Defense of the Faith - The Bible: How did we get it? Part 2

Alright, so last week we talked about inspiration, right? We had the chain. What was after inspiration? Anybody remember? Any guesses? Remember, canonization, inspiration, canonization. So how the scriptures came about to be, and then how they were put together in a collection of documents. So inspiration and canonization.

And then this morning, we will talk about transmission and translation, how the scriptures were passed along, and then how we convert them from Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic into English or Spanish or whatever different languages have been translated.

All right, so one of the things that I think is important for us to do is always to define the terms that we're talking about. So if we're going to talk about transmission, transmission is What? How do we describe transmission? Any guesses? Thoughts? It's not a car term.

How it's transferred, how we carry on the original text and pass those things down. In some cases, even how we would transmit a translation, just to preserve and carry on the text that was inspired and canonized. And then translation, how do we define translation? I just want to make sure we cover those things up front. Change it from one language to another. We're going to get into the concerns of translation when we get to that section, so I won't cover that now, but that's a good starting definition of that. and maybe understand the ability to understand when you translate from one language to another.

Right. And that's part of what I want to get into once we get to that part is there's actually a lot to translation. Right now, Craig Case is teaching a Greek class, which I have been grateful to be part of. Greek as a language is very particular and communicates a lot. But when you translate that, you not only have the meanings of the words, you also have other issues like cultural meaning and things like that. So we'll talk about translation a little bit more when we get there. So let's talk about transmission.

If the Holy Spirit inspired the Old Testament and inspired the New Testament, We need to talk about how it was preserved and carried on. When we talk about transmission, I think probably our primary concern is the preservation of the original text and preservation as copies were made so that we know this is reliable. If we could find dozens and dozens and dozens of radical variations between documents, that would That would cause great concern. So we want to talk about how do we know that we have reliability and things like that. In this section, we want to emphasize the idea that in the Old Testament, the Jews were very, very particular about how they made copies of the Old Testament documents. So, the Old Testament canon, do we have all these heavily varying versions of the Old Testament, or do we have pretty solid versions of the Old Testament? And the answer is, for the most part, we have very solid, consistent translations, or copies, I mean, of the text. They're in, for the most part, Hebrew, which is obviously the language that we think of the Hebrew people speaking. One of the things that we want to take a look at is what would be their pattern. So down here you see there's some bullet points. What is the pattern of that? they're going to be using for making these copies. Let me ask this.

Today we use computers. How do you make a copy on a computer? You literally can use a keyboard shortcut or right click on a mouse or press and hold on a tablet or something and say copy and then you can move somewhere else and say paste. And the computer On occasion, we'll insert some interesting character manipulations, but as far as textual characters, it copies and pastes things pretty straightforward over and over again. So when we look at things from a technological standpoint, computers have actually made it a lot easier to copy errors, but also copy precisions. If you have mistakes, you could copy and paste mistakes just as easily, right? In software development, one of the rules is to try to not copy and paste code, because if you have to fix a bug in 16 different places versus fixing it in one place, it's better if you can just have one place of code where you have to fix it, right? So in a handwritten, hand-copied language situation, you would want to be very careful. Now, how did the Jews How did they view the text of the scriptures? What was their attitude towards them?

It's sacred. Okay, it's sacred. And the word scripture is having to do with, it's a term used to describe sacred texts and a collection of sacred texts. So if it's sacred text, you're probably going to take care to preserve and maintain the quality. So let's take a look at this bullet list and let's see if you can think of things that you might add to it. I don't think there's a whole lot we could add from a perspective, but maybe you have some ideas.

First of all, the scribes who copied the text were to wash their hands before and after copying, praying each day of copying. Why would washing your hands matter? There's actually two reasons. One of them is biblical. So we have contamination of paper, which is just that we don't smudge the text. This is God's holy word, so we want to sanctify and wash ourselves, that's the idea. But then you also have the idea that if you're smudging these sacred texts, if this is God's word and you're revering it and it's a holy text, You're going to write carefully, you're going to have clean hands, because you don't want to make a mess. Although I just wrote with my left hand, which would have never happened. I've always been right-handed. The second thing here, the name of God was left blank to be filled in with a purer ink by another scribe. I think that's fantastic. So here we have the Tetragrammaton, which is the fancy $5 word for the four-letter name of God. That was all of the instances of God where they used God's name were revered extra special.

