The Sean McDowell Show - 7 Bad Bible Translations (ft. Mark Ward)

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

What makes a Bible translation bad? What are some of the most common "bad" translations and how can we avoid them? Sean talks with author and YouTuber Mark Ward about the top worst Bible translations. READ: What Makes a Bible Translation Bad? https://textandcanon.org/what-makes-a-bible-translation-bad/ SUBSCRIBE TO MARK'S YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/user/mlward038 *Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf) *USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM) *See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

What is the key to finding a good translation of the Bible? And what makes a Bible translation bad? Today we're going to answer these questions by looking at seven bad translations of the Bible with our guest, Dr. Mark Ward. I just want to understand the Bible and I want other people to understand the Bible. Careful translation is something that we have to defend over time. Mark, I've been looking forward to having you on for a long time. I get asked about this topic a ton.

So thanks for coming on, giving us some clarity. But maybe for starters, can you tell a little bit of your personal training and interest in the area of Bible translation? Yeah, I grew up in King James-only-ism, more or less. And as I always say after that, I had a great experience. I went to a wonderful Christian school where my teachers loved me and sacrificed their lives for me. I was taught English very well, I would say, because of our strong focus on the Bible. But as I got into

seminary studies, especially, and actually read Greek and Hebrew for myself and landed in a sector of the church where my pastor was able to lead me gently out of King James only-ism, I conceived a burden for my brothers and sisters back in that world. They had put up a wall using really mainly the King James between me and them, not a personal wall really. So they were still very kind to me and happy to see me succeed in various ways, but an ecclesiastical wall. And I felt that was unjustified. Even more importantly to me and happy to see me succeed in various ways, but an ecclesiastical wall. And I felt that was unjustified. Even more importantly to me personally, I just want to understand the Bible and I want other people to understand the Bible. And I came to realize that there were things in

the King James version, I've got a nice one right here, that I wasn't understanding that I thought I was. And my Bible teacher's heart kicked in and I decided there's some more work to be done in this area. In addition, I saw that Bible translation more generally was confusing to many Christians, even outside of King James onlyism. Why do we need to have more than one? Why are there so many on my Christian bookstore shelf? How do I choose? The most popular article I wrote for the Logos blog years ago, I worked for Logos Bible Software, was which Bible translation is best, and I answered all the good ones. And I did a video like that on my channel. It's been viewed like 40,000 times.

I mean, people are really interested in this question. And I saw a need to increase their appreciation for and trust in our good, major, modern, evangelical English Bibles. When I started probing into this topic, finding out who would be the best guest, your name bubbled to the top. And it's amazing we haven't met in person before. I've done a ton of stuff with Logos Bible Software, had your friend Scott Lindsay on this program. I use it every day. So this is long overdue and pretty exciting to me. So tell me this question. How concerned are you about this? You have a personal backstory, which makes a ton of sense. When you look in the church and outside of the church, how much does it concern you that

we have a lot of bad translations? Honestly, it doesn't concern me a ton. I had to write some articles about bad Bible translations because I was asked to. And I think there are sort of, I don't know, rear guard, you know, defenses we need to put up. We need to put a solid wall around the best practices for Bible translation, but the number of translations outside of that wall, even though I think it's kind of large, the actual market share that they command, the actual number of actual Christians who are using them, especially the number of preachers who are preaching from them, I think is very, very low. But what I came to see with

King James only ism is that the value of vernacular careful translation of which the King James is a signal example is something that we have to defend over time and can't presume. So it is worth pushing back against the bad ideas that sometimes bubble up out beyond those walls, even though I have to say I don't think they're that big of a threat. I really appreciate that honest answer. That's great. I think more Christians are asking, how do I just pick one of the best translations practically for the kind of study that I want to do? And we will get to that. So what are some of the various ways that translations can go bad? Yeah, I think that, well, the two articles I wrote for the Text and Canon Institute and my friend Peter Gury, who I think you might have also had on your channel before. Great, great guy. Love

him and his work, Scribes in Scripture. I highly recommend the work of the Text and Canon Institute is a great place to dig in, get Bible nerdy on textual criticism in the history of the Bible. When I wrote two articles for him on bad Bibles, I did one on sectarian Bibles and one on crackpot Bibles. So sectarian Bibles would be those that are just coming from such a narrow niche of either the church or even outside the church, like the Jehovah's Witnesses New World Translation, they are clearly adjusted at least a little in places, but enough that they ought to be rejected. They're not honoring the wisdom of the best practice of including a multi-denominational coalition to produce your Bible translation. And then crackpot Bible translations are based on all kinds of just crazy. I don't like to be, I don't like to use mean words, okay, but there's nothing

nice to say here. Some crazy ideas that just don't work linguistically or theologically that cause people to create either extremely literal Bibles that are so literal you can't read them, as if the very word order that God inspired the Greek in is somehow sacrosanct for every single language, even though it doesn't make any sense to us. Or crackpot Bibles like, you know, God is giving me, God is touching my forehead through his Holy Spirit and downloading a bunch of information onto my mental hard drive to tell me how to translate things accurately. There's, well, we can get more into it, but those are the two big categories that I see. That's really helpful. So in some ways it's ideological and just incompetence or kind of foolish translation

ideas built into, in some ways it's kind of like how you cut a, uh, you know, how you cut a log, so to speak, the angle going in is going to determine how it comes out. That's probably true of the translation, isn't it? The assumptions you have going in is going to shape the product. Absolutely. Yeah. Good stuff. All right. So we're going to jump into these top seven. My final question is, how did you pick these top seven? Oh, I was paid, you know, by the anti-crackpot and sectarian Bible lobby to choose these. No, they're just the ones that happened to land on my radar. And because they're mostly minor, you know, I said earlier, we're not talking usually about very prominent translations. I had my pick, and I feel a little bit bad for the poor people who got picked on.

