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Translating the Bible is a vexed task

53 points by MoSattler 4y ago

MoSattler 4y ago
https://archive.ph/iJJ1Z https://archive.ph/iJJ1Z
- daedlanth 4y ago
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MonkeyClub 4y ago
“Traduttore, traditore” (“translator, you traitor!”). Translating ancient texts is hard enough given the complex historical and cultural contexts. When it comes to religious texts, though, the level of complexity grows exponentially, especially given how their contexts widen. On an unrelated note, this always vexes me: > By contrast, the two faiths’ cousin—Christianity I get how one can see a relation between Judaism and Christianity. But to add Islam to the mix under the generic label of “Abrahamic religions” seems to be way too much of a stretch, as there’s neither historical nor philosophical continuity. It’s like saying that everyone who’s heard of the Trojan horse story and perhaps related it to their circle is automatically a member of a “Homeric culture”.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  It's not a stretch at all. In the same way that the New Testament (Christianity) extends the Old Testament (Judaism), the Koran considers itself a part of the same lineage. Moses, Jesus etc are prophets in Islam, and Jews and Christians are "people of the book" and accorded special protections.
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Abraham is considered the first prophet in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hence Abrahamic.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Technically speaking, in Judaism and Christianity Abraham is not a prophet (which is a very specific term), he’s instead a patriarch. And in terms of being the first, that’d be Adam.
      - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
        Abraham is called a prophet by God ("therefore restore the man’s wife, for he is a prophet").
- arp242 4y ago
  Islam is generally considered an Abrahamic religion. There is a lot of continuity; the (very very) short version of the Islam perspective is "Abraham explained God's will to us, then Jesus was sent by God to explain God's will better, and then finally God sent Mohammed and he communicated God's will perfectly". Three time's the charm I guess? Many of the figures you know from the Bible make their appearance in the Quran as well, including Abraham of course (hence: Abrahamic religion).
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Yep, I know that, but it doesn’t offer anything else than a claim to authenticity, by posing as a continuation, while the previous revelations are then discarded. The mentions of Biblical persons and events, as I hinted in the previous comment, are cultural rather than theological, and can’t be used to establish theological continuity, no matter how hard the Ismaelite genealogy is pressed.
    - icemelt8 4y ago
      entire islamic theology is based on Abraham and his actions, the rituals in the holy journey of Hajj and Umrah are all repeats of actions of Abraham and his family.
      - MonkeyClub 4y ago
        Yep it’s a very narrow focus on one person, and disregards the millennium of Judaic and Christian traditions that followed on from Abraham. In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified.
        sofixa 4y ago
        > In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified. They all share the same god and the same origin story, and even share religious sites. Compare them to any other religion, and they are quite close.
- antihipocrat 4y ago
  The Koran literally begins by explaining how it is related to the other two religions that preceded it, and how it is also historically contiguous with them.
  - shakna 4y ago
    So does "The Divine Authority of Holy Scripture Asserted" by self-professed Messiah, John Miller. There are plenty of cults that spring out of every major religion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that relationship is anything more than tenuous. This isn't a statement on Islam - depending how you examine certain things and weigh them, it could be either Abrahamic or maybe a little bit more distant. But you need to make a judgement call.
    - messe 4y ago
      > There are plenty of cults that spring out of every major religion Where do you draw the line?
      - shakna 4y ago
        Generally speaking, size and widespread acceptance. The use of the word "cult" there, isn't an insult. It just speaks to the smaller breakoff groups that form. Protestantism began as a cult. It is no longer. Sort of like how creeks spring from every river.
        lolinder 4y ago
        Given that this is a conversation about Islam, this whole subthread seems like a distraction. By any metric of "size and widespread acceptance", Islam is a major religion whose claims should be treated as seriously as any other (which doesn't necessarily mean they should be taken at face value).
        shakna 4y ago
        Yes, it is a major religion... But if it came from the other religions, it began as a cult. As all religions do. Abraham's story, the origin of his religion, began as a cult. And that's the way I used the term in my paragraph that began this subthread. The focus on the word "cult" is a distraction. The concentration is on whether two religions should really be considered part and parcel, when they have diverging core theology, diverging core tenants, and differing historical origins.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  There is: Mohammed met many christian travelers and decided it was a good idea to unify people. The stories are the same, the people are closer than Italians and Israelis, and saying Christianity is Abrahamic because Rome killed a guy who reneged most of jewish literal intepretation then elevated him as a divine figure is just as silly...
- verbify 4y ago
  I think Judaism and Islam have more in common with each other than with Christianity. Christianity's belief in the divinity of Jesus is shared by neither other religion. The Jewish jurist Maimonides ruled that Christians were idol worshipers because of their belief in the trinity and Muslims were not (Menachem Meiri rules otherwise). But more than that, in terms of practice, Muslims and Jews share a great deal. Praying in a certain direction. Praying several times a day. Specific dietary requirements, including banning pork. And Jewish and Islamic thinkers were in constant dialogue, I'm not sure why anyone could say there's no philosophical continuity.
  - User23 4y ago
    > Muslims and Jews share a great deal. Praying in a certain direction. Praying several times a day. Specific dietary requirements, including banning pork. Christian churches face the East. Christian clerics and devout laypersons pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. Finally many Christians observe religious dietary requirements involving fasting and abstinence from meat.
    - verbify 4y ago
      > Christian churches face the East I should have been more specific, it's about praying to a specific place. Jews face the western wall in Jerusalem, Muslims face Mecca. And they do this in or out of the synagogue (or mosque as far as I know). I've seen people get out a compass! > Christian clerics and devout laypersons pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. This might be more analogous, but the "devout laypeople" seems less analogous, as it's got the status of a commandment in Judaism and Islam. > Finally many Christians observe religious dietary requirements involving fasting and abstinence from meat. In this Christianity really differs from Judaism and Islam. I'm talking about ritual slaughter and avoiding eating specific animals, not general periods of abstinence from meat. All in all obviously Judaism and Christianity share a lot too, I'm just suspicious of the claim that they shares more with each other than Islam when my experience is not like that at all.
      - llimos 4y ago
- cdogl 4y ago
