Some of the sad (bad) history of English Bible translations
English Bible translation has a lot of wonderful history, especially when we look at the early translators (e.g., John Wycliffe and William Tyndale) who risked their lives to defy church leaders who were against the Bible being translated into the ‘common’/‘vulgar’ English language (when a ‘superior’ Latin translation had already been available for around a thousand years).
However those brave actions aren’t the topic of this blog entry, but rather we’ll focus here on some of the unfortunate circumstances and unfortunate decisions that led to the somewhat sad state of our current English translations.
But before we get to that, we first need to go all the way back to Roman times. Although the earliest New Testament manuscripts that we have are all Koine Greek and the Hebrew scriptures (Old Testament) had already been translated into Greek (see the Septuagint), Latin was a major language of the Roman empire, and a Latin translation was commissioned by the Pope in the late 300’s that later came to be called the Latin ‘Vulgate’ (meaning ‘common’/‘ordinary’). This translation was a great asset to the church, but the problem was that over a period of roughly one thousand years, this Latin translation remained highly revered by the church even when the average person in England could no longer understand Latin. (This lead to a period of terrible corruption in the church once the ordinary people no longer had access to the scriptures in their own language and so had to rely purely on what they were taught from the pulpit.)
In the mid 1300’s, John Wycliffe started to translate the Bible into the language of the people (that we now call ‘middle-English’), but unfortunately, this early English translation was done from the Latin not the Koine Greek and Hebrew. Of course, this extra level of indirectness led to a number of deficiencies in the Wycliffe translation, and particularly to the invention of name ‘James’ (which was probably pronounced as two syllables at the time: ‘Yames’) for the Greek name ‘Ἰάκωβος’ (Yakōbos), although in passages where Wycliffe realised that it was talking about the Old Testament character, he corrected it to ‘Jacob’ (pronounced ‘Yakob’). This is discussed more here and here. The saddest part of the ‘Yames’ error is that it wasn’t corrected by the succeeding English translations and ‘James’ now has even become a common English boy’s name (even though no Biblical character had a name even slightly resembling that).
William Tyndale (in the 1500’s now) changed Wycliffe’s spelling for names with many of them now starting with the letter ‘I’, hence the beginning of Jude 1:1: ‘Iudas the servaunt of Iesus Christ the brother of Iames.’ That spelling went all the way through to the original 1611 King James Bible, but by the 1769 printing (along with hundreds of corrections, and dropping the ‘apocrypha’), all those ‘I’s at the beginning of names were changed back to ‘J’s.
The next sad event is simply an accident of history. Language change, although it was slowed down after the invention of the printing press and the resultant stabilisation of spelling, is continuous (and ongoing even now). English is a West Germanic Language, but also heavily influenced by Latin and French. As the (originally Germanic) ‘J’ (pronounced like English ‘Y’) changed its pronunciation, English words like ‘Iesus’ ended up as ‘Jesus’ even though both the Hebrew and the Greek names began with the ‘Y’ sound.
In terms of spelling, the first letter of a word is quite vital. You can often get your spell-checker to complete a word for you if you know how it begins. So sadly, we now have a situation in English Bibles, where the first letter of many, many names (starting with ‘J’) is wrong. If you visit Israel, you’ll notice that all Hebrew speakers will start the names of those places with a ‘Y’ sound.
What’s more, a number of Hebrew names (like ‘Ishmael’, ‘Isaac’, ‘Israel’, and ‘Isaiah’) have a ‘Y’ (that ended up being dropped completely) preceding the ‘I’/‘i’, so English speakers sadly get those names quite wrong as well.
Then names like ‘Isaiah’ (and ‘Jeremiah’, ‘Uzziah’, and many others) have an ‘i’ in the middle that should be a ‘y’. The transliterated Hebrew is more like ‘Yeshayahu’, and then‘Yah’ (the shortened form of God’s name) can more easily be recognised inside the name. (The situation in Spanish and many other languages is even worse, where the ‘h’ gets changed to ‘s’ so it becomes even harder to recognise a ‘Yah’ on the end of ‘Isaías’. Not all languages have an ‘h’, so sometimes changes like that are unavoidable—other times they’re because of a prestigious intermediary language.)