Like, I could have easily picked on plenty of others. They just, these are the ones that happen to have gotten across my radar. However, there are a couple that have kind of risen higher in the church's consciousness, and the Passion Translation, I think, is probably an excellent example. That was one of the ones that I chose because I'm getting questions about it. The Passion Translation is one I could have put in Secretarian Bibles or in Crackpot Bibles. I think it's actually both, but I think it lands more in the Crackpot category. I do hasten to add that none of these translations that I cover is 100% completely wrong. You know, C.S. Lewis said

about false religions, they're never entirely false. Even these Bibles, I think they contain tons of precious truth. And even the Passion Translation, there were moments when I'm reading it and I'm thinking, that's a really insightful rendering, and I really appreciate that. It's the problems in it that caused me to not be able to recommend it and to overall call it bad. That's really helpful, and I think a fair way to approach it. So let's jump in, start with the first one. And by the way, you're right, this is not a massive issue, but I have had students teaching high school at Christian schools bring in copies of this first one to me, completely unaware of what kind of translation it was that likely

somebody knocking on their door gave to them and they had been reading. So our first one is the New World Translation. Tell us a little bit what it is and why you think it's a bad translation. Yeah, the Jehovah's Witnesses are, you know, modern-day Aryans. They deny the Trinity and therefore are not considered part of Orthodox Christianity by Orthodox Christians. And they produced this New World Translation in the 50s and into the 60s. I believe it's had a couple revisions since then. And the very earnest and zealous missionaries that come to your door and may hand you this. It is true. I can imagine evangelical Christians taking this to school, not realizing where it's actually come from.

I have not experienced that. I haven't actually seen evangelical Christians holding it. I don't deny your experience at all. But what I would tell that high school student is turn to John 1. And in John 1, instead of the word was God, they have the word was a God. This is the consistent criticism of the New World Translation from the very beginning. Once it came out, there was an evangelical at Westminster Theological Seminary who actually wrote a dissertation about this. And the outline, the shape of our criticism of this translation, the sectarian translation, hasn't really changed since then. He set the standard, and I think he was accurate. And I think what I'd say is, you know, the King James translators say in their excellent, excellent preface, which I think everybody interested in Bible translation should

read, they say that we judge something by its predominant character. So they say, a man may be judged handsome. They actually use the word comely. I think today I'd rather say handsome. A man may be judged handsome even though he has a wart on his hand or even several because we judge him by his predominant character. The problem with the New World Translation is that those warts are so incredibly large and they're screaming at you. You cannot miss them. And I put it in the sectarian category because it's really straightforward. Here's what the text says, interpreted according to normal grammatical, historical, exegetical translation principles that are widespread and not just in evangelical Protestantism.

And they changed it. I'm willing to be that blunt about it. That's why it's a sectarian bad Bible. So at the heart of the problem in the New World Translation is this ideology at the beginning that Jesus is not God, hence the Arianism that's left over from the early church. We see this in John 1.1, but we also see it filtered into other passages such as the Gospels and other letters where it's described that they worship Jesus. Of course, since you only worship God, this is often translated as give obeisance more sign of respect than divine worship, isn't it? Yeah, for the really specific details, and I do encourage people to look into them if they're at

all interested in the New World Translation or have Jehovah's Witnesses coming to their door, I'd actually refer you to the footnotes of my article, the Text and Canon Institute, that point to that dissertation. I think it's really easy to speak in general, you know, to generalize about these things and not know the specifics. And I actually don't recall all the specifics that you're mentioning, but that sounds totally fair. I just want to say, go to that dissertation. That's fair. That's totally fair. I remember was just minimal. And of course, that doesn't prove that their translation is necessarily wrong, but it raises some big red flags when you compare that with the training of people that do say the ESV or the NIV, et cetera.

Yeah, I have to confess ignorance there about that particular question. I would actually say, however, that I have a Jehovah's Witness who consistently watches my YouTube channel and comments on my videos. And frequently when I mention a particular passage in whatever translations that I'm discussing, he'll say, well, here's what the New World Translation says. And, you know, they've had 40 or 50 or 60 years now to make revisions. Typically, actually, it's just fine. And it reflects, you know, basically the same kind of scholarship that most contemporary Bibles do. So I'm not saying the whole thing is absolutely full of works. That's fair.

That actually isn't my experience. It wouldn't surprise me, however, if especially the first edition featured a lot of gaffes. Fair enough. So let's shift to number two. You described certain translations for Muslim nations. Tell us about that. Yeah, I actually encountered this issue maybe about two or three years ago when an online acquaintance whose knowledge of Hebrew, he's a Christian, he's a, I think, former Bible translator, whose knowledge of Hebrew I respect, he was asking me to sign something called the Arlington Statement on Bible Translation. And I am so accustomed to being skeptical of Bible translation

freakouts that I actually, I just couldn't bring myself to believe that what seemed like a really one-sided to me, you know, presentation of the facts should, you know, was enough to persuade me at the time to sign. I will skip to the end, however, and say I ultimately did sign, and here's why. Andrew Case, my good friend who is a missionary translator in Mexico, has a great podcast. It's on hiatus now called Working for the Word, and he interviewed an Egyptian translator. Now I'll finally get into what's the problem with these translations. Someone who has direct experience in Arabic Bible translation and lives in the Muslim world is certainly an evangelical Christian and is saying that there are Western organizations who are soft peddling Jesus deity, not because they disbelieve it, but because their target audience disbelieves it.

