Translating the Bible

 Translating the Bible 

Friends, after taking 2 weeks off, we’re back to Stump the Preacher 2025, sermons requested by you and then delivered by me. This week’s request comes to us from our friend Terri! She wanted to hear more about what went into translating the Bible. Good question, Terri!

The first thing y’all need to understand about translating anything is that translating means loss. Loss of nuance, loss of turns of phrase, loss of voice, and loss of original intent. When you translate anything, even if it’s as simple as “Frere Jacques” from French to English, you have to make decisions on behalf of the original speaker, who often isn’t standing next to you to approve your choice. It’s hard work, and we owe the fact that the Bible is available in such a wealth of languages to the hard work, and tough decisions, made by many, many translators. It’s estimated that the Bible is available in 3,700 different languages.

As I hope y’all know, the Bible did not originate from an English speaking society, and none of the words we call Scripture appeared in English until the 1380s, over a thousand years after Jesus lived and died. An early voice and minister of the Protestant movement by the name of John Wycliffe, and his followers, began that work of translating a long-revered, authoritative, and all-Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, into their vernacular–that is, the language they spoke at home. The Vulgate is a whole story in and of itself, it was commissioned in the late 4th Century by Pope Damascus, who wanted to pull together the still somewhat disorganized assortment of old Latin biblical manuscripts into one cohesive canon, which was finished by an old priest named Jerome, who has since been beatified as St. Jerome. Our Roman Catholic friends continue to hold the Vulgate in very high esteem, and used it as their primary Bible all the way from its inception until 1943 when Pope Pius XII encouraged vernacular Bible translations from the oldest possible Hebrew and Greek manuscripts.

If the last 2 minutes of me talking haven’t already made this very clear, translating the Bible has always been a complicated work of very heavy lifting. When translating the Bible into your language, the first question the translator needs to ask is, what are we translating from? As far as any of us can tell, the “original” writings, the very very first versions of any of the 66 books in our Bible, are lost. The oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament exist in Hebrew, close to the language spoken by the Hebrews that Moses led out of Egypt. But the oldest versions of those manuscripts are still nowhere near originals, and they were copied by hand for many hundreds of years by monks. To make matters more complicated, the oldest versions of those Hebrew manuscripts had no spaces or punctuation between words, and didn’t even have chapter and verse markings. So imagine you were an ancient monk, with a small oil lamp in front of you, hunched over a giant pile of papyrus with a quill in hand, and your job was to copy ALL OF IT, one pen stroke at a time. I’m very sure I could never complete that assignment without succumbing to a combination of carpal tunnel, blindness, and insanity. Many, many mistakes were made. Pages were stuck together. Lines were missed. Monks got confused about which word should be which. And sometimes they weren’t mistaken or confused, the monks changed what they were translating on purpose because they disagreed with it. There’s a giant example of this in the Gospel of Mark that Carole just read for us. The earliest accounts of Mark we have available end very abruptly at verse 8, right after a few women discovered Jesus’ resurrection–”and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Huh. “Nothing to anyone.” Well then how did we find out about Jesus’ resurrection? Surely they must have told SOMEONE, right? But we’re pretty sure that the author we call Mark meant what he said. They told no one. Other hands Mark passed through disagreed, and started adding verses to make the story feel more complete, verses that sound different enough that we’re pretty sure they weren’t written by “the real Mark.” These loving additions and corrections added up over time. Some of our Bible give us three different possible endings for Mark, all in brackets, and we, the reader, are left with a “choose your own adventure” Gospel. Ultimately, which words best speak to the voice of God might be between you and God.

The oldest possible manuscripts of the New Testament are in Greek, which was a language that Paul almost certainly spoke, but that Jesus and his followers absolutely did not speak or write in. As far as we know, Jesus himself wrote nothing. Jesus spoke a language called Aramaic. Therefore, the oldest and most authentic manuscripts of the NT we will ever find are already a translation of Jesus’ words. When we read the Bible in English, we’re reading a translation of a translation. Translating can get messy fast. Have you ever played around with Google translate, and seen how sloppy even our best translating software can be? Or have you ever tried to say something to someone who spoke another language, and you did your best to use a dictionary to pull out the best words, and they still looked at you like you had three heads because what you came up with made no sense? It’s a straight up miracle that anything we hear of the Bible in our church service sounds like human words.

That said, we’ve had a few major boosts over the years in the biblical translating department. We owe a ton to St. Jerome, who finished the Vulgate in Latin, and to King James, who commissioned the King James Bible in 1611. We owe another immense debt of gratitude to Martin Luther, who pushed hard for the Bible to be made available in any language a person may speak, who urged ordinary people to learn how to read so they could read the Bible themselves rather than depending on a priest to read it in Latin and then translate, and who fully utilized the recent invention of the printing press to turn the Bible from a rare item only owned by a wealthy few to a text anyone could have. We also found quite the hidden treasure in 1947 when shepherds in Qumran unearthed the very first rolls from a collection we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. Though the Dead Sea Scrolls provided their weight in gold as far as Old Testament manuscripts and knowledge of the ancient near east go, they arguably opened up more questions than they answered…as Scripture so often does.

And that brings me here: translating the Bible has required as much faith as intellect. Ultimately, those who have compiled the Bibles we keep on our nightstands had to understand not just the tremendously deep history of where these words came from, but, more importantly, the heart of the Divine. And we have no shortage of human opinions about the Divine heart, which is why we have so many different translations just in English. For academic reading and preaching, I tend to stick to the NRSV. It’s a translation that prioritized a precise take on the oldest Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available, and it’s a favored translation among seminarians for that reason. But it’s not always the translation my heart needs to hear today. My very beloved German Bible is a translation that went out of its way to use easily read, contemporary words, even if what Jesus actually said was more “bookish”. Many of the English Bibles I have in my personal collection follow suit, and if any of you like to read the New Living Translation, or the Good News Bible, or The Message by Eugene Peterson, then you, too, have benefitted from a translator who wanted to bring Jesus down from the mountain top and into your life and vocabulary. In recent years I’ve seen several attempts at breaking down the Bible for children, and even a few attempts at writing out the Bible like a comic book, with graphic illustrations and speech bubbles, because to someone else, that is their vernacular.

At the end of the day, we have so many ancestors of the faith to whom we owe abundant thanks. And then, after all that work, the best translator of the Bible may very well be…you. We Protestants believe in a priesthood of all believers, a reality where all of us are capable of hearing the Divine speak into our ears. Is God speaking to you? What does the Divine want the world to hear through you today? What messages are coming alive from the Word, jumping off the pages as you read? Contrary to what Mark originally said of the women who saw the Risen Christ, don’t be scared. Go ahead and tell the world.

Amen.