  Islam incorporates Jesus, Moses and Abraham. The continuity is direct, both historically and theologically. The histories of Christianity and Islam are wrapped up in one another. After all, the Arab conquests took what europe called the “near east”, which had previously been Hellenized and Romanized. Whatever perceived gulf lies between Islam and Christendom politically, I don’t think the history bears it out.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    > The continuity is direct, both historically and theologically. Theological continuity would mean that Islam accepts and extends, ie that Jesus is the anticipated Messiah subsequently crucified and risen, not to mention accepting Jesus as the son of God and final prophet. I have yet to find any Islamic faction that holds that to be true :)
    - whiteandnerdy 4y ago
      I think you're setting an unreasonably high bar. Christianity has a high degree of continuity with Judaism, but rejects important aspects of Jewish theology, such as Kosher and Sabbath-keeping. So while Christianity accepts large amounts of Jewish theology, and extends new ideas, it doesn't universally accept everything that came before it. Similarly, Islam accepts large amounts of Christian theology (and indeed reintroduces some Jewish practice) and brings new beliefs with it, but doesn't bring every tenet along. Admittedly Jesus' divinity is a very big part of Christianity to reject; but then, the idea of the trinity would be an equally big pill to swallow for a Jew ("hear, O Israel: the LORD your God is one").
      - pulse7 4y ago
        First Christians were Jews which kept the Sabbath and didn't eat unclean meat (even Jesus kept the Sabbath). Then later Christians changed many practices and diverged from the first teachings. During Reformation attempts were made to come back to original Christianity. Seventh-day Adventists for example keep the Sabbath holy and don't eat unclean meat - just like Jesus did! And there are also some other, smaller denominations which also keep the Sabbath holy - like Seventh-Day Baptists.
- EB-Barrington 4y ago
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- lolinder 4y ago
  No one calls Islam a "Judaic" religion or a "Christian" religion, they call it an "Abrahamic" religion. That implies nothing more than a shared relationship to Abraham. How far they diverge theologically from that point is irrelevant to the question of whether they can all be considered Abrahamic. Also, as far as the differences go, this comment shows a stark lack of understanding of world religions in general. For all the differences between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, their similarities are glaringly obvious when placed alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, or any of the other religions of the world. "Abrahamic religions" is a very useful grouping for religious studies, serving much the same role as the "Romance languages" in linguistics. When you look at the full scope of what is possible in religion, the Abrahamic religions have more in common than they do differences.
- User23 4y ago
  > I get how one can see a relation between Judaism and Christianity. That relation exists but it’s vastly overstated by many people today. Christianity and Talmudic Judaism are both in some sense successors to the old Hebrew religion that the Romans ended by destroying the Temple, but they draw very little from each other. In fact the direct predecessors of today’s rabbis, the Pharisees, are already portrayed in a less than flattering light in the New Testament. Islam on the other hand positions itself as the successor faith to both Judaism and Christianity. And frankly, nowadays, I’d say that’s the closest relation those two faiths have.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Regarding “hard choices” when translating: what about not making them? If the goal isn’t to editorialize on purpose, could one just write, “[young girl|virgin]” when faced with what the “correct” translation is supposed to be?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  There are some 1500 hapax legomena in the Old Testament, means words that appear only once and, by extension, whose exact meaning is often unknown. How do you translate them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    Ah makes sense. That is indeed vexing. If we have complete gaps in our knowledge of the language, then there’s no room for anything but editorialization.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    Should they be translated then? Leaving then unchanged would communicate the fact that the word has no direct translation. English has borrowed and invented lots of words which have no direct meaning, they just are a subtle way to express a concept - e.g. "grok"
    - bentley 4y ago
      A lot of work in Bible translation over the millennia has been motivated by translators’ desire to make the most important document in history, the stuff of salvation and life itself, accessible to the common man. Luckily, there is room in the world for (and demand for) countless approaches to Biblical translation, from the hyper‐literal to the simple paraphrase. Any person who’s participated in a group Bible study (except in those kooky KJV‐only cults) has experienced reading Bible passages out loud in a circle of people, each of whom happens to be quoting a different translation of the same text.
fjfaase 4y ago
Rather superficial article about the subject. Whole books are written about the subject or why one translation is better than another. (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) The article does not even touch upon culture things, such like how to deal with a translation for a culture where pigs are kept as pets or cattle, while in the old testament they are considered as unclean animals. It also does not mention that there is not one Greek text upon which the new testament is based, but that there are many variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Testament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Te...
- MoSattler 4y ago
  > Rather superficial article about the subject. I liked the article because it gave a general idea on how hard it is to translate very old religious texts. I don't think it's trying to write a theological analysis, just giving a basic understanding of the subject. For those who are more interested in the topic, they can do more research themselves, like checking out the book the economist is covering in the article.
- Amezarak 4y ago
  > (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) Most of them are bad reasons - for example, one very popular criticism is the claim that KJV invented the usage of the word "unicorn" in the Bible, and it's actually a wild ox. But it was traditionally translated that way from the time of the Latin Vulgate, and nobody knows for sure what a re'em is. [Ed - it turns out the Septuagint also uses the word μονοκερως, so it goes back even further.) So while it seems reasonable to personally disagree with the choice of word, it's going too far to declare it to be wrong when a) nobody knows what the referent is for sure b) the two pre-existing "canonical" translations have used your equivalent translation for ~1800 years. You can find people explaining why not to use any translation; people are, uh, religious about their chosen translation and the KJV is the old guy you've got to tear down. But any mainstream translation is probably OK. You certainly miss out on a lot of poetry and historical citations if you skip out on the KJV, and there's very few actual problems with it. Probably the fairest criticism is the general decline in reading ability means that many people find the KJV hard to read, and the NKJV in that regard is only a minor improvement for modern audiences.
bentley 4y ago
