My Beef With English Bible Translations

 I wrote this a while back, but I believe it is pertinent here to what I am trying to say:
 "What a lot of people don't realize about Bible translation, and specifically the translation into English is how much linguistic "noise" there actually is between the source and the target languages. Let's just take the New Testament for a moment. The New Testament was originally written in the colloquial Greek of the first century Eastern Mediterranean. The dialogue and teachings of Jesus that it records however were likely originally spoken in Aramaic (Classical Syriac, not the Biblical Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra), at least most of the time, and as such there are a number of Aramaicisms in the text which were translated directly by four different authors into the more widely spoken Greek.
      In the fifth century, the Greek text was translated into colloquial (or "vulgar") Latin. Think about the amount of linguistic change which occurred just between the first and fifth centuries when Jerome translated the texts. That's about 4-500 years worth of change. To put that into perspective, that's the difference between Anglo-Saxon (think the original Beowulf poem) and Elizabethan English (think Shakespeare and the KJV). The latter is still mutually intelligible with Modern English, the former is not and must be learned as a foreign language. So when Jerome translated it into the Latin of the fifth century, he translated first century Greek with a fifth century Greek understanding of the words and syntax, and both changed over that period of time.
     The Latin text, the Vulgate, was the de facto standard text of the New Testament for the Western Church and Western Scholarship for about a thousand years, and long past the time when Latin was the colloquial language of anyone. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it had morphed into what we now know as the Romance languages and their respective dialects (much as Anglo-Saxon morphed into Elizabethan). Latin as such only remained spoken as, essentially, an artificial language used for education and ecclesiastical liturgy. It was no one's birth language. While it was artificially maintained, the meanings of the Latin words continued to shift and change over that thousand year period. The artificial Latin spoken in Martin Luther's day would have been barely intelligible if at all to Jerome in the fifth century.
     When John Wycliffe, William Tyndale, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other early translators and Reformers first read the New Testament, they read it in this artificially maintained Latin, not their own native tongues, and not in the Original Greek. The Greek texts themselves had been maintained by the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Orthodox Church, but were largely unknown in the Western Roman Catholic Church until after 1451 CE when the Byzantine capital of Constantinople fell to the Turks and a large number of Greek scholars and clergy fled with their manuscripts west to Rome, and other European capitals. Those who came spoke Greek, but a Greek which, like the other languages, had morphed over the fifteen hundred year time span since the original texts were written, and was mutually unintelligible with the Greek of the New Testament. Furthermore, there was no one unified text of the Greek New Testament until Erasmus compiled his Textus Receptus from Eastern Orthodox Lectionaries and other manuscripts. Ironically, he only did this so he could place it side by side with the Latin to prove the superiority of the Latin text over the original Greek!
     This is the linguistic context of Luther's German translation from the original languages, as well as Tyndale's English, and Calvin's French translations. They all may have been excellent scholars, but in many if not most cases their translations relied heavily on the meaning of the Latin text as they understood it in the sixteenth century even if they were trying to translate it from the Greek because they simply did not have the tools at their disposal to achieve enough of a fluency in first century colloquial Greek laced with Aramaicisms in half the text.
     Modern translations of the New Testament often still rely heavily on the work of these men. Virtually all modern translations into English rely on Tyndale's understanding of what the text was saying, even if they don't copy his words directly, they often paraphrase them. Probably a good 75% of the King James Version of the New Testament is plagiarized directly from Tyndale, and most follow suit to a greater or lesser degree because few translators want to deviate from what has already been done, even if modern translation tools tell a different story. Put simply, the New Testament which is read today in English has 2,000 years worth of linguistic, cultural, and theological noise which makes it difficult to understand what the original authors were trying to say to their own target audiences who knew the language, culture, and worldview because they shared it."

     Modern English Bible translators tend to bias their translations to what previous translators have already done. "No need to reinvent the wheel" so to speak. More than this though, they also tend to bias their translations along their own theological systems of thought. For some, like with the ESV, it is overt. For others, like with the NRSV, it is subconscious. No matter who you are as a translator, you will always render a passage as what you think it's saying. Your translation will always depend on your personal understanding of what the author was trying to say. Attempting to translate something word for word doesn't actually help the situation because there are no words between Koine Greek and English that have a direct 1:1 translation. There is always semantic drift between them which is why one word in Greek can often be seen being translated five different ways in English (and one word in English having three or four Greek counterparts) even though the word itself encompasses one concept in 1st century near eastern thought.
