Translation Frustration

So Tyndale translated the. The New Testament into English. 1525, 26. This was still considered problematic, bordering on heretical. Well, it resulted in him being burned at the stake.

Okay. So, yeah, not just bordering on.

It was only a couple years after he was executed that they were like, you know what? I think we’re gonna go with this English Bible thing.

History is just littered with people who were killed for their work. And then later everybody was like, no, this is the good stuff. Yeah, let’s just stick with this.

Hey, everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat that pesky misinformation about the same. Or at least the spread of that misinformation about the same. This is what happens when I go off script and just try to ad lib is I just screw it all up.

Here’s the thing. We. Yeah, it’s easier to. I don’t know, is it easier to combat the spread of a concept rather than the concept itself? Ooh. Yeah, probably.

We’re going. We try to do both. I think we’re going to do both. Yeah, we’re.

We’re in combat mode. We’re in full tactical misinformation gear.

We are both wearing green.

That’s right.

So we’re blending in with whatever a little bit.

Although it. Mine’s bright green with. With yellow on it where it says The Incredible Hulk. Yeah. So how are things?

Things are good, man. I wanted to dive in right off the bat to discussing the cruise slash tour that we are going to be doing at the beginning of October.

Because slots are filling up, but there is still space available and we’d really like to fill all of the slots if we can. It’s going to be great. It’s a Mediterranean cruise with all of the luxurious, wonderful things that are contained in that. That, you know, people have come to expect: amazing food and, and, you know, amazing, just awesome experiences. You can’t go wrong with the Mediterranean. It’s going to be beautiful. We’re leaving from Rome. We’re headed down to Naples. We’re going to. All the way over to Turkey and Athens and gorgeous Greek islands where you can have all, you know, where you can take pictures of the blue-roofed buildings and everything.

And maybe, Dan, you should talk a little bit about. And we don’t have this all fully planned out yet, but what we do know is that for a lot of these places, we are going to take you on excursions that you cannot get anywhere else. So talk a little bit about that.

We’re, we’re working with Sacred Space Tours, which is the tour company that we’re collaborating with and they’ve got buses chartered for us. So in those locations where there are biblically relevant sites or museums or things like that, we’re going to head out and take a look, including Naples. We’re going to try to get as much in as we can of Ephesus. Athens is going to be a big one. We’re going to see what we can do on Crete. And other places like Santorini, places like Mykonos. You’re going to have to find something to keep you busy and entertained.

It’s going to be torture. It’s going to be torture.

It will, it will be rough.

But my understanding is there’s nothing good there. But we’ll make, we’ll, we’ll make the best of it. We’re going to have a wonderful time. I think we’re still working out the kinks on this that we will also probably do a, a couple days in Rome either way, beginning before or after the tour, if you want to, as an add on.

As an add on, it’ll be a couple of days in Rome so we can get to see more of the sites there. And, and I’m hoping to get into the catacombs and see some of the, the artwork and things down there. So, yeah, that’ll be, that’ll be something that we’re going to do, tack on to the end there.

So trust us, this will be worth it to come with us on this thing and you get to hang out with us. So that’s awesome too. Dan is very pleasant. I know I’m a miserable cuss, but everybody’s gonna really enjoy hanging out with, with you, Dr. Dan. So if you are at all interested, we’ve been having people send their email, send us emails, but let’s be a little more direct about it. You can write in directly to Sacred Space Tours. How do they do that?

So we’ve got my friend Trevin Hatch, who is, is the liaison for Sacred Space Tours. And so you can email him at info@sacredspacetours.com and you can even text him or give him a call if you’d like to make sure you get in touch right away. His number is. Or the, his number with Sacred Space Tours is 1-844-787-2536. And let him know you are interested in the Data over Dogma cruise slash tour in October, and he will give you all the information that you need, including if you’re ready to pull the trigger on the form to submit a, a deposit. And that’s, I think, what we’re all aiming for, getting those in so that we can secure the space, because we are. It is a little late in the game for us to be suddenly promoting a tour that’s going to take place in just a few months.

But we want to make sure that we secure all the space that we told them we are looking for.

So I promise you, if you’re even considering this, just, just do it. We are going to make it worth your while. We are going to make it a really good time. You’ll meet other people that are awesome and, and this will be one for the, for the, for the memory books. Yeah, memory books. Do we have memory books? Anyway, you’ll really enjoy it.

For the record books.

Yeah, for that. Yes, exactly.

And then there are also a couple of days cruising days, so if you want to lay out on, on one of the deck chairs and just soak up the sun for 14 hours, I think they let you do that.

All right, well, that’s, that’s, that’s done. Everybody’s gonna sign up now. I know they are. That’s good. And now we can move on with our show. And what are we talking about today, Dan?

I thought it might be fun for us to take a look at some passages in the Bible and how their translation differs from translation to translation. Just get a sense for what kinds of patterns we can see in the way translations are approaching the Bible. Some of the. I’ve got a few different sites pulled up that, that give us a bunch of different translation options. Many of the, the standards, your King James Version, your NIV, your ESV, your NASB, your NRSVUE and, and others. And so I think it would be interesting just to get a sense for how much variation there can be between different Bible translations and also why.

So, yeah, we’ve touched on this a little bit. We’ve touched on the idea that, like, the fact of the matter is that there is no such thing as just a, an unbiased, like, definitive look at what the. At translating these, these documents. Yeah, so everybody’s got their own reasons why they’re choosing a certain phrasing or a certain kind of, you know, a certain interpretation of a thing over another. And it’s, it can be very fascinating. It can also be incredibly frustrating because I, you know, I have been sort of dealing with this, working with this book for years and years. You know, I used to do another show that, that I would, you know, do reports on a whole, on, you know, whole passages from the Bible. And I would compare and contrast different translations and have no clue why they were different and what, what I’m supposed to actually think the story is or whatever.

Yeah, that’s, that’s an assumption I hear from a lot of folks. They’re like, oh, I have all these different translations, so I just compare them all. And it’s like, well, if, if, if you don’t know the relationship of the translation to the source text, that doesn’t do anything for you. I mean. I mean.

Right.

