Link?

Thanks Diana! I appreciate the goal that the editors of these translations have, and it is always a challenge to balance the cultural circumstances of one culture against another in translation. I’m glad these translations have been a blessing to you, and for that I give thanks! I’m not really saying that gender-neutral translations have absolutely no place in our society, but like you I feel they make translation decisions that compromise faithfulness to the original text.

How does your wife know which words in the Bible mean something other than the literal word? Sus

@@starliteinn5397 what do you mean by a "literal word"?

I am also on lesson 25 of my Greek grammar. (It happens to be the last chapter for me though). I wish you good courage in finishing!

@@jacques3402 I finished the participles, those were a nightmare; subjuntuve, infinitive and imperative (chapters 25, 26 and 27) are way more easy. Thank for the encouragment, it's a great achievement for both of us.

Keep up the great work!

KJV has many problems if you know Greek

@@roberttrevino62800 I guess the translators of The KJV didn’t know Greek.

@@church7180 I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic or not lol

Well said Mike!

The mic was under my shirt in this which caused problems. Thanks for pointing it out! I won’t do that again.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. The key point to take away from any translation is that there is no perfect translation. They all have problems. So the question is, which set of problems do you want to introduce into the translation? Do you want the reader to have a closer English to the Greek (and so more difficult to read) or would you like to make it easier to read but obscure the original meaning more? My comment indicates I would opt for the former over the latter, but that doesn't mean there is no place for either. In fact, the comment I made assumes that I'm teaching, where I have the opportunity to give the explanation. If I was doing it in a translation, there is a place to add footnotes to give further explanation of difficult passages. So rather than saying that formal equivalence obscures the meaning of the passage, I'd say our own ignorance of the original culture obscures the meaning of the text. A more literal translation simply allows that ignorance to stand rather than addressing it by smoothing out the meaning through interpretation. Finally, I agree that the target culture shapes the translation, and that English has a richer history than most when it comes to translations. So in a culture without that history, we'd have to make a different set of decisions to English. I recommend the book I mentioned at the end if you'd like to read more on this subject.

​@@bma Well, I do want to make clear that I think you explained some helpful principles to consider in this video. The passages in Proverbs 5 and Psalm 34 really help highlight the kinds of things one needs to keep in mind when translating. Psalm 34 is especially important, because prophecy or any kind of text that will be quoted or referenced in other parts of the Bible need to be given special care. How we translate them will impact how the parallels are translated or understood. In some of the translation work I have been part of, we had an issue concerning the number seven in Proverbs 26:25. Should we keep the number itself in the translation or translate the meaning that the number symbolizes? We found that the language community was confused by the number itself, but I argued we should keep it in so as to bolster the thread of how the number seven is used throughout Scripture, which underpins what the number means in Matthew 18:21-22. I suppose I am approaching the question from a standpoint of general principles of translating gendered language into any language, whereas you are specifically talking about English translations. And that's fine. So, sure, in contexts where teaching is readily available, teachers or other resources can fill in that gap in knowledge of the original language and culture to help readers understand literal translations better. But if a language community does not have those resources available, I would be reluctant to choose a translation that requires such teaching (or if the translation is an audio translation for an oral culture or a video translation for a sign language, "footnotes" are going to be more difficult). But I'm still not sold on literal translations preserving more of the original meaning, at least not always. It really depends on the target language. When translating πάντας as a substantive into English, we can preserve both the primary meaning ("all men") and the secondary - and likely intended - meaning ("all people"; although, even "all" is likely being used with a secondary sense, which I think you touched on in this video). Other languages may not align both primary and secondary meanings, so a translation like "all men" might only align in the primary sense and thus be understood as "all adult human males (and no others)." This would, then, obscure the intended meaning of the original for the target audience. You say that it is not formal equivalence that obscures the meaning but our own ignorance of the original culture [and language]. I don't see much difference. Formal equivalence *can* - though not always - obscure the original meaning *because of* such ignorance. (Don't get me wrong; certainly dynamic equivalence can obscure or lose meaning as well. It's just that I see the comment online a lot that "literal" translations are "more faithful" to the text, and I often want to push back a bit against that.) Of course, teaching and informational resources are a great way to bridge that gap, but the problem can be addressed to an extent within the translation itself. Having said all of that, and probably more than I needed to, I would say that any time we can keep the form of the original and be "literal" in our translation and still successfully transfer the intended meaning and force of the original, we should do that.

I just remembered something else I meant to say. I agree that dynamic equivalence - for example, in John 12:32 - can obscure the meaning of the original in the sense that you would miss the fact that Greek uses masculine words in the way that they do and the implications that may have for how Greek speakers in the first century categorized the world. But if that isn't the point of the passage, then we don't lose out on something terribly important, at least not for that passage. If that concept plays into a larger point that a teacher wants to bring out of the text or multiple texts, then the teacher who knows the original language can still do that.

I agree, these modern versions are just a mess

I appreciate your thoughts here. Yes, I agree I think especially for younger people masculine references are heard as masculine and not processed as generic.

FWIW, I understand what they are trying to do, and I sympathise with the cause, but I tend to prefer translations that are focused more on communicating what the original communicates even if I have to work harder to understand it. But that isn’t necessarily going to be helpful for all people. I agree, there are always compromises in translation and there is nothing we can do about that except learn the language to avoid having to make the compromise. 😜

Until the English language changes to have singular gender neutral words there is going to be a mismatch and even then danger of mistranslation. Of course we could refer to people as "it" but that would not be right. The use of plural instead of singular tends to depersonalise some very important texts. As a not very competent student of biblical hebrew and greek I prefer the NASB for its literality and ease of relation to the original languages. Sadly revisions of the NASB seem to be getting further from the original languages.

Greek tends to differ between "all" which is contextually driven and can refer to groups rather than individuals and "every man" which means all individual humans. We don't tend to make that distinction in English in the same way and so it gets ambiguous in translations. Thanks for watching!

No it doesn’t. It means “man” in the sense of a “mankind” . Ανδρός also means man or husband. You cannot say that Jesus is the “son of human”. He is the “son of man”

@@roberttrevino62800 I agree with what you say about the word άνθρωπος in its biblical use! But in casual speech, how would you translate the phrase " He or she is a human being"? And I would also like to point out that ανδρός is the genitive case of the word ανήρ. So ανήρ means man or husband.

I’m not sure what you’re asking about here, but what’s so wrong with the Masoretic text? It’s far more reliable than the LXX. I’m not saying its without problems, but the OT writings were not written in Greek, and the difference between the MT and DSS is not as great as the difference between the MT and LXX. Thanks for watching and commenting!

Given how the mainline churches continue to cater to contemporary culture, it's little surprise that their favored Bible translation would do the same.