|
"Use
your knowledge of Greek in ways that will glorify God." Using NT Greek in Ministry, David A. Black Why do I bother translating the
Bible from the original languages? Most people seem to think: “If the King James Version was good enough for the Apostle
Paul, it’s good enough for me.” But humor aside, would it have been good enough for Paul? Sir Thomas More said that Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament
was so faulty a piece of work that revision was out of the question, “for it is easier to make a web of new
cloth than it is to sew up every hole in a net.” When the Authorized Version appeared in 1611, Dr. Hugh Broughton, Puritan divine, described by John
Lightfoot as “the great Albionean Divine, renowned in many nations for fare skill in Salem’s [Jerusalem's;
i.e., Hebrew] and Athens’ [Athen's; i.e., Greek] Tongues, and familiar acquaintance with all Rabbinical learning,”
protested it … He published a vicious critical analysis against the completed KJV calling the translators timid and
afraid to publish strong words. He claimed that they placed better renderings of words in the marginal notes rather than in
the read text. He accused the translators of sycophantic crawling to royal authority, of lacking real knowledge of the original
languages, of being interested only in self-promotion. Broughton further lambasted the translators for slavishly following the old
Bishops’ Bible - which was part of their mandate, after all. He hated the new translation and told the king so: “The
cockles of the seashore, and the leaves of the forest, and the grains of the poppy, may as well be numbered as the gross errors
of this Bible.” He said they would answer on the Day of Judgment for their slackness and use of idle words.
He said that the organizer of the translation, Richard Bancroft, would find his eternal abode in hell. After the
KJV was introduced Broughton described the KJV as follows (History of the English Bible, Third Edition, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978, page 107): “The
late Bible... was sent to me to censure: which bred in me a sadness that will grieve me while I breathe, it is so ill done.
Tell His Majesty that I had rather be rent in pieces with wild horses, than any such translation by my consent should be urged
upon poor churches. ... The New edition crosseth me. I require it to be burnt.” And there was a loud chorus of
reprobation when the Revised Version of 1881-5 was published, in which the leading voice was that of another great scholar,
Dean Burgon, who condemned the work as “the most astonishing as well as the most calamitous literary blunder
of the age.” F.F. Bruce summarizes
it in softer terms: “The best of translations are but translations at best. The Bible is probably the
most translatable book in the world, but even so, the process of translation inevitably means the loss or obscuring of some
elements present in the original text. And the criticisms which the public is ready to mete out to new translations of the
Bible are a healthy symptom in so far as they betoken a vigilant determination not to be deprived of any part of the pure
Word of God, and not to have anything foisted upon it as the Word of God which has no right to be so described.” The two phrases underlined above are the reasons why I
make the effort to translate the Bible from its original languages. Like others, my translation is but a translation at
best … but there is comfort and confidence in getting as close to the original as possible using your own
skills.
I do
not have time to write commentaries on every book of the Bible.
I have done a lot of exegetical work, primarily verse-by-verse
in the New Testament, and that work is available on the DOWNLOAD page of this web site in PDF files with numbered pages. But
innumerable pages of personal exegesis and quotations from other commentators do not make a book, properly speaking.
Taking the lead from Benjamin R.
Tucker, each PDF file can be considered “Instead of a Book” – created “by a man too busy to write
one.” They are fragmentary expositions culled from other commentators after I have performed my own
exegesis of the passages.
“A book, properly speaking, is first of all a thing of unity and symmetry, of order and finish; it is a literary structure,
each part of which is subordinated to the whole and created for it. To satisfy such a standard this volume [my PDF files]
does not pretend.”
I have been urged to consolidate this material and to create either a set of commentaries or a book of ready-made sermons.
I have been encouraged to record sermons on tape and make them available in a downloadable library. So far, I have been too
busy to tackle such a prospect and I see no end to my day job now that 40% of my 401K has apparently evaporated.
“Pending the arrival of the
man having the requisite time, means, and ability for the production of the desired “book,” it has been determined
to put forth, as a sort of makeshift, this partial collection of my writings … giving them some semblance of system;
the thought being that, if these writings, scattered in bits here, there, and everywhere, have already influenced so many
minds, they ought in a compact and cumulative form to influence very many more.”
“Apologizing, therefore, for their form only, and full of
faith in their power, I offer these pages to the public INSTEAD OF A BOOK.”
|
