Translation, manuscripts and the choices behind the words on your page
Why Your Bible Reads the Way It Does
No original of any book of the Bible survives. What survives is copies, thousands of them, which do not all agree, and translations of the copies, which do not agree either. None of that is a secret and none of it is a scandal. It is the ordinary history of an ancient text, and a reader who knows the three or four biggest decisions behind their Bible can read any version with open eyes.
Lesson 12 of 12 · The words on the page
The Bible in your hands is a translation of a text reconstructed from copies. Both steps involved decisions, made by people, most of them careful and all of them fallible, and the decisions are known. The copies differ in small ways and in a few famous ones; the translations differ wherever a Hebrew or Greek word has more than one honest English equivalent, which is often. So the way to read a translation is to read two, and to treat every place where they differ not as an error in one of them but as a decision to be understood. This reader carries six English Bibles side by side for exactly that reason, and four essays on how they came to be.
No original survives
The Bible tells its own story of a text lost and rewritten. Jeremiah dictated a scroll to Baruch, Baruch read it in the temple, and it reached the king in winter.
When Jehudi had read three or four columns, the king cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was in the brazier, until all the scroll was consumed in the fire that was in the brazier. — Jeremiah 36:23 · WEB
Read the comment on The King Who Cut Up the Scroll
Cut with a penknife and burned, three or four columns at a time, until the whole scroll was gone. Then the word came again.
“Take again another scroll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first scroll, which Jehoiakim the king of Judah has burned. — Jeremiah 36:28 · WEB
Read the comment on The King Who Cut Up the Scroll
Take another scroll and write it all again. The Jeremiah you have is the second scroll, or a copy of a copy of it. That is the condition of every book in the Bible. The autograph, the sheet the author wrote on, is gone in every case, and what exists is a tradition of copying that runs, for the Old Testament, from scribes in the Judean desert before Christ to the great codices of the tenth century, and for the New from papyrus scraps of the second century to the parchment books of the fourth. The essay on the Masoretic Text on this site tells the Old Testament half of that story; it is worth an hour.
γραφή graphḗ G1124
from γράφω; a document, i.e. holy Writ (or its contents or a statement in it):--scripture.
The word translated scripture means, simply, a writing, something written down. When Paul says all scripture is God-breathed, the word he uses is the ordinary one for a document. The Bible’s word for itself is a reminder that it was written, on material, by hands, and copied by other hands, and that the writing is where the reading has to begin.
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The copies differ, and one famous case
Copies made by hand differ, mostly in spelling, word order and the slips any copyist makes, and the differences are catalogued in more detail than for any other ancient text. A few are large enough to change what a verse says, and the most famous is in a letter of John. Open this verse in the King James, and then in the World English Bible beside it.
For there are three who testify: — 1 John 5:7 · WEB
Read the comment on The Three That Testify
In the King James the verse names three witnesses in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost, and says the three are one. In the WEB, and in nearly every modern translation, that sentence is not there. It is absent from every Greek manuscript before the sixteenth century, and it reached the printed Greek text through a Latin note that had been copied into the margin of Latin Bibles for a thousand years. Nobody now defends it as John’s. Nobody ever needed it for the doctrine it states, which stands on other texts. But it is in the King James, and a reader who does not know why will wonder which Bible is lying. Neither is. One is printing a text as it stood in 1611, and the other as it stands now.
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Translating is deciding
Where the text is not in doubt, the translation still may be, because a word in one language rarely has one exact equal in another. Three examples, from the first page of the Bible, the prophets and Paul.
“The earth was formless and empty. Darkness was on the surface of the deep and God’s Spirit was hovering over the surface of the waters.” Genesis 1:2 · WEB
The word is ruach: wind, breath, spirit. The Spirit of God hovered, or a wind from God swept. Both are honest; each is a decision.
“Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Isaiah 7:14 · WEB
The word is almah: a young woman of marriageable age. Virgin is the traditional rendering and the Greek translators’ choice; young woman is the narrower dictionary sense. The argument is four centuries old.
“whom God sent to be an atoning sacrifice through faith in his blood, for a demonstration of his righteousness through the passing over of prior sins, in God’s forbearance;” Romans 3:25 · WEB
The word is hilasterion. Propitiation, expiation, atoning sacrifice, mercy seat: four translations, four theologies, one Greek word.
None of those is a mistranslation. Each is a translator choosing among true things, and the choice tells you something about the translator. A Bible that reads smoothly has made many such choices for you, silently; a Bible that reads stiffly has usually made fewer. Neither is wrong. They are different tools.
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The English Bibles in this reader
This reader carries six English texts, and you can set any of them side by side with any other in the comparative view: William Tyndale’s New Testament of the 1520s, the first printed in English from the Greek; the Geneva Bible of 1560, the Bible of Shakespeare and the Pilgrims; the King James of 1611, which took most of its words from the first two; the American Standard Version of 1901, a scholars’ revision of it; the World English Bible, a modern public-domain revision of that; and the Bible in Basic English, which uses under a thousand words on purpose. Four essays on this site tell how the first three and the Hebrew text behind them were made, and they are the background reading for this lesson: How William Tyndale Made the English Bible, How the Geneva Bible Was Made, How the King James Bible Was Made, and How the Masoretic Text Was Made. Each is about an hour, and each will change how you hear the version you grew up with.
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How to read a translation
Read two, and when they differ, do not ask which is right. Ask what the original word could mean, which the interlinear view in this reader will show you in one click, and then ask why each translator chose as they did. Know which text your Bible translates, the one printed in 1611 or the one reconstructed since, because a few verses depend on it. And hold every translation loosely enough to learn from another and firmly enough to read it, since the differences between them are real and the Bible that comes through all of them is one book.
Take a verse you know well and read it in three of the six English texts here. Write down the one word or phrase that differs most, and what you think each translator was deciding.
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