Parallel Lines

The last several articles have examined various English translations of the Bible, but how do they compare to one another? Let’s take one Scripture citation and see how it looks in various popular translations available at your local bookstore.

The Test Case – Rom 1:17

Here is a hyper-literal, word-for-word translation from the Greek:

For God’s righteousness in it is revealed from faith to faith, as it has been written, “But the righteous by faith will live.”

Paul is talking about how the gospel reveals God’s righteousness. There are only two main issues in translating this verse (in bold above):

1. What does “from faith to faith” mean?
2. In Paul’s quotation from Hab 2:4, does “by faith” describe how one becomes “righteous” (option A) or how the righteous “will live” (option B)?

King James Family

(KJV) For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written. The just shall live by faith. 

(NASB) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith; as it is written, “But the righteous man shall live by faith.” 

(NRSV) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed through faith for faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous will live by faith.”

(ESV) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”

The KJV here is a very literal translation with no archaic language to confuse the modern reader.

The NASB translates “righteous” instead of “just” in the Habakkuk quotation. “Righteousness/righteous” better reflects the use of the same Greek root word than does the “righteousness/just” combination in the KJV. The NASB also inserts the word “man” (that’s why it is in italics) after “righteous,” probably because readers expect “righteous” to be an adjective and not a noun.

The NRSV translates “through faith for faith” and the ESV “from faith for faith” but these are only slight variations and neither really tries to interpret the phrase.

All versions choose option B for the Habakkuk quotation with some version of the “just/righteous will/shall live by faith”.

Just as train tracks seem endless, so do the number of new English translations of the Bible.

Catholic Translations

(NJB) For in it is revealed the saving justice of God:  a justice based on faith and addressed to faith. As it says in scripture: Anyone who is upright through faith will live.

(NABRE) For in it is revealed the righteousness of God from faith to faith; as it is written, “The one who is righteous by faith will live.”

The NJB is clearly a thought-for-thought translation and not a word-for-word one. It translates the Greek dikaiosynē theou as the “saving justice of God” and expands on that in the cryptic middle term with “a justice based on faith and addressed to faith.” It chooses the word “upright” in the Habakkuk quotation, in which case it would have been better to translate dikaiosynē theou as the “uprightness of God” to preserve the connection. The NJB translates “as it is written” with the more interpretive “as it says in scripture”.

The NABRE and the NJB are similar to the phrasing of the King James tradition with two exceptions. First, they place the verb “revealed” before the “righteousness of God” instead of after. Second, both follow the ambiguous word order of the Greek in the Habakkuk quote instead of choosing between option A or B.

Protestant Translations

(NIV) For in the gospel the righteousness of God is revealed—a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith.”

(CSB) For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

(CEB) God’s righteousness is being revealed in the gospel, from faithfulness for faith, as it is written, The righteous person will live by faith.

(ISV) For in the gospel God’s righteousness is being revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, “The righteous will live by faith.”

The NIV (and CEB and ISV) introduces the word “gospel” so the reader isn’t confused what the pronoun “it” refers to. The NIV also repeats the word “righteousness” in the middle part and is more interpretive with “by faith from first to last.” Paul would certainly agree that salvation is a matter of faith from start to finish but that is not a literal translation.

The CSB is very close in wording to the very literal ESV but the Common English Bible (CEB) and International Standard Version (ISV) go a different route by translating “God’s righteousness” instead of “righteousness of God”; this is a more natural way of describing a possessive in modern English. They both use the present tense (“is being revealed”) rather the perfect tense (“is revealed”) to capture the idea that God’s saving righteousness continues to be revealed whenever the gospel is preached. The CEB, though, is unique with the translation “from faithfulness for faith”, which to my ears is not much of an improvement in clarifying the meaning.

All these versions choose the traditional option B in stating that it is by faith that the righteous will live.

In Summary

Hopefully, this side-by-side comparison of more than a dozen different translations gives you a flavor for how translators go about doing their work. Sometimes they have to make a choice between leaving a confusing word or phrase in place or try to clarify it for the reader. Other times, the verse is ambiguous or has two meanings, only one of which can be captured in English. 

Which of these versions speaks to you?

Dr. Strangeverse

or: How the Southern Baptists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Inclusive Language

Every year for the past several years, the best-selling biblical translation has been the New International Version (NIV), first published in 1978 (with a minor revision in 1984). A product of Evangelical scholars, it is a fresh translation from the original languages and not a revision in the King James tradition like its competitors, the RSV or NASB. How does it compare?

Questionable Translation Choices

According to the Preface of the NIV, its translators strove for both accuracy and readability, but also “the translators were united in their commitment to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word in written form.” This commitment has sometimes led to some questionable translation choices.

