From the Ten Commandments to the Psalms to the Gospels, English translations of the Bible distort the original meaning of the text: The Ten Commandments don't forbid coveting. Psalm 23 is not primarily about sheep or a shepherd. And God didn't give his only begotten son because he loved the world so much.
The problems stem from flawed translation techniques that haven't been updated in hundreds of years.
In particular, there are three common ways of determining what the ancient words of the Bible mean: etymology, internal structure, and cognates. But they don't work very well.
Two other factors further degrade modern translations: a general desire not to change historical translations and a misunderstanding of how to translate metaphors like "God's hand" (God doesn't literally have a hand) or "the Lord is my shepherd."
These five issues have conspired to create English translations that conceal what the Bible originally meant.
Familiar, modern languages like English or Spanish illustrate what goes wrong.
The English words "ballot" and "bullet" share an ancient source, but they mean completely different things. Likewise, "grammar" and "glamour" used to be the same word, but most students don't find grammar to be glamorous. These pairs are examples of how etymology is misleading.
Knowing what an office is does not shed light on what an officer does, even though "officer" has the word "office" in it, just as sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread. These words demonstrate the danger of relying on internal structure -- roots, prefixes, suffixes and so forth -- to discern a word's meaning. (Also, a "strip mall" isn't what some people might suspect.)
There's a word "demand" in French and it confuses English speakers because it means "to ask," not "to demand." In Spanish, "embarazada," does not mean "embarrassed" but rather "pregnant." These kinds of related words (known as cognates) are common in various languages. It stands to reason that if the words are related they ought to mean the same thing, but it's not true. Cognates, like etymology and internal structure, are unreliable.
Proverbs 28:21 in the 400-year-old classic English translation known as the King James Version (KJV) cautions, oddly, that "to have respect of persons is not good." But 400 years ago, "respect" meant "to be partial," and the point was to avoid favoritism. Additionally, the KJV's "turtle" whose voice is heard in the beautiful imagery of Song of Solomon is a bird. These examples demonstrate a fourth problem plaguing modern translations: the power of history.
In part because of the generally conservative nature of religion -- "out with the old, in with the new" is not a particularly welcome sentiment at most seminaries -- these and other familiar but outdated translations often stick with us and continue to influence Bible translators. (One especially grievous case is the well known but widely misunderstood phrase "God so loved the world" in John 3:16. The meaning of "so" here has changed.)
Shakespeare writes that "Juliet is the sun." But even though melanoma comes from exposure to the sun, Shakespeare didn't mean that Juliet is that girl who causes skin cancer. Obviously, he meant that she has some very specific and culturally defined qualities of the sun, such as beauty. This represents perhaps the trickiest flaw in modern translations: missing the important parts of metaphor and other symbolic language.
Unfortunately, etymology, internal structure, and cognates are the three pillars of Bible translation. And with them, the power of history and a focus on the wrong parts of metaphor degrade all English Bibles even more.
So your Bible translation contains flaws as bad as: mixing up "ballot" and "bullet" (etymology), thinking that all officers work in offices (internal structure), mixing up requests and demands (cognates), thinking that turtles fly (history), and thinking that romance must involve cancer (metaphor).
Fortunately, more modern and reliable translation practices are available, though they haven't made their way into published Bible translations yet. Still, more than at any other time since the Bible was composed, we are better equipped now to understand the ancient words of Scripture.
WATCH: Joel Hoffman's TED Talk
Steve McSwain: Jesus said, "I Am the Way..." But What Does that Really Mean?
Bible translations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BibleGateway.com: A searchable online Bible in over 100 versions ...
Bible Versions and Translations Online
Which Bible is the most accurate translation of the original text ...
And if saint Paul calls Jesus "Gods only son", that may not necessarily be the case of Mary. He may really have had true brothers. A women who bore just one child would have been scorned in the community at that time.
As a translator myself, I am familiar with the concept of "cognate". We call them "false friends", like "eventually", meaning "finally" in English, and "possibly" in French.
