. These words almost certainly refer to the passive and active partners in a male-to-male homosexual pairing. The NRSVue is “sectarian” here because it overspecifies the first word and overgeneralizes the second—just as the sect that produced the translation, the sect called mainline Protestantism, would prefer Paul had done. One of Paul’s clear condemnations of male homosexuality is thereby removed from his writings. That wart is significant enough, I would think, to keep those of us who uphold an orthodox sexual ethic from using the NRSVue as the main pulpit Bible in our churches. But whereas I never check the NWT, I will happily check the renderings in the NRSVue in my Bible study in years to come. The (yes, mostly—but not entirely—liberal) translators behind that work appear to me to have been generally responsible and careful. 3. Certain Bible translations for Muslim nations I am a signatory of the Arlington Statement on Bible Translation, which alleges that certain Bible translations that were made for Muslim-majority languages have soft-pedaled the deity of Jesus, and specifically his status as “Son of God.” I was asked by several friends to sign the statement, but I actually resisted for quite some time—because I felt like I wasn’t hearing anything from the other side, and I wasn’t seeing the dispute laid out in any responsible academic venues. Also, I had no way of checking the offending translations for myself. I don’t like being asked to take sides without hearing from the best of all parties. But then I listened to Georges Houssney in his guest appearance on the Working for the Word podcast, with my friend (and Text & Canon contributor) Andrew Case. Houssney was obviously knowledgeable: he was an Arabic Bible translator from Egypt. He immediately won me over, and he helped me understand why I wasn’t hearing from his opponents. I signed the statement based almost solely on his testimony—and to hear more, you really must listen to Houssney. As an example of the concerns that have driven Houssney and the Arlington Statement, The True Meaning of the Gospel of Christ, an Arabic translation available on YouVersion, translates Mark 13:32 this way: No one knows when that day and that hour comes, not even the master of humanity and the angels. For Allah, the father, the All-Beneficent, the All-merciful alone possesses knowledge of the hour.6For this back-translation and all examples in this section, I am indebted to linguist Mike Tisdell. His review of La Bible en arabe tchadien contains more detailed examples. Jesus calls himself “the Son” in Mark 13:32; this translation adjusts to Muslim sensibilities and calls him “Master of humanity.” And instead of doing what Jesus did here and calling God simply “the Father,” The True Meaning adds three Muslim-friendly titles—“Allah,” “All-Beneficent,” and “All-merciful”—that don’t occur in the Greek. (To be clear: “Allah” is not exclusively an Islamic word; it is the generic word for God used by Arabic-speaking Christians. But the word “God” does not occur in the Greek in this verse.) Jesus calls himself “the Son” in Mark 13:32; this translation adjusts to Muslim sensibilities and calls him “Master of humanity.” Another Arabic translation of the New Testament is called The Honored Injil. This translation is actually paired with an English back-translation on its website, so in this same verse you can see for yourself that the Son is called “the beloved Amir,” or “Prince”; and the Father is called “Al-Malik Al-Rahman,” or “the Gracious King.” Now, the Son is a Prince, and the Father is a King; but Jesus could have used those words (in Greek) and he did not. Once again, a translation is bowing not just to Muslim preferences but to actual Islamic doctrine. I call these offending translations “sectarian” because they end up doing the same thing to the deity of Jesus that the NWT does. At best, they confuse the Bible’s picture of Jesus; at worst, they draw up the blueprints for a sect in which you can hold on to Muslim-style monotheism (denying the doctrine of the Trinity) and still consider yourself a follower of Jesus Christ. These are bad Bibles. 