Why Use So Many Translations?
We will have people who visit our church from “KJV only” churches or churches that use just one translation and inevitably I will get asked, “Why do you use so many translations.” The underlying and unspoken concern for many who pose this question is this: a pastor who uses a variety of translations of Bible passages in a sermon is not being faithful to “The Bible”…he is somehow using them to make the points he wants to make with a slight disregard to what the Bible is actually saying. The other concern is the belief that you simply cannot trust the modern translations of the Bible; the only God inspired translation is the King James Version. Both of these assertions are completely false. What I believe most Christians(especially in our community) fail to understand is that none of us would be able to read the Bible were it not for a huge company(most of them anonymous) of translators. In fact, the translation of Scripture became necessary several hundred years BEFORE the time of Jesus and the early church when its original language, Hebrew, was gradually replaced in the everyday lives of the people of God by Aramaic and then by Greek. The Bible is the most translated book in the world. The Bible is so wonderfully complex not one translation could communicate it’s depth adequately. The most accurate way to read the Bible is to read multiple translations. The Bible was originally written using 11,280 Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew words. But the typical English translation uses around 6,000 words. Clearly, nuances and shades of meaning can be missed. So, if you are looking for one silver bullet translation, you won’t find it. The bottom line is this: the Jewish and later Christian community believed that the same Spirit of God at work in writing the Scripture is also at work in translating the Scripture.
I totally agree with your post, that no translation will ever be a silver bullet. But this surely shows that we must rely less on a translation, and spend more time studying the original languages of Scripture. That way Bible students won’t be forever tossed around by the winds of translation, and will base their views firmly on the original text. However, this is unlikely to happen because most Bible students are lazy and just want to have a nice easy read and don’t really care about the detail or the specifics. So translations will always be with us, a new one every year, to make sure the Bible publishers make lots of money.
Not sure I agree that “most Bible students are lazy.” Seems kind of harsh. My only question for you is, once you have studied the original languages and you put the text in your own native tongue, isn’t the end product another translation? In other words, the act of studying the original languages is translation itself.