I have my opinions, based on what I know about translation and, especially, Bible translation, but I do not expect the different Bible-based religions to accept a truly correct translation of the Bible.
Deist, not a Christian, he believes that the Word of God is written into Nature, *equally accessible* to all
regardless of language or nationality. His highly readable "The Age of Reason" points out the problems
associated with any type of linguistic translation. (Many great scientists from Newton to Einstein believed
they were reading and discovering God's Book of nature, encoded in the language of mathematics, b.t.w.)
“Etymology, internal structure, and cognates” here Dr. Hoffman is absolutely right that these pillars are not proper translation tools and that context and culture should be considered too. But what Dr. Hoffman missed to say that in Languages 101 the first thing you learn is exactly that. So either he is wrong basing this whole article on that or the Bible Society and every publishing house who commissioned translators to translate the Bible are hiring uneducated translators or if they are then definitely not in languages. Humblesmith writes “Further, it is the height of arrogance to hint that every bible translation committee is wrong, and that one man has learned something that all these language scholars have somehow gotten wrong. It is horribly wrong to suggest that people who spend their entire careers studying languages have somehow missed such a basic mistake as Hoffman suggests.”
He picked those verses. If they were the wrong verses he should have picked something else that really made a difference. IF there was any. For example if the issue was that “the world” meant at the time “the Jews” then that is different. Or “only begotten son” actually meant “he had other sons but this is the only begotten one”. Then this is really distorting or concealing.
For what I have learned and know that modern translations have not really changed the meaning of any significant parts of the Bible, but just made it a bit easier to the reader. New evidence and facts have only strengthened the truthfulness of the translations and not changed them. the discovery of the dead sea scrolls. The main discovery there was that how incredible it was to find texts centuries before any of the text we have and still hold the same meaning and text. It did not shed any new major meaning.
At the end, I want to say that readers should be careful and teachers should not pick out a text and jump into conclusions. But that’s their error and not the Translator’s. You can pick any translation or even read the original text and jump into the wrong conclusions.
Thus it puzzles me and troubles me that humans so debate words and the meanings of words, written by humans, when the issue cannot be resolved by any authority above imagination and belief.
Science is a reliable method for righting wrong conclusions, but we cannot apply science to something we cannot yet study. Imagination and belief are the tools first used in the procedure of science. They are used at the beginning of the process used to discover or produce knowledge. What can be imagined and the belief chosen to explain what is imagined must be carefully, methodically, rigorously tested to produce even early pieces of knowledge. The chosen belief cannot supplant knowledge but for those who, by any cause, wish to avoid knowledge.
15:15 “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s…” going through a couple of Hebrew dictionaries “Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionary” and “The Complete Word Study Dictionary: Old Testament” and “Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words” I couldn’t find any other meaning for that word other than, “desire”, “covet”, “long for”, “lust”. So he is wrong there. Humblesmith also says: “In each of these passages, the context prevents chamad from meaning take. Hoffman’s point is grossly wrong on the face of it, and proven by using his own advice. What Hoffman’s low level of teaching seems to indicate…”. Again see the same website mentioned above for the listing of the verses. Also did he go and ask a Jewish rabbi how do the Ten Commandments read in the torah? The website torah.org translates the 10th commandment as ...
4:10 “For God so loved the world”, the proper translation says “this is how God loved the world”. So Dr. Hoffman is right by saying it does not mean “that much”. But again that’s not the fault of the translator but the reader. Or is it really misinterpreted? Let’s consider another well-known statement: “I asked Jesus, 'How much do you love me?' and Jesus said, 'This much.' Then he stretched out his arms and died." We can argue here that actually Jesus didn’t say “how much” but the whole statement and context says “He loved me SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH”. Therefore, if the reader understands “so” to be “this is how”, “this is how much” or “that much” does the meaning of the verse really get distorted by understanding one instead of the other. Does it conceal the right meaning? He says “One especially grievous case is the well-known but widely misunderstood phrase ‘God so loved the world’ in John 3:16. The meaning of ‘so’ here has changed.” Really? Grievous? Widely Misunderstood? Doesn’t that portray to the reader of this article that there is something seriously wrong with this and not just a very minute issue?...