4. The Tree of Life Version The fourth sectarian Bible I’ll describe is not “bad,” not that I know of. Even to use the word “sectarian” feels a little harsh. But I regret that I must. It’s the Tree of Life Version, a Messianic Jewish translation released in 2011. A few well-known names participated (namely Richard Averbeck and Craig Keener), and the TLV has not raised any public hackles that I have seen. I’m not going to posit inaccuracies in it. But the constant use of transliterated Hebrew is nothing if not characteristic of Messianic Judaism; my inner William Tyndale balks every time I read in an English Bible words like Ruach Elohim instead of “Holy Spirit”—or “Yeshua finished all his drash,” instead of “Jesus finished his sermon.” Though I honor Abraham’s seed as, yes, God’s chosen people, God is not a respecter of languages. Hebrew transliterations are not holier or more accurate than English renderings. They’re nifty, but they don’t merit the creation of a fresh Bible translation. The more Christian groups with “their own Bible,” the more it looks to outsiders like some funny business is going on. Perhaps it’s a little self-aggrandizing or grandiose for the ESV or CSB or NASB or NRSV to put “Standard” in the names of their Bible translations, but there’s some good in this common practice: I read it as an attempt to acknowledge that the Bible is for the whole church—the whole world. The more Christian groups get to have “their own Bible,” the more it looks to outsiders like some funny business is going on. Also: sprinkling Hebrew words that English speakers don’t know throughout your Bible translation (or Christian-synagogue service) runs counter to Paul’s principle that edification requires intelligibility. This raises the question: intelligible to whom? Not just those who’ve picked up the patois. At 1 Corinthians 14:23, the TLV itself reads, If Messiah’s whole community comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and uninstructed or unbelieving people come in, won’t they say that you are crazy? The more jargon the man on the street has to master before he can understand what you’re saying in your services, the more in tension you are with 1 Corinthians 14. The TLV preface says that it was born out of a fear of seeing the Bible lose its “actual Jewish essence.” I don’t at all deny that that the Bible’s Jewishness gets overlooked or even self-consciously muted by Gentiles. I welcome better understanding of my own wife’s Lithuanian-Jewish roots. And I’ve heard a very responsible and intelligent, ethnically Jewish Presbyterian pastor make a careful case that Protestant Gentiles have something to learn from the Messianic Jewish movement. Also, I found it thought-provoking to see Torah in the place of “the law” at places in the New Testament. But replacing the perfectly legitimate English rendering “slander” (in 1 Pet. 2:1) with the opaque Hebrew transliteration “lashon ha-ra” (Hebrew for “tongue of evil”) is, I’m sorry, a rather arbitrary and linguistically suspect way of restoring people’s appreciation of the Bible’s Jewishness. The uniqueness of Judaism in its own original context was that its God, Yahweh, wasn’t just the God of the valleys or of the hills but of all the earth. And the founding promises to Abraham include precisely a prediction that through his seed, God will bless all the families of the earth. God’s own lashon is not shackled to ancient Hebrew. The TLV is produced by the Tree of Life Bible Society for Messianic Jewish. Source I’m not persuaded, either, by the TLV’s practice of replacing “Lord” in the New Testament with “ADONAI.” I understand the reasoning: it’s analogous to what ancient Jews apparently did with Yahweh.7Though actually, the linguistic situation that obtained then is not at all the one that exists in English. Ancient Jews replaced the vowels for YHWH with those of adonai; the way to do this in English would actually be something like Larsder—figure that one out and be the first to email me, and you’ll get a prize. But if Jesus himself was happy to translate both adonai and Yahweh with the Greek kurios (Lord) in his discussion of the all-important Messianic passage Psalm 110:1,8See Luke 20:42, for example. Even if Jesus was not speaking Greek when he uttered those words, the inspired (Greek) text given to us is an authoritative translation of his words. then I tend to feel safest retaining the English word “Lord” in the New Testament. And to any of the multiple translations in this article that give special focus and attention to getting the name of God just right, I observe that God himself permitted the correct pronunciation of his name (possibly “Yahweh”) to fall out of Jewish tradition—a difficult feat among that heavily traditional people, I tend to think. Related Illustration by David Fassett How Was the Pronunciation of God’s Name Lost? Part 2Ancient tradition divides on the use of God’s name, with no clear reason why some banned it. Andrew Case As with names, so with languages. It is a very, very common thing in religion for people to invest a particular human language with divine sanctity and authority—and then with a depth and accuracy that no other language can match. Roman Catholics do this with Latin; Muslims do it with (a particular variety of) Arabic; Ethiopians do it with Geʽez; KJV-Onlyists do it with Elizabethan English. Messianic Jews have, I allege, done this with Hebrew. Again: I’m not saying that the TLV is a “bad Bible,” as in erroneous or dangerous. From what I’ve read, it’s mostly a traditional Protestant translation with a bunch of Hebrew transliterations bobbing up and down on the surface. But I will say that the effort falls completely flat for me. If you have to resort to translating the Greek New Testament back into Hebrew every so often to get people to see its Jewishness, I think you’re taking a superficial, sectarian shortcut that actually undercuts your purpose. