Subject: How inspired is the NAS Bible today? |
Bible Note: Translation is not the same as commentary. Translation is a conveyance of one piece of text from one language to another, without any elaboration or change upon the ideas being conveyed. For example, if I spoke German, I could translate Hitler's speeches without making the slightest value judgment on what he had to say. My commentary of such speeches, however, would be a very different thing. Commentary is not just "here is what this says in English," but "here is what this says in English, and now here is what the author means by saying this." The thing that stops the "telephone game" is that we have 25,000 fragments of early manuscripts dating from the first few centuries, along with citations from the early church fathers which verify that the Bible we have now is not different from the one we had then. When people do translation, they do not begin with one English translation and bring about another. They go back to the reliable early manuscripts. Bible translation in its technique is nothing like the "telephone game," where once something is verbally said it is not repeated nor written down. --Joe! |