Yeah, one of the most common
questions I get asked, honestly, is what is the best English Bible
translation? And no joke, when my wife was
delivering our first baby in the hospital, she was in labor.
The female doctor was talking to me and she said, now what
is the best English Bible translation? We had this discussion while
my wife was in labor. But I like to tell people we
have an embarrassing riches of translations in English. We have
so many good translations. So we need to be aware that there
are many languages in the world that do not even have one translation.
And so the debates that we sometimes have among ourselves are kind
of silly in light of that. Now are there any bad translations?
I would say yes. A translation that a cult group
has changed the word of God, that's a bad translation. Like
the New World Translation by Jehovah's Witnesses is a bad
translation because it's driven by a heretical doctrinal view. But among translations completed
by committees, of scholars, we really have many different choices.
And the best way to explain it is there's a spectrum, and along
that spectrum, you have some translations that are more word-for-word,
and those are called formally equivalent. And then you have
translations that are more meaning-for-meaning, and that's more functionally
equivalent. So on the far end here, more formally equivalent,
we would have a New American Standard Bible. A little further
back this way, the ESV. Maybe in the middle here, we
would have the NIV, and then we go over here all the way to
functionally equivalent, more meaning for meaning, the New
Living Translation. Now all those translations I
mentioned I think are good translations, but they have a different translation
philosophy. And so for the New American Standard,
for example, if there are 10 words in the Greek, they'll try
to have 10 words in the English, and they'll try to follow the
same structure of the Greek sentence. Now sometimes that results in
the translation being a little bit harder to read. Whereas the
New Living Translation, you may have 10 words in Greek, may end
up having 15 words in English. And what was a prepositional
phrase at the end of the Greek verse may be at the beginning
of the English because it sounds more natural there. So I encourage
people to have multiple translations and sometimes to compare them.
And when they differ, explore that further with a study Bible
or through reading commentaries. The best way to, another way
to understand formal and functional equivalence would be with modern
languages. So when I've gone to China, I
was a teacher in China, one of the greetings in China is, ni
qi li ma, have you eaten, right? Now, if we translate that very
literally, have you eaten, Say I'm with a group of Americans
and I say, this pastor has asked, have you eaten? And I think they
would think, well, does he want to invite us to dinner or is
something wrong? What's going on? Whereas he's
basically just saying, hey, we're glad to have you here, what's
up? Or is everything okay? And so I could do a New American
Standard translation, have you eaten? I could do a New Living
Translation, the pastor says, greetings, he's glad you're here.
Right now, both of those are accurate in what I'm intending
to do, and so that's one way to think about Bible translation.
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