The sad result of this cacophony of mistakes, differences between languages, and change with the passage of time, means that sadly the proper names in our English Bibles are often woefully distant from those peoples’ actual names. This can lead to some unfortunate results:
- A disconnection from the Jewishness of the Bible. Did you know that Matthew’s Jewish name ‘Matityahu’ has a ‘Yah’ in it (and means ‘gift of Yahweh’)? (Our name ‘Matthew’ comes from his Greek name via his Latin name.) Did you know that former Israeli prime-minister ‘Yitzhak Rabin’ was named after ‘Isaac’? Even the name ‘Jesus’ doesn’t sound very Jewish because it’s not. Try ‘Yeshua’ instead (and it’s exactly the same name as ‘Joshua’ in the Bible).
- It’s not as easy as it could be to recognise ‘Yah’ in the middle of a number of Bible names. (The OET Literal Version tries to superscript them to help the reader notice them, e.g., see Matthew 1.)
Robert Hunt, November 2024.
Street and door-to-door evangelist, public school chaplain, prison Bible-study leader, Bible teacher/preacher, and professional Bible translator.
Our emotional attachment to Bible translations
One thing that’s become increasingly apparent to me as I’ve worked on the Open English Translation of the Bible (OET), is how much that Western Protestant Christians are emotionally attached to their favourite Bible translation(s). (This likely applies to other groups as well, but I can’t speak for them.) Despite being mono-lingual in most cases, they’ll tell you that their Bibles feel accurate, but of course, that’s an argument from emotions rather than from logic or linguistics.
Firstly there’s the KJB-only movement—a group (particularly in the USA) that claims that the King James Bible (a 400+ year old British English translation that received hundreds of corrections until 1769 and still contains some mistakes) is somehow more perfect than any modern English translation. Extremist holders of this view even believe that missionaries must teach this out-of-date and difficult-to-understand English all around the world. We find those positions so ridiculous that we don’t bother refuting them, but others have done that very well. All we want to say here is that we find KJB-onlyism to be an emotional attachment to a particular (old) English Bible translation without any logical reasoning—more a case of religiosity than reasoned God-following.
Secondly, many people just trust their denomination or pastor about their Bible translation. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the expertise of most pastors isn’t in linguistics and translation, nor (by definition, since pastor means ‘shepherd’) is it in sharing the Christian message with unchurched people (evangelism) who don’t necessarily know all the Christian jargon (‘Christianese’) yet.
Thirdly, most English Bibles are published by large multi-million dollar businesses with marketing departments. These organisations are very involved in advertising, including emails, videos, and other solicitation where they often claim their translation is best in class. Every single one of them knows that no Biblical character is named ‘James’ (just ask any European what their Bibles call that book), but marketing departments don’t want to rock the boat sales by making those kinds of corrections.
Finally, there’s very many of us (yes, we were exactly the same ourselves) who would read about the great earthquake in Rev 16:18 without ever noticing or thinking about how such a destructive event could be called ‘great’ (as we mostly use the word today, like a ‘great dinner’). Or those who can quote John 3:16 from memory without ever giving a single thought to why it usually begins with the word ‘For’. Or those who can easily sing Great is thy faithfulness without ever realising that those words are in the wrong order for modern speech.
At this point, most people tell me that the Bible is poetic. Yes, some of it certainly is, but the great majority of it is not poetry but narrative. So no, the reason it sounds ‘quaint’ is not that the Hebrew or Greek was quaint, but simply because the English translations that we get emotionally attached to still have much old-fashioned use of English words and phrases—many times following the original languages too closely instead of translating into our language, e.g., with phrases like son of God instead of the more up-to-date God’s son.
So yes, we’re aware that the Open English Translation will likely take a decade or so to make any major mark on the Bible market due to emotional attachment and other factors (not to mention that it won’t be finished for at least another two years). But we’re aiming for the 2030’s generation who’ll be looking for a reliable Bible translation in the language that they actually speak.
Robert Hunt, October 2024.
Street and door-to-door evangelist, public school chaplain, prison Bible-study leader, Bible teacher/preacher, and professional Bible translator.
Which ‘word’?
In the beginning was ‘the word’ (Jn 1:1a in many Bibles). Which word was it? ‘Hello!’ ‘Create!’ ‘Big Bang!’ No, that’s two words!
What about carrying a thick book around under your arm that’s labelled ‘God’s Word’? Shouldn’t that be called ‘God’s Words’? Surely there’s a lot of words in those 2,000 odd pages?
If you grew up in and around churches and Bibles like me, then you probably didn’t think about those questions either? In fact, it’s only now that I’m in my later years that I’ve even thought twice about it. We can be so used to speaking in our own Christianese dialect that we forget that normal people don’t speak like that.