For example, Deut 1:1 in the RSV reads, “These are the words that Moses spoke to all Israel beyond the Jordan in the wilderness…” Since we know from the Bible that Moses was not allowed to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, referring to the wilderness as “beyond the Jordan” or “across the Jordan” means the reference point of the writer was Palestine. This doesn’t pose a problem unless one is committed to the tradition that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, which includes Deuteronomy. Translating the phrase as “in the desert east of the Jordan” eliminates the difficulty and the NIV is the only major translation that makes this choice.

How about an example from the NT? 1 Pet 4:6 in the RSV reads, “For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead…” Is this a callback to 1 Pet 3:19 in which the risen Christ preaches to “the spirits in prison” since the time of Noah? Perhaps. But a key Evangelical belief is that salvation comes from a conversion experience and there is no possibility of that after death. The NIV removes any ambiguity in the passage by translating “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.” Most scholars would agree that “the dead” in this verse were alive when the gospel was preached to them and have since died, but that commentary should be placed in a footnote and not embedded into the translation.

I even referenced a dubious NIV translation in Genesis in a previous article. There are so many harmonizing and theologically-motivated translations in the NIV that at least one website is devoted to keeping track of them. The sheer number of examples leads one to suspect the motivations of the translators.

Furor Over Inclusive Language

In 2005 a new version of the NIV was released with inclusive language. Called Today’s New International Version (TNIV), it went over about as well as New Coke. Evangelicals were the target audience for the NIV and the publishers underestimated the attachment that audience had for the NIV and its willingness to accept gender-neutral language. The main complaints were places where the translators had changed 3^rd person singular pronouns to plural (“he” and “his” to “they” and “their”), “brothers” to “brothers and sisters,” “son” to “child.”

After the outcry, the translators recalibrated a bit and released a new version of the NIV in 2011, ending further publication of the 1984 NIV and the TNIV at the same time. Evangelicals were still not pleased. Reaction among the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, was to denounce the updated NIV and request that their LifeWay stores stop selling it, a request that the trustees of LifeWay decided to ignore. But it really didn’t matter because by then the Baptists already had their own translation of the Bible.

The iconic final scene from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) as Major Kong (Slim Pickens) rides a nuclear bomb down to its intended target. Introducing inclusive language to the NIV had a similar impact.

The Baptist Bible

The Southern Baptists had been thinking about their own translation from the late 1990s. Biblica, the organization holding the copyright on the NIV, provided exclusive publishing rights to Zondervan Publishing House in exchange for covering the costs of the initial translation. Therefore, if the Southern Baptists wanted to use NIV text in their Sunday School material, they would have to pay Zondervan for licensing. Add to this economic issue the rumors of gender-inclusive language in future versions of the NIV and the Baptists sought to develop a translation that would be under their control. The result was completed in 2004 and named the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) after Holman Bible Publishers, the publishing arm of LifeWay Christian Resources.

One feature of the HCSB was to sometimes use “Yahweh” for the divine name YHWH where it appears in the Hebrew. So, for example, Ex 15:3 is rendered, “The Lord is a warrior; Yahweh is His name.” Use of gender-neutral language was conservative in the use of pronouns but more gender-neutral than the 1984 NIV in other places (e.g., in Rom 3:4 where the NIV reads “Let God be true, and every man a liar” the HCSB reads “God must be true, even if everyone is a liar”).

A major revision to the HCSB, simply called the Christian Standard Bible (CSB) was released at the beginning of 2017. One of the main changes – other than the name – was to revert back to the use of “the Lord” instead of “Yahweh” in the 645 instances where it had been used previously in the HCSB. Also, the CSB increased the use of gender-neutral language. While masculine pronouns were still retained, in verses like Rom 8:29 where “brothers” appeared in the HCSB, the CSB translates as “brothers and sisters” thus bringing it a step closer to the 2011 NIV that the Southern Baptists found so objectionable:

For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (NIV2011) 

For those He foreknew He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers. (HCSB) 

For those he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, so that he would be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. (CSB)

It’s Not Liberal, It’s Biblical

This grudging acceptance of more gender-inclusive language has not gone unnoticed by the press. When The Atlantic trumpeted in an article that “Southern Baptists Embrace Gender-Inclusive Language in the Bible”, Southern Baptist scholars rose up to explain that the CSB is not really gender-neutral or gender-inclusive. It's like after years of condemning gender inclusivity as liberal and unbiblical, conservative theologians are now defending the changes as a better reflection of what the Bible actually says.

Over the past couple of articles examining the King James tradition and Catholic versions, we’ve seen how biblical translations have always been controversial. From arguments over what sources to use to arguments over whether translators are attacking Christian theology, every movement towards more accurate and inclusive translations was initially met with resistance and a demand to restore traditional language. But when we see a major conservative denomination like the Southern Baptists relax a bit on the use of gender-neutral language, perhaps the culture wars in this area may be drawing to a close.