Since the article is kind of shallow, here are a few atypical approaches to Biblical translation I’ve found interesting over the years: • The Five Books of Moses, by Everett Fox, who attempts to retain in English the underlying poetry of the Hebrew like alliteration, meter, wordplay, and so on. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-books-of-moses-by-everett-fox/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-book...) • The Books of the Bible: not a new translation (it’s just the NIV), but rather than a typical modern Bible which is laid out for easy referencing, instead cuts out chapters and verses completely, formatting it instead in the way the books were originally written, and eliminating a few historical artifacts of translation like the splitting of the Book of Chronicles, the order of books relative to each other, and so on. (https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes/pd/48037X https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes...) • Alpha: A Translation of Genesis 1. (https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...)
- err4nt 4y ago
  If you like Everett Fox, you may like Robert Alter's translations of the tanakh. He has translated the entire hebrew bible and given plenty of notes along the way. If you don't read hebrew, by the time you are done reading the translation and notes you will have seen or heard the hebrew language wordplay, and the english translation by itself is nice to read!
- gshubert17 4y ago
  Similar translations from the Greek by Andy Gaus titled "The Unvarnished Gospels" and "The Unvarnished New Testament". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gaus
- ChocMontePy 4y ago
  There was a beautifully made book from 1936 called "The Bible Designed To Be Read As Literature" that was set out and edited to be more like a normal book: https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10239/ https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10239/ I picked up a copy secondhand years ago and I'm happy I did.
peignoir 4y ago
Seems like a field where GPT could do a descent job
- sgt 4y ago
  Descent job or decent job?
- haunter 4y ago
  Nice typo
- samus 4y ago
  People have translated the Bible for hundreds of years now. They have interpreted, expounded and preached it for a way longer time already. The problems are interpretation details and questions that cannot be definitely answered because the texts were composed millenia ago. This is a field where GPT is truly redundant. Also, since it was trained on modern-day texts, it is very ill-suited for this task. And there might not be enough ancient texts to properly train a large model that could be used to extract hidden knowledge.
wizofaus 4y ago
I'm more curious about the first word in that article - is "dodgy" becoming accepted as part of the US English vernacular now? It's particularly common in Aus English but I usually have to find alternatives when conversing with Usonians.
- dendodge 4y ago
  The Economist is a UK publication
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Wow - I'd always assumed it was US-based for some reason (maybe because its articles get referred to on HN so frequently!).
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  TIL dodgy isn't used much by Americans. Canadian here, we use it all the time.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Now that I think about it, dodgy isn't used everywhere but it wouldn't feel out of place if someone used it here in the US unlike other commonwealth words like bonnet or solicitor.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago
  I'm an american. It isn't common, but it is common enough that when it is used it doesn't stick out as an out of place word. I use it myself once in a while.
haunter 4y ago
Personally I always thought that formal equivalence (word-for-word) is better than dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought). And that’t not just the Bible but generally speaking about any ancient text. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that the translation should be archaic too (see the “ye and thou vs you”) But oh well it’s a nice topic. Our languages constantly evolve as time goes on yet the originals stay the same. Who knows maybe AI will be helpful too here one day.
Mikeb85 4y ago
Americans have a weird fixation on translating the Bible. No religion apart from Protestants attempt to interpret holy texts without supporting ancient commentsry. Jews have the Talmud and other commentaries, Muslims have hadiths, Orthodox and Catholic Christians have centuries of commentaries by saints, similarly Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and others all have many supporting texts, not just a single canonical one. Yet Protestant Americans are looking for a "perfect" translation so that they can magically understand a text that was never meant to be a single text nevermind interpreted on its own. It's also strange that Protestants trust the Orthodox/Catholic church to decide what is scripture but throw away commentary by saints, including those who lived through the councils that decided what is considered scripture.
- shakna 4y ago
  Protestants are absolutely trained to make use of commentaries. Its one of the bare fundamentals of exegesis, which is taught in first year in basically every Bible college. Its nonsensical to say that they ignore the masses of study on these documents.
  - Mikeb85 4y ago
    Protestant commentaries are way too modern and they throw out basically anything they deem "too Catholic". They also threw out books of the Bible that everyone used for the better part of 1500 years.
    - shakna 4y ago
      The most common commentaries used across all the Protestant churches would probably be the Tyndale commentaries. You will also find the Tyndale's on many a Catholic priest's book shelf. This sounds less like a complaint on professionalism, and more like a personal beef. Not one reflected by the wider church - you'll find many leaders both in and outside the Catholic church, who communicate regularly, and coordinate their efforts together.
      - 4y ago
Luker88 4y ago
Where do I find a literal translation of the bible? I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. I think have read enough fiction with made up words to be able to understand something anyway. Also, maybe not based on Latin? Latin was not the original language anyway, and I got fed up with the mistranslations that we keep repeating as correct. I gave up after searching and learning the history of the text, but maybe something exists, even if it is not recognized by this or that church?
- bentley 4y ago
  Off the cuff, I would say ESV is probably the most mainstream translation that fits your requirements. The translation style attempts to be literal and the source texts are based on the original Greek and Hebrew, not Latin translations. How literal you want to get beyond that is kind of a deep rabbit hole, that probably ends with learning ancient Hebrew and Greek. > I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. A study edition or commentary would help with that.
  - blendergeek 4y ago
    > I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. The Amplified Bible offers several alternative meanings for a lot of words to try to get some more nuance across. This does make for harder reading.
  - CitrusFruits 4y ago
    Yeah I've heard the ESV jokingly described as "English as you've never heard it before" because of the lengths it goes to in order to preserve ordering and meaning to the words while still technically being grammatically correct English.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  I've become fond of https://ebible.org/t4t/ https://ebible.org/t4t/
- memling 4y ago
getoffmyyawn 4y ago
A big challenge in translating "The Bible" is that it is an anthology collected over 100s or 1000s of years in many different and divergent forms. Thus there is no authoritative original version. All available versions were compiled, curated, and edited by their respective authors.
- nhtsamera 4y ago