And that's happening both in Bible translations and in ancillary materials like Bible storybooks. And the difficulty here is I don't read Arabic. I actually started on Duolingo at least to try to learn the alphabet, and that was helpful. It's not dissimilar from Hebrew. If you already know biblical Hebrew, then you can get pretty far pretty quickly with Arabic, but I certainly can't read it. So I had to find someone who has reliable authority to testify to me what they're seeing in the various Arabic or Arabic script Bible translations. And this guy, George Husni, I talk about him in my Text and Canon articles. I just found him immediately persuasive. He obviously knew what he was talking about. He himself had paid a price for making a new Arabic translation. People are very stuck on their traditions,

but now it's like the predominant Arabic Bible translation. So I do find it rather alarming. And I'm not going to name names because I want to be really careful to be accurate. And it's still difficult for me to, as I can't say, here's the other side. I really looked. I looked for scholarly defenses of what some Western Bible translation organizations were doing, and I could not find that. It was another reason I didn't sign for a while. But George helped me just come to believe that the reason I couldn't find these

scholarly defenses is that they are being underhanded. And I found that alarming, and I signed the statement. I think it's an arlingtonbibletranslationstatement.org, something like that. Search for that. It's online. I was asked by some friends who are missionaries in the Muslim world to sign a statement. I don't recall if it's the same one, with concerns about translations of the Bible in Muslim nations, and I just didn't have time to probe into it. But I didn't realize that this is now becoming the predominant translation in English for the Muslim world, is adapting or at least modifying passages and claims that Jesus is God, Jesus is divine, because this might be offensive or off-putting to Muslims. Is that fair? Did I sum that up accurately?

Yeah, I'm not totally sure I'm following you. And especially when I'm critiquing, I really want to be like rigorously fair. Are you going off of what I said about George Husni and his, I'm not sure I followed what translation you're talking about. Okay. So I'm trying to make sense of the translation for Muslim nations that you described. Yeah, made into various dialects of Arabic, and I couldn't even name all of the languages. Okay. Muslim nations, right? Indonesia is a Muslim nation, so it doesn't have to be an Arabic-based Bible translation or Arabic script. But I give some examples in the Text and Canon article. I don't want to

mistakenly make it sound like George Husni is involved in this or that the most prominent translations are doing this. I think this is still a side thing, but if, you know, comparatively minor, but I do not know. I asked some friends who know what they're doing to give me very specific examples okay and i i give those in that article and and it's not just jesus it's the whole trinity that gets um like islamicized and it is bizarre actually there is one site where you can go where they have the arabic script translation i am not sure exactly what language it is i have this in article, a lot of details to keep track of, and they actually have it in parallel with an English rendering of like a back translation in English. So you can see for yourself what they're doing, and you will see names that you associate with Islam, and you're going to wonder,

and rightly so, what are they doing in a Bible translation? Some truths are going to be offensive in the Bible. No matter where you are in the world Some truths are going to be offensive in the Bible. No matter where you are in the world, you're going to be running up against the culture and the main religion or religions there. And at some points, even in our culture, we're maybe squeamish about bodily functions and the King James itself sometimes uses euphemisms. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about covering up essential truths of the Christian faith, like the Trinity. That's really helpful and clarifying. And especially when it comes to Jesus,

when it comes to the Quran, which I've read, of course, in English, the idea that Jesus is God, and you put a human being on the level of God is to commit the sin shirk, which is one of the worst, if not the worst sins, a form of heresy within Islam. So if we're trying to take the word of God to them, which claims that Jesus is God and equal with the Father, and that's necessary for salvation, the last thing we should do is water that down, but it seems at least significant enough to be on the radar of many missionaries and other scholars that this is growing in its influence in the world, in the Arabic world. Super helpful.

Yeah, I think that would be accurate. Okay, good. All right, so let's move to the one I hear probably more about than anything else I've seen all over YouTube. I've gotten emails about this. People have asked me, Sean, what do you think about the Passion Translation? I don't know a ton about it. So tell us about it and why you think it's a bad translation. Yeah, there are numerous problems with the Passion Translation. I will say again, there are moments in it that I found to be really beautiful and insightful. And I find it really hard to understand, like, how would that happen? I think the translator, I'm just going to name his name, Brian Simmons, who comes from a more extremist wing of Pentecostalism.

He's the one who said that the Holy Spirit touched his head and downloaded a bunch of information into his brain so that he could translate accurately. He has some skill with Greek and Hebrew, apparently. It's been a little hard to figure it out, actually. But when I've looked at a couple places in the Passion Translation in some detail, I've actually noted, okay, he really had to know something to see what he's seeing there. But he's adding in a bunch of other stuff from a number of angles, two of which, the two major ones, I just have to call crack pottery as I do in the article. Fair enough. One major one is he says that, well, it's called the Passion Translation because he is revealing the passionate heart of God in his translation somehow. I mean, it's been very fuzzy. This is one problem you have with crackpot translations. You can't pin them down to

figure, okay, what idea are you actually promoting? They're not speaking the language of evangelical, academic, biblical studies. He's somehow using Aramaic instead of Hebrew and Greek or alongside it. Like he's not clear there, but he talks about Aramaic originals of the New Testament in particular. And the only thing he could be talking about the best, like the rest of us can figure is the Syriac Peshitta.

Apparently he was incorporating insights from that ancient translation. Was he reading it in Syriac? Was he reading it in English translation? I think done by George Lamsa, I want to say back in the 19th century. That's really been unclear to me. Mike Winger here on YouTube has done a lot on this and actually paid Trem longman and daryl bach and nijay gupta i think it was to you know make some formal evaluations of simmons's work and they were they were measured all the scholars were measured they were able to praise him for some things like i'm trying to do but also just kind of scratching their heads saying i don't know what in the world he's talking about

and the other major crackpot idea that comes in and this one this is the kind of thing that if you thing that if you're not into linguistics and you haven't had the opportunity to study biblical languages, I can see how it would be really impressive. But he talks about something he calls Hebrew homonymy, where basically if a given Hebrew root has more than one sense, because Hebrew works in a tri-radical system, it's not at all the same way English works. The same three letters can actually be used to make very different words. And he says that when God uses one of those words, he actually means like all of them. Again, I'm trying to represent him accurately,

but it's really difficult because with a crackpot idea, like how do you report it accurately? I'm just trying to say it as much as I can in words that he said. But I drew a parallel to this. I was just in Hawaii visiting my sister. She lives there for health reasons, actually. The climate's really great for her health. And right around the corner from her is Pe'e Pe'e Falls, a beautiful little spot.