So they would leave those out to be with very pure ink rewritten later on. Next, the scribe would check the middle word of each section with the original, also counting the number of words in each section. Why the middle word? Any guesses on the middle word? I thought that would be one of the most accurate ways to do it. If the middle word isn't correct, then something's wrong.

Yeah, if your spacing is relatively consistent, the middle word should always be the same between the original and the copy. And it should be the same place. If you match every word, you have a time-consuming issue, right? Where it's like, OK, we already did one. We did word for word as our dictation or our copying strategy. But now we'll do a second check of the middle word.

So they actually wanted the words to land in the same place? Yeah, so that you had consistency. You want great consistency. That way you know you've got the same thing over and over and over again in zero variation. What the text was mattered so greatly that they didn't want to mess with it.

Last on this list here is flawed copies were to be destroyed or burned in the fire. Not only would that be expensive material wise, but it would also be expensive time wise. Unless, of course, you lucked out and it was the first word, right? Oh, we screwed up the first word. Well, let's just cut off the top of that story or something.

We'll go here. But as soon as you have an error and you make copies of the error, then the error is preserved and carried on. So being strict and following through all this means that the Old Testament documents were preserved, were reliable, and were taken on and revered as God's word and God's message to man through Israel. Let's just put ourselves in the shoes of these scribes. Is there anything that you would add to that? I think that's a pretty thorough Preservation system. I would think because of the tradition in the Middle East that most all the scribes would need to be right handed. Because the left handedness.

Well it didn't matter if you were right or left handed. Everybody was right handed. It's not until the last hundred years that people were even allowed to not be right handed. Just culturally. Because this was the unclean hand. So everybody would have been right handed. even if they weren't naturally predisposed to being right-handed. Somehow my parents are both left-handed, and yet myself and my siblings are all right-handed, so genetically we're more sanctified, right?

I'm joking, I'm joking. So the idea, though, is that the scribes are really preserving and taking care of this Old Testament text because it's God's Word. That's their attitude about it. When you hear this idea that the texts are full of errors and mistakes and variation, that's not true and it doesn't really prove out. And we're going to take a look at some of the things that there are to clarify that later on. But if you're treating this as God's Word, you've got the Hebrew text and you're treating it as God's Word, you have preserved it. Now, the other thing that I want to point out in a non- papyrus sort of a context, if you've got time before papyrus, there's things that were put on stone and things that were written down in clay and preserved on punctures that are there. So there's these long-lasting materials as well that are part of the process.

So let's take a look at some of the Old Testament textual traditions. There's the Masoretic text. It's the entire Hebrew Old Testament copied by the Masoretes after the Scrabble tradition. And then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. How many of you are familiar with the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls? They were found in the last 100 years.

Half of you raised your hand. The other half didn't. So some of you have to listen through my brief telling of the story. There was actually a shepherd boy, as I understand it, who was throwing rocks into caves and heard pots break or heard something break inside the cave.

And then they went and investigated it. And they found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, they found all these preserved copies of the Old Testament. So that, as you can see there on the list, has every Hebrew Old Testament book except for Esther. That's really cool to be able to have those things preserved. The environment of the cave being apparently nice with the jars and what not to preserve the text and the materials that were written so that we can look at them. The Samaritan Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, modified to place the temple on Mount Gerizim. So when we talk about the woman of Samaria, when she engages with Christ, she talks about, oh, your people have your tradition, and we have our mountain and our tradition. But the rest of the text in this copy of the Old Testament is identical.

The Septuagint, and this is an important one. The Septuagint is actually an Old Testament translation from Hebrew into Greek. By the time we get to the Roman Empire, we have Greek as the predominant language. And so there were more and more people that were less likely to read and write Hebrew, but they had Greek under their belt.

And so you might have some of these things that are passed on in the Hebrew culture, that we've got to preserve this, what does that help us with to have the translation into Greek for the Old Testament? Why does it matter that we would have that? What can we gain from that? Any guesses? The language is a little more relevant. Okay, the language is relevant, but it also gives us a clue into what the understanding was of the Old Testament at the time when the translation was done. How did they understand these words and these contexts and these concepts?

