An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XXII - Translations

Translating the Bible from the language in which it was written isn't anything new. During the Third Century BCE a translation of the Jewish scriptures was made from Hebrew into Greek since many Jews, especially those of the diaspora, no longer spoke or were able to read Hebrew. Aramaic or Greek were the everyday languages of most Jews of that era. This translation came to be referred to as The Septuagint. This was the version of the Old Testament that the writers of the New Testament were familiar with. Old Testament quotes typically adhere more closely to the Septuagint than to the Hebrew. 

The New Testament was originally written in Greek. Although there are some who maintain that parts of it were first written in Aramaic, this position doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. While Aramaic was the common tongue among Jews in Judaea, Syria, and other parts of what we now call the Middle East, Gentiles, as well as many Jews, employed Greek as the lingua franca. 

After Christianity was legalized in the Fourth Century CE, Latin translations were made, culminating in St. Jerome's Vulgate. ("Vulgate" means "common" in Latin). This incrementally became the official Bible of Western European Christianity. The Douay-Rheims translation was an English translation made from the Latin Vulgate in the late 1500's. 

During the Protestant Reformation emphasis was placed individual reading of the Bible, thus English language versions began to be made. There were several, but the most well-known is the King James Version (KJV). The KJV was not translated from the Latin version, but from Greek texts. A myth has proliferated that King James influenced the theology of the KJV, or that "parts were changed", or "taken out" to strengthen a patriarchal or anti-feminist viewpoint. Firstly, King James was not a theologian, nor did he have any theological aspirations. He did instruct the translators to adhere to Church of England structure and theology. This would be reflected, for example, in the word episcopos being translated as "bishop", rather than "overseer", among other things. The actual translation was done by several teams of translators who were experts in Biblical Greek. There is no evidence that there was any wholesale changing or deletions of sections in order to diminish the role of women, or to make any major theological revision. Whatever perceived theological problems surfaced had always been there. 

The KJV was revised regularly, mostly updating spelling and syntax, as it was originally written at the very beginning of the Early Modern period of the English language. Around the turn of the 19^th Century wholesale revisions started to be produced. The KJV translators, while using Greek manuscripts to compose their translations, relied on a small number of manuscripts that in retrospect were not very reliable. By 1900 there were a greater number of Greek manuscripts to work from. Greek manuscript editions known as "critical manuscripts" were composed, producing Greek New Testaments that compared various readings. Not only were there better manuscripts to work from, but the knowledge of Biblical Greek had improved over three centuries, as had the understanding of cultural referenced that might not be obvious from a literal translation. KJV contained many English words and expressions that had changed their meaning since it had been first published, in addition to Greek idioms. The newer versions endeavored to make the language of the Bible more accessible and understandable. A modern translation is likely as "accurate" as can be reasonably expected. 

What a translation, any translation, doesn't do, is wave away the contradictions and discrepancies. They're all still there, they're just rendered in modern vernacular. Even if we can be reasonably sure that we have Greek texts that reflect what was in the originally composed gospels, epistles and apocalypses, that doesn't make any of it true. I'm not concerned that the earliest epistle was written 20 years after Jesus supposedly lived, or that the first gospel another 10-20 years after that, or that Jesus himself never left any written records. That's normal. Most historical records that we have access to today were not contemporary records. Just because it's explainable, doesn't confer the laurel of truth upon it. Just because we can confirm certain facts about the Iliad and the Odyssey doesn't mean that all the supernatural doings of the various gods are true. 

What we've got is a pretty well preserved version of documents considering that they were written almost 2,000 years ago.