- Mar 13, 2004
- 18,941
- 1,758
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Non-Denom
- Marital Status
- Married
Thanks for your oppinions but do you have sources? Thanks, otherwise no reply in necessary, as oppinions are not objective enough in debate to pass as evidence@createdtoworship :
You've spoken to two different issues here: 1) the difficulty of translation, and 2) the difficulty of selecting manuscripts.
On 1: As solid_core has pointed out, translating one language into another is not a trivial task. Languages don't map to each other word-for-word. Many individual words do translate directly across languages, but there can be big differences in word order within sentences, how articles are used, whether nouns have endings that indicate their role in the sentence, and so on. For example, a number of the places you've circled to indicate that the English has omitted a word from the Greek are places where English and Greek use articles differently. The Greek is saying "the Isaac", "the Jacob", etc., but English doesn't normally use articles in front of proper names, so the English translators have omitted the articles: "Isaac", "Jacob". If it were a different kind of text -- not merely a list of names -- we'd run into the word order issue. English mostly uses word order to indicate the subjects and objects of sentences, and English tends to use prepositions to indicate indirect objects. (Compare "Jane brought the dog to Bob" with "The dog brought Jane to Bob".) Greek mostly uses noun endings to indicate subjects, objects, and indirect objects, and thus does not need to use word order in the same way English does.
Think about your experiences learning foreign languages in high school, and your interactions with your friends who are non-native English speakers. When I was learning French, I was forever messing up the genders of nouns, because most English words aren't gendered, so genders in French aren't intuitive to me at all. My Ukrainian colleague at work is forever forgetting to put "the" in his sentences, because his native language doesn't use articles as often as English does, so I assume English "the" is weird to him the way French genders are to me.
All this to say: If exact understanding of the Greek and Hebrew texts is important, we need to learn Greek and Hebrew. There are textbooks, and there are college courses. English translations and interlinears, even the best ones, will only ever be an approximation of the original.
2) The difficulty of selecting manuscripts is a different question, and it is a field of study in itself. That's the issue with some of the "missing" verses you mention. Some manuscripts include the sentences/phrases, and other manuscripts omit them. Scholars differ on which manuscripts are the most trustworthy.
Upvote
0