The Christian blogging world has recently been going all fanboy over the ESV translation of the Bible. I’ll confess to not being entirely sure what all the fuss is about, but I’ll go along with things for the moment.
Anyway, Mr. Warnock, master self publicist and famous blogger, has got himself an exclusive blog-interview-thing with the ESV translation committee. The first question he asked was:
ESV Interview: Is translation effected by doctrine?
It is of note that the group of scholars who wrote the ESV include some great giants of evangelicalism. I wonder how important to the accurate translation of the Bible is an evangelical faith. How much does the doctrine one believes in influence the act of translation and the philosophy which lies behind it?
The response is, loosely, that yes, the Evangelical view that the Bible is the (literal) Word of God does inform on the way that they approach the translation. Adrian (and many others) seems very happy with that response, saying:
This inspires me with great confidence about this translation as I want the people translating the bible for me to believe that its every word is inspired by God and is profitable for us. It matters to me whether the original actually said what we are led to believe it does.
Well, in my role as fluffy liberal heretic, I feel I can’t let this one pass without pointing out the rather obvious hole in this argument: Basically, it seems to me, this is an utterly backwards way of approaching things. Rather than approaching the original texts in a neutral fashion, reading them critically and with an open mind and then letting the words speak for themselves and allowing them to inform matters of doctrine and belief, they instead choose to adhere to a doctrine and allow that to inform their translation.
In other words, if you’ve got a bunch of conservative Evangelicals doing the translating and reviewing the translation, then you are of course going to get a translation which is biassed towards the conservative Evangelical viewpoint – or at least one which doesn’t challenge this viewpoint – which will naturally make conservative Evangelicals who read the translation very happy. If, however, people from a wider variety of backgrounds are involved in the translation and review process, it is easier for these biases to be ironed out and therefore, to my mind, a more useful translation produced.
Of course, the obvious solution is for us all to learn ancient Hebrew and Greek and read the original texts for ourselves and make up our own minds. I strongly suspect, though, that this isn’t going to happen any time soon.
In the meantime, I await the publication of the Purpose Driven® Life Application ESV Study Bible, which surely can’t be far off now.
Interesting. Don’t think I’ll be buying it, I have enough different translations at home to last a while yet. However I’d love to learn Hebrew and Greek, maybe one day I will…
I think I agree with you though that it does seem quite a backwards way of approaching translating the Bible.
Oh well. Maybe they should introduce Hebrew and Greek into schools as a replacement for Latin.
Trying to learn greek hurts your head!
Read the NRSV for a good scholarly bible. Or jerusalem so that you can read a bible worked on by J. R. R. Tolkien! Plus it is quite a good translation and really annoys certian evangelicals as it the Roman Catholic translation
I have an NRSV – I bought it for doing the reading at your wedding, remember? 🙂 Does the Jerusalem have the Apocrypha, too?
yes
yes it does have an apoc
The Purpose Driven Life Application Study Bible would be a hotch-potch of 30 different translations, all jumbled together, in order to make whatever fluffly point the authoratative book (The Purpose Driven Life) is trying to make at any particular time.
Or is that slightly too cynical?
I just came upon your blog post after doing googling on ‘evangelical bias esv’. I just posted a response to someone on my own blog including the ESV along with the Living Bible and NIV as versions which have an evangelical bias. I’ve seen the evidence before but wanted to be prepared just in case someone asks me for proof. Cheers.