  Another big challenge is the punishment for getting it wrong, which the article doesn't even mention. >For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. Personally, I wish more people would include curse clauses in important documents. Legal contracts, government constitutions...why not tack on a few lines threatening a dire curse for any party who reneges on their responsibilities?
  - 3836293648 4y ago
    Please say that that is from the old testament
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      No. Revelation, IIRC
      - nhtsamera 4y ago
        Yeah, it's actually one of the last sentences in the New Testament - Revelations 22:18. Jesus did his best to tone down the fire and brimstone, but the Abrahamic god is not a particularly forgiving one.
        paulryanrogers 4y ago
fortran77 4y ago
That’s why we read the Hebrew bible out loud, in its original language, three times a week and cycle over the whole thing in the course of a year.
- TheFreim 4y ago
  > That’s why we read the Hebrew bible out loud Do you have any resources for someone who wants to learn Biblical Hebrew? I desire to be able to read the original languages.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fortran77 4y ago
    Study at a yeshiva? Parents send their kids to schools that teach this stuff. That's' how I learned it. And it takes years to deal with modern vs biblical Hebrew, and also Aramaic, etc. Start with Sefaria so at least you can see what it looks like: https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1?lang=bi&aliyot=0 https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1?lang=bi&aliyot=0
vehemenz 4y ago
The article only touches on this in the last paragraph, but another challenge is translating the language to serve multiple purposes. The canonical texts never serve one purpose. They need to have an allegorical/exegetic component for the educated and clergy, and they need to have a down-to-earth moral/historical component for the "unwashed masses."
moloch-hai 4y ago
Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. We have no such "original text". There never was any such "original text". Read it in the form most entertaining, and you will experience it in the purest form still possible. Seek precision, and you will go badly astray. Anything that turns on the exact meaning of a word will be forever ambiguous. There can be no useful list of such passages or words. You must assume all are. Disagreement about meaning is unavoidable and mistaken. Your opinion about true meaning fails in exact proportion with your confidence in it. Extracting "true meaning" is no different from Newton's attempts at divination by versal numerology. You may evaluate others' opinions in this way. The more confidence they have in their interpretation, the less competent is their opinion.
- athorax 4y ago
  "You may evaluate others' opinions in this way. The more confidence they have, the less competent is their opinion." Rare self burn, nice.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    Rare? Thanks.
- memling 4y ago
  > Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. I think this overstates the case, especially when it comes to the text of the Bible. Thousands of variants exist, but this is precisely because the text was so widely copied. The prevalence of manuscripts and pieces of them dwarfs every other ancient document by orders of magnitude. The abundance provides a means of reconstructing the text with a high degree of probability. Whether that correlates with truth is of course another question but skepticism about the transmission of the Bible would lead us to much deeper skepticism about every ancient document. Perhaps that's warranted! But it seems like a losing proposition if you are to retrieve anything from written history.
  - 4y ago
WUMBOWUMBO 4y ago
Most Bible translations remove the tetragrammaton, anyone familiar with whether or not it appears in copies of the Torah? Many Christian denominations simply don’t acknowledge its existence.
- abrudz 4y ago
  It absolutely does. A Torah scroll without it would be invalid for public readings.
- bentley 4y ago
  The Christian practice of commonly rendering the Tetragammatron as “LORD” in small caps comes from historic Jewish practice, known from extant copies of the Septuagint (a Jewish translation). The Tetragammatron is important to Christianity. John 8:58 is generally read as Jesus invoking it in an explicit claim of self‐divinity.
  - WUMBOWUMBO 4y ago
    John exists outside of the Hebrew Scriptures though. I would go as far as to disagree with the statement “The Tetragrammaton is important to Christianity.” Translations of the Tetragrammaton exists in some translations of the Bible and removed in most others (in place of LORD), for example Pslams 83:18. Hebrew Scriptures keep the title intact, Christian translations remove it. Why is that? P.S. the Tetragrammaton does not translate literally to Jesus P.P.S Scrolling through this list of translations doesn’t seem to render the Tetragrammaton for your given verse (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&version=NIRV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&versio...)
mbfg 4y ago
Odd that an all powerful god would choose text written in dying languages, easily susceptible to being lost or destroyed, as the preferred method of communication.
- expralitemonk78 4y ago
  Thomas Paine, US founding father and deist, believed God's Word is the universe he created. From "The Age of Reason": It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God. Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation.
  - mbfg 4y ago
    i wonder WHY he believed that, what evidence he had to think it was true?
- mcswell 4y ago
  He was doing the best he could, given Babel. The whole thing, going all the way back to the Fall, was necessarily and inescapably imperfect. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient God create such a mess, you ask? A lot of theological ink has been spilled on that question, but I think the consensus was that it was the best that could be done, given a (theological) concept of free will. The alternative was for God to create nothing at all, or at least nothing sentient.
kgwxd 4y ago
People can’t even reliably retell a story they witnessed firsthand and experienced in their native language 5 minutes ago. I don’t understand how anyone can put any stock into religious and other historical text, it’s all complete bs.
cafard 4y ago
With a bit of work, one can find Ronald Knox's short volume On Englishing the Bible, which has many interesting things to say.
mcswell 4y ago
Some things this article doesn't touch on (although maybe the complete book does), which come up when translating into other languages. I'm not saying there are no solutions to these, but they are interesting (and for those who believe, important) questions. 1) How to translate names of animals and other concepts that are unfamiliar in the target culture, e.g. "sheep" into Inuit. 2) Whether to translate a given word in the same way in each instance of the word. Suppose you're translating into a Mayan language, where "bread" is an unfamiliar concept. Jesus refers to "breaking bread" (literal sense) and "the bread of life" (metaphorical sense, for which a translation as tortilla might be better). 3) How to translate a word where the target language makes unavoidable distinctions that the source language does not. In Tzeltal, there is a word for "older brother" and a word for "younger sibling", but no word for "brother, whether younger or older". When the Bible refers to Peter and his brother Andrew, which word do you use? Lots more...
- TheFreim 4y ago
  The issue of having not enough words in the target language is definitely a big one. In John 6:50-54 the original Greek uses different words for eating that have different connotations but will sometimes be rendered as the same word in English "eat" which takes away from the text. Relevant to Christian understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
StuffMaster 4y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/ . I doubt I'll ever shop elsewhere for biblical info.

