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Ministry news...
The featured book on our Home Page this month is "Exciting Ephesians" by Peter Wade. This book is packed with truth, the result of over a third of century of study and devotion to "the highest revelation given from God to man". Each chapter could keep you busy for a week, as you read and re-read it, check out the scriptures, and really discover who God says you are, and how to make it work in your life.
If you don't have this 128-page dynamic book, get your copy this month. If you do have it, get a copy to share with someone in your fellowship or family. This paperback book costs $5.00 plus postage, and its available right now.
God Wrote Only One Bible!
I have a book in my library with the above title, published 50 years ago. I often think of this book when I am browsing in the Bible section of Christian bookstores or catalogs. There's the Women's Bible, the Men's Bible, the Teen's Bible, the Children's Bible. Alongside them is the Devotional Bible, the One Year Bible, the Prophecy Bible, the Spirit-filled Bible, the Life Application Study Bible, the Chain-Reference Bible, the New Convert's Bible, the New Possibility Thinkers Bible.
Give me a break! "God wrote only one Bible!" In this context, the title is true. I know I'm getting or gotten ancient, but I can remember when the only choice in the bookstore was which binding or type size you wanted! Vivien's well-worn Bible is bound in Genuine Seal Skin, mine in Hand Grained Morocco Leather. Both are printed on India paper with good black type. I also have both my mother's and father's Bibles, both well-worn. What will we leave our children?
"For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit" (II Peter 1:21).
God wrote only one Bible, but He used the penmanship of "holy men of God". It is universally agreed among scholars that we do not have any originals of the parchments produced by these scribes, but only copies of copies. I'll leave you to search the Web further for the history of the English Bible, but let's start with the 1611 King James Version, a revision of a previous version. Known as the Authorised Version in England, it too went through some updates over the years. It's majestic language and wide acceptance among evangelicals meant it survived in spite of the 1885 Revised Version and the 1901 American Standard Version, neither of which dented its popularity. In those days, paraphrases were few; Moffat gaining the widest usage, followed perhaps by Weymouth. As one of my mentors was wont to say about the KJV, "It was good enough for the Apostle Paul and it's good enough for me!"
Then came the 1950s, and in the past fifty years the market has been flooded with different translations and paraphrases. It's hard to know who to blame for this, except for the fact that language and culture are always changing and perhaps greedy publishers saw the opportunity and prejudiced theologians saw an open door to push their bias. Two streams developed: "word for word" translations and "thought for thought" paraphrases. Scholars call these "formal equivalence" and "dynamic equivalence" methods of translations. Of course, due to differences in various languages, no translation can be literally "word for word" and readable at the same time, as grammar and word order are often quite different in languages.
In the tradition of the King James Version, a mainly "word for word" translation, along came the 1952 Revised Standard Version (or Revised Standard Perversion to evangelicals who objected to the removal of the virgin birth in Isaiah's prophecy), followed soon after by the New English Bible, New American Standard Bible, the New King James Bible, and lately the English Standard Version. This stream is best for the Bible you are going to really study, not just read.
The paraphrase, or "thought for thought" Bibles, got a boost from J.B. Phillips "New Testament in Modern English", the first parts appearing in the late 1940s, followed by the Good News Bible or Today's English Version, then Billy Graham helped popularise "The Living Bible". The floodgates were now open, and every publisher wanted to put out a Bible, particularly in the U.S. "Twenty-six Translations of the Bible" became a popular compendium, as well as the Amplified Bible. In recent years "The New Living Translation" and "The Message" Bible continue this stream (and I've left out scores of others). These are good for illustrations and I'm not adverse to quoting some particular phrase that rams home a truth.
The notable exception is the above discussion is the New International Version (NIV), which attempts unsuccessfully to straddle both streams but has the sales figures to show its popularity. Their advertisements make the self-proclamation "Most read. Most trusted", but you can't trust it! Sometimes they are paraphrasing and sometimes translating, so how can we trust it? If you have a version with footnotes, it may tell you what the original says, but why not put what the original says in the text where it belongs?
An example: when Paul wrote the Greek word "sarx", the King James and most others translate it correctly as "flesh", but not the NIV. Well, sometimes they do, but when they get to Romans 7 and 8 and want to ride a doctrinal hobby horse, "sarx" becomes "the sin nature"! There is a Greek word for "sin", and one for "nature", but they are not "sarx", so this is not translation but interpretation. (For a discussion of this error, see the Appendix in "Birthright" by David Needham; for multiple examples and a good scholarly yet readable discussion of the two streams of translation, get the book "The Word of God in English" by Leland Ryken.) Is it God's Word or what a group of language experts think we should read? Should we trust it? No. While I did use this paraphrase for a while, I now see its danger and no longer recommend this title. Now they have published a gender-neutral edition!
The NET Bible, now in progress online, also straddles the fence between formal and dynamic translation, but at least they give extensive footnotes on each verse as to what the Greek actually says -- but if that is what it says, why not put it in the translation instead of the footnote? The NET Bible includes 60,237 translator’s notes so far! To their credit, they have left "sarx" as "flesh".
Where will it all end? I don't know, but one thing I do know, "God wrote only one Bible".
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© 2005 Peter Wade. http://www.peterwade.com
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