by A. C. Thomson, Editorial Consultant

Note: This article was previously titled Bible Translation Philosophy.

Part 1

Readers of the Quarterly Record will be familiar from past articles with the fact that the Reformation- and Puritan-era Bible translations undertaken the length and breadth of Europe and beyond were all based on the Hebrew Masoretic Text of the Old Testament and the Greek Received Text of the New Testament. This applies not just to the translations best known to QR readers, such as the Authorised (King James) Version in English, the Luther Bible in German, and the Statenvertaling in Dutch, but also to a host of lesser-known Bible versions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which likewise each became the cornerstone of a language and a nation: the French, Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Spanish (Castilian), Danish, Swedish, and a dozen more translations.¹ It does not, of course, apply to translations made in the late Middle Ages from the Latin Vulgate (such as the Wycliffe Bible in English, the Bonifaci Ferrer Bible in Valencian [Catalan], and the Peter Waldo Bible in Franco-Provençal), although these translations were scholarly and accurate to their Latin source text.

Even after that great era of pioneer Bible translation in Europe, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the continuance of the Masoretic and Received textual basis of what may be called the ‘daughter translations’ into languages which were not the vernacular of any large nation state. What is meant by ‘daughter translations’ here is not, in most instances, that the translation was made directly from English or another language which already had a Bible translation (though this did happen with the earliest efforts to produce Protestant Bibles in countries including the Netherlands² and Denmark,³ with Luther’s German as the source language). Rather, in most cases the same Hebrew and Greek text of the Bible was translated directly into these new target (or ‘recipient’) languages by men well familiar with the Biblical languages, but with very much the same theological convictions and typographical conventions as had driven their respective ‘parent’ versions in the first wave of national Bible translations.

For instance, Bible translations which observe the commendable practice of italicising words not strictly reflected by any one word in the Biblical language texts include not just the Authorised Version in English but the whole family of translations whose translators were intimately familiar with the AV, including the Statenvertaling in Dutch (1637, whose translators were given advice from those of the AV and other translations⁴), the Scottish Gaelic Bible (New Testament 1767, Old Testament 1801), a host of Colonial-era translations, and indeed in Bibles which predate the AV, including the French Geneva Bible (sixteenth century), the William Morgan Bible in Welsh (1588) and the Italian translation of Giovanni Diodati (1607). We even find the practice in the Synodal Bible in Russian (1876).

The Russian is a particularly fine example of how sound translation principles can spread beyond political boundaries when their correctness is evident to serious-minded translators further afield. The Synodal Bible, with its AV-style italicised words, chapter summaries and cross-references, was translated by the Russian Bible Society, which from its foundation in 1816 onwards had far more contact with the British and Foreign Bible Society than with any other nation’s Bible society⁵ and whose Eastern Orthodox patrons were greatly impressed by the undeniable effect of the AV upon British life. In senses such as this, the men undertaking the second-wave daughter translations reapplied the basis of the Reformation-era English, German, Dutch, or French Bible translations to their native languages.

This second wave included the Celtic languages (other than Welsh, which already had the excellent 1588 William Morgan translation),⁶ the remaining Scandinavian languages, some of the smaller languages of Roman Catholic-dominated southern and central Europe and some of the languages of the Baltic and Balkans, as well as a great number of translations across the British Empire and the overseas colonies of other Protestant nations. TBS’s own fine work in that second wave is described, for example, in the ‘Several Overseas Projects’ section of Andrew J. Brown’s The Word of God among All Nations: a brief history of the Trinitarian Bible Society 1831–1981.⁷ And today, the Society maintains a vigorous program to prepare new Bible editions according to Reformation-era principles of translation in languages from across the globe, as described regularly in the pages of the Quarterly Record.

The philosophy of Bible translation

That there was pan-European agreement prior to the twentieth century on the textual basis of the Bible may well be known to QR readers. What is not perhaps so well known, and what this two-part article will address, is the translators’ remarkable degree of agreement over two or three centuries regarding matters not of text per se but of translation: what the Bible is and how to translate it. This may be called their philosophy of translation.

Readers without any foreign languages can still gain an impression of just how much difference one’s philosophy of Bible translation makes to the outcome from thorough works such as Tyndale expert David Daniell’s The Bible in English,⁸ which provides startling examples of discrepant philosophies in minor English Bible translations and the great shortcomings of the resultant Bible versions from as far back as the mid eighteenth century.

Like the study of translation as a wider discipline, the philosophy of translation is a subject which has gained much more academic attention in recent decades than ever before. As a growing discipline, translation studies have shed much light not only on the great learnedness of the Bible translators of the Early Modern era amid highly adverse circumstances,⁹ but also on their philosophical unity.¹⁰

This article will consider the translations of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries to identify their shared, and correct, philosophy of Bible translation which led them to be in agreement (despite differences between the target languages) on the verses which we today are assured are contentious and subject to all manner of ‘better’ interpretations by ‘experts’. To do so, we shall employ the ‘six honest servingmen’:¹¹ the question-words What, Why, When, How, Where and Who (though not in Kipling’s original order). ‘Who’ will of necessity take up the rest of Part 1 of the article.

God willing, the second part of this article in a later Quarterly Record will complete that review, citing more primary-source examples than the present part, and will then look briefly at how the Reformers’ and Puritans’ translation philosophy and adherence to sound textual principles fed through into all of Europe’s great confessions of faith of that era. It will conclude by considering more broadly why it should be that the twentieth century saw such a huge and sudden innovation in Bible translators’ understanding of their task after such universal consensus among many previous generations of men separated by wide gulfs of education, time, and place.

I write as a self-employed professional translator who is currently undertaking doctoral studies under the Rev. Prof. W. J. Op ’t Hof (Free University of Amsterdam [VU Amsterdam], retired) on the many translations of the Puritan era’s bestselling piety manual, The Practice of Piety (by Bishop Lewis Bayly, c. 1611).

