I was asked a very good question after preaching last night (a sermon I forgot to record and thus I’ll be forced to put on a suit and preach it to an empty auditorium some night this week). In the sermon, I made the point that a certain word could have been translated better. It was hardly the first time I’d made a statement like that in a sermon, and I’m always careful to say why and how the translation is lacking (it’s critical for a preacher to “show your work,” to use a math term, so that the audience knows what you mean and why you believe what you do). Nevertheless, the question afterward came to me:
People spend their whole lives learning languages and translations, and they do that for a living: Why do preachers always find the mistakes that they missed?
To be fair, that’s a paraphrasing of the question, and it makes it sound more critical than it actually was. Still, that’s the basic idea and it’s a reasonable thing to ask: Preachers do, often, say “this word isn’t translated well; it ought to say ____ instead.” Who are we to make that call over someone who does translations for a living?
My answer is this: 99% of all mainstream translations are fine. Sometimes they’re better than fine; sometimes they’re great. It’s only ever the 1% of the time that gets called out, and even then, it’s rarely the case where a preacher will say “this is terrible!” (the ones who don’t actually know anything but who just want to sound smart/superior will do that, but not the sincere preachers). Often it’s just the case that a word as it was used whenever the translation was done (a hundred, two hundred, even five hundred years ago) isn’t used the same way today, or perhaps its meaning has evolved and changed over the years, or has fallen out of usage entirely. More often than not, however, the times when a preacher calls out a poorly translated word, it’s simply because the translator chose a word that might have been technically correct, but a different—also correct—word could have fit the context better.
And that’s the other thing to keep in mind: Typically, the people who work on translations are focusing only on getting the simplest, most accurate word on the page. The tradeoff is sometimes the word that is chosen, while it might not be “wrong,” it might be vague and leave the teaching from the text too open to misinterpretation. A translator’s job is not to interpret the text but to translate it from Hebrew or Greek into English. It’s the job of the teacher to take those words and make them make sense to the audience. Sometimes there are translations that were undertaken with the goal of interpreting the text (offering a “dynamic equivalence,” as it’s called). This is not what I want out of my Bible. I don’t want to read a Bible filled with verses that were not translated but were summarized. I don’t want to know what the translators thinks Moses or Paul or John, etc, meant when they said what they said; I just want to know what they said. I’ll figure out the meaning for myself. Those sort of translations only create a second barrier for the reader to have to get through to understand the Bible.
I’ll gladly take a translation that is 99% good and 1% the result of a translator just focusing on words and not context.
The reason I talk a lot about words and translations in my sermons is because we don’t all use the same translation, no translation is perfect, and all of them are imperfect in different ways. The word of God is perfect. It is inspired. It came from the mind of God to the pen of men. The translations from those ancient texts into our modern, leather-bound books are remarkably accurate, all things considered. If I can use my preaching to clarify things, even just a little bit, to help the audience better understand the Word of God, I will do it. That’s why, every now and then, I will say “your translation may say ‘for’ but a better translation would be ‘into’.”
~ Matthew