Here's what you said:

Your over-extrapolation is that the inability to read the original texts makes it impossible to understand and appreciate the original meaning of the text. This is false.

These two pieces are not connected. Being reliant upon a mechanism to understand the original text does not imply an inability to understand the original text. Indeed, if he were to go through the process of learning the original language, he would go through the same type of process of learning the original language as the translators, and there's no obvious reason why how he would understand the text would end up being that much different than the translators.

That's what commentaries are for. People expound on these things at great length in various books.

Because life is nuanced, and that you think it isn't makes your position absurd.

No, this just means you don't know what you're talking about. Remember pareidolia? Yeah, you're doing that thing again.

LOL, the irony.

Let me pick up bits of mightybooshes writing and try to put his argument in a better way. The basic observational point is that the religions ostensibly based on the bible are enormously varied, disagreeing on a host of important doctrinal points. Why has that occurred? One source might be the example Aaron gave, where, say, the American evangelical movement is profoundly anti intellectual not just with respect to science but to the study of their own canonical work. Another might be that people interpret the same words in the bible very differently both at differnet Times in history and today. Another might be that different translations of the bible have substantially shifted the meaning over the millennia. Another might be that we can't even agree on what the most original versions are trying to say. And many others. The point is we have a sort of hierarchy of places where we can transition from a relatively small set of original versions of a book into the diversity of beliefs and practices we see today.

I think mightyboosh is primarily motivated by the diversity we see today but might (as in I'm not sure) be misidentifying the place where a lot of the branching occurs. As in it might be the case that the jump from original books to major translations like KJB is not enormous, that serious study of the later might give one more or less the same impressions as serious study of the original, all else being as equal as possible. Regardless of how big this is or isn't, I think a huge part of the diversity comes from people, often not with serious scholarship but there too, deriving substantially different interpretations from the same passages, regardless of how faithfully they are translated.

The same type of statement can be said of the US Constitution. Or almost any written text.

And that's kind of the point that makes much of the inerrancy/infallibility conversation a little bit dull (speaking now to well named's point). Even if everybody accepts whichever theology you want, it doesn't say much about the interpretation of the text, and that's where all the interesting work needs to happen.

Interpretation is inherently personal. Collective conclusions are just a collation of interpretations with quite few shared data point markers.

The second means exactly ****ing nothing.

What I find difficult to understand is how someone can tell me that only the 'original' texts, that they themselves are unable to read, can be considered inerrant (and they're not even the original texts anyway, they're a Greek translation of the original Hebrew and Aramaic texts as I understand it) and that translation necessarily involves error, so that the version that they can read contains errors, but that this is not problematic.

This amounts to "I'm basing my religious belief system on the word of my god as it is written in this book that contains subtle errors (i.e. differences from the original) but I don't mind'. This would not be satisfactory for me, in such a hugely important context.

I'm not claiming any expertise, but it seems trivially easy to prove that there are significant disagreements over these 'subtle nuances'. How then the certainty that they are 'subtle' or that one has chosen the most correct, least errant, version to base a belief system on?

No. It necessarily requires work and some ambiguity, but that's not the same as error.

The same way people come to conclusions about beliefs about anything that's not extremely trivial.

The original texts on which most modern translations are based are not Greek translations of original Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

I think there are two issues here. First, it is a fact that people have a wide range of disagreements about what the Bible says. I think you are using this as evidence for the claim that the translations of the Bible aren't trustworthy (even if you are not yourself willing to fully endorse this claim).

Our disagreement is over how much evidentiary value this disagreement should have. In my view, it is very little. The reason why is that disagreements over the meaning of Bible are not limited to those who have to rely on translations-even experts who agree about how a particular passage or book should be translated continue to disagree about the meaning of that passage or book. Thus, since we should expect this disagreement whether or not the translations of the Bible are trustworthy, this disagreement only has limited value in showing that English translations of the Bible are trustworthy.

I think the important point to realize here is that disagreements can result from difficulties in understanding what a passage/book is saying even if written in your native tongue. These difficulties are compounded when you add in the distance in place and time of the authorship of the books of the Bible. While they can arise from disputes about how to translate a text, they can also arise from disputes about how to understand a text. Thus, if you are going to argue that the translations of the Bible are untrustworthy, you'll need some other piece of evidence.

The other issue is about why Festeringzit and other Christians don't learn Greek and Hebrew themselves. After all, if the Bible is a communication from the creator of the universe to us personally, shouldn't we want to do all that is in our power to make sure we understand it correctly? I think this is a fair question that is getting lost in your trying to press on the translation issue.

So does anyone know if the basic descriptive claim being discussed is actually true? I certainly agree that mightyboosh can't show that translations are very bad simply because there is widespread differences in interpretations because we would expect widespread differences in interpretations on the best of translations or no translations at all. But it still might be that standard translations are very bad. It might be that intermediary people, interpreting a passage in their way, may result in a translation that substantially differs from the previous in important ways. I'm guessing this is nonzero. But does anyone know how large an effect is...or are we just willing to dispute mightybooshes reasoning for it.

The effect is quite small. For example, the NIV's earlier edition did not take into much account "man" as being "male" compared to short for "mankind" (male and female), and there was a period of time that the idea of how to appropriately integrate gender-inclusive language was a serious discussion (see TNIV). Such ideas can potentially be seen as substantive differences.

There have also been changes in language that need to be considered, such as the usage of the word "prevent" in the earlier KJV versions to mean "to go before" instead of "to stop." I don't think that's quite the same thing, though.