Who should translate the Bible?

To understand the consensus among the classic era of Bible translators, we must first throw their unity into sharp relief by contrasting it with what went wrong in later times. Translation, even the careful translation of the Word of God by men of God under His special guiding, is inevitably a deeply human process. Those of us who, like many evangelists in the early church, also undertake interpreting (spoken translation) are even more aware of the demands of this human dimension.

Machine translation (such as Google Translate and Systran¹²) is now capable of rendering the gist of most kinds of text with surprising intelligibility, to the extent that thousands of translators around the world are already looking for alternative employment. Even though this is now the case, it is of course unthinkable to translate even human laws or literature by machine, let alone the Bible.

Why should this be? What is it that the human brain adds to the translation of any serious and precise text beyond the immense corpora (vocabulary databases) and staggeringly sophisticated rules of syntax processing which machine translation now boasts? What the brain adds is, of course, the one thing that a computer can never envisage: an intimate familiarity with the cultural priorities of the human author (and, for Bible translation, theological considerations and, above all, a saving knowledge of its Divine Author), and the understanding which a given word or phrase will impart to the target audience.

It is worth labouring this point even to those well familiar with the fact that the Bible they read is a translation. No translation is mechanistically word-for-word, not even a verbatim, formal equivalence Bible translation. Some of us have heard horror stories of well-meaning friends of Bible translators who, failing to grasp this fact, have offered to ‘take a passage or two off your hands if you send me a dictionary’. As translation studies¹³ have developed into a fully-fledged academic subject in our day, reinforced by the burgeoning discipline of early-modern intellectual history, we have understood better than ever before that translation is an occupation intimately bound up with processes of the brain and the spirit, processes which are highly specific to the individual.

In the various working environments of the British Civil Service and a Dutch translation agency, and in assistance to the TBS, I have been struck that discussion among translation project coordinators inevitably revolves around identifying translators of sufficient calibre and motivation, whatever the subject area, and then trusting their judgement. Subject matter expertise is certainly not the be-all and end-all of Bible translation: this was the mistake committed in the late nineteenth century from which we have collectively never recovered. Worse still, we in the West have exported this error to the rest of world Christendom in recent decades as supposed Bible translation scholarship has become a cottage industry in its own right.

A condescending downgrade

At the end of the nineteenth century, the condescending notion took hold in the universities of Germany, England and New England simultaneously (and due to a great degree of mutual influence and emulation among these seats of learning)¹⁴ that Bible translation had been done somewhat amateurishly in the preceding ages and that it had better be left to committees of university doctors henceforth, men informed by the recently concocted ‘correct’ textual basis (the Critical Text of the Greek New Testament in particular) and by more enlightened translation theories than heretofore.

The timing of this intellectual downgrade (simultaneous with the theological Downgrade Controversy which hastened C. H. Spurgeon’s death) is significant. Many were coming to regard German scholarship, particularly in theology and linguistics, as an improvement over the antiquated views and teaching methods of the universities in England and the USA. It was at just this juncture that, regrettably, interest in rethinking and redoing Bible translation exploded in the English-speaking world, later tugging the other languages of the world in its wake.

The increasingly woeful Greek and Hebrew knowledge (particularly at the level of syntax, i.e. grammar above the level of an individual word) of the subsequent generations of British and American Bible translators, especially those at the English universities, is not the subject of this article. But I have no reservation in mentioning here that the Revised Standard Version-New Revised Standard Version-English Standard Version succession of revisions is a particularly clear case of what I would call Oxbridgeitis: the failure of one generation’s men to spot their predecessors’ translation errors and the elegant cosmetic disguising of this declining scholarship by means of touching up the English. Daniell is rightly scathing about this English twentieth century affliction in the introduction to his modern-spelling edition of Tyndale’s Old Testament.¹⁵

So much for translation errors of omission. As regards translation errors of needless commission, suffice it to say that we translators are well aware of the inverse relationship between a person’s mastery of the source language and his interest in fiddling with an already decent translation. This is a phenomenon which plagues our lives daily.

I have set out above that when, by God’s providence, the right translator or small team of translators and reviewers is assembled, a Bible society or publisher would be well advised to provide them with guidelines and expectations and then let them plough on according to their own prayerful insights. And this is just what the TBS does, while being careful to check the accuracy and textual basis of the result before publication. Sadly, Bible translations or revisions undertaken in the past century by denominationally affiliated bodies or liberal national Bible societies have missed this point completely, spoiling the translation with far too many editors and other reviewers involved.

The most flagrant examples of this trend come from the Dutch- and German-speaking world. I must stress that they are only flagrant because they are less well covered up than what goes on in other parts of the world. The Swiss Reformed Bible, an outstanding translation effort16 by Zwingli and Leo Jud, printed by a first-generation Zwinglian, Christoph Froschauer (1490–1564), continued to be published for centuries, with whole Bible revisions published in 1540, 1589, 1665, 1756, 1817, 1868, and 1931.¹⁷ The 1931 revision, commissioned by the Zurich Synod of 1907, already contained the ominously long-winded stipulation that this revision of Froschauer’s work ‘be checked precisely throughout for correctness, and where it contradicts the true sense or the rightly-recovered source text [i.e. the Critical Text], or where it is otherwise imprecise, unclear or unseemly, it is to be improved, using first and foremost the best translations [sic!] available, and only seeking a new expression where these are found insufficient’.¹⁸

Having got away with this precedent for passing off effectively a new modernistic translation under the trusted brand name of ‘the Zurich Bible’, the Evangelical Reformed Church of Zurich went a great deal further in 1984. Bible scholarship and linguistics had now made such leaps and bounds, the Synod proclaimed, that an entirely new translation now needed to be made, with the Old Testament translation trio significantly made up of one Hebraist, an ‘exegete’ and a literature specialist (Germanist). (Notice that a literal middleman has crept in here: one whose professional skill is neither sourcenor target-language-related). During its translation, the text of the new Zurich Bible was adapted by other consultant parties, including a Jewish team chaired by a rabbi (to check for ‘unintentional antisemitism’)¹⁹ and a women-readers’ group (to pick up on ‘discriminatory’ renderings).