In Isaiah, you know, it says a virgin will bear a son. People have said, well, that word doesn't really mean virgin. It means young girl or something, right? Yeah, young girl or something. But the Greek translation is Parthenos, right? Okay. And in the Greek Old Testament. And so is that understood as virgin? Yes. Remember Mary, when Gabriel says, you're going to bear a son, she says, how can that be? Because I'm Parthenos uses that word.

So the objections people come up with, no, sorry, the Jews without any Christian bias understood that to mean virgin. So if you look at the handout there, you'll see it was 200 BC that that translation was done. So it's not 280 which would say, oh well, someone was trying to translate it and skew the text to present a Christian Christ being born of a virgin perspective. This is 200 years before. So that's an important nuance there. Any questions on the Old Testament context there?

It's not in the handout, but I think it's worth noting that after Abraham was Isaac, and after Isaac was Jacob. And who is Jacob's son? Joseph, who became a prince within Egypt. When Joseph sends for his father and his family to bring them over, one of the things that is written down is that Joseph says to the scribes in Egypt, write down my family's history. So when we start talking about the Lord's preservation of the history of Genesis and the family of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that was preserved in Egypt. And then another prince was raised up in Egypt, a guy named Moses.

You may have heard of him. And he would have had access to those things. And they wouldn't have written them on some cheap Xerox paper and then accidentally shuffled it in the circular bin. It would have been something preserved in the archives of Egypt that Moses would have had access to.

So when Moses compiles Genesis, he's not just doing it from word of mouth, where we play the telephone game and we say, oh, word of mouth, worst possible transmission method, which is not true. But instead, we have this idea of continuity and being able to carry those things on. But we have good written records that are very consistent across the board because of these precise and consistent writing and copying techniques. Now that we've articulated how carefully the Old Testament was put together, let's talk about the New Testament, which has got way less of a strict copying method, because fewer Jews were involved and more Greeks and Gentiles were involved. The Christians copied the New Testament, and increasingly those were Christians of Gentile background.

But, and when my dad did this lesson 10 years ago, the number of scraps and shards and things that we had of the New Testament was 5,300. But as I was updating this handout for the last 10 years, we've had 500 more documents have been found. And one more earlier document than any before. It's a fragment, but the earliest piece of the Gospel of Mark has been found dating from the first century. So really, really early first century. So there are more than 5,800 surviving hand-copied Greek manuscripts, containing all or part of the New Testament.

Well, that's a really big deal. One of the things that I have to, I just want to draw attention to this, not to make a religious statement politically, But there are lots of documents that are under Muslim control right now, because, of course, Islam is very predominant in the Middle East, that we don't have access to, that we can't really take a good look at. And that, for me, is something where I actually would love for archaeologists to have more access to more of these documents, because there's probably a good chance that we would be able to get access to even more copies and review them and look at them and evaluate what's there. But at this point in time, there's a very intentional hand blocking people from checking out some of the material that's there.

The next sentence in that paragraph that I think is important says, when all languages are included, more than 24,000 handwritten copies of the New Testament have survived to this day for study and evaluation. Does that seem like a really small number, 24,000? Like reliability? Like we have not enough information to hold on to? 24,000 is a very significant number that we can take a look at and compare and do analysis on.

The New Testament copying quality is not as consistent as the Old Testament copying quality. One of the things that is interesting from the Greek class that Craig kind of did an overview of things, but there are times where we'll find variation of letters based on the spelling skills of those who someone was transcribing verbally and someone else was writing down copies. So there's variations on spelling, what we would call typos, but not that there's radical mis-meaning, it's just easy to identify. It's this word, they used an omega instead of an omicron or an alternate vowel. The other thing too is regional differences in how you would spell something.

Like we have theater, is it E-R-R-E, right? The British difference. The meaning is the same. And variations in spelling are obviously important. In fact, what I love about even U.S. history is that if you go back at U.S. documents, in U.S. English, even the spelling sometimes variates pretty widely. But that being said, the meaning doesn't change, it's simply that there might be spelling variations.