But it's spelled P-E-E-P-E-E. So, of course, you know, all the kids say, ha,'s spelled P-E-E-P-E-E. So of course, you know, all the kids say, ha ha ha, P-P falls. You know, it's kind of like Brian Simmons is saying, when God said pe'e pe'e, he also meant P-P. You know, I'm kind of embarrassed to even say this on YouTube, but that's the level of argument here. It is frankly ridiculous. And it's a means by which ideas can be, I'm not even saying he did this, but very easily ideas can be smuggled in that just aren't in the context at all.

It's like God writes us a note on the fridge, take out the trash, and we're like, you know, recombining the letters and counting up the Hebrew numerics and coming up with what he really meant when he's just like, I just said, take out the trash. I think that's a common temptation for people who revere God's words, rightly so. They want to make them extra magical. And I kind of think that's what Brian Simmons has done. Okay. So you said earlier that a lot of these, there's some good, and you described certain

passages, a certain kind of beauty. Is there any context in which you would recommend teaching the Passion Translation or using it, or would it only be in pointing out why it's bad and errors and what good translation should look like? Yeah, I really want to be careful. I'm not a book burner, you know, both because that's not a value of the, you know, the Western educational system that I myself went through. We're wary of that. And once you start burning books, where does it stop? Fahrenheit 451. And because I feel like that just kind of backfires on me.

So what I said instead was, if you're going to read the Passion Translation, make certain that you have an excellent basis in standard translations, major modern evangelical English Bible translations before you spend time with it. And I think if you do have a good basis, if you've read through the ESV and the NIV and the Christian Standard Bible and the New King James Version, then you'll be able to spot where what the Passion Translation is doing is insightful and where what it's doing is weird. And, you know, just he actually does put a lot of stuff in italics that he's just added in. That's kind of helpful. You can actually easily spot, okay, well, that actually just doesn't belong there. And I do have one friend who I really respect and love who says that she just loves the Passion Translation. And, you know, who am I to say that God cannot do good through the Passion Translation?

I am certain that he can, but it's certainly not at the top of my list of recommendations. I'll say that. I appreciate how measured you are in your response, yet also a commitment to accurate translation matters. Now, you hinted at what you think are some good translations. We'll come back to that at the end. Let's move to number four, which surprised me. You put on the list, the new revised standard version update. Yeah. Now here we're getting more into

putting quotes around bad. Okay. I do not have sufficient knowledge of the New Revised Standard Version updated edition to make a pronouncement on the character of the entire thing. I just want to state that outright. People ask me all the time, what do you think of the Legacy Standard Bible? That's probably the biggest one I get asked about. What do you think about the Berean Standard Bible, Berean Study Bible? Now I'm getting it mixed up. There's a couple out there that are kind of rising in the ranks. And I tell them, or the simplified King James Version, I say to make a fair assessment of a whole translation

means sitting down and reading the entire thing and making a sufficient sampling of places where you thought they were good, places you thought it wasn't so great, that you're able to make a generalization. And that's a ton of work. And I just haven't had the time to do it on all these. But there is a rather large wart on the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition,

and I am not the only one to see it. And given the existence of so many other good translations, I'm willing to put this in the sectarian category than the Updated Edition. In 1 Corinthians 6-9, I know you've done work on this. In fact, I'm in the Bellingham the sectarian category than the updated edition. In 1 Corinthians 6-9, I know you've done work on this. In fact, I'm in the Bellingham offices of Logos right now, and you've been here recording. I have. You've done work with us, your course on homosexuality.

And in 1 Corinthians 6-9, you know the words malakoi and arsenikoi tai, you know, to be very literal, soft ones, and then men betters. Well, the way that NRSVUE translates that, they over-specify one to the point where it doesn't apply to hardly anybody anymore, and they over-generalize the other to the point where it obscures what Paul is really saying. I don't think there's really any doubt about arsena coitai. Precisely because it was apparently coined by Paul himself, we have to appeal to etymology. I'm preaching to the choir here. You know this. I'm with you.

Yeah. And they, you know, the exact rendering is now escaping me. But it's men who, you know, commit immorality, something very general. And it's obscuring, we're not talking about, or men who, something about illicit sex, I'm now forgetting this is terrible. But it's so general, it's obscuring the fact that Paul is condemning homosexuality. I would tend to say there's a little more struggle with Malakoi, like is the idea of effeminacy included, or is it mainly the passive

partner in a male homosexual pairing? I kind of see both, but there too, they over-specify so that it's not, I think it's such a big wart that it can only be purposeful given where it's coming from in the mainline Protestant world. And I did an article on TGC about this. I actually talked to one of the New Testament editors, and these are very sharp people who I think otherwise generally do very good work, but they're in the mainline Protestant world where the big pressure on them is to fudge on this very thing. And I think that they did. And I made a case and I haven't been responded to. I don't know if I ever will be. Wow, that is really interesting. I did not know that backstory.

So it's not so much, like you said at the beginning, with the NRSV, you've studied all of it in depth, all the translations. You just see one clear example where this is brought forth by scholars in the mainline church and interpret a passage that is central to debates about the biblical morality of same-sex sexual relationships in a way that is motivated purposefully rather than what the text says. So to me, when I see that, my question becomes, I'm suspicious of the rest of the translation. It does mean there'll be errors. Maybe it's good. But if I see clear bias here and they allow this to happen with the word of God, that's just a big red flag for me. Is that how you see it?