Dutch Bible translations of recent decades have used far more than one literature specialist, or neerlandicus, per committee. The TBS’s Dutch sister organisation, the Gereformeerde Bijbelstichting (GBS), is commendably refraining from doing so by planning to use at most only one africanist (Afrikaans language specialist) as against seven translators in its just-launched Afrikaans Bible project to translate the Statenvertaling marginal notes and potentially also to revise the 1933 Afrikaans text. On the contrary, the Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap (NBG; a very different kind of Bible society to the GBS), with characteristic Dutch frankness, became in 2013 the first liberal Bible society in the world to admit openly that it exists for ‘those who find the Bible relevant’. ²⁰ Far from implying a trustworthy Bible translation philosophy, this can be taken as a dressed-up way of saying that translation committees now have free rein to choose readings which please themselves, defending themselves with the assertion that churched people (i.e. a straw-man notion of someone bored by traditional translations) will appreciate the inventive renderings offered. For its current policies, the NBG has been roundly ridiculed²¹ by alert Dutch readers as a blundering body which enjoys charging heavily for new editions which come out so regularly that one might as well take out a subscription.

The challenges of revision

Expert translators take a light touch to the task of revision (which is in many ways a skill more demanding than fresh translation from the source, and which tends even in secular translation projects to be entrusted to senior colleagues). These experts are highly aware of the possible range of meaning of a given word or phrase in both the source and the target language, and have a breadth of view which allows them to see why (for etymological or grammatical reasons, for instance) historical translation choices were counterintuitively accurate. An example would be the oft-assailed ending of the AV’s rendering of 2 Corinthians 5.14:

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead

Now, it is true that the Second Westminster Company of AV translators, which translated 2 Corinthians, did not contain the very finest Greek scholars on the project.²² It is also true that 2 Corinthians—with its densely rhetorical Greek in which Paul tackles his readers’ worldly thinking using sophisticated language—was challenging to express in English. That said, to claim—as many twentieth-century Establishment critics of the AV have claimed—that ‘then were all dead’ is a mistranslation for ‘died’ which somehow implies a continuation over time or some conjunct form, is simply to reveal an ignorance of the English language. Anyone who has had a modicum of French or German at school will know that these languages express the past simple ‘died’ with ‘to be’, not ‘to have’. The same was true historically of English, lingering longer in emphatic contexts such as 2 Corinthians 5.14. Hence, what many would rashly call a ‘revision need’ in the AV is not in fact one; it is a sound rendering of the aorist ἀπέθανον (they died). A great deal of the variance within twentieth-century Bible translation in many languages has been due to nothing more than ill-informed twiddling of this kind, at the root of which is a disrespect, borne of ignorance, of the original translator’s labours.

Revision can also go wrong when a very good explanatory note from the early modern era, or even from the early twentieth century, is foolishly cut out. The Württembergische Bibelanstalt Stuttgart (WBS), when it was still a relatively conservative Bible society, brought out a Jubiläumsbibel edition of the Luther Bible in 1912 (reprinted 1937 and 1964) to mark its centenary. While Luther’s translation was already peerless in the German language, the WBS provided even greater accuracy in its running notes on the text. One such example is found at Romans 1.20, ‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse’, where the note points out that the often under-translated participle νοούμενα (being understood) describes a logical precondition to grasping the character of the Creator and that its sense can be helpfully expanded as wenn man nachdenksam darauf achtet (if/when attentively pondered over).

Although this note is good parsing of the Greek and is consistent with passages such as Psalm 8, it was ignored by the much blander equivalent note in the newest explanatory edition by the successor body in Stuttgart, the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, ²³ simply stating that the heathen, unlike the Jews, were obliged to erkennen (recognise) God from His works only. There could hardly be a clearer-cut example of what loss a change in translation philosophy can effect, and the second part of this article will present more examples of such slippage from the same timeframe, the mid to late twentieth century. Once translation philosophy is allowed to become deformed in rendering the text of the Bible itself, this quickly spreads to exegesis in preaching and teaching. In January 2017 an ever-perceptive Texan commentator observed of the generation-long struggle over how to translate κεφαλή (head) in Ephesians 5.23, that Wayne Grudem’s exhaustive seventy-page treatment of the matter in Trinity Journal (1990) ‘of course still didn’t satisfy the egalitarians, because this was never really about a serious disagreement on what the Bible said. This was a feminist rebellion against Scripture, with a minimal effort made to pretend this was a real theological discussion’.²⁴ Such ‘minimal effort’ would easily have been seen through if the English-speaking Christian world at large had stuck with the AV and the responsible reader’s attitudes that it brings with it. Instead, Christendom has let down its guard against the argument that a particular Biblical word ‘could also be translated’ in some novel way. The historical, and correct, rejoinder to this fig-leaf argument would be, ‘But the Bible translator(s) did not translate it that way.’

Who, then, should translate the Bible and revise Bible translations? The history of the Reformation and Puritan era answers this question over and over. Bible translators need to have, as Dr David Allen put it in QR 614 (January to March 2016) when describing William Tyndale (p. 29), ‘a burning and compulsive burden to translate the Bible into [their] mother tongue’, and they may need to keep as much distance from ecclesiastical and academic ‘experts’ during their labours as Tyndale had to. Without this in place—if the learning is not coupled with the ‘burning’— the translation philosophy of any Bible version will be in a total state of confusion.

Part 2

Having considered the nature of translation and the ‘who’ of Bible translation, we now turn in this second half of the article to address the five remaining questions and (briefly) examine the practical effect of the agreement on Bible translation which there was prior to the late nineteenth century. We shall then conclude by considering what it was which prompted the radical shift in Bible translation philosophy from the late 1800s and onwards in what we term in this article ‘the long twentieth century’.

