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The Bible In English And How It Got That WayBy Marcus Trammell During a congressional hearing on the usage of the English language, a congressman stated that “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s it’s good enough for me.”1 The obvious problem with this statement is that it is historically impossible for Jesus Christ to have spoken English, considering the time and culture in which He was born—England, much less English, did not exist. I would hope, however, that it is safe to assume that the average church-attending American at the turn of the twenty-first century has the basic understanding that Jesus, the writers of the New Testament, and the early Christians did not speak English. Western
culture as influenced by the ancient Jews puts a heavy emphasis on the accurate
recording of events. This is
determined by our basic understanding of how the world works.
One cannot function in any capacity in our society without having the
ability to rely on information as being true.
We determine whether or not information is true by its historical
accuracy. This same principle is at
work with the Bible. The
Bible, as did everything else, developed over a period of time; thus, it has a
history. The problem occurs when we
fail to understand this history. That
is why we can have groups of intelligent people who, for the most part, do not
understand the historical development of the Bible.
This in itself is not a crime; the problem occurs when these same people
elevate one form or translation of the scripture above another without first
viewing the facts of its development. The
full history of the English Bible is long and elaborate and can only be
presented in summary here. The Bible was probably first translated into Old English
in the late ninth century. This
early English translation appears to only have contained very short parts of the
Old Testament and a brief excerpt from the New Testament.
This meager translation occurred almost a thousand years after the life
of Jesus and serves as an example of the time involved in its development.
One
of the most famous Bible translators, William Tyndale, was one of the first
individuals to attempt a full translation into English.
He was arrested and executed in Holland in 1536 for translating the Bible
from its original languages into the common vernacular of English.
According to John Foxe in Foxe’s
Book of Martyrs, he was tied to a stake, strangled, and then consumed with
fire. While tied to the stake, he
shouted, “God, open the eyes of the king of England!” The whole idea that someone could be executed for the act of translating the Bible into English seems asinine to modern Americans with our First Amendment freedoms. But in truth this serves as only one common example throughout the history of the Bible’s development and should be sobering to those of us who so casually leaf through the pages of a Bible in our common tongue. Some
evangelicals, and specifically Apostolics, wrestle with the issue of accepting
or acknowledging the validity of the “new English translations.” When
dealing with this issue, the first question that should be asked is—What is
new and what is old? Many people
base their foundation of scriptural correctness on the assumption that the King
James Version (KJV) of the Bible is the measuring stick by which all other
translations should be measured. This
is due in large part to the fact that many people grew up in a time when there
was no credible English alternative to the KJV.
Because of this, many became acquainted only with the semantics of the
KJV translation. My motivation here
is not to diminish the KJV in light of its historical importance, but to make a
clear case that it is not out of order for a new generation of believers to use
tools more relevant to its own generation. To
dispel the idea that the KJV is somehow superior to all other translations, one
should look at its historical development.
The KJV contains some textual variants when compared to other, more
recent biblical translations. The textual variants for the most part have no
effect upon what we would deem to be essential Christian doctrine, but that is
not my focus¾my focus is upon the readability of the text and upon what is most useful
to modern Apostolics. The people
who support the continued use of the KJV, in my experience, most frequently
assert that the new translations seek to change or alter the scriptures.
This is a classic example of a position that is formed in the absence of
historical detail. The
history of the KJV dates beyond the seventeenth century and King James of
England to the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536) of Rotterdam,
Holland. He edited the first
edition of the Greek New Testament to be published in Europe. A form of this Greek New Testament would later become known
as the Received Text and would be the very document the translators of the KJV
would use as their primary source material.
The
issue of the Received Text lies in the purity of the original Greek Text.
Erasmus did not have five thousand Greek New Testament manuscripts to
draw from as we do today, but had to be content with only six partial
manuscripts, with none dating before the tenth century.
This
matter is complicated when we understand that Erasmus had only one manuscript
for the book of Revelation, and this one was lacking the last six verses of the
text. Therefore, Erasmus had to
translate the last six verses of Revelation from the Latin Vulgate Bible back
into Greek. This is only a small
part of the complicated history of the Received Text.
In light of this historical information, it should seem trivial to squabble over the correctness of one translation over another without considering the history of the original text. The variants that occur in the more recent translations are due to the fact that we have a plethora of manuscripts (the earliest dating in the second century) to compare and study in our search for the original text. It’s also
interesting to note that the KJV has been updated twice since the original
translation, so we’re not even using the original KJV as translated under King
James. (For
the sake of length of this article, I have not once addressed the manuscripts of
the Old Testament, but the principles remain the same.) This
historical information in no way demeans the power of the language within the
KJV (which no other translation can match); nor does it change our basic
doctrine. It simply clarifies the position of our dominant translation. We should not be
afraid of progress. If we are the possessors of truth, history and its
accurate research will only help our message, not hinder it. Regardless of
what biblical translation you personally prefer, your preference does not change
the facts of history, and the facts of history should always be of high priority
to those who seek truth. God used real people in real time to communicate
his message to humankind, let us not deny the ability of God to work through
these more recent translations. ninetyandnine.com
ã
2000, Marcus Trammell Marcus
Trammell is a junior at Hope
International University located in Fullerton, California.
He is studying to receive a Bachelor of Arts in Biblical Studies and has
given a major portion of the past year to studying the New Testament in its
original language. |
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