How English Bibles are Made

And my guest is Douglas Moo who is Kenneth T. – is it –

In the 1990s, I was invited to join. CBT just invites its own members. So, they invited me to join. One of my colleagues at that time was Murray Harris, who was on CBT, and Murray invited me to join. I said, “I’ll give it a try,” and I’m really glad I did. It’s one of the most favorite things I’ve done in ministry.

But basically, I think most people think, you know, people get in a room and sit down and translate it and – boom – there it is. It isn’t quite that simple, is it?

And so, he talked some scholars at Calvin into getting involved. They formed CBT, and then one of the critical things that people probably don’t think about is the need for some finances, because these people couldn’t do their work for free; they needed to be supported; they needed places to meet and so forth.

And the New York Bible Society, at that time was its name, came along to support the work. Just extraordinary – a lot of great stories there about how God provided for the work of the early days.

So, okay, so you got the financing; you get the committee in place. Now, what does that – I mean you got 66 books you gotta translate. You gotta decide what the text is. So, what is that like?

So, you said you met for weeks at a time. What in the world would you be doing for weeks at a time?

So, a crucial decision that translations have to make is what’s our audience going to be? I like to put it like this; it’s maybe simplistic. The ESV, a popular translation these days, more at the literal end of the spectrum, is aiming for understandable English. The NLT is aiming for easy English. The NIV, kind of in the middle, is aiming for natural English. And so, those are the decisions you make. You might all agree on what the text means, but then how do I put it in English? What kind of English do I use?

And I tell people, “If you just pick up an interlinear and just read the Greek in the order in which it’s laid out, it’s – no one is doing that.”

And most people, I think, think, “Well, you just do the Greek to the English.” And it’s not that simple.

So, you have, let’s say, Greek word X and every time Greek word X appears anywhere in Scripture, you use English word Y to replace it with.

I like to use the example of the expression “ordering apple pie a la mode.” Well, let’s do a literal rendering there. “I want apple pie according to the fashion.”

So, the example I like to use is paraclete; it’s a good example. You know, comforter or encourager, you’ve got a choice there, first of all. And then – but it’s not just a comforter or encourager. And even the word “comforter” could be misleading, depending on what people are thinking about.

And then from there you go, “But in the context of the upper room discourse, we’re clearly talking about the Holy Spirit; we’re just characterizing an attribute of the Spirit in one way or another in order to describe Him.” And so, to bring out the meaning, you’ve got to be aware of all those levels that are going on with the term.

And my answer tends to be, “Well, it depends. What are you reading this for? What are you after? Do you understand the philosophy of the translation, what direction it may be pushing in terms of the way it’s rendering?” Et cetera. And so, I tend to hesitate to answer that question in many ways, at least with the particular area that it’s usually asked with.

Let’s say I’m reading along, and I go, “Doug,” [laughs] –

We get proposals sent to us from fellow scholars doing that. But I get a lot of proposals sent to us from pastors, laypeople just using their Bible. Sometimes the lay person writes into me and says, “I just don’t understand this English. I’m no scholar; I don’t know the Hebrew, but I just – as I read this, the English doesn’t make sense.” And often that’s, yeah, something we need to look at probably.

So, I will gather proposals together as the chair, and then usually in March, I will distribute a packet of proposals for all the members to study on their own, and then we will gather in the summer for a week or two and just work through the proposals to decide, “Is this a good change or not?” Debate that and vote.

We have a built-in, conservative process in what we do. We are convinced the original NIV was done very well. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

And so, when we translate the NIV, we have to make our own judgment about what the best text is. Now, we usually are working from a kind of existing, generally accepted Hebrew OT, Greek NT, and we work from those, but we feel free to make different decisions if we think that we need to. And as you say, then we will sometimes put one option in the text and use a footnote to indicate, “Here’s another really popular option.”

Again, it’s a controversial thing. Particularly in certain parts of the world, we keep hearing that these modern versions have missing verses because verses that were in the King James Version aren’t in our modern Bibles. You know, I like to turn that around and say, “No, the problem is the King James had added verses.

So, sometimes we seize on the differences, and yeah, they are there, but there’s such a minority compared to the vast bulk of agreement that you have between the King James and NIV or and ESV or an NLT.

I remember when we were working on the revision of the Psalms in 2002, I think it was, and listening to my Old Testament colleagues talk about the Psalms for a full week. Boy, my Hebrew grew spectacularly. My appreciation for the Psalms and how Hebrew poetry works just expanded in a significant way. So, that’s been one of the real enjoyable experiences of that, being with these other folks that –

And again, I think it’s just – it’s too easy for people to either pit translations against each other or to not appreciate the actual work that goes into doing a careful translation well.

And, of course, for students who are trained for the pastorate and do that kind of things, those notes also alert them as to where –

Let’s talk about another level of translation that we have just left a little bit of time for, but I think is important, because sometimes there isn’t just the translation, there’s the study Bible that comes with it. And I know the NIV has produced a variety of study Bibles associated with it that kind of look at things from different angles. Talk about the value of the study Bible.

And, of course, the international students sometimes struggle, but the local students say, “Well, that’s American football.”

I go, “How do you know that’s about American football? American football is nowhere in that sentence.” And, of course, it’s a cultural script; the meaning is embedded in the text. And because the culture is shared – when you share a culture, you don’t have to say as much because it’s shared, and people will pick up on the clues.

And then the next remark I made, “But if I gave an Arabic-English lexicon to a student in Saudi Arabia, and they looked up every word of that sentence, they still might not know what it means after they’ve looked up all those words.”

I certainly think it’s important for people to settle on one Bible so that they can kind of have a go-to Bible that they are learning from, memorizing, perhaps reading consistently. To jump around from Bible to Bible I don’t think is probably healthy. And settle on one – of course it should be the NIV –

And we thank you for being a part of the table. We hope you’ll be joining us again soon. If you have a topic you’d like for us to consider for a future episode, you can e-mail us at thetable@DTS.edu, and we’ll take it under consideration. And we hope to see you again soon on the table.