What Bible translation is

The Word of God itself directs multiple times (by highlighting how much more important it is to be translated than the edicts of earthly kings) that Scripture is to be translated into every tongue. See, for instance, Psalm 19 (interpreted by Romans 10.17–18, making clear that it is the Word of God which goes out and which must go out to all the earth), Daniel 4, Esther 8, Matthew 24.14 (cf. Mark 13.10) and Revelation 5.13 and 14.6; these establish that the greatness, goodness, justice, might and saving grace of God in Christ are to be promulgated to every creature in this present age and that the redeemed multitude in glory will be drawn from speakers of every language on earth.

Nor is this translation of the Word merely requisite in order to proclaim salvation for (humanly speaking) its own sake; there is another God-glorifying purpose in Bible translation, one indicated by verses such as Habakkuk 2.14 and Isaiah 11.9. The knowledge of God (as these prophets phrase it), in the Kingdom of God (as John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus Christ present it), is a ‘mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations’ (Colossians 1.26). It is a cause which must expand to encompass every territory and culture on earth because it is a perfect knowledge which rightly honours a perfect Source.

There are many debates among Biblical Christians, even within individual churches which keenly support the work of TBS, as to whether it is sensible or necessary to invest resources in the translation and publication of Bibles in languages which appear, humanly speaking, to offer little prospect of winning converts. The more cautious approach, while certainly understandable in terms of good stewardship of the resources entrusted to us, is not one which the seventeenth century—the golden age of Bible translation and the pinnacle of intellectual development—recognised. To make known the ‘wonderful works of God’ (Acts 2.11), even to open mockers and to great multitudes in arrogance and darkness who might be expected to remain unmoved and who sadly often do remain unmoved, is itself a high calling of God in Christ Jesus.

This is why so many in the era of Puritanism embarked upon refining even already-good Bible translations: to give their all for Christ’s sake. By grasping this consensus among them as to what Bible translation fundamentally is, we may understand much of why they, across nations and denominations, conferred carefully and studied as hard as they could to agree on what is required and what is best in Bible translation. There was no room in that golden age for the proliferation of personally or denominationally specific motives for Bible translation (and other great undertakings) whose formulation became normal and even expected in the twentieth century.

The consoling and invigorating promise to Christians is that ‘your labour is not in vain in the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 15.58)—a promise of God which only makes sense if we grasp that God has been glorified by the effort to make His Gospel known even where the translators (like many preachers and evangelists) have been belittled, ignored and persecuted by their target audiences. As a norm, the best linguistic minds in the church are surely to be encouraged to dedicate themselves to the service of Christ in Bible translation for His own sake first and foremost, just as we may prayerfully encourage the most gifted speakers who may appear qualified for public ministry to consider whether they have a calling to Gospel preaching and evangelism.

That the Bible should have its own philosophy of Bible translation was something at least implicitly believed by Reformation- and Puritan-era translators, before being dislodged by secular academic (and pseudo-academic) translation philosophies from the late nineteenth century onwards. The very language of Scripture is specific to itself: while we now possess copious texts in language forms closely related to Biblical Hebrew (namely, Ugaritic), to Biblical Aramaic (namely, Late Old or ‘Imperial’ Aramaic) and to New Testament Greek (namely, correspondence in Koiné Greek) which were not available to pre-twentieth century scholarship, these caches of documents have merely served to underline how distinct the idiom and vocabulary of all three Biblical languages is. The distinctness of New Testament Greek, in particular, from other texts in the language was acknowledged by the unrivalled scholars of the seventeenth century, some of whom dubbed it ‘Bibline’, almost according it the status of a language in its own right.

This in itself is a cogent argument for translating the Bible word for word. Certainly, the Bible directs—as in Isaiah 28.10, where the prophet is content even to bear this as taunting for the Lord’s sake—that it is to be taught as simply and accurately as that: ‘For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little’. It is difficult to argue with intellectual integrity that the translating of the Bible should be approached in wildly different ways (for instance, through ‘dynamic equivalence’) than the manner in which it is to be taught.

Why translate the Bible

‘Of making many books,’ Solomon warns the eager youth among the people of God (Ecclesiastes 12.12), ‘there is no end’. The Book of Ecclesiastes itself, coupled with the Biblical record elsewhere of his reign and activities, makes plain that much of what Solomon was occupied with in middle age was a sterile study for study’s sake, including (if we are to believe the assertions of many international clandestine societies who have surprisingly detailed traditions on the matter) the compiling of compendia of world knowledge, something akin to the Encyclopédistes of late eighteenth-century France. (In both cases, these projects degenerated from an earlier generation’s Godly efforts to amass knowledge to the Lord’s glory, not man’s advantage.) The pan-Afro-Asian trade in which Solomon’s kingdom evidently engaged, along with the Phoenicians of his age, will have required staggering amounts of translation and interpreting, particularly including translation of religious documents aimed at familiarising court officials with the beliefs and sensitivities of trading-partner peoples. Solomon’s project of ‘know[ing] all there is to be knowed’ (as Kenneth Baker describes the ‘clever men at Oxford’ in the children’s classic The Wind in the Willows) was not an inherently Godly striving. Psalm 131, and 1 Corinthians 8.1 and 13.2 constitute salutary admonitions that far from all study of religion (including religious translation) is positive, and that people’s motives in this apparently most-beneficial human activity can be entirely dark and harmful.

