Translation and Knowing God

Paul at Grace rant . . . what? says he has gotten back to reading his Greek New Testament. I congratulate him on this spiritual discipline, and I do believe studying the Bible in its original languages can be a spiritual discipline, but I do think some of his additional thoughts deserve some reconsideration.

He says:

The trend in scripture translation is to make it more accessible. For example, The Message, The New Living Translation, and the New Century Versions all purport to render the scriptures in a more affable format. I use these translations often in sermon preparation, but I have begun wondering if this really is a good way to digest the scriptures. I mean, isn’t God worthy of us really struggling to find the meaning of the words on the page? . . .

There are some serious problems here, I think. I have a great respect for study of the scriptures in the original languages. I took both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in Biblical and cognate languages. There is much to be gained from deep study of the Bible, and the effort that is required to read it in the source languages helps one get into those spiritual depths. But at the same time, the Bible was not inaccessible to the people who first received it. When the New Testament was written in Greek, Greek was the common language. It was the accessible language, much like the English languages that Paul mentions in his quote.

And while there are some variations, such as Hebrews and Luke-Acts, the New Testament is largely written in everyday language, not complex language.

And shouldn’t we too know that thousands of Greek manuscripts offer divergent phrasing on nearly every passage in the New Testament? Oh, and isn’t it noteworthy that the Greek language’s vocabulary is much more complex and that translators have to make very important theological decisions about which word they think is the correct word from a Greek word that may or may not be the original word?

It is quite true that it’s valuable to know all of these things. But it’s also important to know that this complexity is not merely a feature of Greek; there are always variations to deal with in translation from one language to another. It’s not that Greek is more complex than English, though an argument might be made that it is, it is that English and Greek express things differently. Greek was not complicated to people who grew up speaking it. Certainly translators have many theological issues to decide as they translate–to translate is to interpret–but those decisions can be aided by context and by reading multiple English translations.

But the level of work involved in understanding it is a function of time, and not one of the text. In other words, reading the Bible in Greek requires additional work today, and that is a good spiritual discipline, but it is not a function of the Bible itself.

I think that the struggle of knowing God is very real, but it is not a matter of struggling to understand the words of scripture. Making the scriptures more accessible doesn’t remove the struggle of knowing God, it just opens the door to more people to get involved in trying to know God. Because of translations they can do so with the same ease as early Christians could, because they can access the information in their own language.

By all means use the discipline of studying the Bible in Greek or Hebrew if you know those languages, but realize that it is simply a discipline for you; language is not a barrier God intended between people and the word.