What is the best bible translation?

Rev. Ian M. Thomas

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LISTEN TO: I will praise you (Ginny Owens)

Good morning and welcome to Oldfield Free Church.

I’m Ian and it’s great to see you here!

Have you come prepared to participate in worship? I hope so. Love the song from Ginny Owens. When the darkness fades away - very personal to her being blind, but also for us, for then we shall truly see when we are face to face with Jesus.

Today we will have a message about our Bible: What is the best bible translation? Of course, this is a complete waste of time if we then don’t read it - so we shall be announcing a new bible plan today too!

Again, let me remind you, you do not need your phones during our service, you really can do without them unless you are using the Logos Bible App!

If you’re new here a huge welcome to you. We have leaflets at the back telling you about us - check out our website and stay for a cuppa after the service.

Let’s start with prayer:

Faithful Father, we begin today by giving you thanks. Your love endures forever, it never fails. Though there are many ways in which we have failed, we have not exceeded the supply of your mercy and grace. We thank you for revealing yourself to us through your word. As we open the Bible today we pray that we would hear your voice. We ask that your Holy Spirit would be at work, opening our ears to hear and our hearts to receive your word. May we be transformed into your likeness. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

10,000 Reasons

Waymaker

This is amazing grace

Prayer/Notices/Offering/Kids Leave

Sermon

1 Peter 2:2 NKJV

2 as newborn babes, desire the pure milk of the word, that you may grow thereby,

Hebrews 5:12–13 ESV

12 For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, 13 for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child.

Within a couple of weeks of starting here last year I spoke about the Word of God and how it should be an indispensable part of our daily lives. Without it we cannot grow as Christians. Do go and listen to that sermon again, called ‘Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly”. Without the Scriptures we shall be swayed by feeling, experience, preachers, sermons, messages, TV, culture if we are not deep rooted in the Scripture. For how do we know if any of the things I and others have mentioned are of God or not? We shall lack discernment. And believe me, discernment is lacking among Christians. Christians today somehow believe all the publicity around the bible not speaking the truth, that it is corrupt, that it has contradictions, and so on and so on. You would think by now that there would be no one who could believe a word that is said within the pages of the book called the Bible. And many are swayed without properly investigating for themselves.

But in all things that it speaks about it has been found to be 100% true and reliable. That what we have is more accurate than the ten historical documents that we take for granted as being true from 1500+ years ago. That the contradictions can all be explained with good use of reason and logic.

The things that are ignored are archaeology, history, prophecy and so on that show that the Scriptures has proven time and again its accuracy. I cannot speak often enough to encourage you to get soaked in God’s Word for it is the number one way that God will speak to us.

The Scriptures does not make Christianity fall or stand but what we understand about our faith cannot be known without it. Christianity, if you really want to know, stands or falls on the accuracy and reliability of the resurrection. If that did not happen then there is no point to Christianity at all. Certainly it is not a moral system to follow for if the resurrection is not real then Christianity is corrupt and lying to us. But it is not and neither are the Scriptures.

Translations

Today, I want to talk to you about translations especially as we are about to update the bible the Church uses as its base from the NIV 1984 version to the ESV 2001 version. One of the top questions among Christians and those who are not, is

“what is the right translation?” or “what is the best translation?”.

There is an argument that has raged, especially in the U.S., about Bible Translations and especially concerning the KJV also known as the Authorised Version. And we will get back to this later on...

We are going to need a bit of history now as to how we got our English translations and a few other interesting titbits.

Well, we need to go back to the Vulgate. This was a Roman Catholic Translation of the Hebrew and Greek Manuscripts by Jerome in the 4th Century. Why is this important? Because most of our translations since then have been influenced by it.

And indeed some false religion known as Jehovah’s Witnesses for it is from this translation that we ended up with Jehovah, which is not God’s name, by the way. God’s name is YHWH. There is no J in Hebrew. And, in fact, Jehovah is made up of the letters of what is called the Tetragrammaton, which is YHWH. and Adonai, which means Lord or Kyrios in Greek. There are no vowels in Hebrew.

The Latin used the vowels of Adonai and Elohim and inserted into YHWH and ended up with Jehovah. There was no such word as Jehovah before that. It is artificial simply because of the language of the time, Latin, and other languages changed the pronunciation of J from Y to what we have today. Gja instead of Ya. This is where Jehovah’s Witnesses have gone completely wrong with even the name of God. We know now that YHWH is pronounced Yahweh Jews and Greeks have always pronounced it.

Anyhow, returning to English Translations, we come to the man known as Wycliffe who was a priest who wanted people to have God’s Word in English rather than in Latin so he translated from the Latin Vulgate to give an English rendering. You see what has happened here? It is a translation of a translation. Despite this it was quite a good version published at first, in the year of his death, but written in Middle English. That was in the 14th Century. Oh, I did say he was a Roman Catholic priest who wrote many a treatise against the Catholic Church, an early reformer and he does not hold back in his attacks.