Paul, the intellectual colossus of the New Testament as Solomon is in the Old, has an even more pointed warning for us on the matter of motives in Bible translation. ‘For we are not as many, which corrupt the word of God: but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God speak we in Christ’ (2 Corinthians 2.17). The direct relevance of this to Bible translation is apparent. In the original Greek, Paul is opposing Biblical Christianity to those—‘many’!—who even in his day are καπηλεύοντες (an amplified translation of which, not suitable for use in the text of a Bible translation itself but perhaps useful by way of elucidation, would be ‘in the business of adulterating and/or huckstering’ the Bible).25

Whichever nuances one might validly see in Paul’s participle in this verse (note well that this is a participle describing habitual occupation), the central warning is clearly that the Word of God is not merchandise, coupled with the sad truth that excitingly different Bibles will always find ready buyers and sellers. Of course, TBS and other publishers have to recoup their costs in distributing the Bible, to the extent that donations do not cover these costs; but there is absolutely not to be any profit motive in Bible translation, seen Biblically.

We who have what historians call the ‘long’ twentieth century (extending, for argument’s sake, from the late 1870s to roughly our own day) behind us cannot with any honesty deny that many have made a business—a profitable business at that—of Bible translation throughout that time. Nor can we overlook that the root of that mushrooming global wickedness has been in the English-speaking, supposedly ‘evangelical’ churches and their institutions.

The TBS is not in the un-Christian business of denigrating others who publish Bibles. However, concerned readers should investigate for themselves how increasingly difficult it is to obtain unbiased and full figures for the comparative national and worldwide sales of Bible translations in English, as this information is commercially confidential and sometimes cleverly presented. It is also worth looking into how newer Bible translations in English or other languages have displaced the Authorised (King James) Version in, for instance, various countries in Africa, sometimes with the use of incentives and bulk discounts targeted straight at pastors.

This quincentennial year of the Reformation has seen another rush of new Bible translations, such as a new Lutheran translation in English²⁶ and another revision of Luther’s German.²⁷ The current spate of translations appears to be marked by an acknowledgement that ‘dynamic equivalent’ (roughly, phrase-for-phrase or idea-for-idea) translation—beloved of the twentieth century—was a mistaken enterprise. But even here the translators lack the conviction to return to the old paths, instead embarking on a new, supposedly middle way, one with a surprising amount of readymade definition for the translator’s self-perceived role.

So then, profit is not the only wrong motive in Bible translation: a misplaced sense of one’s own unique insights and needfulness is often also involved. Speaking once to a new colleague translator in the British Civil Service, I asked him what he had previously done for a living. ‘I was a Bible translator in Albania’, he replied. ‘Did Albanian not have Bible translations already?’, I asked (knowing full well that it did), to probe his motives. ‘Only formal-equivalence ones’, he replied dismissively. The man’s motive for retranslating the Word of God had been that the existing translation in the target language was too accurate.

The desire to scratch the ‘itching ears’ of 2 Timothy 4.3 (and to be rewarded by the owners of those ears) has obviously been a major motive for the retranslation of the Bible, one far from always fuelled by pecuniary considerations. Many of the one-man Bible paraphrases made in the twentieth-century English-speaking world which are now acclaimed by profit-making (increasingly often, secular!) publishers as masterpieces of ‘refreshing’ Bible translation for the Christian millions began in obscurity as pet projects undertaken with no prospect of remuneration.²⁸

Other Bible translators appear to have been motivated by intellectual linguistic curiosity, such as the nineteenth-century prodigy George Borrow, an agent for many years of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). His writings leave the strong impression that there was no life of grace in him and that he was engaged in Bible translation and revision around the world for the mere thrill of discovery.²⁹ It is also troubling that he proposed fresh Bible translation projects to BFBS on the basis that he was able to do the work if they would provide the pay to keep him in the countries where he was already travelling.³⁰

The right motives in Bible translation were alluded to at the close of the first part of this article. Let each one who is considering future engagement in this high calling carefully weigh up his motives and count the cost, as with any grand activity undertaken for the Lord Himself. Let him not hesitate to join such an endeavour if the existing Bible translations (if any) in the intended target language are shoddy; but let him ‘meddle not with them that are given to change’ (Proverbs 24.21, with the emphasis in the AV rightly lying on the wrong attitude).

How to translate the Bible

Eugene A. Nida and Charles R. Taber³¹ published the definitive statement of twentieth-century ‘dynamic equivalence’ Bible translation methodology. Space precludes a full rebuttal here of the work of the driving force of the duo, Nida (1914–2011), but no matter, as he was not exactly subtle about his presuppositions in Bible translation. The first chapter of his book is entitled A New Concept of Translating. Even the first page explicitly embraces the author-denying ‘reader-response’ theory of literary criticism: ‘[W]hat one must determine is the response of the receptor to the translated message’.³² In line with this, his book is replete with study statistics showing how to get readers and listeners to have the supposedly correct reaction to a given word or phrase. A far cry from 1 Corinthians 2.14!

The trouble with Nida’s entirely new framing of Bible translation (or rather, of all translating, since that is what his book advocates) is that his professional experience was with the aboriginal languages—such as the Mayan family of languages—of Central America. These were, of course, the main focus of his employer, the American Bible Society, in his day, as these languages were the nearest to the United States with substantial populations of monoglot speakers with no Bible translation.

However, in the grander scheme of things Nida stands at the end of the classic period of Bible translation, despite his being regarded by secular linguistics as representing the dawn of new theories. In Nida’s day there were fewer and fewer major languages in the world with no Bible translation at all, and the nature of Bible translation was in many nations shifting to the correction of less-than-ideal existing work (which is nowadays a major focus of TBS projects). In worldly terms, the ‘low-hanging fruit’ had already been plucked by his time, and all he was left to go on was the highly eccentric.