So the next section, because of this variation, this next section is called textual criticism. And textual criticism is an important concept to have an awareness of and understand just on a high level. It's the discussion of the nuances and differences between copies in an attempt to determine the original text. If we can go back in our 24,000 copies, If we can go back and look at the 5,800 original Greek copies, plus some of the early translations into other languages, and see how those things were translated, you're going to find a very consistent common thread at some point in time and know, okay, so this variation over here, this was an anomaly. It showed up here. and this dates later, or this dates as a variation.

That doesn't mean that with textual criticism we start to abandon major parts of the text. There are liberal scholars in the last several centuries who have really tried to use textual criticism as a way to break down the New Testament and Old Testament texts, but their arguments assume Error is the norm and assume that God is not able to preserve his word. And that's their beginning point. And from there, of course, they extrapolate and say, well, here's this variation and here's that variation.

But textual criticism allows us, from a theocentric or a God-centered perspective, to actually come to an understanding of what the original text would have said. There are some key terms that are used in textual criticism to define collections of Old and New Testament documents.

The first one here is the majority text, the Byzantine textual family. It's later historical as far as when it was assimilated or compiled, not assimilated, but it's There's more copies of it. The minority text, the Alexandrian textual family, relatively early, but smaller numbers. So we have fewer of those that are maintained.

And then this one is an important one, the Textus Receptus, the received text based on the 1633 overstatement by two Dutch printers. How many of you have heard of the Textus Receptus before? Some of you. It's approximately what the King James was based on.

And the King James was actually missing some of the Greek at that point in time. And so the scholars, and these were not idiots, so I'm not saying that these are a bunch of idiots and we should mock the Texas Receptus. They're missing some of the Greek and they went to the Latin Vulgate. And they translated things from Latin to Greek and then translated from Greek to English. So they added some extra layers in that.

So it's good to understand what that Texas Receptus means. So on occasion, you'll find, I use the blueletterbible.org website. If you go there and you click on the interlinear or Greek button for the verse, sometimes you'll see, well, not sometimes you'll see, you'll see at the top The critical texts are more recent Greek translation. And then at the bottom, after the interlinear, you'll see the Texas Receptus version.

And every once in a while, you'll see there's variation between those two. Again, not radical variation, but some variation between the two. Yeah? So what do you mean by the word is an overstatement? Well, the received text is an overstatement of that particular bundle.

It's marketing terminology, these Dutch printers, that everybody receives our text. I'm going to quote Bill Cosby, normally I wouldn't do that in a theological context. Do you remember his routine where he's talking about God creating in the first six days, where he says, God calls everything good? Okay, so it when Bill Cosby's talking about that he goes when man makes something we're like look at our new car It's amazing and in five years, it's rusty and it's dented and it's ruined God makes a tree and he just calls it good The reality is is it's the amazing. This is the received text.

It's an overstatement of Of what was there? It's a marketing spin on on there. It's not that it's a bad thing collection of text and we should reject it outright. It's just that it was an overstatement by some printers to kind of explain why their product was better.

Maybe you've been to the store and seen two things that look otherwise identical. You read the ingredients are identical, you look at the nutrition facts, it's identical, but one of them has a new sticker underneath it. This is the new sticker. Okay? That's really the point of the Texas Receptus was a sales pitch for a label.

Most newer translations since the King James are based on newer compilations like the critical text of the Greek where we've been able to use proper biblical respectful textual criticism to go and continue to refine our understanding of what are called the original autographs, the first letters, the first writings. On the next page, on page three here, you'll see the New Testament manuscript distribution by century and manuscript type. This is just kind of a handy chart to kind of see some of the volumes and quantities we have of the different writing styles.

In the Greek class that I'm taking right now, we're using the minuscule style Greek text, which is fantastic, because can you look at the uncial style on the top part that looks like all capital letters? Do you see all the spaces between the words? No? That's way hard to read compared to the minuscule style. So it's nice that we have the minuscule style. It makes it a lot easier to do translations and parsing things now. An example of that in English is, do we know the difference between he is now here or he is nowhere? Yeah. Getting those letters, the letters with no spaces all look the same.

