Translations Can Be Painful

I grew up on the King James Version. It was the only Bible in our church. As grade schoolers we could read it, relish it, and memorize it. So much was its cadence and vocabulary ours that we learned to pray in the KJV English. Some people slipped into the KJV when they were taking about God or the Bible.

As a high schooler I bought and began to read the NASB. My copy, which I took off the shelf recently, had “Galations” in the header once or twice. My youth pastor, who endeared himself to both Kris and me, liked that I was reading but asked me not to bring it to church because it might bother others. So it did. Some were pained by my choice to read it and talk about it.

Some of our friends were in the Mainline churches so they were reading the RSV, which received the scare tactic, in my Baptist circles, that it was produced by the “ecumenical National Council of Churches,” which evidently meant “Beware.”

My father at times read the translation of J.B. Phillips. I don’t know if he took it to his Sunday School class or not, but I know one had to be careful with the looseness of that translation. I first heard the word “paraphrase” when connected to this translation.

One more from that era. The Good News Bible came out, was widely vilified for “taking out the blood,” but it was selling like crazy. So I added it to my shelf of books. I only later learned the Eugene Nida theory of translation was behind it and, from that perspective, was consistent and considered a success. Surely the translations and publishers found the experiences of critics to be painful.

In my college days, I often heard people refer to The Amplified Bible so I looked at it in bookstores but learned from my teachers that adding one word to another is not translating. “Decide,” one of my profs said aloud in class. What the Amplified Bible provided readers was alternative translations to the KJV. At times I heard people who had no capacity at all to read the languages of the Bible say “I prefer this word” from the Amplified Bible. That, however, is not how to choose which word best translates a Greek word. It’s not about what we like but what is most accurate.

Those pre-college days were KJV with warnings about anything else. Pain on those who tried much more than at-home reading of other translations.

In college the NIV began to appear. First a handy copy of John, then the whole NT in clothbound, which I bought and read through voraciously, marking it up. The NIV, published by a recognizably safe evangelical publisher (Zondervan) and translated by a team of recognizably safe translators, a couple of whom were at Calvin (who had a display I saw at the seminary), broke the thick tie to the KJV. For most of us. Some were furious. Some knew God spoke KJV and that’s why they prayed in the KJV. The NIV got hammered in pulpits and the lay folks went home and read the NIV. In effect, by the NIV we were set free to read the Bible in a modern translation. I never again returned to the KJV.

One of my college professors told me he liked the RSV the most. So I began to read it, and then on a summer short-term mission trip in England I found a beautiful leather and goldened RSV at a used book shop, bought it and it became my Bible for the last two years of my college and for my seminary years. I became an RSV fan. I still refer to this Bible. It had the advantage of being big and black and very Bible-ish looking. And I had gobs of notes, all done with a micro-thin Rotring fountain pen.

Then the whole NIV came out, I bought a copy and used it – and had a hard time deciding which English translation to read so I read both. By the time I was in seminary few were stuck in the KJV mode, and most seminary peers were using either the NASB or the NIV. A few mainline-catechized peers had the RSV, and I noticed that a prof or two of mine used the RSV in class.

The NRSV came out, some RSV fans (with the “initials” Wayne Grudem, John Piper) did not at all like the inclusive language of the NRSV, requested and acquired permission to edit the RSV into the ESV, and there you have it.

In speaking, I use the translation my audience is most familiar with. All these newer translations are reliable, but if I get to choose, I use the NRSV.

All this to say this: every one of these translations got itself in trouble.

So, when the Norwegians – bet you didn’t expect that shift – discovered a new translation, the receptions were not all charitable.  CT has an article about it, by Ken Chitwood. Here’s a top example:

And yet, across Norway, news that a forthcoming Bible translation will replace gå fortapt (get lost) with gå til grunne (perish) has roused strong feelings.

“Why change something that is completely understandable?” said one woman in Alta, a town on a fjord on the northern coast.

“Such judgment day and sulphur speeches do not belong in a modern, inclusive church—at least not during funerals,” said an Oslo woman on Facebook. “It adds stones to the burden for relatives.”
But the editors of the forthcoming Bible—commissioned by the Norwegian Bible Society and scheduled for publication in 2024—say they are not surprised. Receiving criticism is part of the process.
“It’s always a controversial thing to translate the Bible,” said Jorunn Økland, a biblical and gender studies scholar on the editorial team. “Whatever you do, it’s going to be controversial.”

One issue is that it was not that long ago that a fresh Norwegian translation had appeared, many liked it, and had taken root.

Many Norwegians also really like the translation the Bible Society published in 2011. For that edition, biblical scholars and language experts teamed up with renowned authors, who are considered the finest “stylists of modern Norwegian,” including Karl Ove Knausgård, Hanne Ørstavik, and Jon Fosse. The translation became a bestseller the year after publication.

“Its stroke of genius was how it underscored that in a time of increasing secularization, the Bible isn’t out of touch with society,” Økland said. “People may not go to church, but they still consider the Bible their own.”

Despite its popularity, the translation also received criticism, especially from church leaders and scholars. In the past 10 years, editors have collected more than 800 critical comments to consider in a revision.

In 2021, the Norwegian Bible Society tasked a committee to start working on an updated edition. As they started to lay the groundwork for revisions, the editors calculated they would need six or seven years. The Bible Society said they had one.

One way to deal with the compressed timeline, according to Økland, was to forgo a formal consultation process. Instead, the editors published drafts of their work in the fall of 2022 and waited for people to react.

“We invite the reactions as part of the democratic process. It’s a wonderful thing about how we work in Norway,” Økland said.

They got the feedback they were looking for. Responses were swift and vociferous. While some of the readers of Norway’s two Christian newspapers—Dagen and Vårt Land—praised the revisions, many objected to specific choices in very strong terms.

No one agrees with all the choices made in any translation. You should sit in a seminary classroom when a Greek or Hebrew text is being carefully parsed and examined. Lots of suggestions about translations; not a few criticisms as well. One of my former colleagues at Northern loved to put translations to the test in his class.
Which is where I want to land today: if there is a pervasive problem with translations it is familiarity. People “know” their Bibles because they have read them. Their translations are their Bibles. Changes disrupt, and the bigger the change the most disruptive. Familiarity breeds resistance to change, and resistance often morphs into fear and name calling. One must accept such resistances.

But it’s painful. What the Norwegian translations are experiencing folds itself into the decision to publish a fresh translation. We need the translations and we expect the feedback, and when The Second Testament comes out this summer, you’ll be kind to me, won’t you?! (Thank you.)

But isn’t the purpose of a new translation precisely to change things? To ask people to re-think the familiar? To experience a shift in understanding in order to understand God’s message to us today in a fresh way?

I think so.