     Most Modern translations are dynamic equivalence translations to one degree or another, attempting to render what was meant rather than the actual form in which the words in the text appear. There are a few that attempt to adhere to a modified formal equivalence such as the NKJV, NASB, NAB, and the ESV, but most of the others are either dynamic equivalence such as the NIV or straight up paraphrases such as the Living Bible, the Message, and the NLT. These are the ones I can think of off the top of my head, though I know there have been more published in the last 20 or thirty years. 
     Again, the translation is only as good as the understanding of the translator of what the author was trying to say. If the translator is steeped in a particular theological worldview then their translation will ultimately reflect that worldview. They will see what the text says through the lens of their theology. They will see it through the lens of their own modern worldview most of the time. Are they doing their best? Yes, of course they are, but when you're locked into a certain theological or denominational framework of understanding certain passages, it's going to color everything you produce.
     All of the above is why I don't use English translations on a regular basis anymore. I don't generally care who's doing the translating because the problems are still the same. 
     I've been translating and re-translating the Greek text of the New Testament for going on thirty years. I've translated through every book of the New Testament at least twice. Most of them I've done at least four or five times. Some, like Romans, I've lost count of how many times I've translated through it completely fresh. 
     Why do I do this? 
     Because every time I put it away and start again fresh I see something I didn't see before. Every time I go back and check the lexical definitions of words I know I've checked a hundred times before, I'm looking to understand what exactly the semantic meaning really is here. My autistic brain wants to just plug in one of the lexical definitions that's already there, but it also knows that most of those lexical definitions are using English that's at least a hundred years old to describe idioms from a language and culture that's 2,000 years old. And so, I get hung up on a word or a sentence. 
     What is Paul actually saying? (Paul's letters are where this usually happens the most.) 
     I put it away. Read more about the history, language, culture, and philosophy of the first century Roman Near East. I read modern translations of other works from the same language and period, and then go back again and look at it again with those eyes. 
     I put it away again and focus on Modern Greek to see if it has anything to teach me about how certain word usage and constructions might have survived, and then I again go back and run through it again, looking at it with the eyes which that has given me. 
     And every time I do this, I strip away just a little bit more of the two thousand years of language, culture, and theological changes which have been imposed on the text and I come closer to being in the room with the author as he's writing. I come closer to having that conversation with him on his terms, not my 21st century, English speaking American terms. And I come closer to understanding what he was saying to those readers who already knew what he was talking about, because he was only reminding them of things he's already said to them while he was there. 
     I must come to this author without a Protestant theological background, without a Catholic or Orthodox background, without the background of someone from my century, and I must listen to him as he writes as though I was someone from his own time and place, someone who understands the people, the places, the idioms, the humor, the sarcasm. I go, and I come back as though I'm traveling through time; learning more each time I do until I get it. 
      I must approach it without bias, without judgment, without a preconceived opinion and just let Paul, or Matthew, or John speak as they are, no more and no less, and not put words in their mouths they didn't mean or say. In doing all this over the more than three decades since I started learning Biblical Greek, I peel back the noise generated by twenty centuries of change, both unintended and deliberate, layer by layer. 
     This is why I don't just do one translation and then go back and edit and revise it. I always go back and work from the Greek fresh. Every time. I go back and look up words I already know the meaning of just so I can find a new way to say it in English to see if that is more appropriate for a modern usage. I play with it a bit. Should this be word for word and grammar for grammar, or should it be rendered idiomatically or paraphrased? My ASD brain spends a half hour on a single sentence sometimes obsessively trying to make it make sense with the actual word meanings and grammar rather than giving it the standard theologically biased translation. And sometimes I go back and find that I was wrong, and I look at it again and wonder how I could have rendered it that way before. Sometimes it makes perfect sense at the time but looks like gibberish in English when I go back and look at it again. 
     But I go back. I sit in that room with the author as he's writing, and I do the hard work of trying to understand what he's actually saying without the noise. And sometimes, just sometimes, I get it. He speaks clearly as though it's my own native tongue. And that makes all of the above worth every single time.