Good point. We don't want to speak with "clear authority", do we?

Or, maybe we do:

I think if I or anybody else was claiming that, you'd be right. But since nobody around here actually is claiming or even implying that, I don't know why you'd mention that. But thank you for sharing.

This is a good example of the Circumstantial ad hominem Fallacy. Thank you for sharing.

Yes, but I'm the one using works that rests on the opinions of referenced and credentialed scholars.

You are free to ignore those people, I don't own your opinions.

First of all, a characterization isn't necessarily an ad hominem. A characterization can be fairly used when it points to likely underlying motives and bias. It's a bit strange that it's mostly fundamentalist Christians who struggle with modern accepted translations and it's not unfair to question that.

And secondly ad hominem suggests attack, and it's hardly an attack when it's something they brag about on their own About page. To quote:

"We are Christian, Protestant, conservative, evangelical, fundamental"

I agree that you fairly characterized their website (although I'm not sure that they promote any particular political agenda), but I perhaps falsely assumed that you made mention of the fact as a way of discrediting what they had to say. What they (or anybody else) says is either true or false, regardless of their agenda or motives. Perhaps your reference to them as "fundamentalist" was meant to be laudatory.

Further, I have no reason to believe that they have any bias against modern accepted translations. I don't believe that they are King James Onlyists, which is the only fundamentalist group that I'm aware of that has a big problem with the modern translations.

All of the credible translations have important differences at various points, which does not mean that anybody involved has a "poor understanding" of Ancient Hebrew.

,

1. I'm not "ignoring" anybody.

2. I don't bow the knee to "credentialed scholars", given that they frequently disagree with each other. Is it your current position that no "credentialed scholars" (gotta watch out for those uncredentialed scholars!) would agree with what gotquestions.org stated on their website on this topic?

Sorry, but I can't find your post where you said who these scholars are. Please direct me to that post. Thanks.

I haven't. I use NIV and NABRE when debating bible specifics (one protestant, one catholic), KJV for dramatic effect when precision isn't important (it's the prettiest text after all).

It's no secret that I find fundamentalists / literalists to be very troublesome.

It's not how Judaism / Christianity was ever meant to be. The tradition in both those is open debate and scholarly discussion of the linguistic details and historical contexts of the texts, and allowing for the interpretations to develop and mature.

Then after hundreds of years we get the rise of fundamentalism / literalism in the 1700s - 1800s, which then suddenly decide that the Bible must be understand as is. But there is no "as is", it's a text - most of it decided by committee and the includes decisions on which parts are included. The word of god, theologically speaking yes, but still it must be understood through the pens and eyes of men.

In essence I see literalists as elevating themselves to prophets, implicitly claiming to speak directly for God. Theologically troublesome and culturally worrying.

Sure, there is debate - but the tone is much more direct and much more bombastic. And the political movements that go alongside it are very aggressive and anti-intellectual. The refusal to see parts of the bible that fly in the face of clear evidence as allegorical or understanding it from a literary perspective is worrying. Some 40% of Americans now reject very basic scientific theories of which we have ample evidence and support, and they elect politicians who do the same who have managed to ruin parts of the educational system.

And sites like gotquestion.org is part of that movement. I give them props for being honest about their stance on the about page, but it's not as clear on their FAQs which they use a lot of effort and money to get high up on google page rankings. And indeed, they do actually face a fair amount of criticism for their practices.

I would suspect that the vast majority of serious students of theology would laugh in the face of anyone doing serious Bible study with the NIV.* The most reputable English translations of the Bible from the point of view of serious studying would be the KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV and Holman.

*Okay, the polite theologians wouldn't literally laugh in your face, but you get my point.

That you think that the NIV (which is a "dynamic equivalence" translation) is more precise than the KJV (which is closer to a literal translation) shows me that you know very little about English translations of the Bible.

edit: I personally use the KJV almost exclusively. And I agree, the text of the KJV is most pretty!

An afterthought regarding the NIV: The NIV is an excellent translation if English is not your primary language.

I hope that it is no secret that I do not find fundamentalists/literalists to be very troublesome.

Please share with us how Judaism/Christianity was "meant' to be. And please show your work.

I don't see literalists that way, but you probably already knew that.

I myself am neither troubled nor worried.

You seem to worry a lot. You would probably worry a lot less if you become a Christian.

I can't speak for your neck of the woods, but the secularists have done far more to ruin parts of the education system here in California than have religious folk.

I agree, and I am very grateful for them.

And perhaps they should receive criticism for that. I might look into this at some point.

Thanks for the thoughtful post, tame_deuces! I look forward to continuing this dialogue.

You're the one who used an uncredentialed and unreferenced source to question a translation of Genesis 1 & 2 which is mirrored in every translation you list here as "serious". So your point seems mostly to be one of convenience.