The Greek word λόγος (logos—but not the plural of logo) does NOT mean ‘word’ as the word ‘word’ is normally used in modern English. It would be usually better translated as ‘saying’, ‘message’, ‘discourse’, ‘statement’, ‘account’, ‘address’, ‘matter’, ‘idea’, ‘report’, ‘presentation’, or similar. Just read some of the Greek lexicons (for Strong’s #3056) and you’ll quickly discover that.
Now it’s true that the mother of a the rebellious teenager might tell him/her: “I’d like to have a word with you about the language that you’ve been using.” Or someone might ask, “What’s the word on the street about which Bible translation is best?” So yes, some of that older usage still lingers on in certain contexts. But would your president or prime-minister give ‘a word’ to the press about the new tax policy? Probably not.
The Bible is still often called ‘The Word of God’. That’s simply archaic English. The word ‘word’ in our English nearly always refers to these groups of letters on this page separated by spaces. It’s time that God started speaking our language in English Bibles. At least ‘The Message’ translation gave some thought as to how modern readers talk (and that was some two decades ago now).
There’s a lot of other hang-over vocabulary that only Christians now use. For example, have you been delivered from your evil habits? Talking to a gang member on the street, he’s not likely to tell you that he’s hoping his brother will be delivered out of prison this month. In mainstream English we still use ‘delivered’ for pizzas and babies, but no longer for chains and prisons. Being delivered is retained in other contexts as a form of church jargon—talking like someone out of a previous century. Nowadays in real life, we are more likely to use ‘set free’ for prisons and sinful habits.
Churches have ‘Seeker services’ but when did you last ask someone in the supermarket what they were seeking there in the aisles? No. we use ‘looking for’ now in mainstream English.
And don’t start me talking about what an epistle is. I’m too busy writing letters—no actually, I moved on past letters to mostly emails over a decade ago. So you certainly won’t find any epistles in the OET (and probably not any psalms or testaments either).
The Open English Translation is a new, exciting, modern-English translation designed especially to make it easier for you to share the good message to those on the street. Oh, and did I say it’s provocative (as in provoking you to think as you read your Bible)? Join us and help.
Robert Hunt, August 2023.
Street and door-to-door evangelist, public school chaplain, prison Bible-study leader, Bible teacher/preacher, and professional Bible translator.
What’s that ‘for’?
The most memorised Bible verse in the world was John 3:16 from the KJB: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (See this verse and other translations here.)
So here’s my first question: What does the conjunction ‘For’ mean in that sentence? You see, I don’t start sentences with ‘For’ in my New Zealand English dialect (except perhaps in the short sentence ‘For what?’ where it’s a preposition). Perhaps it means ‘Because’ in John 3:16, but if we substitute that in, then the sentence sounds wrong out of context because it seems to need to connect to something (which it actually should—it should be connected to the previous verses). However, ‘Because’ does seem to be the correct modern replacement for ‘For’.
So now my second question: In your dialect of English, how often do you start sentences with ‘For’? I’ve been listening carefully for over a year now and have never heard or read it in that time. (Please contact me with the sentence and the context if you hear someone say it.) Yet ‘For’ is still there even in many modern English Bible translations, e.g., this fairly modern one. (Search the page for the capitalised conjunction ‘For’ and for the conjunction ‘for’ after a comma. I counted seven in John 3 in NET.)
So here’s the rub: If so-called ‘modern’ English Bible translations frequently use the conjunction ‘For’, but if it’s never/rarely used in our speech, then the conclusion surely must be that those Bibles are not translated into MY language! (I discovered this when talking to people on the street about the Bible and finding out how strange it sounded to them.)
The Open English Translation of the Bible aims to translate the Hebrew and Greek scriptures into the language that we actually speak.
The Readers’ Version (still in ‘draft’ status) starts the verse with ‘Because’, because v16 is connected back to v14-15.
Because in that same way, God loves the people of the world enough to cause his only son to be born and to give him to the world, so that everyone who believes this will not die, but will live forever. (John 3:16 OET-RV)
The Literal Version aims to show all the words that are there in the original language:
For/Because thus the god loved the world, so_that he_gave the the only_begotten son, in_order_that everyone which believing in him may_ not _perish, but may_be_having eternal life. (John 3:16 OET-LV)
Robert Hunt, December 2023.
Street and door-to-door evangelist, public school chaplain, prison Bible-study leader, Bible teacher/preacher, and professional Bible translator.