Tag: Bible Translation

Suzanne has returned and is carrying on the debate about the approiate use of language for gender in Bible translation. Her response comes in three parts. I’m going to comment briefly on each, and then make some further comments on this controversy. (You can follow Suzanne’s links to Adrian’s posts.)

First, in Response to Adrian: part1, the lexicons, she deals with the issue of the lexicons. I’m not so concerned with the particular lexicons concerned. I do have all of them in my Logos software, and also have some in the form of good old-fashioned books. But the number of lexicons is not really the point.

It is an error to simply combine the definitions one finds in a lexicon in order to produce add nuances of meaning. Each context must be examined on its own merits. Now there certainly can be a transfer of meaning between contexts, i.e., one uses a particular word in a new context because of some relationship its existing meaning has with the new situation. The individual definitions are not necessarily disconnected, but they can become so. Let’s take the word “car” as an example, we have cars we drive on the highway, train cars, elevator cars, street cars, and so forth. In each context a specific definition applies. I cannot claim that there must be an element of individual locomotion in the concept of “train car” just because that is an element of the word “car” when speaking of an automobile.

Similarly, when it was common to refer to “humanity” as “man” in English, one couldn’t claim a special emphasis on maleness. Going back to the language I grew up with, I might have said something like, “That is a man walking down the street.” Doubtless, with the emphasis, I’m referring to a man as opposed to a woman or child. On another occasion I might have said, “God is infinite, but man is finite.” In this second case, should you assume that there is somehow an emphasis on “maleness” in my reference? Absolutely not! The contexts are totally different. In the first case I’m specifiying a male, in the second, I’m contrasting being human with being God. There’s no carryover. The part of the definition that connects is the humanness, not the maleness.

Now whether it was feminists who got it started or not, I think using “human” is a much better idea, and makes the second sentence clearer. But that is something I have learned in the last few years. Henry the college and graduate student would have used the other terms. But I never intended any male representation by that usage.

As I tell Greek students: The lexicon doesn’t tell you what a word means; it gives you a set of options. The context tells you what the word actually means.

In her second post, Response to Adrian: part2, the interlinear, I have to agree with Suzanne, though I’m a bit more laid back on the use of interlinears. (Students are never to use them, as they inhibit actual language learning.) But interlinears do not get you closer to “what the Greek really means.

In her last post, Response to Adrian: part3, neutering, Suzanne points out that simply not referencing someone’s masculinity does not result in neutering.

I have to add that I see this concern about neutering as a bit hypersensitive. There seems to me to be a “theological correctness” approach going on here, in which someone has to watch their language closely to make sure they don’t accidentally allow for any feminization of God. I have no sympathy with this theological correctness any more than I do with political correctness. But barring one New Testament that corrected gender language with reference to God, I have not found any of these feminist agitators amongst Bible translators. I have only found a concern for accurate translation, translation that communicates clearly to the audience. I must just run in different circles. 🙂

On the other hand, I probably do have a feminist agenda from a complementarian point of view. I favor women in church leadership, women as elders, women as pastors, and women in every last position they are gifted and called to fulfill. I don’t need to retranslate the Bible in order to support this view. I merely need to understand the incarnation, and then read the Bible in its cultural context. I believe that God has called the church to move ahead of the world on this issue, not behind, and that it is a scandal that we are still trying to keep women out of leadership.

I hope for the day when we see such barriers fall in the face of our oneness in Jesus the Christ.

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.

Adrian Warnock has responded to his perceptions of the approach taken by the folks over at Better Bibles. Since this is a topic that interests me, I thought I’d call attention to it. I don’t have anything to add at the moment, as I think Peter Kirk, both in comments on Adrian’s blog, and in a posting on Better Bibles, has brought up all the points I might have noticed.

It appears that Adrian is accusing the Better Bibles folks of holding a position that I know they don’t hold. I also think Peter Kirk is asking an excellent question when he wonders what political correctness has to do with it.

My eyes are glued to my comment trackers. 🙂

PS: I would possibly be more properly accused of political correctness than any of the folks at Better Bibles. See my essay Gender Neutrality and Bible Translation.