I mean, it gives you a chance to pick and choose. You can. You can.

Yeah, that’s generally one that you like. Yeah, but it’s not like you add up A, B and C and that equals D and D is the correct answer. It’s right. You can’t triangulate the source text based on these translations unless you already know what’s going on underneath the hood. And so I want to do that a little bit. I want to talk about. There are a few different reasons that we’ll see that people translate things the way they, they do. One is that they’re in a specific tradition, not necessarily a religious tradition, but a translation tradition.

Right.

There are a lot of translations that are following after like the KJV or something like that.

And so King James Version, I mean, you’re using a lot of initialisms, and that’s okay. But I do want to make sure that we. Make sure that everybody knows what they mean as, as we progress.

And, and there’s, there’s some history behind that. Do you think it would be helpful to just briefly talk about the history of English Bible translation?

Yeah, I mean, we’ve touched on it before, but let’s, let’s have a refresher. I think it’s a good idea.

So for the longest time, everybody was just using the Latin, and there were translations that were based on the Latin. The Latin Vulgate translated by Jerome around 400, 405 CE. And this was kind of the official translation of the Roman Catholic Church, and, and a lot of the kind of affiliate groups used it as well. And there were translations out there from the Latin. We have an English translation, the Wycliffe translation, that was made in the late 14th century CE based on the Latin. But we don’t get translators trying to go back to the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament and the Hebrew manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible until we get to the Reformation. And Martin Luther’s kind of the first to do this with German based on Erasmus’s Textus Receptus. And then William Tyndale does it for English. So he translated. Translates the New Testament into English from the Greek.

Okay. I, you know, it’s funny, I. For whatever reason, it had never sunk into me that the difference between the. The Wycliffe. Wycliffe and the. The Tyndale is that Wycliffe came. It was a translation of a translation. Yeah, it was, you know, it was the Greek via Latin into English or the. The, you know, Hebrew slash Aramaic via Latin into English.

And. And so if you wanted to translate the New Testament until Erasmus put together his. His Greek New Testament, you were up a creek because you didn’t have a source text unless you went to the libraries and you cobbled together a bunch of manuscripts and decided for yourself, oh, I’m going to use this manuscript for this verse and this one for the other one. Erasmus made it, so you just had to go buy his book. And now you had the whole Greek New Testament. And so Tyndale was like, jackpot. What? And translated the. The New Testament into English. 1525, 26 is when that came out. And now. And when Tyndale did it, this was still considered problematic and seditious.

Like bordering on heretical.

Well, it resulted in him being burned at the stake.

Okay. So, yeah, not just bordering on.

Not bordering all the way. All the way there, fully full-on into you’re going to die now.

Heresy. Yeah.

And a lot of it had. It wasn’t just, how dare you translate the Bible into English. It was because he was using a bunch of words that they had kind of said, you can’t, you know, the ekklesia, they had always translated as church. And he was like, this just means congregation. And they were like, this undermines the institution. And like priests, he’s like, I don’t. I don’t like the, you know, the priesthood. And this really just means presbyter, elder, so that’s what he’s going to go with. And so there were. I think there were a list of five words that they were really upset with him about. But he was also publishing a lot of hit pieces, The Practice of Prelates, and other texts that were just railing on church leadership and. And particularly More. Shoot, I forget his name. It’s not Henry More. Not the Cambridge.

Thomas More.

Thomas More, yeah. He and Thomas More were going at it. They were. They were not big fans of each other. And Thomas More is the one who ended up not signing his death warrant, but he’s the one who chased him down and got him thrown in prison. And, and he himself would be executed not too. In fact. Wait, was he, I think Tyndale was in prison when More got executed.

Oh, yeah, because he was.

Because Tyndale was in prison for a while.

Interesting.

Anyway, anyway, it was only a couple years after he was executed that they were like, you know what? I think we’re gonna go with this English Bible thing.

And that how often in history is just littered with people who were murdered, were killed for their work, and then later everybody was like, no, this is the good stuff. Yeah, we’ll just stick with this.

So, so then immediately a bunch of people just basically take Tyndale’s stuff and reproduce it. And so you’ve got translation, the Matthew Bible, you’ve got the Coverdale Bible, you’ve got the Great Bible, you’ve got the Geneva Bible, you got the Bishops Bible. And then the King James Version is a very conservative revision of the Bishops Bible. And so these are all one, it’s one lineage. Like, all these English translations are basically descended from each other. English translations are basically descended from each other. And even if they weren’t, like, they really didn’t want the King James Version to be like the Geneva Bible. They still use the Geneva Bible as a reference. They were still like, what did Geneva say? Okay. And so there was influence. And so it’s, it’s basically one just kind of. I, I, I don’t use the word inbred or incest to, to denigrate, but this was all very incestual, translationally speaking.

Well, it wasn’t even a translation at that point. We weren’t even translating, they were revisions. Yeah, yeah.

And the King James Version has become, through historical accident, embedded in the foundations of not only the English language, particularly for Americans, but within the, the foundations of English Bible translation. And even we have Robert Alter, who published his own translation of the Hebrew Bible, recently published alongside of it a, a book called the Art of Bible Translation, where he talked about how you’re all in the shadow of the King James Version. And so you’ve got to grapple with that. You’ve got to engage with the King James Version. And he also wrote another book called the Pen of Iron that was all about the influence of the King James Version. I’m not as big a fan of the KJV as him, but that’s an example of how a lot of English Bible translations these days are working in the shadow of the KJV, and they enjoy the shade. They’re not gonna leave.

And so if you and that shadow just got a little longer when, when Donald Trump decided to release his own KJV.

Yeah, because that’s, that’s just going to extend the lease on the KJV’s dominance for who knows how many more centuries.

Somebody could make a fortune selling the Gideons on a new translation or on a new version. If you can talk those guys into buying your version. Yeah, you’re, you’re, you’re in, you’re, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re on easy street at that point.