Clash of the Creationists

When you hear the word “creationist” do you think of a person who believes the earth was created less than 10,000 years ago in six 24-hour days? Properly speaking, that person would be a Young Earth Creationist (YEC). There are actually Old Earth Creationists (OEC) who believe the earth was created millions – if not billions – of years ago. OECs can be further sub-divided based on belief in a global flood or whether humans were directly created by God. A handy chart can be found here.

Until 50 years ago, most Bible-believing Christians were OECs. The YEC movement is a fairly recent phenomenon. The father of the movement was a Seventh-Day Adventist named George McCready Price (1870-1963), but it is only since the 1960s that YEC views became the dominant doctrine among evangelicals. (A brief history of how that came to be can be found here.) Many Christians still hold one of the many variations of OEC, but they are nowhere near as vocal or visible as the YEC adherents.

So it’s not at all surprising that creationists of all stripes hold conflicting views on how to interpret the first two chapters of Genesis. In a previous article I discussed how inconsistencies between the two creation accounts in Gen 1 and Gen 2 revealed the work as coming from different authors. Those among the creationists who assert that Moses was the author of the first five books of the Bible deny this. The YECs assert that the second chapter is simply a more-detailed explanation of what happened on Day 6 of creation week. The OECs hold different opinions on how to interpret Gen 1 and its relation to Gen 2.

The inconsistencies between the two chapters have to do with when plants and animals were created. According to Gen 1, vegetation was created on Day 3 after dry land was made to appear, and the birds of the air and the fishes of the seas were created on Day 5. Yet, when the second creation account begins (Gen 2:5-7), we are told that there were no “plants of the field” (wild plants) or “herb of the field” (cultivated plants) because there had been neither rain (which is all the wild plants need) nor humans to work the earth (what the cultivated plants need).

Why does the second creation account say there are no plants if they were created on Day 3? The YEC explanation is that in Gen 1:11 all grasses and herbs and trees were created except for the “wild plants” and “cultivated grains.” Those types of plants couldn’t exist before the creation of humans because wild plants have thorns (and thorns were a product of God’s curse in Gen 3:18) and cultivated grains require irrigation.

There are problems with this explanation. The plain sense of the text says there were no plants at all, wild or cultivated, in the beginning. And part of the reason for that was YHWH God had not yet sent rain. This itself raises another question because the land was covered with water just three days before and now it is so dry that plants can’t grow? Anyhow, in this barren wasteland, YHWH God plants a garden with fruit trees as an oasis for his newly created human to live. But if, according to Gen 1:11, the earth was covered with green plants and fruit trees since Day 3, why create a garden at all when the human could have simply been moved to a more verdant site?

How do YECs explain the birds? Although Gen 1:20-21 recounts God creating the birds on Day 5, Gen 2:19 says that “YHWH God formed from the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the heaven” as possible companions for Adam. YECs resolve the contradiction by translating “formed” as “had formed”. That is, God had already formed the birds on Day 5 and the land animals earlier on Day 6 but he’s just presenting them now to Adam to be named and considered as possible companions.


"Adam Naming the Animals" by Jan Saenredam (c. 1565-1607)

There’s a bit of special pleading in the assertion that the Hebrew word for “formed” should be interpreted in this instance as “had formed.” Every major translation (KJV, RSV, NRSV, NAB, NEB, JPSV, NJB) translates the word as “formed” because the context doesn’t meet the criteria for translating it as “had formed.” Only the NIV translates “had formed” because the translators wanted the second creation story to harmonize with the first.

This quibbling on the obvious meaning of the words or their translations is a typical ploy by biblical literalists. They insist the Bible is inerrant and must be interpreted literally, but when two passages contradict each other, they will read them in such a way that they don’t contradict, even when it requires that you have to ignore the plain meaning of the text, read something into the text that isn’t there, or re-translate the text to mean what they need it to say.

The OECs, on the other hand, don’t have to resort to such contortions. Although asserting Mosaic authorship of all of Genesis, they can allow that Moses is using an analogy of six creation days to teach the theological basis of the Sabbath day rest and, therefore, would not view Gen 1 as a literal account of how creation happened. Interpreting the six days of creation as topical, instead of chronological, they can more easily harmonize the scriptures with the findings of science.

In the final analysis, an OEC interpretation of the meaning and intention of Gen 1-2 may not be all that different from that of a biblical scholar who attributes the chapters to different authors, but it will be wildly different from the YEC interpretation. And the YEC apologists will attack the OEC proponents with the same vigor they would use against a proponent of atheism such as Richard Dawkins. OECs try to reconcile conflicts between scripture and the sciences of astronomy, physics and geology (if maybe not biology), but when confronted with a conflict between the Bible and science, YECs will always choose the Bible and will twist their understanding of science “facts” to fit their biblical interpretation.

If nothing else, OECs prove that it is possible to believe that the scriptures are inspired, yet do not need to be taken literally. Cardinal Baronius – not Galileo – once said, “The Bible teaches us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.” Allow me to make a slight modification of that: Genesis 1 and 2 teach us why God created, but not how God created. The “how” is answered by science.