But it's ideal to have that gap in grammatical structure and things articulated in the copies. Does the Hebrews have to choose between the words? Hebrew, yeah. It's been a long time since I've personally looked at Hebrew, although I did do that in seminary briefly. My dad is saying yes. I trust him, so it's good. That was mostly a joke, but hopefully you all trust him, right? So the next section here, key points that are observed in copies. There's changes in writing style, such as uncial and minuscule.

The New Testament contains approximately 20,000 lines, of which only about 40 lines are in question because of variance. How many of you have ever seen a note in your Bible or your study Bible that says this doesn't appear in certain manuscripts. The two places are the account of the woman caught in adultery and the ending verses 9 through 20 of the Gospel of Mark.

Those are the biggest blocks that get called into question. Having studied those, I think both of those ought to be considered scripture. But those are a major piece of the 40 lines, so after that you're really talking about really minor nuances here and there.

No None of those differences bring into question theological doctrine. We've suddenly introduced this really radical, heretical idea, or not, or there's a whole new idea that's never been presented before that's right in here. Only 1 8th of the New Testament variants amount to anything more than a stylistic difference or evident misspelling, like the Omicron Omega swap and things like that. And I actually just stated this next bullet point already, and that is that no major doctrines rest upon these minor variations.

One of the things I think that's interesting, the skeptic wants these problems to be radical. The skeptic wants these problems to be very serious, and the skeptic wants us to have no reliability whatsoever in the scriptures. But consistent review of the copies of what we have, the volume of copies that we have, and the historical, being able to date things back and see that there's continuity, really takes the question out of the reliability. I think that's an important concept, because I've heard over and over again hand-wavy statements by agnostics and atheists who really don't want the Bible to be reliable, but they're very hand-wavy, and they'll say, well, there's errors.

Well, where? Let's look at it. Let's talk about it. Now, of course, they've been told that, and the person before them told them that, and the person before them, it sounds like a telephone game. They're probably wrong, because they said the telephone game is wrong. So it ends up being something where there's not a lot of weight to that discussion, but they've held on to it.

In context or in comparison, here are some other ancient documents that we can find out how many copies or references to these certain documents do we have. So writings about Caesar, 100 to 44 BC. The earliest copy we have is 900 AD. That's 1,000 years time, and we have 10 copies. Anyone really doubt that Caesar existed, or Plato, or Aristotle? These are historical figures. If you go learn about philosophy, at a university, you're going to find out about Plato and Aristotle, right? And Socrates, you're going to find out about these. But if you look at these dates, there are some pretty big gaps there.

And yet, there's not skepticism there, right? What's the cost of skepticism of Plato and Socrates? We're not talking about salvation, right? There's no loss of the gospel. But because Christianity is an affront to the flesh, skepticism reigns. Even though when you look at the relationship and context there, there's no way that they should, if they're skeptical of the New Testament, there's no way they should even have any belief that these characters existed in history based on their radical skepticism of the New Testament, and we have so much bolstering the New Testament. Underneath that block is a quote, and last week I read a quote, and this week I'm going to read a quote. I promise not to read too much of this text word for word, but I think this is a really important quote.

The interval between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible and the last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.

Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established." And that's a quote from Sir Frederick Kenyon, the late director of the British Museum of Writing in the Bible and Archaeology. And since he wrote that, hundreds and hundreds of additional manuscripts have been found. So it was already validated as a consistent collection of text with consistent understanding and copies and we found hundreds and hundreds of copies since then too.

All right, let's move to translation. Translation is actually something that is near and dear to my heart, not because I'm taking the Greek class, but because I worked at a Christian bookstore in college. And if there's anything that I saw divide believers more than just actually arguing over the doctrine of what's in the Bible, it was which Bible translation was the one that you should have. So the first thing I have here is a sentence.

Much noise has been made over the years about translation into English and whether or not Paul read the King James. Okay, Paul didn't read the King James, but there are people that really think he did. Unfortunately, they haven't thought all the way through that.

But translations have existed for a long time. And people have lost their lives for translations. There was a time when you should only have the Greek, or you should only have the Hebrew and Aramaic, but you should certainly not have anything in your own tongue. Because they were afraid there would be errors in the translation, or the right people weren't in control of it. It was very political. The seminary that my dad and I went to, and many other people have gone to, is called Tyndale, named after William Tyndale, and he was a guy that was working on an English translation. And for most of his translation time, until he was killed, he was on the run.

