Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: inco!fontana@uunet.uu.net (Tod Fontana) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Bible versions Message-ID: Date: 5 Jul 90 07:45:58 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: McDonnell Douglas Electronic Systems, McLean, VA Lines: 322 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Does anyone out there have any facts (not opinions) on the different types of Bibles out there (King James, New American, etc)? I'm curious as to how they originated, how literal their translations are, how politacally motivated they may or may not be, and how "accurate" they are? (I know this demands opinions, but lets try to back it up with historical or literary fact). Thanx. [I collect Bible translations as sort of a hobby, so let me try to summarize the ones I know. "authorized" lineage AV, RV, ASV, RSV, NASB, NKJV use concensus scholarship, "formal equivalency" NAB, NAB w/2nd ed. NT NIV RSV, RSV w/2nd ed. NT, NRSV JB, NJB use concensus scholarship, "dynamic equivalency" TEV/Good News Bible NEB, REB Phillips conservative scholarship, literal NASB conservative scholarship, "format equivalency" NKJV paraphrase LB I. The "Authorized" lineage Just as a matter of history, I'll start by summarizing the translations that started with the Authorized Version ("King James"). (Note that AV and KJV mean the same thing. I normally use AV, because "King James" is really a nickname.) RV - Revised Version - first major attempt to revise the AV, primarily because of the great number of earlier manuscripts. Great Britain. ASV - American Standard Version - American equivalent of RV, done shortly thereafter. Contained some additional advances in scholarship. Tended to be more literal than AV. RSV - Revised Standard Version, yet another American revision, done primarily because of yet more manuscripts, including Dead Sea Scrolls. Backed out of literalness of ASV, though still not a very free translation. Included scholarly views that were controversial at the time (like translating Is 7:14 as young woman instead of virgin). So it was considered flamingly liberal at the time. Most of these features are now present in evangelical translations. NASB - New American Standard Bible - in some sense a conservative reaction to RSV. Tried to return to the supposed accuracy (i.e. literalness) of ASV, backed out of some of the more controversial positions of the RSV. However did still make use of early manuscripts (though not very aggressively). NKJV - New King James - I have looked at the preface and a few passages, but I don't own this. Seems to be in opposition to the textual scholarship of the previous revisions: it adopts the "majority text". See below. Updates AV by removing "thee" and "thou", and other things that are blatantly inappropriate in the 20th Cent., but otherwise sticks very close to AV. Presumably this means it is not as literal as the AV or NASB. Sees to be a proprietary translation, done by Thomas Nelson. II. Current translations I have classified current translations alone two axes: their approach on textual matters, and their translational theory. By textual matters I mean which Hebrew and Greek text they translate. As I'm sure you all know, we have many manuscripts. Textual criticism is the art of taking these manuscripts and figuring out what the original (if any -- there are some scholars who think that the whole concept of "original" may be misleading for the Gospels) was. I am not competent to comment on textual matters in the OT. The concensus view, among both conservative and liberal NT scholars, is that the best text is that represented by a small number of early manuscripts. Early in the 20th Cent. this meant primarily Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, two major manuscripts from the early 4th Cent. Since then we have found papyrii going back as early as the mid 2nd Cent. They have generally supported the accuracy of Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, though some details have changed. The payrii are not complete, but there are enough of them that we have fairly good coverage from documents of about 200 A.D. The documents from before 200 are really fragmentary. All of this is based on a fairly small number of early documents. If you simply count existing Greek manuscripts, they are primarily late, and mostly follow texts that most scholars think have a number of minor additions and other changes. There is now a small group of scholars who believe that this "majority text" is the best. It very similar to the text on which the AV is based. At one point I thought this view was completely crackpot, but it appears that some competent people believe it. It is still, shall we say, unusual. I'm not the best person to give detailed evidence. But you should know whether translations are based on concensus scholarship, i.e. use the latest discoveries in early manuscripts, or stick with the majority text. The other major axis is translational theory. They are two major ones: formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence says that we are trying to produce something whose form is as close to the original as possible. The same Greek word should be translated consistently as the same English word where possible, so people can see the form of the Greek by looking at the English. This has some similarity to a literal translation. However the major formal equivalence translations aren't really what I'd call literal. They do try to deal with idioms. There are lots of Greek words that can have many different effects, particularly prepositions and conjunctions. A Greek expert can normally tell