"Why All the Translations?" is the question
Denny Burk asks in the title of chapter 44 of
Dembski &
Licona's
Evidence for God. It's a good question; it seems likely that we have more translations of the Bible than of any other ancient text (
Beowulf, say, or the works of Chaucer, Homer, Plato, Omar Khayyám...). The only reason for this I can come up with is that many people have been dissatisfied with the extant translations and thought they could do better — and believed it was
important to do better.
Burk points out that there are three approaches to translating the Bible:
formal equivalence,
dynamic equivalence, and
paraphrase. The
King James Version is apparently a formal equivalence or word-for-word translation, while the
New International Version is a dynamic equivalence translation, which Burk describes as a thought-for-thought rendering. This gives a clue as to why there are so many ways one can interpret scripture. The version I see cited most often is the
New International Version, which according to Burk is not a word-for-word translation but one where the translators have endeavoured to get inside the heads of the original authors. This in itself requires a degree of interpretation, so it's not surprising that when Biblical scholars are engaged in exegesis they feel free to contribute their own interpretations.
The third option — a paraphrase translation — isn't really a translation at all. Burk quotes
Paul D. Wegner in The Bible in Translation, describing a paraphrase as a "free rendering or amplification of a passage, expression of its sense in other words."
All this concern over different translations cannot help but raise the suspicion that the real reason there are so many is that no-one knows for sure what the original really said, let alone what it meant.
4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbbible.aspx?pageid=8589952760
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