But as far as the actual translation process goes, the scholars who translate the Bible do it in the same type of way that they might try to translate other texts from antiquity. You would basically be challenging the entire spectrum of textual translation if you were to try to stand on a claim like "The Bible has been translated poorly." Secular scholarship of the Bible has not created any particular challenges to the translation process, and that's a pretty good reason to believe that the translation process is solid.

It seems reasonable that if the goal is to understand the text correctly, that reliance upon the existing scholarship of translation is of more value than attempting to learn ancient languages directly. It's far more likely that the latter will result in not understanding much of anything due to the practical realities of the two scenarios.

This is strange claim. I said that if a person truly thought the Bible was a communication from the creator of the universe to us, that they would do everything in their power (within reason) to make sure they understood that communication. I assume that one valuable way of increasing your understanding would be to learn to read the Bible in the language in which it was written. This doesn't imply that they aren't also relying on the work of prior scholars (quite the contrary). But yet few educated Christians can read either Greek or Hebrew. Why not?

Alternatively, if you don't like this example, I can shift to the one you cite here: why do so few Christians read scholarly commentaries or other books on how to understand the Bible if they think it is a personal communication from the creator of the universe?

The bolded is the answer. If I have a plumbing issue in my house, I feel I could probably learn enough about plumbing to fix it. On the other hand, I can hire a plumber to fix it for me, and it would take significantly less time and the quality will probably be greater than if I were to do it myself. It's not so much about being educated, but decided that certain types of effort are not worth it.

It's true that lots of people could try to learn how to read the original languages, but there's plenty of evidence of people wanting to learn the original languages and failing (say, people going to Christian colleges and taking a class in Biblical Greek and failing it).

So the link between being educated and learning the ancient languages doesn't seem necessary and the evidence of people lacking the intellectual capacity to learn the language give two reasons why it's not strange that more Christians don't read Biblical Greek and Hebrew. It's far from clear that such a demand is within reason.

Let's say my grandma speaks Chinese, but I don't. If my grandma wanted to tell me something, she could perhaps communicate that through my mom, who is bilingual. But when grandma says something to mom, mom might sometimes need to fill in some details that would be lost in the translation, or provide some context to grandma's thoughts (say, if she's sharing an anecdote from her home village). Those extra thoughts add to my ability to fully comprehend what grandma is saying, and potentially adds further insight to the personal message. But even if I went out and learned perfect Chinese, I may still miss some of those things, because even full knowledge of the language may not give me access to some of the information in grandma's mind. So having people to elaborate on thoughts and ideas doesn't necessarily take anything away from the communication.

And this doesn't even get into the Holy Spirit stuff, which I think would support the case but would also be extremely tangential to the challenges you're raising.

The problem isn't just the lack of understanding of the ancient hebrew, greek or aramaic language but more importantly a lack of understanding of the culture of the time.

Not exactly, it may be possible that there is a version that is the most inerrant. In fact that has to be the case. But since there is so much disagreement, and since inaccuracies are a given, and since the majority of believers are not in a position to judge for themselves, then how can believers know which version they should consider inerrant? I don't think it can be argued that the differences are so subtle that it doesn't matter, or that we can say with any authority exactly how 'subtle' those differences are.

What I've been exploring is FZ's certainty.

I think so too, but I would go further and say that this is much harder than it sounds and that few would really achieve the level of proficiency and understanding that a native speaker has, especially because these are ancient languages.

I think it's the same thing.

This is not what I've been claiming, I've never used the words 'very bad'. Somehow what I'm claiming was exaggerated into this. In fact, since I've been claiming that FZ can't know that the differences are 'subtle', that no one really can be sure at the level of difference, it would be contradictory for me to then claim that the differences were a specific level.

I never said that it was 'impossible to understand the bible' either.

You're wrong.

Of course not. You only said something equivalent to that.

Huh?

Sigh. Why can't I read a commentary on an OT passage written by a scholar
in ancient Hebrew, where they detail the subtle differences in meanings
in a word between ancient Hebrew and English?

Again, you're demonstrating that you still don't understand this idea of inerrancy.

Sorry, "virtually impossible" not "very bad" or "impossible". I don't care about the degree. My point didn't depend on the degree. If you want "a little bad" or "unknown how bad", so be it. You are quibbling over the only unimportant point. If you want to start somewhere, I would suggest post 128 which I think is a fairly good summary of precisely the issues going on ITT.

This doesn't work as an analogy. The goal here is not having your plumbing fixed, but understanding a message from God. You can't hire someone else to understand for you (of course you can hire someone to understand it for themselves, but you still wouldn't understand it). Of course, maybe you think it isn't that important to understand God's message or that we don't need to have a personal, but only corporate understanding of God's message, but that seems false to me. Maybe some Catholics would have that view, but it does seem to conflict with Protestantism.

Anyway, this is all a bit moot. Learning the languages of the Bible is only an example of a more general problem. Christians claim to believe that the Bible is a communication from the creator of the universe. So why are so many ignorant of most of the Bible?

This is a risible response. I don't believe that you think that the main reason most educated Christians don't know the languages of the Bible is because they lack the intellectual capacity to learn it. They might lack the willpower or the desire, but learning a language doesn't require an unusually large intellectual capacity.

I'm not sure how this is a response to my claim. I'm certainly not claiming that (on Christian grounds) you should expect perfect knowledge of God's mind by reading the Bible. I'm also not claiming that you shouldn't (on Christian grounds) read the commentaries and criticisms of Bible scholars. What point are you trying to make here?

I believe the standard response would be that none of the versions are inerrant.

Certainty about what?