I KNOW YOU KNOW WHAT YOU THINK I SAID …
The most recent books of the Bible are almost 2,000 years old. Therefore, the customs, ideas, and common everyday knowledge that was shared by the apostles and their first-century readers are as foreign to us as the rhythm of village life in Indonesia’s remotest valleys.
Even if we could come to the text with intimate knowledge of the history and folkways of biblical times, to read the Bible the way it was written would require an understanding of three ancient languages that only a few scholars can claim. The Bible I read is an English translation, and all of us who read our Bibles in translation stand one step removed from reading it the way it was written.
Every translation, no matter how literally the translators intended to duplicate the original, is to some extent an interpretation because no two languages are alike in vocabulary, grammar, or thought.
A missionary friend of mine is fond of reminding me that English has no decent word for “worship.” Although we think we know what worship means, it’s not because our English word for it tells us. If it did, we wouldn’t hear so many sermons, see so many articles, or have such heated disagreements over worship in the Christian community.
Some things that can be said easily in one language, can hardly be said at all in another.
I served as an intern under a remarkable man who is both a brilliant scholar and a godly pastor. One of his multitude of talents is the ability to preach in Swedish as well as English. This ability stood him in good stead in the community his church served, because many people there had grown up speaking Swedish (the way they knew the Lord intended). Every year or so he’d be called to conduct a Swedish service where they could sing, pray, and hear some good preaching, all in Swedish. On occasion, when Dr. Nelson was preaching to his regular, largely English-speaking congregation, he’d stop in mid-sentence, assume a characteristically pensive look, and then say, “I can’t think of a good way to say this in English, but in Swedish it would be …,” and then favor us with a phrase or two in that language.
All we transplanted Irishmen, Germans, and assorted Anglo-Saxons would scratch our heads in bewilderment at this, but those old Swedes would beam with new understanding, certain they’d heard the Word exactly the way the apostles had written it!
Translators are faced with Dr. Nelson’s predicament on every page of the Bible. A word or phrase that makes perfect sense in Greek or Hebrew may have no English equivalent, but only rarely do they dare say, “I can’t think of a way to say it in English, but in Hebrew it would be …”
The chance of there being any Hebrews or Greeks from the old country to understand that word are zilch. The translator needs to make an informed judgment on what English word, or group of words, comes closest to the meaning of the original. As any comparison of English translations will show, there are many places on almost every page where the informed judgment of different translators is simply not the same.
The first verse of the Bible offers a good illustration. The KJV reads, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The NIV, along with most contemporary translations, translates the same Hebrew word as heavens. The difference that one letter can make in the way we understand the verse is profound.
For us, the word heaven overflows with theological meaning. Heaven is the dwelling place of God. It is the home that all believers look forward to some day. It’s the place that is as high above the earth in splendor, majesty, peace, and holiness, as God is above humanity. The word heaven rings with the anthems of angelic choruses and the shouts of adoration rising from the throats of God’s people gathered around His throne. It would be hard for most of us to read Genesis 1:1 and not hear the echoes of that sound.
With the single letter s added, however, those overtones are hushed. Moses wrote not about heaven, but about the heavens, not about pearly gates and golden streets, but about the vast expanses of the universe. The reason there is a difference in the two translations is that translation work involves far more than looking up Hebrew words in a Hebrew/English dictionary and finding their English equivalents.
In this case, although the words themselves are among the first learned by beginning Hebrew students, Genesis 1:1 uses them in a figure of speech.
Scholars call it hendiadys (hen-DIE-a-dees). In hendiadys a writer will use two words, linked by the conjunction and, to convey a single concept. Flesh and blood is a good example of hendiadys. When we speak of flesh and blood we usually mean natural, material, human life, as opposed to supernatural, immaterial, or non-human.
The KJV translators rendered Matthew 18:17, “Blessed art thou, Simon-Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my father which is in heaven.” If we read the same verse in the NIV, we see that the translators recognized the figure of speech and translated it using the single word man.
Both translations are accurate, although in this instance I prefer the King James because it retains the figure of speech Jesus used to make his statement more colorful and memorable. That’s what figures of speech are for. In reducing the hendiadys to its ultimate meaning, the NIV translators were accurate but they robbed Jesus’ statement of its poetry.