So a lot of the translations that we’re gonna see kind of follow after the King James Version, because if you’re trying to pump out a translation and you got a publisher breathing down your neck, you’re gonna punt a lot. And usually punting means, what did the King James Version do? Let’s update the language a little bit. But other than that, we’re going to follow. Follow what they did pretty, pretty closely. So that’s one thing that can happen. Another thing, another question is what source texts are we relying on? Are we incorporating the Dead Sea Scrolls or not? Are we going to lean on the Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation, or not? Another thing has to do with our general theory about the nature of the Bible. Like the, the NIV, the New International Version, is pretty explicit up front that all the translators share this commitment to the inspiration and infallibility of the Bible, which means if they find problems, they’re going to scratch them out or they’re.

Highly motivated to massage those problems.

Yes, there’s, there’s a lot of a massage going on here. When I was in massage therapy school, I would, when we did our clinical internship, I would always say, I’ll do shiatsu. And that was always fancy. It was something that people loved doing. But I did, I liked it because I didn’t have to set up a table and I got to be in my socks. So there are a lot of Bible translations, let’s just say that want to be in their socks, that don’t want to have to put their shoes on.

Oh, that, that is a delightful way of putting it. I’m very happy. Although something tells me that a lot of these massagings are not even shiatsu worthy. They are.

No, no, no.

They are. They are the seedy massage parlor in the bad part of town that keeps getting raided by the cops.

Yeah, there, there’s no, there’s no Reiki. There’s no energy work going on here. No hot stone. No. None of that Ayurveda therapeutic stuff. It is, but there might be a.

Happy ending waiting for.

Oh, by the way, just apropos of absolutely nothing, call your massage therapist. A massage therapist and not a masseuse.

Oh, okay. Yeah, noted. Especially, especially not a male massage therapist.

Yeah, well, yeah, the, the, the, the other term is masseur, but.

Right.

Also, don’t call them that. Just call him massage therapist. Okay.

Okay, fine.

So there, there are a bunch of reasons that translations are going to differ, but I want to start with an easy one that we talked about in our very first episode of the podcast so many eons ago. Genesis 1:1 , which is. Okay, the very beginning. And we have from the King James Bible, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. Economical, very simple, very straightforward, easy to understand.

Not. Not, you know. Yeah, not. It’s, it’s, it’s not hard on the brain or anything.

Too. Too bad it’s wrong.

And I have. Yeah. As we’ve talked about, I’m looking at Bible Hub where you can pull up dozens of translations, and the first 10 are all very clearly almost identical. They’re all basically descended from the King James Version, including the New King James Version and, and so on. And they all say the same thing, except for some of them may have heavens in plural because shamayim in Hebrew is, is plural. So New International Version, New Living Translation, English Standard Version, Berean Standard Bible. I, I don’t think I know what that is. And then you got the New American Bible, which is kind of a Catholic-oriented translation, the NABRE. And then you’ve got the NASB 95, the NASB 77, and then this Legacy Standard Bible, Amplified Bible, I don’t think I’ve looked into before. But it says in the beginning God. Parenthetically it says Elohim created brackets by forming from nothing the heavens and the earth.

So that’s really, that’s really holding your hand through this.

By the way, this is, this is from nothing.

Yeah. Is that from nothing? Part of. Is that translational or is that just sort of a little like. No, that’s an editor’s note.

Yeah, that’s an editor’s note that’s telling you we would like you to interpret this this way.

And what I don’t see on here is the correct translation, which would be when God began to. Oh, we got additional translations.

Let’s see if that NRSVUE I think has When God Began.

Right? They have When God Began. The. The Jewish Publication Society Tanakh. So the JPS Tanakh has When God Began. Robert Alter’s translation has When God Began. There’s another one called the. The First Testament translation by I believe, Greenstein. Is that accurate? Greenstein or Goodspeed also says something very similar.

Can I, can I take you to my favorite translation of the Bible? Because it’s not one and it’s crazy.

What’s that?

The Message is my favorite, which by the way, The Message for Genesis 1:1 has first this colon. God created the heavens and the earth. No, the heavens and earth. All you see. All you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness and inky blackness.

There you go.

The Message is great, you guys. I - I wouldn’t use it if you, like, want, you know, accuracy in any way, but for just sheer, like goofy fun entertainment, The Message is really amazing.

Yeah. And a lot of people talk about this, the spectrum of Bible translation where it’s like thought-for-thought all the way to word-for-word. Or if you went extreme word-for-word, you’re just reproducing the source text, but you’ve got like interlinears are over there and then on the other end you’ve got the thought-for-thought, which are paraphrases or which are like trying to process the source text and then spit it out in a way that would be more accessible. And I think The Message is definitely in that - in that vein. But yeah, and the reality is that translation is a lot more complex than - than just a single spectrum like that.

That’s right, because languages are - they’re not just words. They are like - meaning doesn’t just come from words. It comes from how you structure your sentences and how you - and how you know - what the syntax is.

Yeah, so this one here comes down to how we’re interpreting the word bereshit, the first word in Hebrew, which scholars these days are in pretty widespread agreement. This is in the construct. And if it is in the construct, then it means “in the beginning of” something rather than just an absolute “In the beginning, this is what happened.” And so the - the fact that so many translations stick with “In the beginning” is - is a testament to the influence of the - the traditional reading. And the King James Version didn’t originate that reading, but it goes back much further than that. But it is definitely not creation ex nihilo, creation out of nothing. That’s for dang sure. All right, another one I want to look at is Genesis 2:8 . And there’s really one main translation I’m going to be poking fun at here. Genesis 2:8 . Here’s the King James Bible: “And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

Okay, now this is a part of a distinct creation account from Genesis 1 . The NIV says - and the order of creation is different right here, it’s in a different order from Genesis 1 . The NIV says, “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden, and there he put the man he had formed.” And so we’ve - we’re using a pluperfect verb tense. Instead of just saying, “this is what he did,” it’s saying, “now this is what he had done before we get to right what we’re talking about now.”

He’s not doing it right now, or he - he didn’t just do it, he did it a while ago. And right now we’re catching up to that point, or now that’s becoming relevant.

And the purpose is to say, “no, this is not in a different order.” Right, because we can - we can translate this in the pluperfect and say, “now look, remember back in chapter one when he had done this?” So I’m just kind of casting your memory back there so you remember, recall that this happened. And so it’s trying to suggest that Genesis 2 is, is not actually giving the creation account in a specific order, but just kind of casting back.

