Of The Making Of Translations There Is No End

 Of The Making Of Translations There Is No End

As difficult as translation is, however, godly scholars through the ages have labored diligently to bring the Word of God to His people in languages they can read and understand. Even before the time of Jesus, devout Jews in Alexandria had translated the Old Testament into Greek for the growing number of people who no longer spoke, or read, Hebrew. The Roman scholar Jerome rendered the Greek and Hebrew into the Latin of the common people in the fourth century a.d. Wycliffe and Tyndale performed the same service for the English-speaking world. The German translation of Martin Luther has held the same place of honor among German speakers as the Authorized, or King James Version has among English speakers.

Through the work of translators on the committees that gave us the New American Standard Bible, the New King James Version, Today’s English Version (Good News Bible), and the New International Version, believers today have access to God’s revelation in language they can understand and trust. Beyond our English-speaking world, numerous Bible Societies, teams of Bible translators, and men and women from a multitude of mission boards strive to reduce non-written languages to written forms so that residents of the Third World can also read the words of God.

In many ways, the process of Bible translation testifies to one of God’s great, on-going miracles. He not only inspired Scripture, but He continues to oversee the faithful transmission of His Word. An infallible original would be of little value if the copy we read is riddled with error. Our Bibles are so faithfully preserved that we can read our English translations with nearly the same confidence and reverence as the first century church read its personal letters from the apostles. No important doctrine or teaching of Scripture is subject to question because of the problems with translation that I’ve mentioned earlier. The ideas that God taught His prophets and apostles are accessible to us today, even though we are sometimes unable to fine-tune our interpretation the way we’d like.

Problems in interpretation usually arise out of isolated passages dealing with obscure issues. When it comes to knowing how to be saved, how to live the Christian life, or what God requires of us, we need have no doubts about the reliability of our Bibles.

Think of it! God’s self-revelation took place over thousands of years, to people who spoke at least three different languages, and lived lives as foreign to us as the lives of an Afghan nomad or a Vietnamese rice farmer. Yet we and others from all over the world can read that revelation, learn from it, grow by it, and meet the God whose book it is!^[1]

 

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^[1] O’Brien, David E. 1990. Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties. Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien.