hatsoff

The NIV... yikes. I definitely agree with you that it is an "inept" translation, though if by "textually deficient" you mean based on the wrong variants then I disagree--it's just that they do such a bad job of translating that it doesn't really matter what H/A/G texts are behind it.

The KJV is actually one of the most accurate translations, in my opinion, with two great exceptions: First, it includes many recognized interpolations without noting them as such--namely the Johannine Comma, Pericope Adulterae and the Longer Ending. In this respect, the NET Bible might be better for the uninitiated--except that it is not quite as well-translated. Second, the language is simply too archaic. Often one must read certain passages two or three times over to understand them, by which time you may have lost the flow of the narrative or treatise--leading you to re-read entire chapters. This would not be such an issue if it were necessary, but it is not--especially given that the NKJV retains nearly all of the verbatim substance, minus outdated words (namely thees and thous).

In my opinion, the NET Bible is probably best for those unfamiliar with the most important textual variants. I use the NKJV due to its accuracy in translation; since I recognize most major variants, I don't mind their presence in the text.

I would not wish the NIV on anyone.

Apikorus

Yes, and the difference between the literati and the illiterati is that the former have a basis on which to form an opinion regarding the fidelity of the KJV translation.

The KJV cannot possibly convey the same sense as the Hebrew. All the punning which is present in the Hebrew is absent in the English. The aspectual element of biblical Hebrew grammar is only approximately rendered in the English. Hebrew nouns, verbs, and and adjectives convey gender information, which is absent in English. So all translations are inherently flawed. At best they approximate their sources.

Nazaroo

That clarifies that.

A reasonable question, but some erroneous assumptions. I have said repeatedly I am not a KJVonly whatever. Although my Hebrew is rusty, I depend upon Kittle or Kohlenberger more than any translation. As to the NT, I have no need of a translation at all. Koine is fine.

So for me, although the KJV is a better than average translation (and I prefer it over most modern ones), it still sucks in relation to the original languages.

The reason I like the KJV is not the same as the reason KJVOnlyists like it. I am under no illusions as to some of its many faults, (we could start with fauna and flora, for about a thousand badly rendered hapax legomena).

And the KJV translators understanding of NT Greek syntax is appalling. I can hardly stand it.

I like the KJV because its a 'naive' translation, done by sincere believers with a very transparent and simple approach to the task, not like modern translators who go out of their way to be clever and forward hidden theological agendas (just look at Isaiah/Almah etc.). The KJV can be trusted for its simplicity and its errors are innocent and mostly harmless. Who can say that about a modern translation?

I like the KJV for the same reason I like the LXX. it was done by people who lived in their text, not academics who have no real care or understanding of it.

As for the canon of the 'bible', that is an entirely different issue. Even though I am a Jew, I would throw Esther in the garbage, as would many an ancient Rabbi. Its just not a religious book. So likewise would go Ecclesiastes, obviously authored by a cranky old atheist/cynic.

For the NT, I'd keep Luke and John, and a few letters. Who needs the rest?

To me it is obvious that the NT is 'sufficient unto salvation' as liberal protestants hold. It isn't 'inerrant', and so Catholics and myself agree on that. On the other hand, the pope has no authority for me, and on this I and my fellow Jews are at one.

I guess I'm special.

However, since Matthew reproduces 90% of the contents of Luke, we can say that where they agree Matthew is 'inspired' well enough. Its only when Matthew strikes out on his own that it is obvious the well-meaning but errant Judaizing elements in the church have been at work.

Matthew has attempted to blend in the letter of James to the Lukan Sermon on the Plain. The result as far as I'm concerned is a disaster.

Matthew sacrifices the entire Social Gospel in favour of a cheaply bought 'unity' between Paulinists and Jewish Christians. And the price is simply too high. Even as a Jew I have to side with Luke and Paul on this one.

Matthew is bum-wad.

edit: I'm just going to try a little experiment here...
εν αρχη ην ο λογος και ο λογος ην προς τον θεον.

שדגע/פםןקרחגלך

Okay that's good. I can enter both Greek and Hebrew. Awesome

I was worried because this board isn't supporting any scholarly fonts. At least we have unicode.

hatsoff

Just to clarify, I didn't assume you were KJVO based on your defense of the PA. Rather, I think I confused you with someone from TOL. So, it was my memory playing tricks on me--though probably due to your PA enthusiasm--not a blind assumption.

Wow...four acronyms in two sentences. I must be getting lazy.

But that's one of my favorite books! It speaks to cranky old cynics like me, you see.

I think Matthew is an important Gospel. It just needs to be treated as what it is: one man's amalgamation of his own ideas with ancient orthodox traditions. I think that's the problem with all New Testament writings. Christians for the most part misuse them, but that doesn't negate their historical value.

Nazaroo

Isn't this funny. We both like the KJV but are strongly opposed in our opinions.

I think the NIV and all modern translations, based as they are on a shitty 4th century ecclesiastical text (Codex Vaticanus) and foisted on the public by the Jesuits are simply pure crap.

On the other hand, I like the KJV because it reflects the traditional Christian text (including the LXX for the O.T.) especially the Byzantine text. As a translation I think it is awful, especially the Greek NT.

Isn't that funny, that Hatsoff and I should arrive at the same bible through opposite conclusions.

And for Praxeus I have this to say:

I am in total agreement with you. You don't need Hebrew and Greek to read the bible. Its pretty much available to anyone, in spite of imperfect translations and erroneous textual critical theories.

I spent several decades studying the problem, finally convincing myself that the most important truths of the scriptures are indeed well transmitted.

You don't need perfection in a bible. You don't even need a complete bible. All you need is a generous helping of honest truth to find salvation, and the Lord makes that available to most men and women.

So hang onto your KJV, and don't let anyone cheat you out of truths that even a child can receive and understand.



Deu 6:4 `Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah;
Deu 6:5 and thou hast loved Jehovah thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might,
Deu 6:6 and these words which I am commanding thee to-day have been on thine heart,
Deu 6:7 and thou hast repeated them to thy sons, and spoken of them in thy sitting in thine house, and in thy walking in the way, and in thy lying down, and in thy rising up,
Deu 6:8 and hast bound them for a sign upon thy hand, and they have been for frontlets between thine eyes,
Deu 6:9 and thou hast written them on door-posts of thy house, and on thy gates.

Apikorus

Similarly you don't need to read Greek to read Homer nor Aramaic to read the Talmud -- the texts are all available in translation.

On the other hand, to arrogate expertise regarding the fidelity of a translation requires a good familiarity with the text in its original language. This is not to say that one can't pass judgment on a translation if one isn't fluent in the original language. One can still be sensitive to how the translation reads in English (say), how well it flows, etc. But this is quite independent from the issue of the fidelity of the translation itself.

In addition, many elements simply cannot be translated from one language to another. As I mentioned before, the aspectual nature of Biblical Hebrew, the frequent use of alliteration and puns in the biblical text, its meter, the gender content of the grammar, and more are impossible to faithfully convey. So reading the KJV is like seeing a false color photo, in a sense. It might be very close to the original in many aspects, but it is hardly identical.

The KJV translators were anything but naive. Their "sincere belief" often manifested itself in deliberately mistranslating the Hebrew in order to repair corruptions or harmonize inconsistencies in the Hebrew text. Here's an example which I've described in an earlier thread:

...Let's move on to another example of a textual corruption in the MT, and concomitant harmonizing mistranslation in the KJV. This comes from 1 Sam 1:24, in the story of Chanah, the mother of Samuel. The KJV reads

And when she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bullocks, and one ephah of flour...

This is a good translation of the Hebrew. "with three bullocks" is a direct translation of the Hebrew b'forim shloshah. In the next verse, we read

And they slew a bullock, and brought the child to Eli.

Here we have yet another example of a harmonizing and deliberate mistranslation in the KJV. The Hebrew of 1:25 says vayishchatu et-hapor = "and when they had slain the bull" (singular, definite article). So the Hebrew contains a disagreement between the forim shloshah = "three bulls" in 1:24 and the singular hapor of 1:25. Of course, KJV readers would never know this, because the KJV deliberately mistranslates the Hebrew here, by neglecting to translate ha = "the".

Once again, the KJV translators were forced into this sleight of hand due to corruption of the underlying Hebrew text. The Septuagint, the Syriac, and, most importantly, the Hebrew text 4QSam^a from Qumran instead read "three year old bull" in 1:24 rather than "three bulls". Emanuel Tov proffers that the common text originally read bprmsls, before the advent of word division and the matres lectionis. Eventually the text was parsed differently, with the MT (and the Targum and Vulgate) being witness to a division bprym slsh (the y and h being matres), and the DSS, Syriac, and LXX witness to a division bpr msls. This seems quite sensible.

This is admittedly a minor issue from the perspective of the the story of Chanah as a whole, but it does expose the harmonizing nature of the KJV translation.

To anyone knowledgeable of the Hebrew and familiar with the KJV, this sort of harmonization is common. Another example is Gen 4:8, where the Hebrew reads

vayomer qayin el-hevel achiv

which means "And Cain said to his brother Abel." End of verse. Whatever Cain said is not quoted. The very next thing we read is, "And YHWH said to Cain, where is Abel your brother?" (Gen 4:9). So it seems that either the second half of Gen 4:8 has dropped out of the text, or the author slipped and wrote vayomer (he said) when he should have written vayidaber (he spoke). Incidentally, the LXX provides the missing dialog ("let us go to the field"), although this itself is likely a corrective insertion.

What does the KJV say in Gen 4:8? "And Cain talked with his brother Abel." But talked/spoke is daber and not amar, which means "said".

Yet another second deliberate mistranslation comes with rendering the remainder of 1 Sam 13:1 and the beginning of 13:2. The KJV of 1 Sam 13:1-2 reads smoothly:

(1) Saul reigned one year; and when he had reigned two years over Israel, (2) Saul chose him three thousand [men] of Israel...

The KJV deliberately mistranslates the Hebrew of 1 Sam 13:1, since the plain sense translation is absurd. However, in doing this, it becomes necessary to meddle with the second verse, so as to grammatically attach it to the first.

The Hebrew of 1 Sam 13:1 reads,

ben-shanah shaul b'malkho ushtei shanim malakh al-yisrael

A literal translation of this verse would be,

A yearling was Saul in his reigning and two years he reigned over Israel.

The construction ben-X shanah has been used to describe chronological age in Hebrew from the Bible through modern times.

There are actually two mistranslations by the KJV here, both deliberate. First, the KJV translates ben-shanah shaul b'malkho = "Saul was a year old when he began to reign" as "Saul reigned one year." The construction b'malkho, which everywhere else (38 other instances) is rendered as "when he began to reign" is here translated instead as "he reigned." But whenever the HB wishes to say "he reigned" it does so differently, either with malakh or vayimlokh. So the KJV translators cleverly and deliberately mistranslated b'malkho to avoid the absurdity of Saul being one year old upon taking the throne.

The second deliberate mistranslation comes with rendering the remainder of 13:1 and the beginning of 13:2,

(1) ushtei shanim malakh al-yisrael (2) vayivchar-lo shaul shloshet elofim miyisrael...

as

(1) and when he reigned two years over Israel, (2) Saul chose him three thousand [men] of Israel...

It is clear that the Hebrew ushtei shanim malakh al-yisrael is a separate clause, meaning "and two years he reigned over Israel." The KJV inserts the word "when" which is uncalled for.

Verse 2 should begin "And Saul chose for himself three thousand from Israel...". The "and" at the beginning comes from the Hebrew letter vav in the opening word of vs. 2, vayivchar = "(and) he chose". Grammatically, this construction is known as preterite plus vav-consecutive, and it is very common in biblical Hebrew. The meaning is not seriously affected by failing to translate the vav -- vayivchar could sensibly be translated simply as "he chose," although the vav is of course there. So perhaps it should not be too surprising to find that the KJV fails to translate this vav. Except, that is, for one inescapable and damning observation: in virtually every case in which a verse in the Hebrew begins with a vav (whether or not it is a so-called vav-consecutive), the KJV translators directly translated the vav, either as a conjunction, adjunction, disjunction -- whatever. If you look at the KJV of 1 Sam 13 and compare to the Hebrew, you'll see this immediately. Every single verse in the chapter except for verse 1 begins with the letter vav -- 22 out of 23 verses -- and each and every one of those vavs is translated ("and," "but," "now," etc.). A cursory inspection of the rest of 1 Samuel -- which must have at least 650 verses, over 80% of which (conservative estimate) begin with the letter vav -- reveals that 1 Sam 13:2 is the only instance in which the KJV translators failed to translate the vav. This is quite peculiar, and I am aware of only one other example in the entire Hebrew Bible (there are grammatical differences -- see here).

We are left with the following hypothesis. The fact that the opening vav in 1 Sam 13:2 was left untranslated -- something virtually unheard of in the KJV -- provides strong evidence that the KJV translators recognized a problem with the underlying Hebrew in 1 Sam 13:1. It is no accident that this verse is corrupt in all surviving witnesses. One plausible reconstruction of this verse would be

ben-X shanah Shaul b'malkho v'Y ushtei shanim malakh al-yisrael

which is to say

Saul was X years old when he began to reign, and he reigned Y+2 years over Israel.

In the NASB and NLT, for example, X=30 and Y=40. In the RSV, X and Y are left blank, as ellipses.

As an added bonus for KJV lovers, here is a KJV qere list page, which identifies all the places where the KJV fails to translate the written text of the Hebrew Bible but instead translates the qere, or spoken form, which is written in the masorah. Which words are God's words -- the ketiv or the qere? Or both??

Nazaroo

I didn't mean naive as grammarians. They were experts in Hebrew, as far as it was understood by Jew and Goy alike in 1600.

I mean naive and transparent as in they were committed to translating the text as accurately as possible where it could be understood, even if it went against a popular belief or Christian tradition. In this they often abandoned the Latin and even the LXX in favour of the Hebrew.

The examples you've shown don't demonstrate any hidden agenda or translational bias at all, other than a desire to restore any breaches they found in their copies. They were quite conservative even here, in emending a difficult text.

But with your expertise, won't you have a go at the 1,000 fauna and flora that even most Hebrew experts don't know how to translate? Its a little disengenuous to pretend that because you are an expert in Hebrew that now the text is problem-free!

Aren't you in much the same boat as poor Praxeus, who must rely upon an expert translation? (and you must admit there are some very good ones out there for the Tanakh.) What do you do, when you want to know what a 'behemoth' is, or what the unicorn really was? It can't all be smooth sailing, even with access to Jerusalem University's extensive library of books and army of experts.

Just for fun, give us a list of the animals in Genesis or Job.

Toto

The Nazaroo-spin dialogue has been split off here and locked.

Please stick to the subject of this thread.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation.

Toto

Apikorus

Nor have I ever issued such a claim. Indeed, I claim just the opposite -- that the text is often corrupt, arcane, and difficult to parse or understand. It deals with events and social structures far removed from our present day context. So my second claim is that knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and the sociohistorical context allows for a more nuanced understanding of the text, even while acknowledging that the aforementioned difficulties prevent us from achieving perfect clarity.

Here again you are misunderstanding me. I have never claimed that the KJV OT is a theologically tendentious translation. Only that it smoothes over difficulties in the Hebrew. I often find the KJV to be beautiful.

spin

Let me try again to prod at the edges of Nazaroo's theory to try to stimulate some ooze of enlightenment.


First you say that Matt has left out various things from Luke, then you say "The fact that Luke 'leaves out' Mk 6:45-8:26 is strong evidence .. that.. [t]his section was added to Greek Mark much later." It's alright according to for Matthew to leave stuff out, but again according to you Luke couldn't leave stuff out.

Then you attribute stuff to Matthew changing Luke when an easier explanation is that Matt simply used his Marcan source in some of the various cases you have cited. Obviously the writers have their own interests and you may even be right in specifying some of them, however your conclusions from the data seem to be more contrived than the simpler notion of each adapting their source materials differently and there be no sign that the writer(s) of Matt knew Luke. (This of course doesn't mean that there was no later cross-fertilization from one gospel to another at a scribal/editorial level.) Matt puts its own slant on the source material while Luke puts its different slant on it. How would the data present itself differently after such a process from the process you advocate?


spin