Well, yes and no. And I pulled this up to make sure I can get it right. I'm mostly yes. I'll get to the no in a second. Let, let me read what they wrote They said do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God do not be deceived the sexually immoral idolaters adulterers Male prostitutes, that's how they take Malakoi, which I think is so over specifying that you know How many male prostitutes have any of us into me? They're out there and yes, that's bad, too And then they translate arson a quite I as men who engage in illicit sex and that is so too and then they translate arsenikoitai as men who engage in illicit sex and that is so general and they actually have a note saying meaning of greek uncertain i think both the general translation and that footnote they're both wrong the meaning is not uncertain and it is not that general it is specific so yes i'm with you i suspect the rest of the translation however i'm in a different position,

and I think you probably are too, than the average person in church. I was given the opportunity to study Greek and Hebrew. So I'm not afraid to go read a liberal translation or Roman Catholic translation or the Jehovah's Witnesses translation, because if I come across something, I'm like, huh, that doesn't seem quite right to me. I can go check it out. I recognize, I don't think God calls everybody to learn Hebrew and Greek. So I'm willing for people to say, you know, if it's got a warrant that large, I'm just going to set it aside. I think though that in the scholarly world, it's okay to say there probably is still some insight there, some hard work they've done elsewhere. And who knows exactly who it was that made that change. I heard that it was kind

of made at the last minute. It's been hard to get straight facts. But yeah, that would be my yes and no answer to you. That's very fair. I actually agree with that. If you look in the bookshelf behind me, there's tons of books I disagree with that I read all the time. But if somebody says, Sean, give me a trusted Bible translation, and I see that gaping one, I still am concerned about the rest and just wouldn't suggest it. But that's a very fair qualification. Okay, let's shift to one that I was not familiar with until I saw your article, the Tree of Life version. What is it, and why is it a bad translation? Yeah, I've gotten more pushback on this than any of my other criticisms,

because it comes, the Tree of Life version comes from Messianic Judaism. And again, I want to say kind of up front where my knowledge stops. I don't have a ton of knowledge of Messianic Judaism. One of the reasons is that as I've encountered it, I have observed that there must be strains within it. You know, why should I be surprised? That's the way all of Protestantism is, including Messianic Judaism, if you want to include it. And I tend to want to. But I was like, okay, so who are the representative theologians? I don't know who to listen to.

I'm always looking for the most careful, responsible, and influential proponents of any given viewpoint. And I've struggled to find that with Messianic Judaism. So people have pushed back on my criticisms of it. And I want to say, you know, I kind of don't want to talk about Messianic Judaism more generally, lest I accidentally, you know, misrepresent it. But I can talk linguistically. And in the Tree of Life version, what they've done is, seems to me, they've two major categories of things, which ended up making me call it sectarian. One is they have this real fixation on the names of God and on proper names more generally.

And they hew to Jewish traditions there. So in a place where the text says Yahweh, you know, the Hebrew text says Yahweh, they'll actually have Adonai because that's the Jewish tradition. That gets you into some weird situations like in Psalm 110, where the Lord says to my Lord is an important phrase that Jesus uses in the gospels to prove his deity. I just think that brings confusion. I think we're introducing Jewish superstitions about the pronunciation of the divine name into Christian English Bibles. I just find that strange. I also observe the other major category of stuff that they do. Linguistically, this is where I just really was bothered i'll actually go back to my first encounters with messianic jewish folks it just seemed to me that and i had studied hebrew and

greek at the time this is years ago they were just tossing in as many hebrew transliterations into their speech about christianity as they possibly could it didn't seem to be a ton of rhyme or reason to it you know sabbath is shabbat well okay you know messiah is mashiach okay um i i came to think that they they are producing a sectarian translation by trying to insert as many hebrew transliterations as they can the one example i bring up in the article is the word slander. Oh, somewhere in second Peter. Now I'm forgetting the exact reference. They translate it as Lashon Hara. They have it in italics. And that means the tongue of evil or the tongue of the evil. Well, yeah, I mean, that's probably the way that it would be said in Hebrew. but what in the world is a transliteration of Hebrew words

doing in an English translation of a Greek text? It just seems to me, I just started feeling like, okay, this is a superstition now. We've got to say as many Hebrew words as we can. And I've observed that many religious groups and Christians are not immune to this, sort of baptize or sacralize one language over another. We know that with Latin and the Roman Catholic Church. We've seen that happen with Arabic and Islam. They say that translations of the Quran aren't really the Quran, it's only the Arabic

that's really the Quran. I actually didn't know anything about this until I had a YouTube channel, and I had an English, so British man, who is a priest in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church contact me and say, well, we treat Ge'ez, the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge'ez, that way. It's the sacralized language, and that translation of the Bible is perfect. I see this everywhere, and I don't think it ought to be in the Christian religion, because the very foundational texts of the Jewish religion are God saying to Abraham, I'm going to, through you, bless all the families of the earth.

Christians, Orthodox Christianity has historically consistently said, with the major exceptions of the Roman Catholics and Latin and the Giz Bible, which I think are offshoots, they've consistently said God can speak any language and God's word translated into any language is God's word. The King James translators say this themselves. So I think they are, the Tree of Life version is giving up some essential elements of our Christian heritage. Let's say for great motivations, reaching the Jews, fine. My wife is ethnically Jewish. I'd love to see more Jews come to Christ. But I think it's kind of a little bit crackpotish, a little bit superstitious, and I'm willing to call it sectarian.

So it sounds like it's a catch-22, that some of the motivation might be to speak to the Jewish people, bring in the Hebrew language, but it comes at a cost on the other side to you where you're concerned how things actually become translated on the flip side. Is that fair? Yeah. And as a linguist, I'm asking who in the world speaks this crazy hybrid language of mostly English all the time, but a bunch of Hebrew words sprinkled in? Well, the only people I know of who do that are Messianic Jews. And I am told reliably by multiple sources that 90 plus percent of them are just gentiles if there were a bunch of actual jewish people in new york city who spoke this sort of hybrid hebrew and english language then i could imagine a missionary saying well we need to target

them in the language they actually speak i'm prepared to do that like hawaiian pigeon or something but that doesn't seem to be the case, as best I can tell. It seems to be a superstitious use of Hebrew as if it's God's real holy language, and real truth has to come through Hebrew. English is not really a fit vehicle for it. Why have you gotten the most pushback on this one, do you think? Because most of the other people i was criticizing are so far from me ecclesiastically that my criticisms didn't even reach them but i think it's actually a good sign i think that it was messianic jews who were pushing back against me and nobody was nasty by the way nobody was cruel or a jerk um i want to say that immediately i think that it's because

they're true christians and they care about the Bible that they were sensitive to my criticisms. And I think they sincerely believe that what they're doing, because the common threat I kept getting was, well, we're using this to evangelize Jews. I think they really think they're doing that. I, as a linguist and as someone who cares about the history of English Bible translation, I question that, but I don't question their motives. I think they really are sincere in that. That's great. I appreciate that, but I don't question their motives. I think they really are sincere in that. That's great. I appreciate that qualification and that charity towards their efforts at reaching Jews. All right, these next two, I would have guessed you might have gotten even more pushback on this. And when we say bad translation, we put it in quotes because what you mean about

the message being a quote bad translation is very different than the New World translation. Give us your thoughts on the message. Yeah. By the way, these last two we're going to talk about because we plan this in advance were not in my articles on bad Bibles. But are commonly – well, we'll get there. We'll explain. Okay. The message.