Jesus Himself did this. Jewish leaders in His day wouldn't sleep with someone's wife, or murder a man, and therefore thought themselves sinless, but Jesus explained to them that even thinking about doing those things constituted a transgression of the spirit of the law.
So, while Dr. Hoffman is correct, it seems that in some instances, he's only looking at this from an Old Testament standpoint, and not allowing the New Testament to shed light on the meaning.
Very thought-provoking though. Thanks for posting!
You are right about what I'm trying to do here. I'm only looking at the original meaning of the text, so I'm not addressing how the NT interprets the OT (or, for that matter, how later commentators interpret both the NT and the OT).
I think the NT interpretation is valuable, but I also think that we can't even see the interpretation if we don't have accurate translations.
One particularly clear case of this is Matthew 4:4 (also Luke 4:4), about not living on bread alone. The text there quotes Deuteronomy 8:3, but the point in Matthew and Luke is different than what's in Deuteronomy. (I have more here: http://goddidntsaythat.com/2011/03/29/if-not-by-bread-alone-then-by-what/ .) Most people can't see the difference because the translations mask it.
On the contrary: your article seems to miss the point of Deut 8:3. It is not that God fed them manna, which was not bread, it was that they lived not by bread, but by the faithfulness of God's word. God promised them they would survive even without bread, (that is the 'word' referred to), and God fulfilled the promise by giving them manna.
So also in Mat/Luk 4:4, Christ does not need bread to survive, he needs only rely on the promise of God. But of course, he has faith in this, so does not break the fast prematurely, as if believing that he needed the bread to survive.
So in the end, there is very little difference in the meaning if you take 'motza' as referring to "whatever God says you can live on" vs. "the word of his promise". Why the main difference is to make it look like Christ was quoting out of context -- hardly necessary since you admit that 'motza' really IS used as "the word of his promise" elsewhere in the OT.
On the contrary: the "documentary hypothesis" applies ONLY to the Old Testament books, and not even to all of them. The New Testament books have had very little rewriting. It became politically impossible to do such rewriting very early on in the churches, by the late 2nd century. Before then, people who might want to "rewrite" the Gospels would usually choose to write their own instead, as happened with "The Gospel of Thomas", which is a Gnostic forgery.
Actually, there are between 5,000 and 6,000 Greek manuscripts (counting fragments) of the New Testament, not anywhere near 25,000.
Re: "I believe that this article is atrocious and destructive."
If all we have is your personal belief devoid of any facts, what merit is that? I've been reading Greek for around 30 years, and I found Dr. Hoffman's article interesting.
Of course we do. Story is what gives life meaning. Families are united by the stories they tell. And the Bible is full of story which gives meaning to people's lives. Most people enjoy listening to a story, and the reason TV and movies are so popular is that they tell stories.
came true, where the odds of just 4 productions would be 1 in so many zero's
it wouldn't fit in this computer....Lol. Please pray for your own wisdom as well.
Although God used people to write his Word (nothings impossible for a no boxed God only our little ''P- brains'')
Remember, if we can figure out everything of God, if so would he still be / or need God or us?
Peace & blessings.
Pray for wisdom? Why not work for it and earn it legitimately?
By what authority do you state that god used people to write?
Just like the article - gigantic claims, not one solid example.
I believe that each person can make decisions which are ethical and produce outcomes that are moral and just. I test that belief so I can learn something about each person.
That is the only belief I hold. What label do I get?
We can study the creation but not yet a creator.
We can study the design but not yet a designer.
No person, group, organization, corporation, government or world holds certifiable authority to speak or write for a creator or designer of this universe.
If we want to learn anything at all about anything at all, this universe is the only authoritative source of information that we can learn anything from.