which effect is meant in a given passage. Normally formal equivalence translations will choose different English words to express this. But still the intent is to bring over the form as well as the content of the original. Dynamic equivalence says that the goal of translation is to transfer the same message to the 20th Cent. reader that the original did to the original reader. The English sentence structure will often not be at all similar to the original, since people say things differently in English than in Greek. Attempts will be made to bring out the implications of figures of speech and other implications that were part of the intended meaning but require special efforts to get across in English. This is still intended to be a translation. It is not supposed to add any interpretations by the translator. A. The major formal equivalency translations Let me start with the translations that I think are most widely quoted. These are all based on the formal equivalency method, and all accept modern textual scholarship. The first three are very similar. They are NAB, NAB w/2nd ed. NT (New American Bible) Catholic NIV (New International Version) evangelical Protestant RSV, RSV w/2nd ed. NT, NRSV (Revised Standard Version) liberal Protestant These translations all try to stick as close to the original as possible while still being readable English. None of them use "thee and thou", or other obsolete words. Because they all adopt pretty much the same translational approach, and they are all based on modern textual scholarship, they tend to be very similar. You can find many verses that are identical or nearly identical. They are all fine translations. There are some minor differences. First, I think you can see slight differences in how literal they are. In the NT at least here's the order NAB 2nd edition, RSV - the most literal. The original RSV took very strictly the instructions to stick with AV wording where possible NRSV - does a bit more to bring out the force of prepositions, conjunctions, and various expressions where literal translation would not do so NIV, NAB 1st edition - go just slightly further than NRSV (though in NAB 1st edition there are clear differences in different NT books) Other unique features: NAB - the OT is uneven. It was done over decades. Gen was so far out of date that it had to be retranslated, so it ended up visibly newer, i.e. less literal and using more modern scholarship. Even the NT tended to be a bit uneven. The same expression would be translated differently in Mat. and Luke. The 2nd edition smooths this out, but makes it more literal. The newer parts of the OT still tend to have a less literal feeling. However this is still a competent translation. For detailed study of the NT, if you want something as close to the original words as possible but still want modern textual scholarship, the 2nd edition might be the best translation for you. In the OT they sometimes rearrange the order of passages. There's some theory that the originals got out of order. I find it annoying. NIV - I find this more attractive the more I look at it (though it is not one of my default translations). It tries to go as far towards readability as one can go while still showing you the form of the original. NRSV - still guided by the instruction to stick with AV wording where possible. It's not a bad compromise between literalness and readability. Its most visible feature is an avoidance of masculine gender where the original used masculine to mean everyone. "brothers" will be translated "brothers and sisters", and "he" as "they" (with the whole passage turned plural). This was not true of RSV and RSV 2nd edition. The textual scholarship of all of these is very similar, but the NAB 2nd edition and NRSV are enough newer that there are a few places where there are minor differences from NIV. Most people won't notice it. (NIV is based on the 2nd edition of the UBS Greek. NAB 2nd edition and NRSV are based on the 3rd. NRSV says they had access to the 4th in draft.) B. Jerusalem Bible The Jerusalem Bible is a Catholic translation, based on the French Bible de Jerusalem. The 2nd edition is known as the New Jerusalem Bible. As far as I can tell, no policies have changed in the NJB. It simply used some new manuscripts and has reexamined various decisions. The Jerusalem Bible basically accepts all the same theories as the three above, but comes out with a very different result. Part of it may be the difference between American and British practice. But the Jerusalem Bible tends to be a bit closer to a dynamic equivalence translation. It also tends to be slightly wordier. The OT scholarship tends to be more "aggressive". I.e. they think the Hebrew is corrupt and use an early Greek translation a bit more often than the American translations (though RSV and NRSV go a bit further in this direction than NAB and NIV). They use the original names of God in the OT. "Yahweh" is used where other modern translations say "the LORD". Mostly the difference is simply stylistic. I think they simply did a better job of divorcing themselves from memories of the AV. This translation is well regarded by scholars, particularly in the OT. In my view the NT seems to be a bit uneven, i.e. to vary between formal and dynamic equivalence. It also shuffles parts of the OT where they think the original is out of order. C. Dynamic equivalence translations using concensus scholarship In this section I am going to include TEV (Todays English Version), also known as Good News Bible, from the American Bible Society (a conservative Protestant organization that has managed to produce a liberal translation) NEB, REB (New English