Understanding Genesis 1:1 as an example of hendiadys yields the meaning: “In the beginning God made everything that is, without exception.” Moses opened the recorded revelation of God’s activity with the magisterial pronouncement, so vital in the polytheistic world of ancient Israel, that nothing existed without the creative Word of God. To today’s non-theistic world it says that God’s creative act included everything the eye of humanity could see and the mind of humanity could imagine. Every new scientific discovery has already been explained as merely another fragment of God’s handiwork.
THE GREEKS HAD A PARTICIPLE FOR IT
No one who has struggled with the first year of a language will ever forget the frustration of translating every word in an exercise perfectly, according to the dictionary, learning exactly what every word meant, and coming up with a sentence that might have been composed by an orangutan pounding on a typewriter with a ball-peen hammer. As slippery as the meaning of words can be, however, understanding their meaning is the easiest part of translation. Words are only the building blocks of language. Without the mortar of grammar to hold them together, they have about as much meaning as the barking of dogs or the cackling of chickens.
Knowing how difficult it is to translate words directly from Hebrew to English, think how much more difficult it is to translate the grammar of Greek or Hebrew into English. In Hebrew, for example, there are not tenses as we think of them in English. Struggle with that for a minute. Hebrew tenses have more to do with kinds of action than time. Hebrew verbs are concerned with such questions as:
Is an act completed?
Is it ongoing?
Is it intensified or turned back on the one who did it?
So how do we get Hebrew verbs into English, where sense of time is so important?
The two Hebrew “tenses” are called “perfect” and “imperfect.” The Hebrew perfect tense is usually translated into the English past or perfect tenses. It isn’t always precise, but it gets the job done. What it really tells us is that an action has already been completed in the past, or is so certain that it can be spoken of as complete even though it won’t actually take place until some time in the future.
Prophets used the perfect tense in this latter sense, so it’s called the “prophetic perfect.” An event can be far in the future from the perspective of the prophet, but since the act is promised by God it can be spoken of as if it had already happened. The time sense of the tense is past, but the action is still future.
When God promised Abraham, “To your descendants I give this land” (Genesis 15:18), He spoke in the perfect tense. Even though He spoke to Abraham 600 to 800 years before the promise was fulfilled, it could be spoken of as a fact of human history because it was already accomplished in the mind of God.
Translation is an incredibly complicated process. That beloved phrase of some preachers, “If you could only read it in the original language …,” contains a kernel of truth. (Most of us preachers can’t actually read it in the original language, either, but we like our congregations to think we can!) But if we can’t read it in the original language, we’ll never actually read it “the way it’s written.”
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!
LITTLE PIECES OF KITTY, AND OTHER MYSTERIES
The problems in translation aren’t all on the side of biblical languages. The English language also places a barrier between us and the Bible. The language we speak both shapes and limits our understanding. We interpret the unfamiliar in terms of what we already know.
When my wife was about two and one-half years of age she was introduced to her first litter of kittens. Peering into the box and seeing those tiny, squirming creatures, she exclaimed, “Look, Mommy! Little pieces of kitty!”
No one today, including my wife, knows exactly what reasoning process was going on in her young mind. Perhaps she thought someone very naughty had dropped the cat and it had shattered into “little pieces of kitty.”
The sayings of children, filtered as they are through such limited experiences, are filled with examples like this. To understand sights, experiences, and ideas far beyond their powers of comprehension children translate them into terms of their familiar world. We find their statements amusing and adorable. We treasure them because they outgrow that sort of thing so quickly. Or do they?
In the late 60’s or early 70’s some ingenious graphic artist devised that maddening bumper sticker that said JESUS in large white, block letters on a black background. It sounded straightforward, but it was a visual riddle. The artist ran his white letters to the limit of the page, eliminating their outer edges. To read block letters, our minds depend on those dark borders. Without them, we are forced to interpret the word from outside our usual experience.
Almost everyone I knew tried to find letters in the black shapes because experience teaches us that letters are printed black on white. That led quickly to frustration. Only after we learned to read the white spaces and allow the black to recede into the background did the name of Jesus become visible.
We can almost hear Him saying, “If you have eyes to see, then see.”
Our problem was perceptual. We were not used to seeing letters presented that way and our minds refused to process the otherwise obvious information. Even today, knowing what the sign says, I have to struggle when I see it to make my mind overcome the conventions it’s used to working with.