53 points by MoSattler 4y ago

MoSattler 4y ago

https://archive.ph/iJJ1Z https://archive.ph/iJJ1Z

daedlanth 4y ago
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MonkeyClub 4y ago

“Traduttore, traditore” (“translator, you traitor!”). Translating ancient texts is hard enough given the complex historical and cultural contexts. When it comes to religious texts, though, the level of complexity grows exponentially, especially given how their contexts widen. On an unrelated note, this always vexes me: > By contrast, the two faiths’ cousin—Christianity I get how one can see a relation between Judaism and Christianity. But to add Islam to the mix under the generic label of “Abrahamic religions” seems to be way too much of a stretch, as there’s neither historical nor philosophical continuity. It’s like saying that everyone who’s heard of the Trojan horse story and perhaps related it to their circle is automatically a member of a “Homeric culture”.

rippercushions 4y ago
It's not a stretch at all. In the same way that the New Testament (Christianity) extends the Old Testament (Judaism), the Koran considers itself a part of the same lineage. Moses, Jesus etc are prophets in Islam, and Jews and Christians are "people of the book" and accorded special protections.
- akiselev 4y ago
  Abraham is considered the first prophet in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam hence Abrahamic.
  - MonkeyClub 4y ago
    Technically speaking, in Judaism and Christianity Abraham is not a prophet (which is a very specific term), he’s instead a patriarch. And in terms of being the first, that’d be Adam.
    - edflsafoiewq 4y ago
      Abraham is called a prophet by God ("therefore restore the man’s wife, for he is a prophet").
arp242 4y ago
Islam is generally considered an Abrahamic religion. There is a lot of continuity; the (very very) short version of the Islam perspective is "Abraham explained God's will to us, then Jesus was sent by God to explain God's will better, and then finally God sent Mohammed and he communicated God's will perfectly". Three time's the charm I guess? Many of the figures you know from the Bible make their appearance in the Quran as well, including Abraham of course (hence: Abrahamic religion).
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  Yep, I know that, but it doesn’t offer anything else than a claim to authenticity, by posing as a continuation, while the previous revelations are then discarded. The mentions of Biblical persons and events, as I hinted in the previous comment, are cultural rather than theological, and can’t be used to establish theological continuity, no matter how hard the Ismaelite genealogy is pressed.
  - icemelt8 4y ago
    entire islamic theology is based on Abraham and his actions, the rituals in the holy journey of Hajj and Umrah are all repeats of actions of Abraham and his family.
    - MonkeyClub 4y ago
      Yep it’s a very narrow focus on one person, and disregards the millennium of Judaic and Christian traditions that followed on from Abraham. In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        > In general, to my ears “Abrahamic religions” is a forced academic classification, and doesn’t point to any actual spiritual kinship shared between the religions thus classified. They all share the same god and the same origin story, and even share religious sites. Compare them to any other religion, and they are quite close.
antihipocrat 4y ago
The Koran literally begins by explaining how it is related to the other two religions that preceded it, and how it is also historically contiguous with them.
- shakna 4y ago
  So does "The Divine Authority of Holy Scripture Asserted" by self-professed Messiah, John Miller. There are plenty of cults that spring out of every major religion, but that doesn't necessarily mean that relationship is anything more than tenuous. This isn't a statement on Islam - depending how you examine certain things and weigh them, it could be either Abrahamic or maybe a little bit more distant. But you need to make a judgement call.
  - messe 4y ago
    > There are plenty of cults that spring out of every major religion Where do you draw the line?
    - shakna 4y ago
      Generally speaking, size and widespread acceptance. The use of the word "cult" there, isn't an insult. It just speaks to the smaller breakoff groups that form. Protestantism began as a cult. It is no longer. Sort of like how creeks spring from every river.
      - lolinder 4y ago
        Given that this is a conversation about Islam, this whole subthread seems like a distraction. By any metric of "size and widespread acceptance", Islam is a major religion whose claims should be treated as seriously as any other (which doesn't necessarily mean they should be taken at face value).
        shakna 4y ago
        Yes, it is a major religion... But if it came from the other religions, it began as a cult. As all religions do. Abraham's story, the origin of his religion, began as a cult. And that's the way I used the term in my paragraph that began this subthread. The focus on the word "cult" is a distraction. The concentration is on whether two religions should really be considered part and parcel, when they have diverging core theology, diverging core tenants, and differing historical origins.
xwolfi 4y ago
There is: Mohammed met many christian travelers and decided it was a good idea to unify people. The stories are the same, the people are closer than Italians and Israelis, and saying Christianity is Abrahamic because Rome killed a guy who reneged most of jewish literal intepretation then elevated him as a divine figure is just as silly...
verbify 4y ago
I think Judaism and Islam have more in common with each other than with Christianity. Christianity's belief in the divinity of Jesus is shared by neither other religion. The Jewish jurist Maimonides ruled that Christians were idol worshipers because of their belief in the trinity and Muslims were not (Menachem Meiri rules otherwise). But more than that, in terms of practice, Muslims and Jews share a great deal. Praying in a certain direction. Praying several times a day. Specific dietary requirements, including banning pork. And Jewish and Islamic thinkers were in constant dialogue, I'm not sure why anyone could say there's no philosophical continuity.
- User23 4y ago
  > Muslims and Jews share a great deal. Praying in a certain direction. Praying several times a day. Specific dietary requirements, including banning pork. Christian churches face the East. Christian clerics and devout laypersons pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. Finally many Christians observe religious dietary requirements involving fasting and abstinence from meat.
  - verbify 4y ago
    > Christian churches face the East I should have been more specific, it's about praying to a specific place. Jews face the western wall in Jerusalem, Muslims face Mecca. And they do this in or out of the synagogue (or mosque as far as I know). I've seen people get out a compass! > Christian clerics and devout laypersons pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. This might be more analogous, but the "devout laypeople" seems less analogous, as it's got the status of a commandment in Judaism and Islam. > Finally many Christians observe religious dietary requirements involving fasting and abstinence from meat. In this Christianity really differs from Judaism and Islam. I'm talking about ritual slaughter and avoiding eating specific animals, not general periods of abstinence from meat. All in all obviously Judaism and Christianity share a lot too, I'm just suspicious of the claim that they shares more with each other than Islam when my experience is not like that at all.
    - llimos 4y ago
cdogl 4y ago
Islam incorporates Jesus, Moses and Abraham. The continuity is direct, both historically and theologically. The histories of Christianity and Islam are wrapped up in one another. After all, the Arab conquests took what europe called the “near east”, which had previously been Hellenized and Romanized. Whatever perceived gulf lies between Islam and Christendom politically, I don’t think the history bears it out.
- MonkeyClub 4y ago
  > The continuity is direct, both historically and theologically. Theological continuity would mean that Islam accepts and extends, ie that Jesus is the anticipated Messiah subsequently crucified and risen, not to mention accepting Jesus as the son of God and final prophet. I have yet to find any Islamic faction that holds that to be true :)
  - whiteandnerdy 4y ago
    I think you're setting an unreasonably high bar. Christianity has a high degree of continuity with Judaism, but rejects important aspects of Jewish theology, such as Kosher and Sabbath-keeping. So while Christianity accepts large amounts of Jewish theology, and extends new ideas, it doesn't universally accept everything that came before it. Similarly, Islam accepts large amounts of Christian theology (and indeed reintroduces some Jewish practice) and brings new beliefs with it, but doesn't bring every tenet along. Admittedly Jesus' divinity is a very big part of Christianity to reject; but then, the idea of the trinity would be an equally big pill to swallow for a Jew ("hear, O Israel: the LORD your God is one").
    - pulse7 4y ago
      First Christians were Jews which kept the Sabbath and didn't eat unclean meat (even Jesus kept the Sabbath). Then later Christians changed many practices and diverged from the first teachings. During Reformation attempts were made to come back to original Christianity. Seventh-day Adventists for example keep the Sabbath holy and don't eat unclean meat - just like Jesus did! And there are also some other, smaller denominations which also keep the Sabbath holy - like Seventh-Day Baptists.
EB-Barrington 4y ago
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lolinder 4y ago
No one calls Islam a "Judaic" religion or a "Christian" religion, they call it an "Abrahamic" religion. That implies nothing more than a shared relationship to Abraham. How far they diverge theologically from that point is irrelevant to the question of whether they can all be considered Abrahamic. Also, as far as the differences go, this comment shows a stark lack of understanding of world religions in general. For all the differences between Islam, Judaism and Christianity, their similarities are glaringly obvious when placed alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Shinto, or any of the other religions of the world. "Abrahamic religions" is a very useful grouping for religious studies, serving much the same role as the "Romance languages" in linguistics. When you look at the full scope of what is possible in religion, the Abrahamic religions have more in common than they do differences.
User23 4y ago
> I get how one can see a relation between Judaism and Christianity. That relation exists but it’s vastly overstated by many people today. Christianity and Talmudic Judaism are both in some sense successors to the old Hebrew religion that the Romans ended by destroying the Temple, but they draw very little from each other. In fact the direct predecessors of today’s rabbis, the Pharisees, are already portrayed in a less than flattering light in the New Testament. Islam on the other hand positions itself as the successor faith to both Judaism and Christianity. And frankly, nowadays, I’d say that’s the closest relation those two faiths have.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Regarding “hard choices” when translating: what about not making them? If the goal isn’t to editorialize on purpose, could one just write, “[young girl|virgin]” when faced with what the “correct” translation is supposed to be?