And so this, your contention would be that that is a mistranslation.

That is a mistranslation guided by the presupposition of univocality. And so in order to obscure the fact that there is discontinuity between these two accounts of the creation, they use the pluperfect to disrupt the consecutive order of creative acts that is taking place here. And I think there was another one, ah, the Douay-Rheims, which is a very early Catholic translation, which was based initially on the Vulgate and then later on was kind of revised in light of the King James Version. The Douay-Rheims says the. And the Lord God had planted a paradise of pleasure from the beginning, wherein he placed man whom he had formed. So that’s another one that is. That is playing the same, getting stuck on the same sticky wicket, right, of presupposing univocality.

I’m pleased to report that Wycliffe did not fall for that trap and said, forsooth, the Lord God planted at the beginning the paradise of liking. The paradise of liking.

By the way, that’s a great title for a. A book or something, if you want. If you want to write a.

A book.

The paradise of liking, I think would be a good title.

Oh, man. Wycliffe was. What was he on that? That is an interesting one. Now there’s one that I always look at just because I hope that one day I will see a different translation is Genesis 20:13 .

Oh, really?

And this is not one that people are. That, you know, blows anybody’s hair back. But here’s the King James Version. And it came to pass when God caused me to wander from my father’s house, that I said unto her, this is thy kindness which thou shalt show unto me at every place whither we shall come. Say of me, he is my brother. So this is. Is Abraham being like, hey, we need to lie to some folks to save my hide. And. And this is something that was that I think Jacob also does after Abraham. But the. The interesting part is that the verb, when God caused me to wander, the verb is in the plural in Hebrew.

It is unambiguously a plural verb. And the word for God, Elohim, is grammatically plural. And so in order to determine whether this is intended to refer to. To a singular deity or plural deities, you’re supposed to look at the verbs and the pronouns. And so you could make a case that it would be more accurate to translate this. And it came to pass when the gods caused me to wander.

Oh, wow.

Which some scholars think probably makes a little better sense if this tradition is coming from very early in the history of Israel. And others think, no, it’s. It’s just some kind of harmonization. When you have participles, the participles, which is a verbal noun, the participles can match the ending of the plural noun Elohim. And so for some, for kind of like phonemic reasons, there. There can be phonemic harmonization. We want the verb. We want the participle to rhyme with the noun. And so I can. I’m. It’s a little easier for me to accept that argument if there’s a participle, but here’s not a participle. It’s just a straight up verb, and it’s plural.

And so I’m sure we all followed all of that. Everything that you just said went with the participles and the phonemes and whatever.

So if you have the. The participle ending in im and you have Elohim, verb, im then it rhymes. And so because the way that these texts sounded was so important to the Hebrew language, I think that. There’s a better case to make that you can have people saying, I’m just going to use a plural participle here, even though I’m talking about the single God, because it sounds better.

Yeah, that kind of stuff is really fun. It definitely, I think, would blow a lot of people’s minds if Genesis. Genesis, what was it? 20, verse 13 was like. And when the gods had me, caused me to wander. That I think, I think some people would. Would. I mean, you know, we’ve talked about the, the fact that this is not a, a monotheistic book.

Right.

But I don’t. But, you know, I think that may be one of the things that, that we’re talking about is that people are making choices to make sure to, to minimize the polytheism of the book and, and bring in as much monotheism or, or make the monotheism highlighted and, and sort of stretch across the entirety of.

The thing and, and mask anything that complicates it. And that’s exactly what’s. What’s going on here is they’re masking that. Okay. I found another example that might be a little clearer when you remember when we talked about the necromancer of Endor.

I love the nec. The witch. I’m going to call her the witch. I like the witch.

And the. In verse 13, where, where she says that she or it says she, I saw a divine being coming up out of the ground according to the NRSV. But it’s just Elohim, God. A God, Gods. It says Elohim. So Elohim raiti olim, but. So that rising up participle is plural. But Elohim olim rhymes. So that could be an. And then Saul responds, what does he look like? So, okay, did you not hear me use the plural? But so that’s an example where maybe that’s plural just for phonemic reasons.

Okay, interesting.

Yeah. So the next one I want to look at, which I think is going to be a little more fun, is one that we’ve, we’ve talked about somewhat recently. Deuteronomy 32 8. Oh, okay. Which is, which is a. The fun one. So this is where we have the Song of Moses. And Moses is supposed to say, ask your fathers, and they will tell you the elders and they will say to you. Then King James Version says, when the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. Now this is an example where it’s a question of the source text. The Masoretic Text here has children of Israel. Like, that’s, that’s not really up for debate. The ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint, has angels of God. And scholars have long known they like to translate the phrase sons of God as angels of God. So people stroked their beards and clicked their tongues and thought maybe this originally said according to the number of the Bene Elohim, children of God.

And then lo and behold, we found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 4QDeuteronomy j, which says precisely that the sons of God. And so any translation that has been executed since the 60s has been aware that we have this reading out there, that, that there is a better reading and some of them will translate it better. Like the, the NRSVue, which is the one that we default to the official position of the Data over Dogma podcast.

Correct.

Says he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods, which is just understanding children of God, Bene Elohim, to be used as a way to refer to a member of a given category. So like sons of the prophets means.

Prophet or son, son of man means.

A person, a human. Right. You’ve got the, the, the daughters of Adam from Genesis 6 , which just means women. And so that’s how they’re taking it. We have, in the, the New English Translation, we have a very interesting take. He set the, the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the heavenly assembly. Oh, so it’s not just translating what it says, but it’s saying, well, the Bene Elohim, the children of God were members of the divine council, the heavenly assembly. And so let’s just render heavenly assembly. And so.

Interesting. Yeah, but talk a little bit about. Because one thing that you said that I kind of, I think maybe some, some of our listeners might get hung up on is why. So we find, you know, we find one Dead Sea Scroll that confirms this Benei Elohim idea. Why is that the now dominant or now preferred rendering reading.

