How does God’s word sound? May depend on translation

The Rev. Pete McKenzie directs the two dozen or so worshippers sitting in the pews to Psalms 68:11:

"The Lord gave the word: great was the company of those that published it."

It’s a perfect passage to begin Wednesday evening Bible study at Bible Baptist Church, 2238 Sandy Lane, and the perfect version of the Bible from which to read it.

That’s because tonight’s topic is the King James Bible, and Bible Baptist Church is an independent Baptist, King James-only church, whose members hold the 400-year-old Bible translation, over all others, to be authoritative, error-free and theologically correct.

However, the King James — the venerable translation of the Christian holy book that for much of its history literally was the Christian Bible — today is just one of more than a dozen English-language Bible translations American, English-speaking Christians use for worship, prayer and study.

In fact, at the same time that the attentive congregation at Bible Baptist Church is leafing through their King Jameses to search out Psalms, Christians at other midweek Bible studies at other churches across the valley likely are leafing through their NIVs, NKJVs, RSVs, CEVs, NRSVs and myriad other versions of a holy book that they all, at least theoretically, share.

Most worshippers — of any denominational stripe — probably give little thought to the holy books they read, be they Christian Bible, Hebrew Bible or Quran. But the journey a holy book travels from a foreign-language "there" to an English-language "here" can be complicated, confusing and controversial.

In the Islamic faith, "there is no official (English) translation of the Quran," said Ibrahim Hooper, national community director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group. "The only official version is in the actual Arabic."

"There are what we call translations of the meaning of the Quran, so there are many different English translations and translations into many languages," he added, but no one translation that is "taken as, quote, the book."

In Judaism, translation of the Torah — the first five books of the Hebrew Bible — from Hebrew to English traditionally wasn’t considered an issue because "we always taught our children how to read and understand Hebrew," said Rabbi Felipe Goodman of Temple Beth Sholom. "So we’re reading straight from the original."

While there are English language translations of the Torah, translating the books into English "was never that important to us until now, because we find ourselves in a place where a lot of people don’t understand Hebrew anymore," Goodman said. "But up until the mid-20th century, I would say, translation was not important for us."

In Christianity, however, the history of the translation of the Bible into the vernacular is an enterprise filled with debate, battle and even martyrdom. Luckily for modern Christians, dealing with the alphabet soup of Bible translations now found in any bookstore typically involves nothing more lethal than a sense of overwhelming confusion.

The Rev. Ralph E. Williamson, senior pastor of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in North Las Vegas, receives queries "all the time" from congregants seeking a Bible translation recommendation.

Questioners typically "want something that can give them a good biblical response to whatever they’re looking for, but they want it in a context that they can understand," Williamson said, although balancing those two criteria can be "a challenge."

Bible translators today almost always begin with source documents written primarily in Hebrew and Greek. Joel Green, professor of New Testament interpretation and associate dean for the Center for Advanced Theological Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., said many are surprised by that.

"I’ve been asked repeatedly if the translations I’ve worked on are translations of the King James, for example, assuming a translation from English to English," said Green, who also is New Testament editor of the Common English Bible, released in 2011. "So when I explain that it is a translation from Hebrew or Aramaic, in a few cases, and Greek, people are surprised and they wonder if Bible scholars actually know those languages."

Then, Green said, many Christians assume that translating biblical texts from Greek or Hebrew to English is "a fairly straightforward process, and it’s sometimes quite messy."

In doing a translation, translators must consider the meanings and usages words and phrases had in their original Hebrew or Greek. Then, on the other side of the translation equation, they must select English words and phrases that best convey to English-speaking target readers the original passage or thought.

"As much as you try to work at understanding the old language to represent it fairly, you have to do as much work analyzing the state of current language," said Douglas Moo, chairman of the Committee on Bible Translation, translator of the New International Version, which saw the release of a major revision last year.

"The question becomes, what kind of translation do you want to produce?" Moo said.

Some translations strive to retain the structure of the original Greek and Hebrew — with, in Moo’s view, the risk of making the modern-day English version unclear or stilted — while other translations stress the meaning of the original languages.

In either case, translation almost always is about more than, as Moo puts it, "take Greek word X and, throughout the work, substitute English word Y."

Consider the word "dog."

"Today, we might think of an Irish setter sitting next to the family before the fireplace when we hear the word ‘dog,’ " Green said, but the dogs that lick the sores of Lazarus in the biblical account "are not, quote, man’s best friends. They are scavengers. So you might translate that as something like ‘cur.’ They don’t live in people’s homes. They rifle through the trash of the villages. It’s quite different."

The judgment — or, some would call it, the subjectivity — involved in translating a holy book can create fertile ground for debate.

Jamie Sabino was familiar with both the King James Bible and the NIV Bible while growing up. Her father was a pastor and, Sabino said, "I just didn’t know there was even an issue" about using one translation instead of another.

Then, six years ago, she began attending Bible Baptist Church and learned about the history of the King James Bible vis-a-vis other translations. Sabino said it took her about two years of study to learn about the King James and that, at the end of the process, she became a King James-only believer.

McKenzie, pastor of Bible Baptist Church, said he preaches only from the 1611 King James version, believes in "the authority of the King James" over other translations and holds the King James to be — as the church’s doctrinal statement puts it — "the pure, preserved word of God, without error."

According to McKenzie, other English-language translations trace their lineage back to source texts that began as, or over time had become, corrupted.

"There is this kind of idea in modern Christianity that all Bibles are kind of cousins, that they are all kind of related, and that is not the case," McKenzie said. "It is a matter of the family of manuscripts from which they come."

And, McKenzie said, translations of Bibles other than the King James suffer from a pervasive "man-centered," rather than "God-centered." approach. As a result, he said, we today have "more versions of the Bible than ever before, but we seem to be a more biblically illiterate people than we’ve ever been before.

"I got saved in 1977 in the Bible Baptist Church in Las Vegas when I was a 17-year-old boy. At that time, (the King James) was the only version the church used, but I wouldn’t say back in those days that we really understood why. We were just told, ‘This is the Bible, the good book, the right book.’

"But I can truly say that, having taken the last 34 years of my life reading that book and studying from it and comparing it with other versions — studying the roots of it — it’s only proven itself to be exactly what it proclaims to be, and that is the preserved word of God."

McKenzie accepts that his, and his congregation’s, King James-only stance isn’t shared by other Christians.

"What we realize," he said, "is that we’ll probably never be a megachurch because we’ve taken a strong position on the King James Bible."

But, Moo said, "I think that most people are not feeling that way about the King James anymore, and I suspect that’s cultural and regional to some extent. In the Southeast, there still seems to be very high regard for the King James as the Bible as contrasted with others. I don’t find that in other parts of the country these days."

Over the past half-century or so, today’s English-speaking Christians have become accustomed to having several Bible translations, each one written in a specific sort of language, from which to choose. As a result, Moo said, "I don’t think we’ll ever go back to a time when there’s a single English translation that dominates the landscape."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.