Holy, holy, holy
From A collection of short essays. Project references reflect the source essay; see our current status.
That’s used in a hymn to describe God, but what does it actually mean to say that ‘God is holy’? Or even ‘God sits on his holy throne’? ‘Clean’? ‘Spotless’? ‘Honest’? ‘Sinless’? ‘Perfect’? Perhaps. It’s not easy.
What about ‘the glorious gospel’ in 1 Tim 1:11? What does ‘glorious’ mean in that context? ‘Glowing white’? ‘Shiny’? Probably not.
These are very difficult words and concepts to translate into modern English, and even when church attenders read more traditional translations and sing at church, they often use words like ‘holy’, and ‘glory’ without being able to explain what they actually mean in the contexts that they’re used. (Try asking a few people like we have.)
The Open English Translation Readers’ Version aims to translate difficult words and concepts into modern-English words and phrases that our readers can understand. This depends on us being able to determine what the writer was probably intending to communicate, and fortunately there’s a lot of information available to help us understand the probable options.
However, this doesn’t come without potential problems. Other ‘easy-to-read’ versions (we’re not talking about limited-vocabulary translations or translations for children) like the very popular New Living Translation (NLT, a translation which we often recommend to others) show some of the problems with this area of scriptural interpretation. Often the NLT and similar translations seem very clear and easy-to-understand because they’ve selected one of the possible meanings and used it. That’s wonderful if the selection was indeed what the writer intended, but sadly, we can never know that for sure now. So actually, in practice we have to weigh clarity against accuracy and transparency.
But back to our first statements, terms like ‘holy God’ and ‘glorious gospel’ aren’t really helpful either if a large percentage of readers can’t explain what they mean. So the OET will strive to translate these terms into modern-English at the risk of being criticised.
Another feature of the OET is version numbers—one on each ‘book’, plus one for the entire publication (currently around v0.48). Even after we reach v1.00, we still expect to make revisions for a year or two (or more), as readers help us to keep making improvements (and corrections). Please don’t hesitate to join us.
Robert Hunt, August 2024