Because it wasn't okay to translate in English. Now, I want to make one other statement about translation, is that we might speak English in this room, I think we all do speak English in this room, but there are other languages. So these issues also relate to Bible translation into other languages. So keep that in mind, because sometimes it's easy to just fall into English-only mindset, but think about some of these principles we're going to talk about in that context of, I have to turn this into Spanish, and I have to turn this into French, and I have to turn this into emoticons, or whatever the next linguistic development is. So let's take a look at these bullet points.

There are more than 19,000 ancient New Testament manuscripts in Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and other languages. So 19,000. And I'm guessing that since this was written, more of them found. 19,000. That's, again, a significant number. To my knowledge, maybe there weren't so many burning at the stakes and things like that that would have been part of that.

The oldest copy of the New Testament known to exist are the Syriac and Old Latin versions from the second century. Whole copies in those languages. So that's a pretty powerful thing. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin in 405 A.D. That's also known as the Vulgate, which replaces the older Latin translation from 190 A.D. Now, how many of you are familiar with what Vulgate means? We hear the word vulgar, right, and we think that's terrible. Vulgate meant like the common tongue. It wasn't meant to say this is a vulgar translation of the Bible, just in case you hear that in your brain. artificially connects those dots.

So what countries spoke Latin? A bunch. The Roman Empire shifted from Greek to Latin within several hundred years of the New Testament time. So Latin would have been suddenly very common all the way across the Roman Empire. And Greek to Latin would have been a very logical jump since Christianity was pretty broadly believed across the empire. Many of the Western European languages are basically derivations from the Latin. Yeah, the Romantic languages are Latin variations.

Venerable Bede translated the Gospel of John into pre-English and we have at the end of this handout we actually have some variations on John 3.16. We're almost to them, but I want to articulate that you're going to get to see how this pre-English looks compared to modern English. I think it's really worth your time to just read through each one of these in sequence when we get there, because it will kind of help show you how our language that we speak today developed. Last on this list, John Wycliffe, professor at Oxford, translated the Bible from Latin Vulgate into 14th century English. Because of the lack of printing technology, all copying of Wycliffe's translation was done by hand. Again, all by hand. The printing press was awesome. When Gutenberg decided he was going to use the printing press, the first thing he made copies of was the Bible, and that's a big deal.

But they still would have been very, very, very expensive copies. Like in today's money, as I understand it, it would be like a $15,000 Bible. Or half of the median salary of a U.S. job right now for a Bible. Six months wages when the printing press comes out. So handwriting would have still been expensive, maybe you're more likely to get a snippet of it than a $15,000 Bible. Today you can get a Bible for maybe a dollar. You can get the cheap newspaper print ones.

A lot has changed since then. So this next flow chart here or diagram is translation theory. And this is really cool to look at. Like I said, we're talking about Greek or Hebrew and Aramaic to English. But think about these things going to different cultures. Not just United States English, but what is the difference in British culture? What is the difference when you talk about all the cultures around the world? Think about some of these things.

So the first thing we've got here on the left-hand side is the source language. We have language distinctives that are part of Hebrew or Greek. Hebrew is a very story-focused language. Greek is a very technical language. And the Kornet Greek is less technical than classical Greek from before that, which was even more complicated.

The idea that the Hebrew has a poetry pattern that rhymes is something that we'd have to consider. Someone has to tell you that, right? Otherwise, you might observe it, but you won't understand. You'll say, this doesn't rhyme. Because in English, that matters. But what about other languages and how they deal with poetry? How does that translate? So idioms.

Keep coals of fire on their heads. It's like, oh, OK, well, that's a weird idiom. In modern day English, we don't even use coal for much in our day-to-day lives, unless you work at a power plant, unless you're a coal miner. Coal just isn't used the same way.

