Obtaining the Words of a Verse for a Translation

[Tomyris]

As someone who loves the Greek New Testament and reads in it daily, there are several threads currently in place that are dismaying to me, as they seem to stem from a misunderstanding of the textual situation. I'm going to address the New Testament here, as the OT is really beyond anything I could shed light on in any helpful manner.

What we have are literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament itself, copied over from previous versions that were copied over from previous versions, etc. There are some small variations in some of the branches of the trees: one branch may have 'in him', another may leave it out. None of these has any doctrinal significance whatsoever. In addition, we have ancient manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Aramaic, as well as other languages such as Armenian. Many of these manuscripts, however, do not cover the entire NT. We also have an enormous number of quotations from the NT that appear in the patristic literature: some early Christian writers quoted extensively, and some paraphrased, and some translated anew into their own language. There are also liturgies, inscriptions and a simply amazing number of attestations as to the consistency of what we have as the New Testament.

I have before me a Greek New Testament that documents the textual variations that have been found to date. Let's look at one verse: John 6:47.
The NASB has 'Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.' My Greek NT has (my rough translation) amen amen I say to you (pl) the one believing has eternal life. There is a footnote on 'believing' that exhibits a wide range of manuscript attestation between including 'in me' and even 'in God' in the Syriac.

The translator is faced with a concern as to how to render the verse in the receiving language, as there is no way to determine which branch of manuscripts and documents to follow. In this case it is reasonable to go either way: believing implies believing in something, and here the context implies believing in Christ compellingly. Thus, whether 'in me' is in the passage or not in translation really does not matter.

The New World 'Translation' has been discussed. I put 'Translation' in quotes because it is not a translation - I understand that the JWs took an existing translation and modified it, as Russell had no Greek, and it could not be considered a translation.

It is a mistake to consider every textual variation as significant or implying that someone hundreds of years ago was a clandestine JW because one or two words have dropped out of a manuscript family. God has safeguarded the text and the meaning of Scripture, but we do not know if 'in him' was subtracted from or added to the text. We know what texts have what, and that is as far as we can go, and we do not profit when we attempt to read far more into textual variations than is appropriate.

If you are interested in manuscript variations I suggest you obtain a United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, edited by Aland and Black, which has a marvelous amount of information in the Introduction and throughout the text on this subject. Paul warned us against foolish disputations about words, and I would like to see the one going on now stopped.

Thank you very much.

 

[yeshuasavedme]

As someone who loves the Greek New Testament and reads in it daily, there are several threads currently in place that are dismaying to me, as they seem to stem from a misunderstanding of the textual situation. I'm going to address the New Testament here, as the OT is really beyond anything I could shed light on in any helpful manner.

What we have are literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament itself, copied over from previous versions that were copied over from previous versions, etc. There are some small variations in some of the branches of the trees: one branch may have 'in him', another may leave it out. None of these has any doctrinal significance whatsoever. In addition, we have ancient manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Aramaic, as well as other languages such as Armenian. Many of these manuscripts, however, do not cover the entire NT. We also have an enormous number of quotations from the NT that appear in the patristic literature: some early Christian writers quoted extensively, and some paraphrased, and some translated anew into their own language. There are also liturgies, inscriptions and a simply amazing number of attestations as to the consistency of what we have as the New Testament.

I have before me a Greek New Testament that documents the textual variations that have been found to date. Let's look at one verse: John 6:47.
The NASB has 'Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.' My Greek NT has (my rough translation) amen amen I say to you (pl) the one believing has eternal life. There is a footnote on 'believing' that exhibits a wide range of manuscript attestation between including 'in me' and even 'in God' in the Syriac.

The translator is faced with a concern as to how to render the verse in the receiving language, as there is no way to determine which branch of manuscripts and documents to follow. In this case it is reasonable to go either way: believing implies believing in something, and here the context implies believing in Christ compellingly. Thus, whether 'in me' is in the passage or not in translation really does not matter.

The New World 'Translation' has been discussed. I put 'Translation' in quotes because it is not a translation - I understand that the JWs took an existing translation and modified it, as Russell had no Greek, and it could not be considered a translation.

It is a mistake to consider every textual variation as significant or implying that someone hundreds of years ago was a clandestine JW because one or two words have dropped out of a manuscript family. God has safeguarded the text and the meaning of Scripture, but we do not know if 'in him' was subtracted from or added to the text. We know what texts have what, and that is as far as we can go, and we do not profit when we attempt to read far more into textual variations than is appropriate.

If you are interested in manuscript variations I suggest you obtain a United Bible Societies' Greek New Testament, edited by Aland and Black, which has a marvelous amount of information in the Introduction and throughout the text on this subject. Paul warned us against foolish disputations about words, and I would like to see the one going on now stopped.

Thank you very much.

Here -Here! -Agree!
While JW purposely conceals and deceives, many translators merely are ignorant of context or cultural association or, sometimes, out and out biased, but anyone who hangs their salvation on the letter of the word has missed Salvation, Himself, in "me own" opinion.

 

[Tomyris]

Here -Here! -Agree!
While JW purposely conceals and deceives, many translators merely are ignorant of context or cultural association or, sometimes, out and out biased, but anyone who hangs their salvation on the letter of the word has missed Salvation, Himself, in "me own" opinion.

Allow me to make a distinction between translation and interpretation - the one deals with changing the words into another language, the other the meaning. And words in one language do not map exactly to another language. And NT Greek is notorious for leaving out words - Gregory Nazienzen is tough for this reason, for one - words he expects the reader to fill in. We do this in English as well.

Words in one language have semantic ranges not available in another language, and words change in meaning over time. A word I ran into yesterday means a woman's shawl in classic Greek, but 800 years later it was the term used for a military cloak. I would not translate that 'the soldier sewed his dainty little shawl'! If I say 'that boy is cute' I mean something different from 'that dog with the bow tie is cute' or 'that dress is so cute' when I am using the word cute. In translating these sentences to another language I might be forced to used three entirely different words for the three instances of the word 'cute' - none of which exactly captures, but only approximately conveys, what is meant.

In English we have belief and believe that are cognates; in Koine Greek we have believe-obey-be faithful-have faith-trust as words that are linked by the same root, so that it can be very hard to translate well without losing some of the richness of the original.

I stay away from the now misleading KJV, with its 'prevent' that now means 'go before' and hundreds of other obsolete uses and translation choices that have been superseded by a better understanding of Greek and many more manuscripts than were then available. I use the Greek, far more rich and accurate. But that is just me.

 

[Nanopants]

Unfortunately, though, translation can be impossible without interpretation, as is especially the case with paraphrased translations.

I've also seen fairly significant differences between critical texts and some of the older, more tradtional sources. I'm not going to take a position on any of these though as I think they can all be useful, but it would be appreciated if critics of the texts could simply leave it at something like "these are the assumptions we made, this is the strategy we used, and here is the result, nothing more."

 

[LittleLambofJesus]

As someone who loves the Greek New Testament and reads in it daily, there are several threads currently in place that are dismaying to me, as they seem to stem from a misunderstanding of the textual situation. I'm going to address the New Testament here, as the OT is really beyond anything I could shed light on in any helpful manner...............................

Thank you very much.

I especially like these 2 for the Greek.

The first one uses 5 of the Greek texts and multi Bible versions, which can vary quite a bit within the MSS:

Greek New Testament - Parallel Greek New Testament by John Hurt

This one is a Hebrew/Greek/English interlinear, but if I am not mistaken, it is based on the W-H Greek text:


Scripture4All - Greek/Hebrew interlinear Bible software


.