We ought to be silent when Jesus is

My argument has genuine force: if Jesus’ silence on the Septuagint implied acceptance of translation diversity, shouldn’t modern silence on NIV, ESV, and other translations imply the same? The parallel seems sound.

Early church fathers like Origen argued that God would not establish churches without giving them access to God’s Word in authentic form, and hearing Scripture in the Scriptures constitutes a foundational element of the church.[1] This reasoning supports translation pluralism—the principle that God’s Word can authentically reach people through multiple linguistic forms.

Yet there’s a crucial difference: while modern English Bible translations base their Old Testament on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament authors and early Church most often used the Septuagint.[2] This means the early church didn’t choose between original languages and translations—they were a translation community. Augustine and others throughout history argued that if New Testament authors used the Septuagint, the Church ought to affirm its authority.[2]

The principle of silence-as-acceptance works best when applied to the same situation: Jesus didn’t ban Greek Scripture Septuagint in Greek-speaking communities, so we shouldn’t ban modern translations in modern-language communities. But this doesn’t require silence on which translations best serve the church’s mission—only acceptance that multiple faithful translations can coexist.

[1] Stephen Ryan, “Chapter 9: The Word of God and the Textual Pluriformity of the Old Testament,” in Verbum Domini and the Complementarity of Exegesis and Theology, ed. Scott Carl and Christopher J. Thompson, Catholic Theological Formation Series (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2015), 128.
[2] Timothy Michael Law, When God Spoke Greek: The Septuagint and the Making of the Christian Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 4–5.