Reading rather than. Because, you know, that’s one source. But we know that there’s lots and lots of source texts and they don’t always, you know, you know, as, as these scrolls were written, you know, copied and disseminated and whatever different differences emerged. Why is, why is that going to be preferred over other traditions?

So that, that’s a good point. Because earlier does not necessarily mean more original because it’s very complex how these texts can change as they’re transmitted. The first part is the fact that there were no children of Israel at this time. So this, this dividing up of the.

Nation kind of a problem.

All right.

So we’re probably supposed to understand this as a call back to the part in Genesis where it talks about Peleg and it says the earth was divided in, in his day or something like that. So this is probably something that’s, that’s, that’s calling back to Genesis 10 now. And, and the Table of Nations. Now you do have a statement that there were 70 folks who came out with, came out of Egypt to return with the sons of Israel after following the, the Exodus. And so that’s one of the, one of the arguments for children of Israel. 70. But we all, we have the 70 nations in Genesis 10 . And once we look at, consider the reading sons of God. Well, one that doesn’t have the, the chronological problem that sons of Israel has.

It is much earlier. We don’t know when exactly children of Israel got worked into the, the manuscript. But all of the earliest manuscripts we have, all the manuscripts that we have prior to the Masoretic Text read something different. The Septuagint had sons of God. The Dead Sea Scrolls have sons of God. And this makes better sense because this would account for the tradition that we see developing later on of every nation having a guardian angel over it. And so if we’re dividing up the nations according to the sons of God, then then that makes a little better sense of that. Deuteronomy 4:19 also seems to be reflecting the idea because that’s where it says when you look up into the sky and you see the sun, the moon, the stars, and all the host of heaven, we don’t want you to be driven to worship them because God distributed them to the nations.

And so it’s the, this is an astralization of the gods, but it’s treating the gods as each one being distributed to its own nation. So it accounts for the idea of patron deities over each of the nations of the earth. So it’s, we have manuscript support. Chronologically it makes better sense. It also has much more explanatory power. And it also fits into other passages that seem to refer to this tradition about, about each nation having a deity distributed to it.

Right.

And we also have another verse in Deuteronomy 32:43 , which in a similar way had a reference to gods that was smudged out, but we were clued in by the Septuagint. And then we found a Dead Sea scroll manuscript that demonstrated the Septuagint was, was right, but we don’t need to get into that one. But, but this is another one where it’s, it’s theological. The motivation to avoid the, the reading that scholars overwhelmingly agree is more original. It’s a theological concern. They don’t want to say that. And so there are a number of translations. Let me see if I can, if I can remember which translations there. There are a handful that will avoid it, surprisingly, the English Standard Version, which we have. We talked about the ESV on the podcast.

Not really. No, I don’t think so.

Okay, so this was a, this was a translation that was basically done because of a bunch of evangelicals got together in Colorado Springs and said, I don’t like how the NIV is favoring women.

Okay, yes, we did talk about this. Right? Yeah, that’s.

So they, they came up with the English Standard Version. In a lot of ways, it’s a very, very accurate translation. And so here they say, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. Dead on. It is a perfectly literal translation. There is no shame there. They’re not trying to hide anything. But we get.

The shame comes later, I guess.

Yeah, I’m okay. How about this? How about the, The Message? Oh, he put each of the peoples within boundaries under the care of divine guardians.

Oh, wow.

So they’re incorporating it, but they’re incorporating the broader tradition of this idea of guardian angels over each nation, which is something that you see in later Greco Roman Judaism. For instance, the Book of Daniel , where Michael the Archangel comes to Daniel and he’s like, sorry, I just came from battling the prince of Persia, and, and then now I’ve got to go battle the prince of Greece. And, and this is supposed to reflect the guardian angel over each of these nations. And Michael is the head, because Israel is, is the head.

So it stops being about God, like sort of patron gods, and becomes lesser divine, divine agents of some sort.

So between the exile and the Greco Roman period, you basically, in order to try to further exalt the God of Israel, all the, all the second tier deities and the craftsman deities and, and the servile deities, everybody gets squished down into the bottom tier, which is basically the servile tier.

Right.

And so everybody who used to be gods, now they’re just angels. And like, technically angels are considered gods, but it’s like, you know you’re god with a little g. Yeah.

You’re the JV. Yeah, it’s. It’s a cute god.

The JV squad. But you have translations like the New American Standard Bible, the NASB, which says according to the number of the sons of Israel, and then they’ll just include a footnote that says the Dead Sea Scrolls say sons of God. The Septuagint says “angels of God.” We don’t care, though. New English Translation has… Oh, we already went over that one, but they’ve got copious notes there. Which reminds me, let’s look at another one from the… From the NET, specifically, because it annoys me. A translation.

And this is Exodus 22 , verse 8, and Exodus 21 , verse 6 is very similar, but I think the… The problem is more clearly outlined in Exodus 22 , verse 8. So… But first, let me share the… The King James Version. And then do you have the… Do you have the NRSV in front of you?

I can.

Okay, pull it up and follow along.

We’re in Exodus 22 . Is that what you said?

22? Yeah, we’re going to be in verse eight.

Okay. Here’s the King James Version. “If the thief be not found, then the master of the house shall be brought unto the judges to see whether he have put his hand unto his neighbor’s goods.”

Okay, that is not what it says in the NRSVue.

What… What does it say in the NRSVue?

“If the thief is not caught, the owner of the house shall be brought before God to determine whether or not the owner had laid hands on the neighbor’s goods.”

Provocative. Yeah. And…

And also not easy to do. It seems like it’s either already before God or…

Huh. So the…

It’s…

Elohim is the… Is the word in Hebrew. Now, here’s the thing that complicates the way the NRSV translates it, because if you go down to verse nine, it says, “the one whom God condemns shall pay double to the other,” according to the… The NRSV. However, if you look in the Hebrew, that verb for condemn in verse nine, it’s not singular, it’s plural. And so it doesn’t say God. It actually says gods.

Okay, so when the verb is plural, then that is then retroactively applied to the… To the… The subject.

The subject. If… If the subject is the word Elohim, because that can be singular or plural.