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: The solution to sectarianism I do think Bible translations need to do what they can to avoid the appearance of sectarianism. My own beloved ESV has been charged with sectarianism on behalf of the translators’ complementarian viewpoint. Though I think this criticism is overblown, sticking with the literal/traditional translation in Genesis 3:16 probably could have saved them significant grief. In general, retreating to the literal in sticky places is a wise policy. And here’s another: I like the tradition, going back at least to the NIV, of involving many Christian denominations—from complementarians to Messianic Jews—in a Bible translation committee, as a method of both eliminating and of appearing to the public to eliminate denominational bias. I acknowledge at this point my own (inerrantist evangelical) biases, and my own fallenness and finiteness and situatedness. But I cannot sit nowhere, or in heaven; so from where I sit, some Bibles are, at least sometimes, sectarian. I’m okay checking such Bibles in my study, but I wouldn’t use them as the official translation of a church or other institution. In our balkanized Christian world, no English translation will ever be trusted by the whole English-speaking church. But translators (or rather revisers, because we don’t need any more mainstream translations) should still aim for that possibility instead of giving in to the temptations of sectarianism. The next essay will cover a second mark of bad translation that I call crackpottery. You can watch this as a video.Notes1I say this despite the now twenty-year-old book by Jason BeDuhn, Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003). See Robert H. Countess, The Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New Testament. A Critical Analysis of the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1982).2See Kenneth J. Baumgarten and Kevin Gary Smith, “An Examination of the Consistency of the New World Translation with the Stated Philosophy of the Translators,”Conspectus Volume 6 (2008).3See N. E. Barry Hofstetter, “Review of Truth in Translation: Accuracy and Bias in English Translations of the New Testament by Jason BeDuhn,” Westminster Theological Journal 66, no. 2 (2004): 448.4David Norton, ed., The New Cambridge Paragraph Bible with the Apocrypha: King James Version, Revised edition., vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xxviii.5One KJV-Only Facebook commenter, for example, recently insisted that English Bibles must “retain the distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns”; if they don’t, “that’s a deal killer for me.” Never mind that many other grammatical features—such as the distinction between singular and plural relative pronouns—are “lost” on the trip from Greek to English. Actually: context is nearly always sufficient to communicate this distinction.6For this back-translation and all examples in this section, I am indebted to linguist Mike Tisdell. His review of La Bible en arabe tchadien contains more detailed examples.7Though actually, the linguistic situation that obtained then is not at all the one that exists in English. Ancient Jews replaced the vowels for YHWH with those of adonai; the way to do this in English would actually be something like Larsder—figure that one out and be the first to email me, and you’ll get a prize.8See Luke 20:42, for example. Even if Jesus was not speaking Greek when he uttered those words, the inspired (Greek) text given to us is an authoritative translation of his words.
