Thursday, November 29, 2012

Revelation In Translation

Probably the most important thing I learned as a teen-aged Christian was this:  Get yourself a good Bible. Good, as in:  a Bible you can understand. For, once upon a time, among Pentecostals (like me), there was this idea that the only REAL Bible was the King James Version, dropped straight from Heaven on an eagerly-awaiting English-speaking flock. And if you were a faithful believer, you just had to learn to      
English: King James IC
English: King James IC (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
put up with find the beauty in the "thees" and "thous" of the King's English of 1611.

I know that the picture of fundamentalist/conservative Christians is one of hide-bound, stuck-in-the-past reactionaries. That's true in some cases, but the Pentecostal pastors who taught me were really quite revolutionary compared to the stereotypes. For one thing, I grew up in the local Church of the Foursquare Gospel, which has always ordained women, and I experienced first-hand ministry under women as pastors. At a time when "Christian Rock" (anyone remember that?) was controversial, my pastors favored it--not that they spun any Larry Norman records. But they never called it "the devil's counterfeit"; to them, it was like a missionary learning the language of the people he/she lived among. And, as for the new Bible translations that began making their way into the pews, my pastors were all for them:  The Living Bible, Good News For Modern Man, The Amplified Bible. . . anything that made Scripture more easily understandable.

My first non-KJV Bible was the Good News version, aka Today's English Version. Then I picked up a New International Version; and then, the Amplified, New American Standard, New King James and English Standard versions. Today, the NIV, NAS and ESV translations are the ones I use most. Out of these came another lesson:  It's important to compare translations before you grab onto a doctrine.

This matters for me because, from time to time, I get to fill a pulpit. And there have been plenty of times when I've had a bang-up sermon from a striking text run through my mind. . . until I researched that text in two or three translations. Suddenly the text changed, and I couldn't support the main idea. 

Example? Well, how about this one, quoted frequently by old-time Pentecostals:  "It's the anointing that breaks the yoke." That's from Isaiah 10:27 in the King James version:  "The yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing." Yet here are some other translations:
  • "and the yoke shall be destroyed by reason of fatness" (American Standard)
  • "And destroyed hath been the yoke, because of prosperity" (Young's Literal)
  • "and the yoke will be broken because of the fat" (English Standard)
(Translations courtesy of Rick Meyers' e-Sword software)

It's easy to see where the idea of "anointing" comes in; but newer translations make clear that Isaiah is speaking, not of supernatural empowerment, but of freedom (for Judah, from Assyria) and blessing and increase as a result.

Moral of story? If you can't support your "revelation" through two or three translations, maybe you should simply set it aside.
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