What motive would there be to obscure the meaning in this case?
I doubt there was any motive to obscure the meaning of the verse. My point was to show that when one uses a Bible translation that is not in the language that we use today there
must be some sort of translation that goes on in the user's head. Nobody speaks, writes, or thinks in the language of Luke 14:10 today. In this forum, for example, I have not read a single post that is written 17th Century (or earlier) English.
People erroneously think that the original texts were written in some sort of language that was not in common use in that time. For example, the manuscripts of the New Testament time were written in Koine Greek, the widely understood language of the Roman world. The people of the region, including Jesus, spoke Aramaic, "a Semitic language, a Syrian dialect of which was used as a lingua franca in the Near East from the 6th century BC. It gradually replaced Hebrew as the language of the Jews in those areas and was itself supplanted by Arabic in the 7th century AD." The main Bible in use was the Septuagint, "a Greek version of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament), including the Apocrypha, made for Greek-speaking Jews in Egypt in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and adopted by the early Christian Churches".
It is bizarre to me that people think that they can clearly understand 17th Century English, when neither today's culture or language are anything like the way they were more than 400 years ago. "Language is culture." When I was an undergraduate studying human geography, the most appropriate way to divide up the world was by
language, not by political boundaries or physical features.
The only reasons that I can think of that people still use the King James Bible are 1) it makes them feel religious and superior, or 2 (doubtful) that they are lovers of archaic prose.
I am a strong believer in the dynamic equivalence method of translation. "Dynamic equivalence is a method of Bible translation that seeks to reproduce the original text of Scripture using modern language and expression to communicate the message of the Bible. In translating a verse,
dynamic equivalent translation is less concerned with providing an exact English word for each word of the original text as it is with communicating the basic message of that verse.
Considering the original context, culture, figures of speech, and other effects on language, dynamic equivalence seeks for today’s Bible readers to understand the text in the same way (or with the closest similarity in meaning as possible) as those to whom it was first addressed. (emphasis mine)
I want to understand what the original texts meant to the people at the time they were written. We are about 2000 years(!) and much longer from when the "books" of the Bible were written, and I want above all to understand them as though I was one of the original hearers. I believe that God wants His words to be clearly understood regardless of time, place, or culture.