Mayan languages have been described in some recent comparative studies as the most different from the norms of other languages in the whole world, in terms of their grammar, pronunciation and lexis (stock of vocabulary). Their speakers, traditionally highland peasants, had few or no words for the kinds of farming or models of economics and government referred to in the Bible. Nida’s response, and that of his school after him, was not only to do one’s best to make the Bible comprehensible to these outlying souls of humanity (a commendable aim) but also—far less advisably—to recast the extreme difficulties of that kind of Bible translation onto the central stock of humanity, including the few dozen languages spoken by most of mankind which do have existing Bible translations, grammars not so very different from Greek or Hebrew, and (not least via deep-rooted church influence) full theological and literary vocabularies for concepts specific to the times and places of the Bible books. To be more technical, Nida was a leading structuralist; this school is, in a sense, the specific reflex in linguistics of the general philosophical and economic persuasion which was then in the ascendant, namely empiricism. The concept of empiricism (in a nutshell, ‘we can know only after experimentation’) is arguably based on the fundamentally flawed notion that all units in all systems, even human ones, are freely interchangeable. In its extreme form, favoured by some theorists of government, empiricism regards people as mere units of production to be standardised in mind, body and spirit.

This thinking in the mid-twentieth-century West—which originated from the most atheist persuasions in Britain and the European Continent— foreshadows neo-Marxism’s identitarian scheme, in which we are merely representatives of our affinity groups and have no unique worth or distinctive life as individuals created by God. Allied with this is the notion of ‘creating community’ in megachurches (the most enthusiastic users of modernistic Bible translations), as pushed by Peter Drucker (1909–2005), a management theorist who found rich pickings in the megachurch subculture without ever proclaiming himself a Christian.

Tying all these twentieth-century strands together—at senior planning level; this is not the philosophy of most individual Bible translators, who are usually misguidedly sincere—is the pernicious worldly political idea that if all readers and listeners can be made to have the same response to the Bible, or any other shared text, then they can more easily be ruled. God’s sovereign grace is thereby expressly denied.

How, by contrast, did the Early Modern translators receive their particular training in Bible translation methodology? The Rev. Professor W. J. Op ’t Hof, in his review of the influence of Puritanism upon the Dutch Further Reformation, states:

The literary tradition in which [they] were brought up, even as schoolboys, was the three-stage progression of translatio-imitatioæmulatio [translation-imitationemulation]. In the seventeenth century, not only men of letters but theologians too had been fed this tradition almost with their mothers’ milk and replicated it in the development of their own writing as they grew up.³³

In other words, the men who undertook Bible translation in the classic era had first done straight translations from Latin and Greek (and, in some cases, even Hebrew) into their own languages as small boys, they had imitated (pastiched) the style of a given author, and finally, as teenagers, had the skill to emulate these authors. By their student years, they were absolute masters of the idioms of their own languages, as well as being intimately familiar with the Biblical languages. This was all before they embarked upon Bible translation!

When the Bible should be translated

We now turn to the perhaps less self-evident final two questions, those delimiting the circumstances of time and place proper to Bible translation. As for ‘when’, the most obvious answer is that the work should be embarked upon as soon as it has pleased the Lord to assemble the right translators and backing; but another consideration here must be, ‘Has the current generation of Christians who speak the target language expressed a strong sense of the need for a Bible translation of their own, or are they content to continue using an accurate and well-loved established translation in another of their national languages?’

Despite what we have seen in the treatment of the ‘what’ question above, this is a matter in which we need to be wise and well-informed in planning Bible translation to avoid producing counter-productive Bible versions which will not spread the knowledge of God. There are cases where TBS has been implored by tribal peoples to produce a Bible translation in their native language because they cannot understand national or neighbouring languages well enough to digest the Word of God in them, but there are also cases (particularly in the much more schooled context of twentieth-century Europe) where Bible translations have in fact been more of a hobby than the meeting of a genuine need. The European dialects which the consensus of classic-era Bible translators passed over were perhaps passed over for good reason.

Great discretion is needed on this point (and was exercised in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), a discretion which is sorely lacking where linguistic knowledge and familiarity with the local context is scant. The Jews and proselytes to whom the apostles preached at Pentecost marvelled that they were hearing the Word of God ‘in our tongues’ (Acts 2.8, 11). This expressly refers to the language in which each group of hearers was brought up, usually referred to as ‘mother tongue’ or, more recently, as ‘native language’. This was until recently an uncontested concept, one which helped form the agreement on matters of Bible translation which the classic age had.

The agreement on this point, as on so much else, was splintered in the late twentieth century. Secular language teaching research took leave of the older concept of ‘native language’ or ‘mother tongue’ in favour of terms such as ‘first-acquired language’ (or ‘L1’). The premise of the Council of Europe’s Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is that people are normally well able to become fully competent in second, third and fourth languages if they are only gifted with average intelligence and a manageable level of time commitment, and it too downplays the consideration of one’s native language. Meanwhile, Western evangelicalism began speaking in the same era about the distinction between one’s ‘head language’ (assumed to be the language of school and business) and ‘heart language’ (assumed to be the language of family and home), a distinction which may be well meant in many cases of unschooled tribals (as noted above) but which is not a universally-applicable or scientifically-based distinction.

Indeed, functional polyglotism is the norm in most of the world, and here again the twentieth-century debate has been greatly skewed by having its centre of gravity in the monoglot English-speaking world, where neither proponents nor supporters of dynamic equivalence translation typically have sound competence in even a second language, nor can they imagine how that would work. The relatively slight number of great Early Modern Bible translations in Europe reached native speakers of dozens more European languages with great spiritual profit. Luther’s German, for instance, was read perfectly well by people brought up as native speakers of any number of Slavic and minor Germanic languages in the German and Austrian empires, who had been schooled in High German and used it in wider society. The speakers of the smallest languages in Europe, such as Faroese and Manx, were not unaware of these dynamics when they in the eighteenth century clamoured for Bible translations, with the argument that they were ‘the last languages in western Christendom’ to lack one. Those making this call were well aware that there were far more native languages in Europe than there were Bible translations, but they were also sensible of the rare distinction which a language has if it has or acquires the status of a national language used in church and state to bind whole countries together. Once a good Bible translation is made in a particular language it also often helps to establish the formal vocabulary and standard grammar of that language; this is another reason why the classic era of Bible translation was conducted in such unanimity and met with such success.