How Was the Pronunciation of God’s Name Lost? Part 2 Ancient tradition divides on the use of God’s name, with no clear reason why some banned it. Andrew CasePart 1 of this series is available here. It’s important to recognize right up front that we simply do not know with absolute certainty how God’s name was originally pronounced. The common English pronunciation of “Yahweh” is an educated guess, but we’ll never know for sure how it sounded when God spoke it to Moses. Two key things prevent us from knowing: (1) Hebrew was written without vowels for many centuries, so we’re left with only four consonants: YHWH, and (2) people started avoiding the pronunciation of God’s name long before Hebrew began to be written with vowels. And when the Hebrew Bible was finally written with vowels, artificial vowels were inserted into the spelling of God’s name in order to keep people from pronouncing it! So, in this article we’ll try to understand why—why did the Israelites go from swearing by Yahweh’s name, using it in prayer, song, and greetings to forbidding its use altogether? Why did the Israelites go from swearing by Yahweh’s name, using it in prayer, song, and greetings to forbidding its use altogether? Clues from the Bible God himself gives us a clue as to what might have motivated this historical change of attitude towards his name in the book of Amos. This book goes back at least to the 8th century BC, and thus represents the oldest evidence of what might have caused the shift. Amos warns the people of the coming exile and destruction that will punish their pride and oppression of the poor and needy. As he describes the horrors of Yahweh’s imminent judgment, he says, “And if the relative who comes to carry the bodies out of the house to burn them asks anyone who might be hiding there, ‘Is anyone else with you?’ and he says, “No,” then he will go on to say, ‘Hush! We must not mention the name of Yahweh’” (Amos 6:10). Thus, there exists the possibility that some Hebrews were so traumatized by what happened under Yahweh’s judgment that they preferred not to talk about him anymore. This trauma could have easily developed into never mentioning his name for fear that they might somehow run the risk of falling under a similar judgment. This trauma-induced fear could have then evolved into the substitution of titles for God’s name, which the Jews later labeled as a sign of reverence or respect. This idea of avoiding his name out of reverence or respect, however, cannot be found in Scripture, but rather is described in later man-made traditions. It’s also important to recognize that an ancient contingent of Karaite Jews condemned these traditions, saying that those who insist on avoiding the pronunciation of God’s name should be considered unbelievers. During the intertestamental period the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (popularly called the Septuagint), and an interesting thing happened in the translation of Leviticus 24:16. The original Hebrew reads: “The one who blasphemes (naqab) the name of Yahweh shall surely be put to death.” But the Greek version reads: “The one who names the name of the Lord will surely be put to death.” Here, the act of blaspheming is translated into Greek as the simple act of naming. The manuscript tradition of Leviticus in Greek is unanimous without variation on this text. The Septuagint translators may have rendered “to blaspheme” (naqab) in Leviticus 24:16 as “to name” for any of the following reasons: In a spirit of piety, they could not even bring themselves to translate the verb “to curse/blaspheme/slander” when so directly connected to the divine name. So, they used circumlocution to generalize or soften the phrase. They simply misunderstood the Hebrew verb. They allowed a belief about pronouncing the divine name to influence their translation. Because of the Septuagint’s strong influence on post-exilic Judaism and the early Church, this reading may have led to the proliferation of sentiments against the pronunciation of the name. If an anti-pronunciation belief was already prevalent during the time of the translation, then it may have served to strengthen that belief. This is admittedly speculation, but nevertheless an important piece of evidence that needs to be mentioned and considered in the search for why the tide turned against vocalizing the divine name. Clues from outside the Bible The Babylonian Talmud offers another explanation,1Michael L. Rodkinson, trans., The Babylonian Talmud: Original Text, Edited, Corrected, Formulated, and Translated into English, vol. 1. (Boston: The Talmud Society, 1918), Rosh Hashannah 18b. but not as ancient as Amos or the Septuagint: the prohibition against the use of God’s name began as one of the anti-Torah decrees enacted by the Seleucid Greek tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes around 168 BC. This was part of his plan to convert the Jews to Hellenism. But when Judas Maccabeus defeated the Greeks, he restored the use of the divine name and established a law requiring the use of God’s name in contracts so that every Jew would regain the habit of using it. But the Rabbis were opposed to this decree and banned its use in