Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Fri, 4 Sep 1992 06:23:02 EDT
From:         JEK@NIHCU.BITNET
Subject:      Bible versions

John Russell writes:

 > My point was not that THE Bible was incorrect but that there
 > are MANY Bibles... many different versions.... Do we have to
 > go back to Latin sources? Greek? Hebrew? How many times has the
 > Bible been translated and changed... along the way?

Why, yes, of course we have to go back to the Greek and Hebrew
originals. Not every time we sit down to read the Bible, but every
time there is a question about the precise meaning of a verse, or
about how it ought to be translated. Fortunately, copies have
survived of all the books of the Bible (except for parts of the
apocrypha) in the original Greek or Hebrew (Aramaic for parts of
Daniel).  Fortunately, the disagreements between manuscripts are
mostly trivial, so that we have a reasonable confidence of knowing
the correct original reading almost all the time.  Fortunately also,
the student who does not know these languages can simply compare
different translations in English, or whatever modern language he is
most comfortable with.  I have a Bible with four translations in
four parallel columns.  I usually read down one column, and stop to
glance over to the other columns whenever something strikes me as a
bit odd or interesting.  I also have a New Testament with eight
versions in eight columns, and still another volume that gives the
King James, and beside each verse alternative versions taken from 25
other translations (the alternatives are printed only where they
differ significantly in meaning from the King James or from each
other). The upshot is that not knowing any Greek or Hebrew at all
need not bar you from Bible study that is concerned to know exactly
what the original language said or meant.

You ask how often the Bible has been translated and changed...along
the way.

Suppose you have a document originally written in Hebrew by one
author, then translated from Hebrew to Greek by a second, then
translated from Greek to Latin by a third, from Latin to French by a
fourth, from French to English by a fifth. It would be reasonable to
doubt the accuracy of the Englsh version, and the more translations
there were in the line, the less reliable the finished product. This
is analagous to a number of stnadard electrical resistances arranged
in series. The more of them there are, the less electricity gets
through.
     But suppose instead that you have a document originally written
in Hebrew, with translations made around 200 BC into Greek, other
translations made from the Hebrew into Latin around 380 AD, others
made from the Hebrew into Aramaic around 90 AD. Suppose that these
different translations have been preserved by separate communities,
so that an error in copying one version is unlikely to affect
transmission of another version.  Then, when, for example, the
Hebrew and the Greek agree on a verse, it is a safe assumption that
the verse is found in that form as far back as the date of the
translation from Greek to Latin. This is analagous to a number of
electrical resistance arranged in parallel. The more resistors there
are, the more electrricity gets through.

 Yours,
 James Kiefer
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