Dear Briefing: Bible translations

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In your Bible Brief notes, you recommend some unusual Bible translations. Why is this?

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In an age of so many choices, what recommends one translation over another? And how do I work out whether the additional material offered by publishers (study notes, cross-references, maps, concordances, CD-ROMs, and so on) is a help or a hindrance to my understanding of God's word?

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There are at least four things worth saying.

1. All translations involve some sort of compromise

The first compromise comes when you don't yourself know the languages in which the books of the Bible were written. It is not for vain reasons that people learn Greek and Hebrew at theological college. If you know these languages, you can come much closer to the Bible itself.

However, many of the translations we have today are excellent, and it is wonderful that the Bible is available to anyone with a basic level of literacy. It was trapped in the hands of scholars and church figures for centuries before Tyndale and his friends came along! Our modern translations take different approaches to turning the Greek or Hebrew texts into English, and that's where the compromises are made.

For instance, a translator must decide whether to preserve the structure of the original language (the way it puts sentences and sections together), or whether to make the language more natural to read in English. Sometimes, this involves making decisions about the meaning of a passage—decisions which are invisible to the reader.

So, unless biblical Greek and Hebrew become the common languages of the day again, we will have to make some compromises in our Bible choice.

2. Your choice of translation depends on what you are using it for

If you are someone with an average understanding of English, you need an easy-to-read translation such as Today's English Version (the Good News Bible). If you require a translation that is a very close approximation of the original manuscripts, but achieves this through the use of some awkward or old-fashioned English expressions, use the Revised Version or the New American Standard Version.

Over the last 25 years, the most popular choice for personal reading and reading in church has been the New International Version (NIV). It does a good job of being reliable in its rendering of the original manuscripts, while at the same time being written in readable, modern English. It also expresses an evangelical bias as opposed to the slightly liberal bias of the older Revised Standard Version.

However, in an attempt to be clear and modern, the NIV translators have done too much work for the reader. Therefore, careful study of the Scriptures is difficult. The NIV errs too far on the side of ease of reading. For detailed personal study, small group study and expositional preaching, we need something better. Many preachers, myself among them, have been saying this for years. Fortunately, there is a new translation just around the corner which looks like it may deliver what we have been waiting for—the English Standard Version (ESV).

3. Do not assume that the more features a Bible has, the better off you will be

The demands of the publishing industry have meant that in the last decade Bible publishing has dramatically changed. We used to have a small range of Bibles to choose from, the main criterion being where we were going to use them: large ones for the lectern, medium-sized ones for the pew, and small ones for the briefcase or handbag. Now, there has been an attempt to produce Bibles for every specific market segment. This has generally meant adding things alongside the text of Scripture. For example, our Bibles almost always come now with headings and subheadings summarizing the content of the Bible passage below. These are often useful, but not always. Sometimes, they distract us from actually reading the passage and deciding for ourselves what it is about. For example, it is hard to ignore the heading ‘The Prodigal Son’, and read Luke 15:11-32 with the elder son in mind, when he is perhaps more important to the story.

Cross-references, too, can be enormously helpful. They encourage us to treat the Bible as a whole and understand one book in its relation to the others. However, unless they are comprehensive, they can make theological suggestions that may or may not be supported by the text itself.

Finally, notes at the bottom of the page (such as in the NIV_Study Bible) are basically unhelpful. Certainly, they may contain interesting information, but their very presence on the page means that the reader ends up searching the notes rather than working at understanding the Bible passage first. What's more, they are often misleading; for instance, the constant suggestion in the NIV that “the meaning of the Hebrew for this phrase is uncertain” is extremely unhelpful. Most often, it means that the translators can't agree on what a word means, not that the text makes no sense. It's a human problem, not a problem in the text. The other problem with these notes is that they can be too right. They become as authoritative as the text of Scripture itself, thus opening the reader up to exploitation at the hands of the note-writer's theological bias. We saw this problem emerge when in 1917 the Scofield Reference Bible placed the date ‘4004 BC’ alongside the text of Genesis 1.

4. Red-letter Bibles are a dead loss

They are bad for your theology of revelation, and bad for your eyes. Don't buy them.