contracts because those contracts might eventually be burned with the divine name written on them. Get new articles and updates in your inbox. Leave this field empty if you're human: The Essene community who copied the Dead Sea Scrolls also strictly forbade speaking God’s name in any context, including prayer, but they give no reason for this in their rulebook. Later writings in the Mishnah from the 3rd century AD describe a developing attitude of Jewish teaching on the issue: “The following have no portion in the world to come: … Abba Saul says: Also one who pronounces the divine name as it is written” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1). Ironically, there is much rabbinic teaching that has contradicted the ban on speaking God’s name. If you read Mishnah Berakhot 9:5, 54a:1–9, 63a:7–8, Makkot 23b:10 and other Jewish commentaries on Judges 6:12, you’ll find ancient rabbinic agreement that using God’s name in simple greetings as Boaz did is not only permitted, but should be encouraged. Strangely, the typical practice and overwhelming culture around the divine name in Israel today is one completely contrary to what these traditional Jewish commentaries conclude. In my research I have not found a reason for this, and it is difficult to know with any certainty when the ban on using the name became mainstream. Clues from the Septuagint The majority tradition of the Greek translation of the Old Testament (or Old Greek) used kurios, “Lord” in place of the divine name. The great Christian manuscripts Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, and Vaticanus all have kurios in place of God’s name. What motivated this? Some have suggested that this was a strategy used by authorities to facilitate the Hellenizing of Jews. By suppressing the special name of God and using kurios, it made it more universal and easier to harmonize with the emperors and gods of the Greco-Roman world.2Robert Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 51. Related Illustration by Peter Gurry. Images from iStock The Most Important Bible Translation You’ve Never Heard ofUsed by the Apostles and the early church, the Greek translations of the Old Testament may be the most important ever made. William A. Ross But some Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament differ from the standard of using kurios for the Name, especially amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. For example, the Nahal Hever scroll fragments of the Minor Prophets (8Hev XII gr), dated from about 50 BC to 50 AD have the divine name written in paleo-Hebrew script in 28 places. Another scroll has iao in the place of the name. So, whether the original Septuagint translators first chose to use kurios or something else remains inconclusive, leaving us to speculate. Whatever the case may be, it appears that there was controversy or confusion amongst the Septuagint translators and revisers regarding what to do with the divine name, as well as a special interest in it. The practice of substituting the title kurios (“Lord”) for God’s name was widespread, but no one ever revealed a clear reason as to why. There’s much more to say about the Septuagint evidence, which you can read for free in my book on the divine name. Conclusion It seems that ancient Jewish tradition was divided on what to do with God’s name. If you think the evidence looks confusing, that’s because it is! It seems that ancient Jewish tradition was divided on what to do with God’s name, but there is no conclusive reason as to why some banned its use. Was it due to the trauma of exile, the mistranslation of Leviticus 24:16, the prohibition of an evil tyrant, reverence, or a combination of all of these? It’s impossible to be certain with the evidence we have. What we do know is that it eventually became standard to avoid pronouncing God’s name, especially in Jewish circles, and this played a part in the loss of how it originally sounded. In the next article we take a look at what the New Testament authors did with the divine name. Related Illustration by David Fassett Why Didn’t the New Testament Authors Use God’s Name? Part 3The use of “Lord” for the divine name probably helped identify Jesus with the God of the Old Testament. Andrew Case This article is in the public domain. You may freely use, share, and reproduce it. For a more in-depth treatment, see here.Notes1Michael L. Rodkinson, trans., The Babylonian Talmud: Original Text, Edited, Corrected, Formulated, and Translated into English, vol. 1. (Boston: The Talmud Society, 1918), Rosh Hashannah 18b.2Robert Wilkinson, Tetragrammaton: Western Christians and the Hebrew Name of God (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 51.