rippercushions 4y ago
There are some 1500 hapax legomena in the Old Testament, means words that appear only once and, by extension, whose exact meaning is often unknown. How do you translate them? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hapax_legomenon
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Ah makes sense. That is indeed vexing. If we have complete gaps in our knowledge of the language, then there’s no room for anything but editorialization.
- XorNot 4y ago
  Should they be translated then? Leaving then unchanged would communicate the fact that the word has no direct translation. English has borrowed and invented lots of words which have no direct meaning, they just are a subtle way to express a concept - e.g. "grok"
  - bentley 4y ago
    A lot of work in Bible translation over the millennia has been motivated by translators’ desire to make the most important document in history, the stuff of salvation and life itself, accessible to the common man. Luckily, there is room in the world for (and demand for) countless approaches to Biblical translation, from the hyper‐literal to the simple paraphrase. Any person who’s participated in a group Bible study (except in those kooky KJV‐only cults) has experienced reading Bible passages out loud in a circle of people, each of whom happens to be quoting a different translation of the same text.

fjfaase 4y ago

Rather superficial article about the subject. Whole books are written about the subject or why one translation is better than another. (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) The article does not even touch upon culture things, such like how to deal with a translation for a culture where pigs are kept as pets or cattle, while in the old testament they are considered as unclean animals. It also does not mention that there is not one Greek text upon which the new testament is based, but that there are many variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Testament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textual_variants_in_the_New_Te...

MoSattler 4y ago
> Rather superficial article about the subject. I liked the article because it gave a general idea on how hard it is to translate very old religious texts. I don't think it's trying to write a theological analysis, just giving a basic understanding of the subject. For those who are more interested in the topic, they can do more research themselves, like checking out the book the economist is covering in the article.
Amezarak 4y ago
> (A quick search will find you people telling you not to use the King James translation.) Most of them are bad reasons - for example, one very popular criticism is the claim that KJV invented the usage of the word "unicorn" in the Bible, and it's actually a wild ox. But it was traditionally translated that way from the time of the Latin Vulgate, and nobody knows for sure what a re'em is. [Ed - it turns out the Septuagint also uses the word μονοκερως, so it goes back even further.) So while it seems reasonable to personally disagree with the choice of word, it's going too far to declare it to be wrong when a) nobody knows what the referent is for sure b) the two pre-existing "canonical" translations have used your equivalent translation for ~1800 years. You can find people explaining why not to use any translation; people are, uh, religious about their chosen translation and the KJV is the old guy you've got to tear down. But any mainstream translation is probably OK. You certainly miss out on a lot of poetry and historical citations if you skip out on the KJV, and there's very few actual problems with it. Probably the fairest criticism is the general decline in reading ability means that many people find the KJV hard to read, and the NKJV in that regard is only a minor improvement for modern audiences.

bentley 4y ago

Since the article is kind of shallow, here are a few atypical approaches to Biblical translation I’ve found interesting over the years: • The Five Books of Moses, by Everett Fox, who attempts to retain in English the underlying poetry of the Hebrew like alliteration, meter, wordplay, and so on. (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-books-of-moses-by-everett-fox/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/55160/the-five-book...) • The Books of the Bible: not a new translation (it’s just the NIV), but rather than a typical modern Bible which is laid out for easy referencing, instead cuts out chapters and verses completely, formatting it instead in the way the books were originally written, and eliminating a few historical artifacts of translation like the splitting of the Book of Chronicles, the order of books relative to each other, and so on. (https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes/pd/48037X https://www.christianbook.com/niv-books-of-the-bible-volumes...) • Alpha: A Translation of Genesis 1. (https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.html https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht...)