I get tons of questions about it. I bet you do too. And I never want to push someone's conscience past their barrier that they have set up unless the Bible demands it. And I do not think the Bible demands that you have your conscience open to paraphrases. I would like to say, however, that in general, if a bunch of other conservative Christians are, you know, who are doctrinally sound or finding some profit in something that violates your conscience, suspect yourself first. OK, then do your homework and then maybe you still have to end up disagreeing. Overall, I think the message is valuable and good. Eugene Peterson knew what he was doing.

He knew Greek and Hebrew. He wasn't making crack potash or sectarian claims for the value of his work. There are a couple of times where he appears to refer to his work as a Bible. And I do have problems with that. I think it's a bad Bible translation when it is misused, namely as a preaching Bible or as a study Bible. As a study aid, as a way to kind of shock you out of your Bible reading rut, I think it can be fantastic as a way to remind you, just to remind you that there was a time when this Bible hit people as fresh and not foreign. I think there's great value in that.

But I have to admit, when I started praising it on my YouTube channel a couple times, and I preached an expository sermon from the message to prove that it could be done, I heard back from some folks who said, yeah, but my daughter's church, they're using it as a preaching Bible and isn't that problematic? And I say, yes, I do think that's problematic. It's a paraphrase and not a translation. So what role do you see ideally, so to speak, the message playing in somebody who's a Christian, who's informed and thoughtful and accurately handing the word of God. It's very similar to what I said about the passion translation minus the criticism. So I'd say have a good basis in solid standard translations.

Have some understanding of what it means to be more formal or literal in a translation and what it means to be more functional or dynamic in a translation. Read along that spectrum. And then when you're pretty well versed in that, then pick up the message. And I think you're going to see immediately most times what he's doing. You're going to see immediately where he's transculturating and not translating. Smart mouth college is not in the Hebrew, you know, in Psalm 1, you know, just in case anybody was worried about that. But why does he say smart mouth college? Well, he's trying to be fresh. Now that was done long enough ago that it's maybe not so fresh anymore. And I think we need new paraphrases. I happen to know that Lex Impress is doing one with Mike Bird right now that I'm very interested in. I think paraphrases

are a study aid of that kind. And I just love the idea of just shocking you out of your rut. Because isn't it true when you say the same words over and over again no matter what they are the pledge of allegiance or the you know our father which art in heaven they start to become just syllables to you they don't mean anything to you and i found the message on quite a number of times to insightfully spin me around and show me the same truths I've always been saying or knowing from a different perspective. So it's a wonderful supplemental tool that personalizes things. Now you mentioned earlier with the updated NRSV concerns about 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. I remember there was at least somewhat of a mild controversy, whatever that means on social media these days, about that very passage in the message.

And I pulled it up. So here's what Eugene Peterson translated the message to be in this passage. So instead of referring to same-sex sexual behavior, it says, this is 9 through 11, kind of lumped together. Those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don't qualify as citizens in God's kingdom. Now, broadly speaking, of course, that's correct. But some had said, well, there is a sectarian angle here that Eugene Peterson was maybe not as clear as he could have been on the historic Christian view of marriage. Would you see that in the message and have that concern, or do you think he's just being more general? I have two angles on this. I did read his fairly recent biography, and I am not on the same page theologically with Eugene Peterson. I was actually rather put off by quite a number of elements in his life, even though I've really enjoyed some of his books.

And one of the most off-putting elements was the controversy at the end of his life where he appeared to endorse same-sex monogamy and then walk it back, and then he died. And I'm thinking, how in the world are you unclear on this after all this time? And you can read the Greek and the Hebrew, you know, your Bible. You know, he lived on that border between evangelicalism and mainline Protestantism. And I certainly don't. I don't want to be out there. So yes, on the one hand, I'm concerned. And do I actually think in my heart of hearts that he was fudging there?

I would say yes, I think he was. I don't think we can know that for sure so why don't I treat that as a massive wart the way I do with the NRS VUE it's because I'm not treating the message as anything but a paraphrase I'm not treating it as a Bible translation I'm not preaching from it it isn't authoritative for me it's repeated moments of insight and just as I can read the problem of pain by CS Lewis as I can read The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis, whom I absolutely love, and he takes a very different view of Adam and Eve than I do, and yet derives some really insightful points from the story nonetheless, I can take what

Peterson has done and I think use it faithfully. That just doesn't concern me as long as you know that it's a paraphrase. He's not saying what's wrong. He's failing to say what's right. I also see a difference there. Another little point I'd make is that in my beloved King James that I grew up on and I still love, what in the world does abusers of themselves with mankind mean? That's 1 Corinthians 6, 9. It hardly means anything. It means about the same thing as what Peterson said. So somehow, you know, people can understand even when there are what I would call, I don't know, I don't think the King James translators were fudging, you know, to try to soft pedal their, the teaching of homosexuality. I think, I think that they were trying to be

delicate and not quite so blunt as the Bible was, as the Greek was. And we all survived and we understood what the passage was saying. So I know that some people just cannot accept that I would at all praise the message. Why wouldn't I just toss it in the trash and burn it? Given the valid criticism right there, 1 Corinthians 6, given the way people feel that the message just violates what the Bible is. The Bible is supposed to be sacred. Well, yes, but I'm constantly kind of pushing up against that also. I absolutely believe the Bible is inspired. I'm an industrial strength, you know, biblical inerrantist.

