considering the sensitivity of the material, does translating the bible into english hide its actual meaning?

Question

also, considering the old saying that once a story has been passed through 5 people, it only retains a small percentage of accuracy, should we be taking it as literally as some people claim that we should?

to up the ante: did certain people INTENTIONALLY mistranslate the text in order to manipulate the masses?

Answer 1

Really good question. Some of the depth of meaning is lost in traslation. One of the main reasons is that ancient Greek (koine Greek) and ancient Hebrew do not often translate well into English. For instance, John 1:14 states (in most english traslations) that the word became flesh and lived with/among us. The verb that is translated 'to live' is horribly mistranslated. The verb really means 'to tabernacle,' which does not have a good English cognate. Apparently, the author of John's gospel is equating Jesus with the original taberbacle or tent of meeting in the Exodus story, the place where God met with humankind. There are myraid other examples.

While translation from Greek and Hebrew into English is problematic, the biggest problem is, as you note in your second question, the vast number of discrepancies between the ancient copies of the Biblical text. No one has a copy of any of the original manuscripts - what we have access to are copies of copies of copies, most of which are removed from the original text by at least 150 years. Interestingly, most of the scribes who copied the original material were non-professional scribes who made a lot of mistakes while copying the material, and at times, it appears, they deliberately changed the material (and at times accidentally changed the text). There are more variants (places where the different ancient manuscripts differ with each other) than there are words in the entire New Testament, and as new manuscripts are discovered, the number of variants grows.

For this reason alone (and there are others) it seems difficult to take the text as literally as some do, since we don't have the original texts. Humility and caution should be used before we declare something unmitigated truth.

Answer 2

I would think so, because not everything translates exactly into certain languages. The original text of the bible is probably much different from the one we read today. I don't take it literally cause that would be rather stupid considering it's like the whole thing has been through a huge several thousand year old game of telephone. I don't know if it was deliberately altered to influence anyone, considering they didn't know how much of an influence it would actually have at the time....

Answer 3

If you talk to someone who has done in depth study into the Bible and the languages involved, most of them will tell you it is the translation have been pretty close. Now there is a problem with how a lot of people interpret what they read in the Bible because they want to twist the Bible around to say what they want it to.

Answer 4

I don't think "hide" is the right word, but you should always keep in mind that reading a translation is reading someone's opinion of what was said.

If you really care about what Scripture actually says, you have a couple of options. You can learn the original languages - Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (it's a particular dialect of Greek which I can't remember how to spell at the moment). You can get a Bible with a decent set of footnotes (I prefer the Schofield Study Bible) or you can look for a translation that people who do read the original languages say is good (NASB seems to be the modern choice).

It's worth keeping in mind that, if you believe God authored Scripture, then it seems reasonable to me that He would've picked the exact language He needed to get His point across. It's worth it to study the original languages.

Answer 5

I personally believe that so much gets lost in translation. I believe that the Bible is meant to be a book of guidance and
not literal. The morals of the stories can always fit the times.

Answer 6

I think this is a good question and a fair question. I also believe that the only way to answer this question is to study the bible. And I mean really study it, give it a solid, diligent chance to show you what it is.

I've been doing just that for a decade. My life has been renewed, transformed, I have been changed from within. I believe God can keep the power of His word, no matter how many hundreds of years it has been passed down, how many languages it has been translated into. The power of God in my life, through these years of study, has made me believe that.

Answer 7

Well, your faith came first in the you accepted a God that you could not see.It was written by men when God called them.When I came to the same question about 20 years ago, I decided that I trusted God that he would make sure the right books were picked. I have 7 translations of the Bible. To be sure for yourself, read more translations and see if they are the same as in the King James Version.

Answer 8

It is hard to say how much of the bible is what was originally said. Some languages it is hard to translate into another language. Like Japanese for instance. If you translate something from Japanese it is more likely not going to have the same meaning in English. It also gets changed from translation to translation. It is just like stories handed down from generation to generation. Embellishments are made.

Answer 9

Some times it does. some depends on the state of the materal that it was written on and the weathering. Then the acual understanding of the person/s doing the translation fro one langue to another. just a small missing mark or misinterpatation of a mark will throw off its meaning.

Answer 10

No. Our translation (some of them anyway) comes from the literal grammatical interpretation of the only the oldest Greek and Hebrew texts. The margin for error is almost non-existent.