err4nt 4y ago
If you like Everett Fox, you may like Robert Alter's translations of the tanakh. He has translated the entire hebrew bible and given plenty of notes along the way. If you don't read hebrew, by the time you are done reading the translation and notes you will have seen or heard the hebrew language wordplay, and the english translation by itself is nice to read!
gshubert17 4y ago
Similar translations from the Greek by Andy Gaus titled "The Unvarnished Gospels" and "The Unvarnished New Testament". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Gaus
ChocMontePy 4y ago
There was a beautifully made book from 1936 called "The Bible Designed To Be Read As Literature" that was set out and edited to be more like a normal book: https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10239/ https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.10239/ I picked up a copy secondhand years ago and I'm happy I did.

peignoir 4y ago

Seems like a field where GPT could do a descent job

sgt 4y ago
Descent job or decent job?
haunter 4y ago
Nice typo
samus 4y ago
People have translated the Bible for hundreds of years now. They have interpreted, expounded and preached it for a way longer time already. The problems are interpretation details and questions that cannot be definitely answered because the texts were composed millenia ago. This is a field where GPT is truly redundant. Also, since it was trained on modern-day texts, it is very ill-suited for this task. And there might not be enough ancient texts to properly train a large model that could be used to extract hidden knowledge.

wizofaus 4y ago

I'm more curious about the first word in that article - is "dodgy" becoming accepted as part of the US English vernacular now? It's particularly common in Aus English but I usually have to find alternatives when conversing with Usonians.

dendodge 4y ago
The Economist is a UK publication
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Wow - I'd always assumed it was US-based for some reason (maybe because its articles get referred to on HN so frequently!).
Mikeb85 4y ago
TIL dodgy isn't used much by Americans. Canadian here, we use it all the time.
xeromal 4y ago
Now that I think about it, dodgy isn't used everywhere but it wouldn't feel out of place if someone used it here in the US unlike other commonwealth words like bonnet or solicitor.
tasty_freeze 4y ago
I'm an american. It isn't common, but it is common enough that when it is used it doesn't stick out as an out of place word. I use it myself once in a while.

haunter 4y ago

Personally I always thought that formal equivalence (word-for-word) is better than dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought). And that’t not just the Bible but generally speaking about any ancient text. On the other hand that doesn’t mean that the translation should be archaic too (see the “ye and thou vs you”) But oh well it’s a nice topic. Our languages constantly evolve as time goes on yet the originals stay the same. Who knows maybe AI will be helpful too here one day.

Mikeb85 4y ago

Americans have a weird fixation on translating the Bible. No religion apart from Protestants attempt to interpret holy texts without supporting ancient commentsry. Jews have the Talmud and other commentaries, Muslims have hadiths, Orthodox and Catholic Christians have centuries of commentaries by saints, similarly Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and others all have many supporting texts, not just a single canonical one. Yet Protestant Americans are looking for a "perfect" translation so that they can magically understand a text that was never meant to be a single text nevermind interpreted on its own. It's also strange that Protestants trust the Orthodox/Catholic church to decide what is scripture but throw away commentary by saints, including those who lived through the councils that decided what is considered scripture.

shakna 4y ago
Protestants are absolutely trained to make use of commentaries. Its one of the bare fundamentals of exegesis, which is taught in first year in basically every Bible college. Its nonsensical to say that they ignore the masses of study on these documents.
- Mikeb85 4y ago
  Protestant commentaries are way too modern and they throw out basically anything they deem "too Catholic". They also threw out books of the Bible that everyone used for the better part of 1500 years.
  - shakna 4y ago
    The most common commentaries used across all the Protestant churches would probably be the Tyndale commentaries. You will also find the Tyndale's on many a Catholic priest's book shelf. This sounds less like a complaint on professionalism, and more like a personal beef. Not one reflected by the wider church - you'll find many leaders both in and outside the Catholic church, who communicate regularly, and coordinate their efforts together.
    - 4y ago

Luker88 4y ago

Where do I find a literal translation of the bible? I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. I think have read enough fiction with made up words to be able to understand something anyway. Also, maybe not based on Latin? Latin was not the original language anyway, and I got fed up with the mistranslations that we keep repeating as correct. I gave up after searching and learning the history of the text, but maybe something exists, even if it is not recognized by this or that church?

bentley 4y ago
Off the cuff, I would say ESV is probably the most mainstream translation that fits your requirements. The translation style attempts to be literal and the source texts are based on the original Greek and Hebrew, not Latin translations. How literal you want to get beyond that is kind of a deep rabbit hole, that probably ends with learning ancient Hebrew and Greek. > I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. A study edition or commentary would help with that.
- blendergeek 4y ago
  > I would like one that does not force a meaning on words that are not known. The Amplified Bible offers several alternative meanings for a lot of words to try to get some more nuance across. This does make for harder reading.
- CitrusFruits 4y ago
  Yeah I've heard the ESV jokingly described as "English as you've never heard it before" because of the lengths it goes to in order to preserve ordering and meaning to the words while still technically being grammatically correct English.
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
I've become fond of https://ebible.org/t4t/ https://ebible.org/t4t/
memling 4y ago

getoffmyyawn 4y ago

A big challenge in translating "The Bible" is that it is an anthology collected over 100s or 1000s of years in many different and divergent forms. Thus there is no authoritative original version. All available versions were compiled, curated, and edited by their respective authors.

nhtsamera 4y ago
Another big challenge is the punishment for getting it wrong, which the article doesn't even mention. >For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book. Personally, I wish more people would include curse clauses in important documents. Legal contracts, government constitutions...why not tack on a few lines threatening a dire curse for any party who reneges on their responsibilities?
- 3836293648 4y ago
  Please say that that is from the old testament
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    No. Revelation, IIRC
    - nhtsamera 4y ago
      Yeah, it's actually one of the last sentences in the New Testament - Revelations 22:18. Jesus did his best to tone down the fire and brimstone, but the Abrahamic god is not a particularly forgiving one.
      - paulryanrogers 4y ago

fortran77 4y ago

That’s why we read the Hebrew bible out loud, in its original language, three times a week and cycle over the whole thing in the course of a year.