It is for reasons such as this that I described modernist Bible translation in the previous part of this article as a cottage industry. Its theorists are far less scientific than their use of terminology might imply. Moreover, the witness of Scripture is consistent that the Holy Spirit is normally pleased to change the heart of a sinner through using the ‘head’ means of reading and hearing the Word of God: through teaching and study, not through emotionally resonant ‘heart language’ in itself. Untold is the delight felt by Christians and their Bible translators when the accurate Word of God is first read to them in their own language, a moment of sweet reward for many TBS brethren. Yet we also know that success in Bible translation cannot primarily be measured in terms of nods and smiles on the faces of totally non-Christian speakers of the target language, which is a strategy followed by many Bible translation enterprises. Often, these sounding-board panels for Bible translations are called ‘focus groups’, a term borrowed straight from product marketing. In other words, the desired effect is that the world is effortlessly comfortable with the idioms in which God is ‘made’ to speak.

The Netherlands illustrates the ‘when’ of Bible translation in microcosm. G. A. Wumkes (1869–1954) published an outstanding Bible translation in the northern Netherlands language of Frisian (the closest relative of English and Scots), with a New Testament in 1933 and the whole Bible in 1943. Just one generation later, Bible translations into other regional languages of the Netherlands, such as Twents (a form of Low Saxon) and Zeêuws (Zeelandic), began to be made, but were immediately eschewed by Reformed believers belonging to the very same denominations that had warmly welcomed Wumkes’s Frisian Bible. Also in the same generation, the Lowland Scots New Testament³⁴ of William Lorimer (1885–1967) was treated as a mere linguistic curiosity by the serious Christians of this part of Scotland, almost all of whom continued to use the English Authorised Version as their Bible translation of choice. What accounts for the difference in reception? The casual observer might think of all of these as highly similar looking instances of mid-twentieth century North-West Germanic languages receiving their first ever Bible translations; and indeed if this cluster of languages had been located in Central Africa or the New Guinea highlands, that is perhaps how these projects would have been pitched to supporters. But the crucial difference is that Frisian had been the receptacle for Reformed Christian writing since the seventeenth century,³⁵ and its status as a literary language had never been called into question in the world or the church, whereas the likes of Zeêuws and Twents had settled into being regarded as dialects of Dutch and their speakers (although schooled in Standard Dutch, just as Frisians at the time still were) were content to listen to preaching and read Scripture in Standard Dutch. Likewise Lorimer’s Scots translation has more to do with the revival of pride in Lallans (literary Lowland Scots) than with any felt need for a Scots Bible.

Consequently, all the latter groups of speakers, unlike the Frisians, regarded these mid-twentieth-century Bible translations as a mockery, and in fact these projects (unlike Wumkes’s Frisian) were approached in dynamic equivalence style. This was rather necessitated by the translators’ knowledge that serious Christians would be even more outraged by them if they had been attempted in literal style, for that would have made it even more evident that the translations were not necessary due to the existence of the Statenvertaling, with which they would have sounded almost identical if translated literally. Let Bible societies be very sure of the facts on the ground before accepting a pitch for new translations into languages or dialects related to languages possessing an existing decent Bible translation.

Where to translate the Bible

Even in the ‘where’ of Bible translation we can see that the Early Modern translators of God’s Word had a better understanding than the moderns. William Tyndale fled the England of Henry VIII and Bishop Tunstall in 1524 to produce his Bible translation in secret in various locations on the Continent, before his martyrdom at Vilvoorde near Brussels in 1534. At the time of his capture, he was still translating and revising, a full decade after his last day-to-day contact with native speakers of English. He had left his academic books behind him, and indeed his letter from jail³⁶ touchingly pleads for him to be allowed merely one Hebrew Old Testament, lexicon and grammar in his cell. Yet for all that, he produced a breathtakingly accurate Bible celebrated above all for the quality of its English.

The translators of the Dutch Statenvertaling, after their appointment and at their own request to enable an undisturbed work of translation,³⁷ were allowed to take their leave of the congregations they were then serving and prepare for a cloistered existence at Leiden, for the Synod of Dort had sensibly resolved³⁸ that it would be essential for the men to be in each other’s habitual company in order for the resulting translation to be a harmonious whole. How different are these practices (of which examples could be furnished from across Europe) from those standard in Bible translation since the time of the Revised Version (1881), where academics suffering from many other simultaneous calls upon their time are expected to produce their translations amidst their other duties and in the spiritually highly unhealthy, politically changeable and intellectually overwrought environments of secular university towns. Indeed, they are nowadays positively encouraged to avail themselves of unbelieving academia to inform their Bible translations. Had Tyndale’s Bible and its revisions not been available to the men of the Authorised Version translation companies, and had they had to work from scratch (a very different kind of translation work than revision), I am rather sure that they likewise would have sought King James’s permission to take their leave of Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster to work in isolation. Many of TBS’s translators are not able to shut themselves away from other duties, much as they would love to, and the Lord honours their great labours in difficult circumstances.

But where such is possible, who today will accept Bible translators secluding themselves to concentrate, let alone urge it? This understanding has been lost due to the rise of the idea that one has to be surrounded by the babble of the street to have the right ‘ear’ for the target language; again, this betrays a very low and mechanistic view of the capability and calling of the translator. The Early Modern Bible translators shunned that approach—even though (for instance) Luther frequently urged the use of natural idiom—and instead concentrated on the words of original Scripture itself, with the result that their translations are highly similar in outcome.

The unity of early modern translators

How did the Reformation- and Puritan-era translators demonstrate their shared philosophy in practice? Let us consider one key verse in each Testament, examples focusing on the meaning of individual nouns, so as to make the changes in philosophy as easy as possible to demonstrate. (Other notorious examples encompassing whole sentences could have been furnished but are far more complicated to analyse.)

