Wheaton College Alumni Magazine Winter 2013 | Page 34
How
to
Translate
a
Bible I
by Dr. Daniel Block,
Gunther H. Knoedler
Professor of
Old Testament
Kenneth N. Taylor ’38, LITT.D. ’65
will never forget the meeting at the airport hotel in
the late 1980s. With the encouragement and blessing
of Kenneth Taylor ’38, Litt.D. ’65, I and five other
biblical scholars were there to discuss a revision of The
Living Bible. Ken had produced this work, a paraphrase
of the American Standard Version, specifically to
communicate biblical truth to his children. We all know
what happened. The Living Bible became much more than
an aid for promoting spiritual growth in one family in
Wheaton, Illinois. With Ken’s determination to cast the
Scriptures in language and forms that people actually speak
and understand, it broke down barriers between the sacred
text and modern readers.
Ken Taylor was sharply criticized, and in many circles
The Living Bible was viewed as a sinister project that
not only represented idiosyncratic interpretations of one
individual, but with its loose renderings of treasured texts
also undermined the authority of the Scriptures. For his
part, Ken felt that scholars often were more interested in
preserving formal equivalence in translation than actually
communicating the Scripture’s life-giving message.
Nevertheless, Ken authorized the leaders in his company,
Tyndale House Publishers, to engage evangelical biblical
scholars to address the problems the critics had raised.
We spent that first weekend asking each other what it
was about The Living Bible that gripped the imagination
of millions of people in the English-speaking world, and
exploring how that quality could be preserved even as
we addressed the problems that many—especially biblical
scholars—had with Ken Taylor’s work. The decision was
made to appoint a Bible Translation Committee (BTC) that
included six biblical scholars (general reviewers) to lead the
project. In addition, three scholars would assist in drafting a
base translation of one or more books for the BTC to discuss
and approve. Unlike the original Living Bible, which was a
paraphrase, this New Living Translation (NLT) would be a
true translation, based off the original Hebrew and Greek.
Since all translation involves interpretation, however,
sometimes we on the committee would disagree on how a
passage was rendered; but after a discussion a vote would be
called, and in the end the majority ruled.
Although the translation philosophy underlying the NLT
is generally classified as a dynamic equivalence theory, for
us the question was more practical: If this biblical book were
written today, how would the author have written it? The
question applies both to vocabulary and syntax. Formal
translations (“word for word”) are not necessarily more
accurate, because few words in any source language have
the same semantic range as the words in the target language.
Jesus’ quotation of Deuteronomy 6:5 demonstrates that the
Savior himself had adopted NLT’s translation theory:
Deuteronomy 6:5
You must love the LORD your God
with all your heart (leb),
all your soul (nephesh),
and all your strength (me’od).
Luke 10:27
You must love the LORD your God
with all your heart (kardia),
all your soul (psyche),
all your strength (ischus),
and all your mind (dianoia).
How could Jesus render a statement that had three critical
elements in the Hebrew original with four Greek words?
The answer is obvious when we realize that Hebrew leb
cannot be fully represented with a single word “heart.” In
almost half the occurrences in the Old Testament, the word
represents primarily the seat of thought, rather than the seat
of the will or emotion. Therefore to represent it with only
one word in the target language is to skew the meaning,
which apparently led Jesus to add “with all your mind” at
the end. Here a word for word translation would have been
lexically precise, but inaccurate in meaning.
The first edition of the NLT was formally celebrated in
1996, and a thoroughly reworked version was published in
2004. More than 27 million copies of the NLT have been
sold over the past sixteen years. As a participant in this
project almost from the beginning, I must say there is no
greater honor than to be involved in the communication of
the Word of God, and there is no greater blessing than to
hear the stories of those for whom the Scriptures have come
to life, and actually for whom the Scriptures have brought
them to new life in Christ Jesus.