More Gender Accuracy Fun

Adrian Warnock has continued his series with Cows, Dogs, and Political Correctness parts 2 and 3. I’m quite certain that the folks over at Better Bibles will answer some of the major points, and indeed they already have in some comments.

I want to simply point out that it appears to me that those supporting male representation are trying to create translation rules that serve a particular theology, while they are accusing their opponents of forcing the language to support a politically correct view. No doubt there are those who trying to read political correctness into the Bible. I say “no doubt” because “politically correct” is such a dismally badly defined word that one can hardly defend oneself from the charge of political correctness once made.

Let me look at just a couple of quick quotes from Adrian’s post:

All these arguments about how to correctly render specific Greek words in English leaves us in danger of missing what is the main point about this issue. The controversies about these words in modern English translations often fail to discuss a far more fundamental point – especially when it comes to the translation philosophy of the ESV. That point is the desire to have a Bible that is essentially literal, and as much as possible, transparent to the original language.

But in fact the major issue here is whether it is even possible for a translation to actually be literal and at the same time transparent to the original language. It seems to me that this combination alone suggests some misunderstanding of the function and the possibilities of translation. I am further driven in this same direction by the next paragraph:

This all becomes very apparent when you examine an ESV reverse interlinar in comparison with almost any other modern translation. The ESV very clearly attempts to translate each Greek word and it doesn’t take a long time of studying with such a tool before you begin to understand something of what each Greek word means in different contexts. Words which have a clear equivalent in English are not arbitrarily changed to other words with different meanings. Thus, the translation attempts not to capture the “broad meaning,” but the actual word-for-word meaning of the text. If we believe that each word of the Bible is breathed out by God, such an approach to translation is vital.

But an interlinear doesn’t tell you “what the Greek really means.” I see here a bit of that endless pursuit of the one expression that will tell the reader the real story without that person bothering to learn to read Greek. Adrian says, “Words which have a clear equivalent in English are not arbitrarily changed to other words with different meanings.” But there are no such Hebrew or Greek words. Each word has its own range of meaning and they are simply not equivalent between two languages. What one observes by reading an interlinear is a false picture. There is some value in an interlinear, but testing the accuracy of a translation is not one of them.

In part 2 Adrian stated: “In short, it seems that the words anthropos and aner are loosely synonyms.” That partakes of the same sort of problem that the above paragraphs do–the assumption that some sort of word for word equivalence is a workable method of producing an accurate translation. It is similar to the concept frequently held by beginning Greek students that the real definition of a Greek word is the English gloss. “Anthropos” and “aner” are not loosely synonyms, and even many complementarians would be annoyed to hear it put that way, I suspect, because they want to argue that “aner” is very rarely anything but all masculine. More importantly, however, a translator must regard each of these words as having a range of meaning, which they do, and try to choose the best equivalent in each context. Their ranges of meaning do overlap, but they also have distinctive portions of those ranges as well.

I recommend reading Adrian’s posts and follow the comments and entries elsewhere, especially from the folks over at Better Bibles.