Then came a man of the reformation known as Tyndale. We even have a bible society called after him. He translated from what? You guessed it - from the Latin Vulgate but ALSO from some Greek and Hebrew. A little bit of a mix. But this version has set the standard for even though Tyndale was martyred for this translation, it was just a few years later that Henry the VIII Authorised the translation of a bible and it used what translation? Tyndale, the man he had put to death. Miles Coverdale did the work and it was known as The Great Bible. But it could only be put into churches for it was huge, like the so-called family bibles. No normal person could afford a copy.

Then a new translation was created in Geneva by the Calvinists using a Greek translation produced by Erasmus in 1590 and this was mass-produced called, would you believe it, the Geneva Bible.

Erasmus is an interesting guy for he translated from six manuscripts the whole bible in Basel Switzerland. The interesting part is that the manuscripts had Revelation missing and he cobbled together Revelation from commentaries of the time but the last six verses were missing and so Erasmus created these six verses translating Jerome’s Latin Vulgate into Greek. And this was used to translate back into English. So, it went from Greek into Latin into Greek into English. And to this day all bibles that use the so called Textus Receptus have Erasmus interesting Greek translation translated into English.

But the problem was that the Anglican Church did not like it so produced another bible Authorised by Elizabeth I, known as the Bishop’s Bible. This used partly the Greek translation of Erasmus and the Authorised Great Bible produced in Henry VIII’s day. The general public had the Geneva Bible but in Church they heard the Bishop’s Bible! And so along came King James I of England with yet another version and was translated from both the Bishop’s Bible and Geneva. Confused yet?! This was the King James Version, also known as the Authorised Version - but note this is the

third Authorised Version by a monarch:

King Henry VIII Great Bible,

Queen Elizabeth I Bishop’s Bible

King James I King James Version.

The King James Version then is not just from the Erasmus Greek Text known as Textus Receptus but also takes parts from the Latin Vulgate. It is still the most popular in use Bible today.

Now we come to the King James Only argument. It is as if the original language of the Bible is English. And that is a problem - there is even a book called: “When God spoke English: The making of the King James Bible”. That’s a problem because that is what is thought. The KJV IS God’s version of the Bible and therefore everything else is to be disregarded even the original languages! But for those who have been trained in the languages of the Bible, namely Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek it is not long before you realise that it is not as perfect as it has been made out to be. One of the arguments for the KJV translation is that it is so accurate in translating the Greek that they are practically word for word. This is not true. The Greek is a precise language but also very wealthy, that some Greek words can be translated into a phrase in English to make the full meaning come out. There are translations that try to achieve this like the Amplified Bible. But this is hardly readable except for study.

One of the arguments for sticking with the King James Version is that why would God produce another version of the English Bible 400 years later. But God did not God-breathe translations. I mean, how many translations have we got already before I get to the King James? I have mentioned

The Vulgate - 382

Wycliffe’s bible in 1380

Tyndale in 1522

The Great Bible - Miles Coverdale 1539

Erasmus’ based Geneva Bible 1560

Bishop’s Bible 1568

King James Bible 1611

Six translations before. In fact, if we were to take the King James Only crowd we should return to the Vulgate for there wasn’t a new version for 998 years, or stick with Wycliffe’s 231 years before.

And you know what - even when Jerome translated the Vulgate there was a riot because the Greeks, who were used to reading the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew, saw that some words in the Book of Jonah had been changed from what they knew, even though Jerome was correct - and it may seem petty to our ears: the Greeks knew about the Gourd (a word from the Old Latin) that grew over Jonah whilst he sat waiting for destruction to come upon Nineveh. But Jerome translated it as Ivy. That was enough, it seems, for them to riot.

So, it is not surprising that when you are used to something it is hard to accept a different rendering from up-to-date translations and they are still fighting about it today quite ferociously. What is forgotten is that the Christians of the time, especially the Puritans, did not like the King James version, they preferred the Geneva Bible produced 51 years before.

Have your taste in translations but know, it is a translation.

One more thing about the King James Only crowd seem to be unaware of is that the version they have is not the 1611 but the 1769 Oxford Edition. There is an earlier Cambridge edition of 1760 too but the Oxford one won out. There are differences in the editions.

There would be few indeed who could read today the 1611 edition for the spellings were very archaic even for that time.

So, onto the more modern versions. There are well over a hundred, and I cannot look at all of these, but I will pick out a key few. Let us start, though, with the first of the newer translations which was in

1885 when the Revised Version came out, 274 years after the King James. Many new manuscripts had been found since the days of the translation of the King James. As I said, Erasmus had access to six manuscripts. By the 1850’s we had over 7000. Archaeology and history and museums and even the Vatican opened their libraries, and then, we also had the Dead Sea Scrolls for the up-to-date versions, discovered from 1946 to 1956, which mainly confirms what we already know. With all these new Greek Translations came out, the best known is the Nestle-Aland (UBS).

