It’s taken a good long while to get to where we are with my forthcoming translation of the New Testament called The Second Testament. I began in 2019, a little more than three years ago, and just this week I sent in the corrections for the PDF of The Second Testament.
I’m beginning to feel a bound version. I can’t wait.
I will occasionally be posting about my translation and do my best to anticipate and answer some questions.
On work days, I spent 3-4 hours translating. Often it was a M-F work week. Some days I could do 100 verses and other days 30 or so. Details can be all-consuming. An example: Many verses in the Synoptic Gospels are identical or close to a parallel Gospel. I worked hard to make them identical in English when they were identical in English. I don’t know that other translations do this. (In fact, some don’t.) Another example: I did my best to keep one English term to one Greek term, and it’s not possible. However, I tried. So, if I discovered an English term just couldn’t work for, say it’s 30th appearance in the NT, I’d go through the entire NT on that word and change them all to an English term that worked better. Which reworking the whole is fine for a word that occurs seven times, but lots of work for one that occurs 85x!
The Gospel of Matthew was first so I translated the whole book for nothing but the experience of working out the theory. Then I started all over at Matthew 1:1 and redid it all – then from there I moved straight through the New Testament. It took about 16 months or so. Then I started all over again, reading the Greek text and then my translation and editing as I went along – again, checking especially for consistencies. I got dizzy shifting my head from Greek text to Second Testament translation, but at least it was all on one large computer screen.
I did not read the entire translation in English from start to finish until recently. That, too, led to more consistencies and a few changes.
Vocabulary choice was a constant decision. You may already know that my template for The Second Testament was John Goldingay’s The First Testament, though he’s translating Hebrew and Aramaic and I am translating Greek. Not the same. So I couldn’t just use his vocabulary choices. At times, yes; at other times, no. One can translate the Hebrew word torah as instruction but one can’t translate the Greek term nomos with “instruction.” You can wait to see what I do with that choice.
You may also know, since I’ve said it a few times on this site, that I avoided religiously loaded terms in the Christian tradition. This may surprise some readers, especially when they get to cherished passages. I don’t, for instance, use “justify.” I hope my choice will jar you and push you to rethink how we think about that Greek term (dikaio—word group).
Early on I compared my translation with others: NRSV, NIV, CEB, NT Wright, DB Hart. But I quit doing that early on because it complicated what I was doing. What was I doing? Trying to give readers a feel for how the Greek text works, making it English of course, but avoiding finding natural dynamic equivalents. Our English translations are far more paraphrastic than most of us know. I told one of my friends that the translation I was offering is clunky and he offered the term chunky. Yes, both. It will not always read smoothly, but that is because the Greek does not operate the way English does.
When it comes to my lexica – or Greek to English dictionaries – I quickly gave up on using the standard NT lexicon, BDAG (Bauer, Danker, Arndt, Gingrich) because I sensed it was doing its best to make the Greek terms work for our developed, Christian, theological language. So I spent far more time with other lexica; Liddell, Scott and Jones, and the new Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, and then by a stroke of fortune, the arrival of the Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Yes, at times I consulted Nida-Louw as well.
Over all I want readers to get a feel for the Greek styles of the authors of the NT, and that’s not easy. But Matthew does not sound like Mark, Mark does not sound like Luke, Luke does not sound like John, and John does not sound like Paul, and Paul does not sound like Hebrews, and Hebrews does not sound like James, and James does not sound like Jude or Peter or John. I get why our English translations do what they do, but why do we have to make each distinct author sound like some boilerplate single style of English? And who decided translations are to use English vocabulary at the 12th or 10th grade or below? I dare say Luke, the Pastorals, and Hebrews are wounded when we don’t let their higher styles and vocabulary choices be what they were.
When it comes to the relationship of The Second Testament to other English translations, I’d like mine to be seen more as a bee in their bonnets than a fly stuck in their ointments.
I hope you are surprised at times, and I hope also you wonder if you have ever read some verse in the New Testament! When you decide to open your NIV or NRSV or ESV or CEB and compare it to The Second Testament I have accomplished my purpose. It is designed to supplement your favorite translations. I hope it will become a good study Bible for you because it will surely slow you down.
Publication date right now is June 6.
I'm very excited about this! I have The Bible for Everyone and enjoy the Goldingay's First Testament and Wright's Kingdom New Testament. But they don't seem to go together stylistically. I have a feeling your translation will pair nicely.
Sounds like you took an ad fontes/back to the sources approach, no matter to where that led. Looks exciting.
You wrote, "I hope you are surprised at times".. Question: Was there anything that, despite your years of experience, surprised you or stood out during the project?