Bible, Revised English Bible) - done by a group of "mainline" churches in Great Britain. REB is the 2nd edition of the NEB. (Actually there were a few minor changes made to the NEB after initial publication, but it was never called 2nd edition.) Phillips, translation of the NT only, done by a well-known British scholar. He was working on the OT, but died before finishing it. (The joke went that it would be called Phillips' 66.) Phillips is best thought of as a paraphrase, or maybe a very free translation. It was very popular for a few decades after the war. It was thought that he did the best job of presenting Paul's thought that has ever been done. Sometimes he got carried away and became a bit too much of a paraphrase. This was corrected in a 2nd edition. A lot of people still think this is the best translation to read simply to get a sense of things. My favorite is the TEV. The big challenge in dynamic equivalence translations is to be systematic. You don't want to do a formal equivalence translation and just now and then where you happen to have a brilliant insight paraphrase one sentence. Doing this gives a very uneven feeling. TEV has a remarkably consistent style, and does a very good job of bringing out all of the implications implied in the original but not obvious in a literal translation. See particularly Job, which is full of irony, much of which is not visible in other translations. Bibles have traditionally become a model of style. Luther's translation did much to form modern German. Similarly with the AV for English. The TEV is a model of simple, clear language. I read it before writing any major technical documents. Some passages in the prophets are rendered as prose, with the amount of parallelism reduced. This is not done for the more poetical parts, obviously. They comment that things that come out as good, dignified prose look silly as poetry in English, so they think translatiing this way does more justice to the original. I'd rather have poetry translated with a bit more formal equivalence. The NEB got rave reviews when it first came out. It was the first "official" translation to completely break with the AV tradition, and also to adopt dynamic equivalence. Of course "private" translations such as Phillips and Goodspeed had done so before. But this was an official translation. Like any dynamic equivalence translation, it clarifies a lot of things. However I do not like its style and I do not trust its scholarship. The style tends to be "high-falutin'", in my view -- pseudo-literary. Not King James, but too intentionally dignified. It is interesting to see how two translations with the same theory can be as opposite as TEV and NEB. Also, its dynamic equivalence is not as consistently carried out as TEV's. Its textual criticism is idiosyncratic. There are many words, particularly in the OT, whose meaning isn't known. But they tend to make guesses that are rather different that most other scholars. This translation is not often quoted by scholars (though to be fair, neither is the TEV). The REB updates the scholarship a bit and reexamines some issues, but doesn't change the basic approach very much. D. Conservative translations Now we come to two translations that consciously reject concensus scholarship. I am not the best source of information on these, because I don't own any of them. But I have looked at them, and do know why they were done. The first is NASB. At a time when translations were becoming less literal and new manuscripts were being used, the NASB translators believed it was appropriate to return to the tradition of the ASV. Thus it is rather literal, and it is rather more cautious about using newly discovered manuscripts than the RSV was. It was intended to be more acceptable to evangelical Christians, who at that time generally considered the RSV to be the work of the devil. (Since then people seem to have gotten over their shock, and accepted just about everything the RSV did. The NIV generally goes further than the original RSV, and has been well received in the evangelical community.) I consider it so literal as to be nearly unreadable. If you really need this, you should be using an interlinear edition (original language with a literal translation written under it). Note that although it was cautious about new manuscripts, and rejected some of the more controversial decisions of the RSV, it didn't really have a clear alternative theory to suggest (as the NJKV seems to). The NKJV is a more recent translation that seems to have similar goals. However this time the ideal is the AV, rather than the ASV. The AV is probably a better starting point, because the AV really didn't strike a bad balance between literalness and readability. It tends to be more literal than modern translations, but part of that is that they simply didn't understand some idioms that we do now. However to be fair the NASB was intended as a hardcore study Bible, for people who really wanted to know exactly what the original said. For that purpose, literalness is an asset. I think NKJV is intended for more general use. The OT uses the Dead Sea Scrolls. However the NT is produced using the "majority text" theory, which I discussed above. (I still think this is a crackpot idea.) The NKJV has gotten rid of blatantly out of date language, including "thee" and verbs ending in "est". But they've tried to stick with the AV where possible. Finally, I should really mention the Living Bible. This is frankly a paraphrase. I believe it was done from the RSV. It has not gotten good reviews by scholars. I think you're better off with TEV. But I'm not the one to give a detailed review. --clh]