Then there's things like culture, greet no man on the way. Well, OK, that's a cultural thing. How does that translate into our culture? Historical background, occasion of the writer. So we have all these things that are part of the original document, and now you have to convey that in a meaningful way. So you'll see there's two layers. If you look at the chart, you see one arrow that goes over, and then there's a second one. So let's talk about the first layer, and then we'll come back around to the second layer. So the receptor language has the same problems, but they're different. They're the same qualities of linguistic distinctives, idioms, culture, historical situation, occasion of today's reader.

How many of you are familiar with Chinese structure at all? sweet. None of us have that exposure. So I have a friend, Mike Mason, who will actually be here in a couple weeks in Colorado, who took Chinese. And he said one of the things that was interesting about the Chinese language is that there is no syntax for questions. We use voice inflection, right? And we have the question mark? Well, the whole language is tonal and has inflection built into it in Chinese. So if they say something that's not true, it's a question. Well, how do you take the Greek context with the Greek ideas and the Greek sentence structure, or even English for that matter, and translate that into Chinese?

Well, suddenly, now you've got that. How do you do that? So that's why I said think about other languages. For us, this is one way. If we're going into other languages, it could be radically different in a different direction. So the bottom layer of this chart here is step one, decode from source language and take into account the language distinctives, the idioms, the culture, the historical background, and the occasion of the writer. And then encode it into the receptor language, again, taking into account all those things.

That can be complicated. That can take time. And you have to understand the original in a meaningful way to where you feel like you really understand all of those qualities before you can then convert it and translate it into those other things. Was that the second bell that Brian just rang? That was the first one? Okay. Thank you.

So this next section here is the textual translation or comparison of John 3.16 and other printings of the English Bible.

And for various reasons of comedy, I'm not going to read these out loud to you. But on your own time, please do read through them and look at the variation. You'll notice that some of the letters look kind of funny. And that is because the way they would write letters was different in the way that they would write words. And sometimes the words that they would use were different. That meant the same thing.

So follow that and read through that. The last section here is general recommendations for translation choice. And these are recommendations that I think carry a lot of merit. Use a Bible translation that is closer to word-for-word rather than a paraphrase or thought-for-thought translation. Why is it that a word-for-word translation might be more precise for our understanding than a thought-for-thought translation? Because the words convey a specific meaning or connotation where a thought for thought is more subjective. The idea of subjectivity was really what I was looking for in that.

We got for Abigail, when she asked for her first Bible, we got her an NIV Bible, which is more thought for thought. It was because where she was at a reading level, was about the 6th grade reading level for where she was at. But as her reading level improves, and frankly she's a fantastic reader, we will switch her over to probably a new American Standard, which is written at about a 10th grade reading level and is more word for word. The King James, by today's education standards, is written at a 12th grader college level because you have to know so much about the cultural differences and historical linguistic differences between 1611 and 2015.

Things like conversation. We use the word conversation. After this, Brian will ring the bell in a few moments. Well, I'll stop and we'll get up and we'll have a conversation. But in 1611, conversation was how you lived your life. But if you read the 1611 King James without knowing that, then you'll say, ah, it says, have a good conversation. You're like, yeah, I'm going to have a good conversation.

It doesn't mean the same thing. So it's considered to be a higher reading level. But having a thought-for-thought translation while you can convey a lot of the meaning, can sometimes lose something. And it also requires someone to interpret it, take it in as a thought, and regurgitate it as a thought. And then there's more chance for bias to be introduced. The third bullet point on here of this subsection is the Living Bible was a translation of a translation.

It did not use any original language research. The guy was on the subway translating the King James into modern English for his children. Which is fantastic. I mean, I hear that and I think, this man loved his children. But it means that it's probably not a good study reference, right?

And lastly in this is, get access to tools that will help you understand the original language and culture in which scripture was written. Examples of that would be Vine's Expository Dictionary, or the Holman Book of Biblical Charts, Maps, and Reconstructions. And there's a lot more. If you ask my dad or, various scholars, you will definitely get a long list over time, but there are some good resources for understanding the variation between the original language and now and digging deeper into it.

That was the second bell. Any questions, thoughts before we close in prayer? All right, let's pray real quick. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the truth of your word, for inspiring it, for canonizing it, for preserving it, and then allowing us to read it in our language. We just pray for a deeper understanding as we grow in you. We thank you for this time. We praise you in Jesus' name. Amen.