Right. Okay. Right.

Right. So really, Exodus 22:8 should say, “then the owner of the house will be brought before the gods”

“to see whether he has laid his hand on his neighbor’s goods. And the cause of both parties shall come before the gods, and the one whom the gods condemn shall pay double to the other.” The New English…

I was going to say this naughty little NRSV doesn’t even have a note for that.

Yeah, they’re tricky. They’re tricky.

They’re not… They’re not even… They’re not even acknowledging that there’s a possible issue here.

Now, the New English Translation is following after the King James Version, rendering “judges.” And just… Just to be blunt, the word Elohim never means judges in the Hebrew Bible. It means God, gods, or divine, period. Okay, so they have a note here that says… The line says no. Exodus 22:8 . Here again, the word used is the gods, meaning the judges who made the assessments and decisions.

Why would it mean that? Why would they use that word to mean that? That doesn’t make any sense.

Well, the. The note that I was looking for is actually. Okay, it’s in Exodus 21:6 where we have the same thing. His master must bring him to the Elohim. And they say here the word is ha-Elohim. One scholar, Driver, says the word means to God, namely the nearest sanctuary, in order that the oath and the ritual may be made. Made solemn. Although he does say that it would be done by human judges, which is nonsense. Others have made a stronger case that it refers to judges who acted on behalf of God. Here’s the problem. The NET then cites Cyrus Gordon and Anne Draffkorn. Cyrus’s paper is called Elohim and its reputed meaning of rulers, judges. And Draffkorn’s article is called Ilani Elohim. It cites these two in support of the notion that it refers to judges who act on behalf of God.

Each of those articles argues it does not mean judges. It. Each of those articles argues strenuously, this means gods. Wow. And so whoever is responsible for this New English Translation note either just was like, well, I’m just gonna lie and just count on nobody looking these things up or saw the article titles and was like, surely they. They agree with. With what we want the. The situation to be, and so just blithely put them down in support without having ever read them.

Listen, I am sympathetic. I am sympathetic to anyone who reads just a headline and feels like they understand the entirety of the. Of the. The argument. But like, I have been. I have. I have been known to do that on occasion myself.

That. What? I love this. This commercial. This lady’s like, so I read an article. Well, most of an article. Okay. That the headline of an article, right?

Like, yeah, that’s. I think that’s more honest than a lot of us can be. But Cyrus Gordon’s article is titled Elohim in its reputed meaning of rulers and judges. Like, you know, he’s going to argue that it doesn’t mean. But. So. So that is a theologically driven translation. You don’t want it to say gods. They’re going to have it say judges. And we need to throw some citations on there. We need to pad that footnote so it looks like we have a case. Even though they cited 100% of the articles that they cited to defend their reading, flatly refute their reading.

Wow, that’s. That is bold. I’ll say that it is. If I were one of those people who wrote one of those papers, I would be probably a little upset about that.

I think Cyrus Gordon is no longer with us and has not been for some time. I don’t know about. Anne Draffkorn, but. But yeah, that would be annoying. I. I see myself, like, even the, like, comments on my videos, they’re like, Dan said this. And I was like, I have not never once said that in my entire life.

Right. Yeah.

Which. Which is annoying. Feel free.

Feel free to, like, you know, quote us and quote— I mean, don’t quote me. I’m not. I’m pretty worthless to you. But feel free to quote Dan. But, like, at least say what he said. Like, if you’re going to refute him, get it right. Make sure you say what he actually said.

Yeah. I feel like we haven’t spent much time in the New Testament.

Let’s get in there, man.

Yeah, we’re running out of real estate. So an interesting one, kind of a simple one, is Mark 1 , verse 1. So this is the first— the first sentence of any gospel that we have. Mark’s the earliest gospel. This is the first chapter, the very first verse.

You’re saying chronologically?

Chronologically, yeah.

Not— not as they appear in most Bibles, but chronologically.

Chronologically, yeah. Matthew comes first because that is more helpful to segueing from the— the prophet Malachi into here’s our— our coming Elijah, who is going to fulfill all this and all that kind of stuff. But in Mark 1 , here’s the King James Version: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” So pretty straightforward, pretty basic. And then we immediately get into: “As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send a messenger,” blah, blah, blah, blah. Some translations don’t—go ahead.

That is not what I’ve got.

You’re looking at the NRSVUE. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, hit me.

I’ve got “The beginning of the good news”—“good news,” “gospel,” that’s fine—“of Jesus Christ,” period.

It does not— It— You— You said something. You— You kept talking after the words “Jesus Christ.”

“The Son of God” is something that’s been most likely added that is not in our earliest manuscripts. And so, however, there’s a— you can kind of— Like, this is an— It’s not the earliest, it’s not the strongest, but you can make a case for it. And so some folks leave it in. Where’s the— Yeah, but there’s a footnote that says some of these lack “the Son of God” and both Irenaeus and Epiphanius— so early Christian authors—additionally lack “Jesus Christ.” Oh, yeah. While virtually all the rest of the witnesses have the words. Yeah.

So the footnote in the NRSV says “other ancients”— so the NRSV doesn’t have the “the Son of God” part. And their footnote just says “other ancient authorities add Son of God.” Yeah, interesting.

And this is part of the complexity of— When you sit down to translate, you’ve got to pick a source text, and normally you just go for the nearest critical edition. But translators are not bound to the text- critical choices that they make in those critical editions. And so some translators will be like, well, I want to include this and here’s- And I think that we should put this in here because I think it fits. And so they will put stuff back in. So the New English Translation is like, we like “the Son of God.” We’re going to put it in. We’re just going to add a note. And adding a note is kind of a way to cover your tracks. It’s like, I know the argument, I still want to do it anyway.

Right.

Even though- Yeah. I think most scholars would say “Son of God” is probably not there. And one of the reasons is that when scribes transmit these texts, they tend to add to the text more frequently than they take away from the text. There’s not really a good argument to make for how this could have fallen out, but we can come up with good reasons why it would have been added in.

Right. So unless somebody just spilled their coffee and it covered over the “Son of God” part.