In the doxology of Philippians 2, Paul writes (v. 6) that Christ ‘thought it not robbery to be equal with God’. The Dutch Statenvertaling renders the same noun as roof (robbery). Luther has Raub (robbery); Morgan’s Welsh has drais (violence); the Russian Synodal has хищение (theft); the Czech Králice has roupež (robbery); Károli’s Hungarian has zsákmánynak (robbery); Almeida’s Portuguese has usurpaçaō (usurpation); the SPCK’s Scottish Gaelic has reubainn (robbery); and the Polish New Testament published by TBS has łupiestwo (robbery). All these translations from different nations and generations reflect, with similar interpretation, the Greek noun αρπαγμός.

In the twentieth century secular scholarship argued that the noun referred not to the act of robbing, but rather to the object robbed. Hence, the New International Version rendered the phrase ‘something to be grasped’ in previous editions and ‘something to be used to his own advantage’ in the most recent edition, owing to yet another change of mind among scholars as to the meaning of the noun. These debates revolve around comparisons with other Greek texts. The earlier translators in English and other languages, going by the plain sense of the passage itself and of the rest of Scripture, were untroubled by such questions and rendered the noun much more intelligibly. Almost no twentieth-century translation in any language translates the noun ‘robbery as almost every pre-twentieth-century version did! The pre-twentieth-century Christian world thus had a near-universal agreement in this verse as to the identity of Christ and what did (and what did not) constitute His humiliation in becoming incarnate as man.

In Genesis 3.15, God announces the placing of enmity between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. However, very few twentieth-century versions in English or other languages actually reflect the Hebrew noun (rz here with the word ‘seed’ or equivalent. Changing the term to ‘descendants’, ‘progeny’ or ‘children’ obscures the singular and collective meaning of ‘seed’ (as expressly pointed out by Paul in Galatians 3.16),³⁹ and particularly denies the central Biblical meaning of this word, namely the capitalised meaning, ‘thy Seed’ (the Lord Jesus Christ). The accurate translation ‘seed’ is used in the Early Modern translations, including the William Morgan Welsh Bible (had), de Reina’s unadulterated Spanish of 1569 (simiente), Károli’s Hungarian (mag), Luther’s German (Samen) and the Dutch Statenvertaling (zaad). The word-for-word, Bible-interpreting-Bible philosophy of these translators fed through into the confessions of faith of Early Modern Protestant Europe. The Continental Reformed equivalent of the Westminster Catechism, the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism, is peppered with Bible proof texts in every answer just like its British counterpart. The twentieth-century confessions of faith by denominations in the English-speaking world and continental Europe, by contrast, read like committee-forged compromises, with deliberately vague language to encompass both creationism and evolutionism⁴⁰ and various views of the nature of man and of sin, in a single worshipping body.

Another reason why the confessions of the Early Modern era are alike in spirit and wording is that the men who made the classic Bible translations were sometimes the very same men who had written, or who would go on to write, those confessions. Dr Hadrian à Saravia, for instance, a Flemish member of the Authorised Version’s First Westminster Company and the oldest translator (we note in passing that no modern panel of linguists sifted this excellent man out of the AV committee on the basis that he was not a native speaker of English), had in younger years helped draft the Walloon Confession of Faith.⁴¹

What caused the shift in translation philosophy?

The ‘long’ twentieth century marked, or rather was, a downgrade in every spiritual and intellectual discipline known to man. Its only appreciable gains were technical in nature, such as marvellous advances in medicine, transport and communications. This applies to linguistics and Bible translation, too. We gained a massive body of knowledge in many linguistic fields during the long twentieth century, even seeing the rise of dozens of linguistic specialisms, insights and techniques entirely unknown to previous eras, but it is tempting to argue that these were more than fully outweighed by the great losses of quality, Biblicism and common sense in twentieth-century Bible translation practice. To call things by their right names, modern Bible translation has provided an unquestioning shelter and a gratifying career for a large number of dilettantes, hobbyists and postmodernists, in addition to the countless committed Bible translators who have sacrificed jobs, family ties and comforts for their work and whose labours will be rewarded by the Lord of the harvest.

Not all the fault is to be found at a professional level. Are all contemporary Christians as a body even interested in the accuracy of Bible translation? I for one must conclude sadly that they are not. Long experience of (mostly fruitless) seeking to persuade Christian friends of the fundamental wrongness and unlearnedness of their twentieth-century Bible translations has left many of us in TBS circles convinced that many minds are not open to argument on this score.

Even in parts of the world which have only recently become susceptible to the secular mindset variously called individualist, liberal, Anglo-Saxon, empirical or globalist, the navel-gazing tendency of contemporary man is spilling into the church at an alarming rate. Armed with a whole corpus of self-referent worship songs (translated out of English, of course) and listening to dubbed or consecutive-interpreted modernist sermons from the West in which the Lord seems to exist for the benefit of the believer, churchgoers in countries previously noted for their high view of the Bible as the foundation of culture can now be heard asserting that particular verses cannot mean what they have always been understood to mean, because ‘my Jesus would never say that’ or ‘that’s not how I have been led to understand what the Bible is all about’. Once ‘another Jesus’ is being followed from another Bible, we no longer have to do with genuine disagreements about Bible translation but are confronted with darker motives.

Ultimately, Bible translation, like the establishing of the correct Biblical text, is a moral and theological battleground far more than a scientific one. The various branches of science serve merely as handmaids as we ‘earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints’ (Jude 3).

This is no time for us to flag in these vital efforts. Let us unabashedly take the debate to the modernists and challenge them pointedly, though of course lovingly, to defend their translation presuppositions. For theirs are flimsy, but ours have stood the test of time. Bible translation may have become a multifarious profession, but now, as ever, ‘the labourers are few’ (Matthew 9.37) and ‘have ye not many fathers’ (1 Corinthians 4.15).