You don't seem to understand why dynamic equivalence is often preferable. I'll demonstrate. This is an expression in my language:
Formal equivalent translation:
We do not own the needle in the wall

Dynamic translation:
We're broke

English is not my first language, no. But English is also very lacking in precision in general, as it relies so heavily on flow and context to convey meaning. So basically I think any English Bible translation is limited to begin with. I use one for convenience, because this is an English-speaking forum.

If someone wants precision, go with German translations. A very precise language which is easy to translate into because it is extremely flexible. It's also by far the best western language for philosophy and theology, which is an added bonus.

I doubt many contemporary Bible scholars use the KJV translation of the Bible for scholarly purposes (unless they have theological commitments to doing so or are primarily theologians). It is based on later and inferior manuscripts and contains numerous errors. I'll agree though that the NIV is an inferior translation to the ESV and the NRSV for scholarly purposes. However, it is the bestselling English translation, and acceptable for common use imo.

I also agree with tame_deuces that you shouldn't assume that a word-for-word translation is always more accurate than a thought-for-thought translation, especially with languages that differ as much as ancient Hebrew or Greek and English. That being said, the NASB is a useful translation for study.

I find this position to be highly problematic, and I don't think it's reflected that strongly in any sort of "serious" study of the Bible. Could you elaborate a bit on what you about "English translations of the Bible" you find problematic in a manner that leads you to raise that as an issue?

I don't think anyone doing "serious Bible study" adheres to the idea of using one translation almost exclusively. Those who study it seriously recognize the complexities of translations and that there are a vast number of theological decisions that go into the process of translation, which is why one should use several translations when doing serious study.

I actually can't disagree with any of this post. The context of my posts was about English translations of the Bible. I should probably learn German and use Luther's translation of the Bible.

Furthermore, one could argue that if one is truly "serious" about Bible study, that the Bible should be read in its original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek). Since the only language I know is English, that was my context in my posts.

1. I'd first off like to apologize for derailing this thread. I wasn't really trying to provoke a fight about dynamic versus formal equivalence, so I should probably should have not brought it up in the first place.

2. Having said that, let's say I'm translating a German novel into English. Let's use your example. The formal equivalence would be "We do not own the needle in the wall." As a translator, should I render the quote as "We do not own the needle in the wall" or as "We're broke?"

3. I'll let you have the last word in this derail if you'd like.

4. Have a blessed day!

Yes, I could elaborate. And I will elaborate if you or somebody starts a separate thread on this topic. I seemed to have unwittingly opened a can of worms. I personally find this topic fascinating, so when(if?) I get the time, I'll start a new thread and we can discuss it in excruciating detail.

You and tame_deuces can have the last word on this topic ITT.

Peace.

edit: But I'll get the last word in the new thread!

A Norwegian novel, but that's not on you since I never declared my first language.

It's not a derail, issues of translations are important to a theological discussion on "What does God want me to do", which is the thread topic. I don't think anyone here masters ancient hebrew, and even the ones who do disagree on Biblical translations.

I think direct translations are almost always bad for idioms and expressions and often bad for statements that depend on flow and context to convey meaning.

Consider the statement "He fought the system". Even in English it can convey anything from violent rebellion to sending letters, so we can't know what is meant without looking at the context. A target language for translation might operate less dependently on context to convey such meanings. Secondly, the target language might not have a word for fighting which is so broad. Thirdly, the expression could lose all meaning if the target language does not share the concept of "system" as some sort of antagonist whole.

Now, to answer your question 2.

First we need to realize that "nål" doesn't mean needle, it means nail. This is an older usage of the word that is longer commonly understood. Already here you see how challenging a translation effort can be, because we're translating an expression that even the people who speak the language usually misreads.

Secondly we have to know our language history to and context of the text and when it was written to know exactly the sense sense of despair and tragedy that is implied, as over the time the expression became more commonly used to just mean "broke" and not necessarily "extremely poor".

We could do a half'n'half translation, trying to keep the actual implication of the idiom in our phrase. "We were so poor we could not even afford nails to hang our belongings on". But again, this is a bad translation, because we're not actually saying that we can't afford nails, it would originally just have been a figurative way of saying we own very little of value.

We could directly translate it into a meaning that is never technically wrong, "we're broke", but that loses the lyrical flow of the original sentence and some of the tragedy conveyed.

The best approach is probably to use some fitting expression in the target language, if available. "We are dirt poor" or "we have next to nothing", for example, preferably one that fits the prose in the text.

Usually when languages share language groups this isn't very difficult to do, since the shared cultural heritage also means that cultural concepts are often shared. But when you go from one language group to another, like ancient Hebrew to English does, things can get very tricky very fast.

And sorry for the wall of text, but language has always been one of my biggest interests.

It was indeed a wall of text, but a quite edifying one!

Speak for yourself, I'm waiting for lots of things but not death.... that's the thing that's going to get in the way of me enjoying my life.

No wonder you shrug your shoulders.....