And yet I feel that we are constantly over-interpreting it, expecting it to be magic words instead of treating it as it was fully divine and fully human at the same time. I think the message can have a real value in helping you do the latter. I love it. Very, very well said and nuanced once again. Well, this last one, when I said, give me a couple last bad translations you want to

discuss, this kind of surprised me, but I also see how you nuance in it and why you include in this list. So coming in at number seven, and really this is in no particular order, by the way, probably should have said that at the beginning. Why do you include the King James Version in quotes, bad translation? Well, I have it over on my table over there. My book, Authorized the Use and Misuse of the King James Bible. The King James Bible was an excellent translation. It was a translation into an English that no one speaks anymore. You know, scientists agree, historians too, that all speakers, native speakers of Elizabethan English are

equally dead. And the problem with the King James is when it is used as an English translation without a careful evaluation of what in the world is English? What is a language? And people dismiss this very quickly in their defenses of the King James Version, but I think they really need to think it through, or we're giving up the value of vernacular translation, okay? Because English is, if you think of it as like a Venn diagram, over time, Elizabethan English stays where it is, and English is moving away from it. There's a ton of overlap, right? I'm listening through the King James right now. I was doing it on my way up to work this morning on the Dwell app, actually. I love it. Most of it is intelligible, especially to me. I grew up with

it. I'm fine with it. But I know because of years of work on this now that there are not just dead words in the King James, you know, words we know we don't know, but false friends, I call them. It's as if they're false cognates between Elizabethan English and contemporary English. Words we don't know, we don't know. Like the phrase that was my sort of original entry point into this realization was in 2 Kings, no, yeah, 1 Kings 18, 21, I think, Elijah's on Mount Carmel, and he says to the Israelites, how long halt ye between two opinions? If the Lord be God, then follow him, but if Baal, then follow him. Well, I grew up hearing stirring sermons on that and King James only-ism. and then i was reading the esv one day while i was writing a bible lesson for eighth graders for bju

press as it happens and it said how long will you go limping between two opinions and i thought that's not right it said halt which means stop so i was look i said well look at the hebrew the hebrew is limp and i was like man the king james translators wouldn't just make a dumb error like that they were very smart men so i searched for the word halt in the king james version and i stumbled across in the in the gospels jesus heals the halt and the blind in other words the lame or the limping and i realized duh how long halt ye between two opinions doesn't mean how long do you stop between this opinion and that one it means how long do you go limping back and forth between those opinions that's a false friend because language change caused me to misunderstand without realizing it that word halt we still have it but

we use it differently in a context like that one and i've actually pulled now well over 100 people, around 200 people, various methods. And I think four or five now got it right. And a few of them had read my book. So others were like Old Testament scholars. It's not a huge deal, but you multiply this over many other words. Like I've just been reading in Joshua now coasts is used over and over you know the coasts of a Benjamin of the different tribes well it doesn't the word coast back then meant what we would call borders it's just these little like cracks in the sidewalk that you don't realize you're stumbling over so the

King James is bad quote-unquote you know huge quotes here it's a very good translation but it's misused if you treat it as an English translation without all those qualifications. If you're using it in institutional settings, in a church preaching, if you're saying this is the one that you should read at home, I think that's a misuse of it. And I think the King James translators, if they were still alive, would stand right with me and saying, please at least revise our work. People can no longer fully understand it. Wow, that's really interesting to hear that they would back up not a King James only perspective,

the very ones who first translated King James. So the heart of the concern is not that there's this sectarian worldview behind it. It's clearly not crackpot. It's just that language itself has changed. So it's harder and harder to understand if used as a primary translation tool today for people who want to understand the word of God. That's really the hard part. Okay. Now you mentioned earlier some key translations, kind of almost like a secondary comment. I think you mentioned ESV, NASB, NIV. Maybe just take a step back and explain to us the basic translations. We're now moving towards positive translations

between the way kind of NIV and NASB are translated, just so folks kind of understand the different principles that these committees work from. Yeah, very generally the NASB is, I should go like this since I'm backward here. It's on the formal end of the spectrum. We go from literal or formal to dynamic or functional. Those are the technical terms, formal and functional. The NASB hews more tightly to the word order and to the word choice of the Hebrew and the Greek. And if you say, well, why in the world would you not do that? Well, it's because nobody can do it fully and perfectly, right?

There's almost a superstition there with some people. They think we've got to get everything in the word order. That's inspired. Well, no. In order to translate, you're going to have to change the word order that's inspired. Well, no, the, in order to translate, you're going to have to change the word order. The English has a different word order expectation than Greek does because we don't have a case system. So the NIV, um, tends to consider the whole thought rather than try to represent every word. And many years ago, and I was presented with this conundrum, you know, which way do I go?

And I spent years like kind of worrying, which way should I go? Should I be the more formal route so I could be more accurate? Or I was in evangelism a ton in a not so nice part of town in Greenville, South Carolina. I spent hours and hours, years and years, all levels, kids, Bible clubs, teen weekly Bible club meeting. preached every single sunday at two adults who were functionally illiterate i i felt their pull too they just want to understand and how do i help them and i suddenly realized i don't have to choose no one is telling me you have to have only one i can use all the good bible translations out there so i find value in the formal and i find value in the functional.

And the overriding positive message of my YouTube channel is that's what everyone else should do too. We have an embarrassment of riches. The ancient, and I'm truly, this is true, this is just true. The ancient question of how formal should you be versus how much should you aim for intelligibility? Because they are always in tension that that's reflected in the ancient Greek Septuagint which was made you know that translation was made before Jesus Christ so what a lot of Christians have done is they've taken what's an inherent tension that God gave us in translation between languages and they've kind of weaponized

it I think it goes both directions but I'm on the more conservative side. So my friends are tending to say, or kind of grouse, well, we want to have what's really accurate, and we want to have all God's words, and we don't want to have someone else interpreting them for us. Well, that's not really accurate. Those words, even in the formal translation, had to be interpreted. I could go on and on and on about this, and they'd be on my channel. Yeah, I better stop right there. That's probably it. No, that's great. Would you say that with every translation, there's at least some downside at spots? So for example, when I've used the NIV, which is a great translation, I believe it's in 1 Corinthians 15 that talks about natural body versus the spiritual body. And so many people understand that as spirit as in not physical, where the teaching is more about the orientation.