This illustrates, in a trivial way, a problem that sometimes obscures our understanding of Scripture. Our known world limits our abilities to understand what is unknown. Our use of language is one of the most subtle forces at work in shaping our perceptions.
In recent works on decision making, its effect would be called “framing.” We “frame” an issue when we start out with assumptions of what can and can’t be. Because we think in words, we will usually perceive reality in forms for which our language has words and ignore realities for which we have no language.
Because words are arbitrary symbols, they take on whatever meaning we give them. For instance, near Wausau, Wisconsin, stands a hill named “Rib Mountain.” To people from Colorado, the word mountain conjures up images of the majestic Rockies, so they would laugh at Rib Mountain. It rises out of the north woods to the lofty height of 1,950 feet. It’s not Mount McKinley, or even Long’s Peak, but for those who live in the flatlands of northern Wisconsin, it’s the closest thing to a mountain they’ve got.
One of my favorite students was a bright young woman who’d come from Hawaii to attend school among God’s frozen people. After the first mild snow fall in November, I asked her how she liked it. She’d never seen snow before and thought it was beautiful and fun.
The following spring, after five months of living the semi-snowbound life of a Minnesotan, I asked her whether or not she still thought winter was fun. As I’d expected, the fun had worn pretty thin by that time.
Prior to her experience, how could I have explained adequately to Vicki what living through that winter would be like? She had never even seen frost, let alone 19 inches of snow in one day.
I had a seminary classmate from Nagaland, India. He had grown up in a village that probably hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. One day shortly before we graduated and he returned to minister among his people, I invited him to speak at the church I was working in. On the way home we stopped at a fried chicken place for lunch. As we ate, he began to laugh, thinking about the problem he’d have explaining Colonel Sanders to his people. In his village, if you wanted a chicken dinner you first had to catch the chicken. Depending on the comparative athletic abilities of the catcher and the catchee, that procedure alone might take longer than it took us to order, eat, wash our hands on the packaged towelettes, and leave. He finally decided it would be better not to mention it because they’d never believe him.
People from his village might understand “chicken dinner,” but there was no way to convey the image of a red-and-white striped box filled with pre-caught, pre-killed, pre-cleaned, pre-cooked chicken.
The Bible often presents us with similar perception problems. Psalm 1 was written from the semi-arid climate of southern Palestine. In most of that country, wild trees are rare. Yearly rainfall barely supports scrub vegetation, and in some places the deserts are as desolate as any in the world.
When the psalmist wrote of “a tree planted by the streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither,” he knew that trees growing away from the steady water supply of canal, river, or oasis were doomed to fruitlessness, if not death. When the burning desert winds blew from the east, the trees whose roots had no constant source of water, withered, lost their leaves, and struggled to survive.
Readers from the American southwest understand the power of that image better than I do. As I look out my dining room window at a grove of trees in their spring foliage, I have to struggle to see trees as the psalmist saw them.
When the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus’ robe, Jesus said, “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me” (Luke 8:46, KJV). Today, virtue is a feminine word, often a synonym for chastity. Generations of preachers have struggled to make sense of what it meant for Jesus to lose virtue. But virtue had a different meaning in Elizabethan England when the KJV was translated. The word in the Greek text was dunamis (DUNE-a-miss), and it meant power. How different the verse is in the NIV, where we hear Jesus saying, “Power has gone out of me.”
What meaning fills our mind when we read the word church in Scripture? Biblically, it never refers to a building, nor to an organization. Yet in our world confusion exists between the building, the organizational structure, and the true church. To avoid this damaging confusion the Pilgrims, when they landed in Plymouth in 1620, built a “meeting house,” not a church. They understood, as the writers of the New Testament had, that they themselves were the church. Now, after centuries of intermingling meanings, the word needs to be qualified very carefully to avoid confusion.
Even when dealing with words in our own language, the meanings intended by the translator and the meaning our background has taught us may not be the same.
How loaded with meanings words can be! Whether Greek or German, Hebrew or English, they all carry burdens of meaning far beyond our casual understanding. The fullness of language is a great gift, but when it comes to precise understanding of Scripture, it can be a great stumbling block in the way of “reading it the way it’s written.”
David E. O’Brien, Today’s Handbook for Solving Bible Difficulties (Minneapolis, MN: David E. O’Brien, 1990), 111–119.