TheFreim 4y ago
> That’s why we read the Hebrew bible out loud Do you have any resources for someone who wants to learn Biblical Hebrew? I desire to be able to read the original languages.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- fortran77 4y ago
  Study at a yeshiva? Parents send their kids to schools that teach this stuff. That's' how I learned it. And it takes years to deal with modern vs biblical Hebrew, and also Aramaic, etc. Start with Sefaria so at least you can see what it looks like: https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1?lang=bi&aliyot=0 https://www.sefaria.org/Genesis.1?lang=bi&aliyot=0

vehemenz 4y ago

The article only touches on this in the last paragraph, but another challenge is translating the language to serve multiple purposes. The canonical texts never serve one purpose. They need to have an allegorical/exegetic component for the educated and clergy, and they need to have a down-to-earth moral/historical component for the "unwashed masses."

moloch-hai 4y ago

Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. We have no such "original text". There never was any such "original text". Read it in the form most entertaining, and you will experience it in the purest form still possible. Seek precision, and you will go badly astray. Anything that turns on the exact meaning of a word will be forever ambiguous. There can be no useful list of such passages or words. You must assume all are. Disagreement about meaning is unavoidable and mistaken. Your opinion about true meaning fails in exact proportion with your confidence in it. Extracting "true meaning" is no different from Newton's attempts at divination by versal numerology. You may evaluate others' opinions in this way. The more confidence they have in their interpretation, the less competent is their opinion.

athorax 4y ago
"You may evaluate others' opinions in this way. The more confidence they have, the less competent is their opinion." Rare self burn, nice.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Rare? Thanks.
memling 4y ago
> Faithfulness to an imagined "original text" is often asked for, often attempted, but wholly futile. I think this overstates the case, especially when it comes to the text of the Bible. Thousands of variants exist, but this is precisely because the text was so widely copied. The prevalence of manuscripts and pieces of them dwarfs every other ancient document by orders of magnitude. The abundance provides a means of reconstructing the text with a high degree of probability. Whether that correlates with truth is of course another question but skepticism about the transmission of the Bible would lead us to much deeper skepticism about every ancient document. Perhaps that's warranted! But it seems like a losing proposition if you are to retrieve anything from written history.
- 4y ago

WUMBOWUMBO 4y ago

Most Bible translations remove the tetragrammaton, anyone familiar with whether or not it appears in copies of the Torah? Many Christian denominations simply don’t acknowledge its existence.

abrudz 4y ago
It absolutely does. A Torah scroll without it would be invalid for public readings.
bentley 4y ago
The Christian practice of commonly rendering the Tetragammatron as “LORD” in small caps comes from historic Jewish practice, known from extant copies of the Septuagint (a Jewish translation). The Tetragammatron is important to Christianity. John 8:58 is generally read as Jesus invoking it in an explicit claim of self‐divinity.
- WUMBOWUMBO 4y ago
  John exists outside of the Hebrew Scriptures though. I would go as far as to disagree with the statement “The Tetragrammaton is important to Christianity.” Translations of the Tetragrammaton exists in some translations of the Bible and removed in most others (in place of LORD), for example Pslams 83:18. Hebrew Scriptures keep the title intact, Christian translations remove it. Why is that? P.S. the Tetragrammaton does not translate literally to Jesus P.P.S Scrolling through this list of translations doesn’t seem to render the Tetragrammaton for your given verse (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&version=NIRV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&versio...)

mbfg 4y ago

Odd that an all powerful god would choose text written in dying languages, easily susceptible to being lost or destroyed, as the preferred method of communication.

expralitemonk78 4y ago
Thomas Paine, US founding father and deist, believed God's Word is the universe he created. From "The Age of Reason": It is only in the CREATION that all our ideas and conceptions of a word of God can unite. The Creation speaketh a universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they be. It is an ever existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed. It does not depend upon the will of man whether it shall be published or not; it publishes itself from one end of the earth to the other. It preaches to all nations and to all worlds; and this word of God reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of God. Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible Whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abundance with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the scripture, which any human hand might make, but the scripture called the Creation.
- mbfg 4y ago
  i wonder WHY he believed that, what evidence he had to think it was true?
mcswell 4y ago
He was doing the best he could, given Babel. The whole thing, going all the way back to the Fall, was necessarily and inescapably imperfect. Why would an omnipotent and omniscient God create such a mess, you ask? A lot of theological ink has been spilled on that question, but I think the consensus was that it was the best that could be done, given a (theological) concept of free will. The alternative was for God to create nothing at all, or at least nothing sentient.

kgwxd 4y ago

People can’t even reliably retell a story they witnessed firsthand and experienced in their native language 5 minutes ago. I don’t understand how anyone can put any stock into religious and other historical text, it’s all complete bs.

cafard 4y ago

With a bit of work, one can find Ronald Knox's short volume On Englishing the Bible, which has many interesting things to say.

mcswell 4y ago

Some things this article doesn't touch on (although maybe the complete book does), which come up when translating into other languages. I'm not saying there are no solutions to these, but they are interesting (and for those who believe, important) questions. 1) How to translate names of animals and other concepts that are unfamiliar in the target culture, e.g. "sheep" into Inuit. 2) Whether to translate a given word in the same way in each instance of the word. Suppose you're translating into a Mayan language, where "bread" is an unfamiliar concept. Jesus refers to "breaking bread" (literal sense) and "the bread of life" (metaphorical sense, for which a translation as tortilla might be better). 3) How to translate a word where the target language makes unavoidable distinctions that the source language does not. In Tzeltal, there is a word for "older brother" and a word for "younger sibling", but no word for "brother, whether younger or older". When the Bible refers to Peter and his brother Andrew, which word do you use? Lots more...

TheFreim 4y ago
The issue of having not enough words in the target language is definitely a big one. In John 6:50-54 the original Greek uses different words for eating that have different connotations but will sometimes be rendered as the same word in English "eat" which takes away from the text. Relevant to Christian understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

StuffMaster 4y ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/ . I doubt I'll ever shop elsewhere for biblical info.