Which does happen. Like, you do have you- You sometimes have coffee rings, like on old manuscripts and stuff like that. There’s even one of my favorites. There’s an old Roman tile that somebody- Somebody was obviously doing, like in making the tile in their garage. There are cat footprints.

On the tile.

Somebody’s- Somebody’s cat was just like, do, do, do, and ran across the tile as it was drying. It’s- It’s the coolest thing in the world.

That’s awesome.

Yeah. Okay, here’s-

I mean, you might as well just- Just use the tile.

Oh, yeah, yeah, they did. I mean, it was- It was turned over. It was- It was upside down. Like, that was the bottom of the tile.

Oh, so it was-

It was still stuck on a roof somewhere. Okay, look up Matthew 17:21 .

Well, the long pause is instrumental here because you’re not going to find it.

Hey, wait a minute. Are you tricking me?

I am tricking you.

I’m not- You’re right. You are tricking me because- Yeah. Matthew 17:21 ain’t in there.

You’ve got a digital version, right?

Of the NRSV.

And if you look in a hard copy, it just goes 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 24. Verse 21 is not in there. Although there should be a footnote probably at the end of verse 20 or the beginning.

There is.

Yeah. And what does the footnote say?

Other ancient authorities add 17:21. And then it lists what that says.

Yeah. Which says, “Howbeit this?” So King James Version, “Howbeit this kind goeth not out, but by prayer and fasting.” And so this is in the canonical order of the New Testament. This is the first example of this happening, although, as we’ve talked about before, this happens about 16 times in a bunch of Bibles. This is one of the passages that is just removed from modern translations because we know that it was not a part of the original version of this text.

Right.

Because we find we have a manuscript where it’s not there at all. No sign whatsoever of it. And then we have another manuscript where it’s not in the text, but somebody scribbled it in the margins and put a little arrow saying, “Right here.” And then we have. And we have a later manuscript where it’s just right in the. In the body of the text. And so somebody has just slipped it in there. And as you look around at. At different translations, you’ll see that some of them include it, some of them don’t. And this was. This text was first omitted in an 1881 edition of the New Testament.

Oh, wow, that’s. That’s pretty. That’s pretty early in the game, it feels.

Yeah. So once the King James Version kind of took its place as the preeminent English translation of the Bible, nobody messed with it. There were new editions, there were new reprints and all that kind of stuff. But, like, once we got past Benjamin Blayney’s 1769 Authorized Version, like, nobody wanted to mess with the King James Version. But we did have a bunch of scholars who were like, we’ve been finding all these New Testament manuscripts that go back a thousand years earlier than what Erasmus had available to him when he created his Textus Receptus. We can put together a better New Testament. And so there were a bunch of people who set forth in the 18th and particularly the 19th century to do that, to build a better New Testament. And Westcott and Hort are the two scholars who came up with the first, what we now call critical text, which is kind of the. The new and improved version of the Textus Receptus based on hundreds of new manuscripts. And the first. And in 1881, they took the King James Version and they revised it according to this new text.

And this was. This was kind of ballsy because it really upset a lot of people, and a lot of people told them they had no business doing this. But the Revised Version, the RV, was published—the New Testament in 1881—and then the. The full Old Testament and New Testament together in 1885. And. And they left this out in a bunch of other passages as well. And so since then, you still have some translations of the Bible that will put those texts back in there because—not because there’s a good case to make that they’re original, they’re not. But because of tradition, because “None shall,” “No one shall add a word to it or take away from it.” And they believe that that violates that, even though they’re defending the corrupted version has had stuff added to it.

Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Someone else added to it, which is a violation of that precept. But now it’s in there. So I gotta. Not. I gotta honor it or whatever.

Yeah. And. And a lot of. On social media, I see videos all the time from people who are like, I just discovered that they took out a verse in the Bible. And. And they go through, and they’re like, look, look, in your Bible, everybody make sure that you have verse 21 in Matthew 17 . And, you know, they’re just breathless and shocked, and it’s like it’s been 143 years since this was done.

Also, it’s not a, a particularly earth-shattering verse. The verse that, that has been removed that is so scandalous. Doesn’t change the theology at all. Doesn’t change anybody’s practice of their religion. There’s just like, it mentions fasting and prayer.

Gosh, I hope they mention that in other places in the Bible.

And, and they do because this was taken from another book. This was taken from Mark 9 . And, and it’s altered a little bit. But what people are like, they’re trying to remove fasting. They’re trying to make it so we can’t fast anymore. It’s like. No, it still says this in Mark 9 , where Jesus says, this kind doesn’t come out except by much fast. Fasting. Right. But I want to do. We’re getting close here. But I want to do one more that I think is interesting, if that’s okay with you. Okay.

Yeah. I love it.

John 1 , verse 18. We’ll skip over the John 1:1 controversy. We, we already discussed that a little bit.

You know what we’re going to do? We’re g. Well, oh, we’ve already discussed that.

Yeah. John 1:1 . We’ve already discussed.

Oh, okay.

That’s the.

Oh, the Word. And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. Yeah, we’ve. We’ve done that.

We’ve done that. So John 1:18 . I’ll go ahead and read what the King James Version says. Follow along. I, I honestly don’t remember if it’s different in the, in the NRSVUE. No man hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. Is that more or less what you have in the NRSV?

Yeah, it feels a little, the wording feels a little bit different.

Should I just read it?

Yeah, go ahead.

No one has ever seen God. It is the only son himself, God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

So huge difference.

Because it says this son is himself, God.

Which is, which is. Actually, there are two different readings here and it sounds like the NRSV is just keeping both of them.

Okay. Yeah.

Because you either have, you either have the monogenes huios, which would be the only or the unique son, or there are some. The, the earliest manuscript we have actually says monogenes theos, the only or the unique God, which is.

A unique phrase that doesn’t occur anywhere else in the Bible. Monogenes huios. The. The only or the unique son occurs like a dozen times in John.

This other phrase doesn’t ever occur. But if you want Jesus to be God, then it’s very important that you have.

That you stick with the. The other reading. So here’s the New English Translation. No one has ever seen God. The only one himself. God, who is in closest fellowship with the Father, has made God known. Okay, so we’re getting real interpretive. Things are getting weird.