With that said the Revised Version relied heavily on the Textus Receptus Greek text of Erasmus, the basis of the King James Version, but did compare with other manuscripts but mainly was a revision of the King James to more modern language.

[The American Standard Version built upon the RV in 1901. The Jews also had a translation based upon the ASV called the JPS of just the Old Testament known as the Hebrew Bible.]

The Revised Standard Version of 1952 was Ecumenical in that it had Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jews translating and was the first to not have Thees and Thous.

And then the New American Standard Version of 1971 was the most literal.

In the same year a paraphrase came out, the Living Bible, by Kenneth Taylor which is not classed as a translation.

Then in 1989 the Academics favourite, the NRSV, a translation by the National Council of Churches, which is a very liberal organisation, was produced and was gender neutral. Last year, 2021, they updated this again (NRSVUE) and produced enormous controversy especially over translation about sexuality which are hard to justify (Esp. 1 Cor 9:9-10).

New ways

Then in 1978 in America, 1984 here the NIV came out. Unlike all the ones mentioned before they relied upon Erasmus Textus Receptus Greek, the NIV did away completely with it. They translated directly from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek using the wealth of manuscripts, many of which were older than the manuscripts that Erasmus used. They also did not keep to a word for word translation like all before but went with something called dynamic equivalence, a thought for thought translation. That is, they translated what they thought that the text meant in its context. It quickly became the number one best seller and what we have used here in this church for many years.

And then came the translation we are moving to, ESV, English Standard Version, that came out in 2001. It is the most literal and evangelical and uses all the manuscripts but especially from the RSV.

There are many versions out there, including an up-to-date Jewish Translation directly from Hebrew called the NJPS.

And of course, the NKJV which is based on the Textus Receptus as the King James with a bit of modernising and is used most in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but a translation I also appreciate.

There are Roman Catholic Translations, all of which are surprisingly liberal, whether that is the Jerusalem Bible, the NAB and the NABRE.

One more version I want to mention is the NET version found at NETbible.org which is a solely online version but gives you all the variants and manuscripts and notes for translation. I recommend it if you really want to get to grips with what a passage says in the original.

There is nothing like learning the original languages the Scriptures were written in. It takes effort but it is worth it. You will be surprised to find that even literal translations do not translate literally all the time, especially from the Hebrew, because to our modern ears we would not understand it. But with the right tools, commentaries and versions of the Bible you should grasp what is being said if taken in context, context, context. The context in its paragraph, the context in its book, the context in the whole of the bible.

God has also give you teachers to help to understand and make sense of what is there in Scripture just like God gave Ezra to the Jews.

There is no perfect bible version for they are all translations and no language perfectly fits into another. You have heard the phrase - lost in translation. Well, it is true of all of our versions including your own favourite. Compare different versions to get a rounded understanding.

Now to what not to read. Do not read The Message, The Street Bible and especially not the Passion Bible, which is probably the worst so-called translation of nearly all-time. These are terrible paraphrases. There is the New Living Bible which is also a paraphrase but I only recommend to those who find the English language extremely hard. It is one man’s translation and not a particularly good one. With that said, the Old King James Version was used to teach English to millions of people and helped standardise the English Language around the world. Over 200 idioms from this translation has come into English and its prose and cadence are second to none in the English language. That being said - it is an old translation with about a thousand words that have changed their meaning in the intervening 400+ years.

I haven’t got around to talk about differences found in the manuscripts but what is worth knowing is that no doctrine of the bible is unknown because of copyist errors, etc and that we know with increasing certainty that the Bible we have is how it was when it was written, especially if we take into account and read a number of translations.

The point to all this is read what you have. God has spoken to us in these days. God’s Word is powerful and He is still speaking.

Reading Plan

There is a new reading plan for those interested which will also be on the Oldfield Website but also it will be in the newsletter and at the back. All the gospel readings up until Christmas will be the readings for Sunday. If anyone wishes to read, please let me know, and I will invite you up. The list will be at the back. The readings are separated into two lists: The Deep Study, to think carefully about these readings each week, and I hope to comment on each passage either here on Sunday or on a YouTube video which will be shared with you all. It will only take a few minutes to read but longer to think about. The Light Study is for anyone wanting to read through all the Scriptures over the course of 4 years. Again, this is easy reading each week.

Each week the first readings are for deep study. Those in brackets for reading and ight study. The Sunday AM reading is the passage we are looking at that Sunday. This reading alone is subject to change depending on how quickly we go through each passage and whether it is I who is preaching. We are not in a rush. The reading of all the Scriptures will take approximately 4 years.

All readings will take about 20 minutes each week. Be prayerful as you read but pay careful attention to the first 4 readings and the Sunday morning one.

The Scriptures are reliable. Read them to grow. Study them to become mature. Hear them to know God’s voice. Do them to walk in faith and the Spirit.

You were the Word

Benediction

Colossians 3:16–17 ESV

16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. 17 And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

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