Like the Bible is a spiritual book, but that doesn't mean it's immaterial. It can be carried in a physical book as well. So that's one area where I'm like, that just gives me a little pause when it comes to NIV. Very small, tiniest wart potentially. So do you agree with that? And do we see those across different translations just in different ways? Yeah. And I think you answered your own question. We see them in all translations in different ways. You know, the equal and opposite problem

is that a formal translation may have no meaning in a particular place. There's one verse in Colossians in the King James in particular that, yeah, it's accurate in so far as it is a literal translation, but what in the world does it mean? Which things have indeed a show of wisdom in will worship and humility and neglecting of the body, not in any honor to the satisfying of the flesh. Like, I think I know all those English words. I don't think we're having a big problem with archaisms here. I think the problem is those English words. I don't think we're having a big problem with archaisms here. I think the problem is highly literal translation. The King James translators were generally very literal, but not slavishly literal.

I think they set up a good balance between formal and functional approaches. I do tend for preaching to find it easier to use the more formal translations, but that's gobbledygook. I can't get any meaning out of that. So that's why I say, instead of complaining, instead of saying, God, give us the one perfect translation, or here it is, the King James Version is it, or the ESV is it, whatever. Be grateful that you live in a frankly wealthy land where we can afford to have so many different translations, not only produced for us,

but that we can own ourselves and multiple nice copies. Like this is red goat skin leather or something that I got from Thomas Nelson. Be grateful and then use those embarrassment of riches to know your God better by reading the formal and the functional. I think if you'll do that, rather than carrying a narrative in, which is looking for the best and most accurate, instead expect there is not going to be one because God didn't make the translations. And the King James translators say, unless there's an extraordinary measure of God's spirit, there's no way that we can produce the level of perfection that the apostles and apostolic men, they said, did back when the Bible was inspired. So instead, instead of complaining, instead of worrying, use all the good ones. That's what I always say.

That's a great approach. Do you have concerns? This might be a whole separate topic, but when the HCSB was updated to the CSB, there was some pushback on the language being considered gender neutral. Persons, people, whereas in the original, it seemed to be masculine. And the understanding was, well, it meant all people,

not just men anyway, so it's fine. Others. And the understanding was, well, it meant all people, not just men anyway, so it's fine. Others were pushed back and said, no, it carried certain masculine terms. We shouldn't change it. Maybe this is opening a can of worms, but do you have any quick thoughts on that move? Yeah. So I'm a strong complementarian. I have my PhD from Bob Jones University. I worked for BJU Press and I wrote their 12th grade biblical worldview book and uh worked with others one of one of whom was a student of andreas kristenberger to write the the gender uh unit large you know eight chapter unit um and it's odd for me i know to be defending the quote-unquote gender-neutral bibles like the niv or even the tniv but i think you've got to acknowledge everybody out there

you know who wrote the standard evangelical defense of what i would rather call gender accurate translations are d.a carson and doug mu these are the guys who wrote our standard new testament introduction textbook who are stalwart conservatives i mean especially carson um he is a complementarian so is mu at least give yourself pause ask, he is a complementarian, so is Mu. At least give yourself pause, ask why is it that complementarian men are making a defense of this translation strategy? And then I would urge people to read what Mu has written on it. The title escapes me, but he talks about the NIV 2011 in a little booklet that's free online.

Maybe I can find the link and get it in your show notes or something. He talks about the NIV 2011 in a little booklet that's free online. Maybe I can find the link and get it in your show notes or something. Cool. And he talks about his use of corpus linguistics. So he wasn't just sticking his finger up in the air and saying, where are the political winds blowing? He's actually looking at tons of uses of English by people who weren't even thinking that their language would be examined by a Bible translator and saying, what does the generic he mean? How is it used? That's what translators have to do. They have to ask, what is English now? That gets all mixed up with gender politics in a way that I think is mostly unhelpful. There are some extremists out there that Carson and I would reject, you know, the mainline protestants

wanting to turn god into a one or the holy spirit you know is personified as a she yes that's obviously problematic but saying brothers and sisters instead of brothers at least listen to the case of conservative complementarians that we respect such as carson or something like that all right so last answer i get instagram messages tweets all the time. People go, Sean, what Bible translation should I use? And they're looking for like the elevator pitch, quick response. Obviously, there's a huge backstory. But when someone goes, Mark, your YouTube channel is awesome. But my sister or my friend is asking what Bible translation should I use?

What's your just quick response that you give? All the good ones. All the evangelical English major modern Bible translations that you can find at your Christian bookstore shelf. You cannot go wrong. That's a great answer. Really appreciate that. Well, tell us real quick about your YouTube channel

and where folks can find it and what they'll find there. Yeah, just search for Mark Ward KJV. And if you see any attack videos on me from the King James only, it's just ignore those for now. You can watch them later. And I talk a lot about King James only as I'm trying to make a gracious appeal to these brothers because they did a ton of good for me, but I believe they are overtaken in a fault to use language of the King James version. And I want to regain Christian unity with them. I also want to help the church more broadly on my YouTube channel,

Mark Ward on Words, it's sort of called. It's hard to come up with a title for your channel, but to help the church more generally to appreciate our embarrassment of riches in English Bible translation. It's great stuff. Appreciate your work. Keep it up. We'll have you back in the future when we come up with another creative angle for this. Before I let folks go, make sure you hit subscribe here. We've got some other topics coming up on worldview apologetics culture you won't want to miss. And part of our apologetics program is we have classes on the authority of the Bible. So we would love to train and equip you. Information below on our master's program. Mark, this has been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you so much.