Here. Yeah. The. So we have the earliest reading which which says the only God. Most manuscripts have only son. There is an argument that, well, this is the earliest one. We have the best support for this. There’s also the the principle of lectio difficilior. The more difficult reading is likely the earlier reading because changes tend to smooth difficulties out rather than add them in.

Right.

And so because it is weird, it’s more difficult, but at the same time, it’s also theologically an incredibly helpful verse. So I would argue that lectio difficilior gets a little muddy when we consider a verse that has to do with the Trinity.

Right. There you go. Wow. That is.

Yeah. That.

It. That one feels like it changes a lot depending on which which one you you go with.

Yeah. And I’m like. I can.

I can see when, you know, when someone is making choices in terms of how they’re going what they’re going to put into their version, their translation, their whatever, there are moments like that where, like, the weight of the world is on your shoulders. If, you know, if you’re if you’re thinking about theological sort of consequences of.

Just simple word choices or simple idea choices. But you’ve got multiple texts, you know, multiple source texts that say kind of different things or very different things or whatever. Like, that’s. Yeah. It’s just not a simple, easy process.

And I think what I’d like people to take away from this is that there are a lot of judgment calls that go on, like, not just one or two, but on texts like this. There are multiple different judgment calls that are taking place under the hood of this translation. And a lot of people want to base a lot of convictions and arguments and things like that on a translation that they may prefer without knowing how much the translators behind that are responsible for for what they’re reading. And we. We even saw with the NET that they might prefer a reading, and they might. They might clarify that there’s debate here, and then they might totally mislead you on the, the research behind that debate. Or as we saw with the NRSV, they might not even let you know that there is debate underlying this and on what this can mean. Right. So I would like for people to, to realize that the, the translations they hold in their hands are, are not, you know, the, they’re not perfect.

They are a, they are the encapsulation of thousands and thousands of judgment calls.

Right.

Some of those stronger than others, but none of them is free from the judgment of, of imperfect, fallible human beings who are frequently motivated by theological concerns and things like that. And also for, for selling their books. It’s going to be difficult to, to move a lot of Bibles if you’re saying stuff that’s just going to tick off the people who buy Bibles.

I don’t know, you might do pretty well. They might buy it just so they can be mad about it. I, I recommend it personally. Get the controversy going.

Yeah, I’m, I’m working on my own translation right now. I’m, I haven’t touched it in a few months just because I haven’t had the time. But I’m almost done with Genesis and I, I might talk to a publisher about releasing like, Genesis, the, the DMV

Version. I’m gonna, I’m gonna start the, the new controversial version, the, the NCV. And it’s just, I’m just going to find all the controversies and I’m just going to go with whatever the most controversial piss people off the most.

And you know what? I think the, the odds of getting that right would probably be higher than chance.

So that’s probably true.

Would be true.

So I know if I do, but, but at the same time, like, if I try to do, if you do that, there are going to be times when it’s like, pretty sure this is wrong. This is definitely right over here. But, or, or you could say it’s 50. 50. It could be one, it could be the other. And you don’t want to, you don’t want to load down your translation with all kinds of, like, alternatives. Like there are some translations that will bracket, put in brackets, like alternative translations, just so you have them all. And, and those tend not to do very well at all.

Well, this is what I was thinking when, you know, as we are looking at all of these different verses and we’re clicking on, you know, I’m clicking on footnotes left and right and trying to figure out, like, what, like, look, the Bible’s already hard enough to read. It’s already very thick. It’s weird language, it’s ancient, it’s, there’s plenty of stumbling blocks just trying to read the damn thing. Adding to that, like, oh, I got to check in with 15 footnotes in this chapter alone. It’s just too much.

Yeah. And that’s the one other thing that I would say about Bible translations is what’s the best Bible translation? Whichever one is going to do what you are reading the Bible in order to do. Because there are some folks who want to get in, they want to get hip deep in the complexities and they want the notes and they want to be able to say, oh, what does this verse over here say? And flip to it and ah, good, there’s a, there’s a detailed footnote that’s telling me there are folks who want that. There are other folks who just want to be able to sit down and read and get lost in the narrative or in the poetry. And there are people who, who translate the Bible that way. Where the, the poetry is, is in poetic typesetting, where they don’t even have chapter and verse numbers, where it’s divided up according to sense unit and it’s all in paragraphs. Or, or you might just have the verses listed on the, in the margins. They don’t interrupt the flow of the text and you don’t have any footnotes. So there, and you know, some Bible translations are intended for missionary purposes.

Some Bible translations are intended to facilitate administrative concerns. Some Bible translations are intended to combat competing religious groups. Like you can translate the Bible in so many different ways to do so many different things. And if your translation does precisely what you want it to do, then that’s the best translation for you. And when it comes to most original, like, there’s no such thing. I get that question a lot. Which is the closest to the Hebrew? It’s like that, that’s, that’s not really a thing. Good luck. You can just go get the Hebrew if you want that. Because the closer you get to the Hebrew in English, the less and less you’re going to understand what it’s saying, because the less and less it is actual English. So. Wow, it’s a moving target. It’s messy.

Yeah, it’s a messy thing. Yeah, it’s a messy thing. I, I, gosh, there were so many things I wanted to get into and I think that we’re going to get into a few of them in our afterparty. So anyone who wants to can follow us over to Patreon. If you’re already a member at the $10 a month or more level. You can, you can hear our after party. We’ll probably I’m going to start us off by talking about theology just as a concept because I want to talk about theology. We had somebody write into us and just say, hey, you know, let’s can we talk a little bit about what, what it means to have a theologian, to have theology and why, you know, why this isn’t a theological podcast. Anyway, we’re going to get into theology and so a bunch of other stuff in a much more like less formal way over on in the Patreon bonus episode. So if you want to, you can go to patreon.com/dataoverdogma and sign up there and then you’ll get early and ad free versions of every episode of the show plus the bonus content if you sign up at the right level.

So so that’s exciting. Otherwise, thank you for listening so much. And you can reach us by writing into contact@dataoverdogmapod. com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

Translation Frustration

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology