This episode is part of the Restoration Theology class.
Would you agree that every translation of the Bible has some sort of bias in it? Even the most literal translations have a good deal of bias baked into them. What can we do? Well, you could learn Hebrew and Greek so you can read the Bible for yourself instead of depending on a translation. Ok, but if you don’t have the inclination, motivation, or time to do that, what can you do? This episode of Restoration Theology is going to take you step by step through an English-only process of detecting bias in translation. You’ll learn a little about the translation process as well as how to spot bias in translation. This is a necessary component in our quest to evaluate doctrines against the text of Scripture.
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- Intro music: Good Vibes by MBB Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) Free Download / Stream: Music promoted by Audio Library.
Hey hey whats up Sean, I’m really enjoying this class. This week’s class on bias translation really helped open my mind on looking at different “tribes” of bibles. I currently use the Y’ALL yes I said correctly Y’ALL version its super helpful with using YHWH instead of LORD and it capitalizes HE HIM and other pronouns when referring to YHWH. It also uses y’all for second person your. I use it for my main personal reading along with the NRSV-EU. You hit a good point on looking at the Jewish and catholic “tribes” of translations which I’m adding to my you version app. Looking forward to the rest of the series!
Sean thanks for this great class and many others! When comparing different translation camps, are all translation camps created equal? For example, should a Jewish translation hold the same weight as an Evangelical? And if not how can we be that balance?
Thank you Sean for your episode 640 “Bible Translation and Detecting Bias.” You had mentioned in this episode that the best way to detect translation bias is to compare various Bible translations within various “translation camps.” You mentioned a few online Bible tools, including the use of AI. However, I would like to bring to your attention the fastest and simplest way that I have found to compare dozens of Bible translations in the matter of seconds. What I do is use inWORD Bible (spelled I-N-W-O-R-D if you are reading this in a future episode). This software is currently available for Android, and Apple devices and Microsoft Windows PCs. While the user is reading the English text to the Bible, the inWORD Bible app allows the user to tap on a verse, choose “Compare Bible translations”, and within 5 seconds, over 70 Bible translations on that one specific verse will appear on the screen. The translations include not only the major English translations, but includes even lesser known translations, along with Hebrew and Greek translations, and Aramaic targums in English.
By the way, inWORD Bible also has 100’s of thousands of Bible articles and resources, linked to each individual verse of the Bible. The app promotes Restoration Theology, with thousands of resources that have a one-God (the Father), kingdom-of-God-on-earth focus.
End of shameless plug.
Keep up the good work. I look forward to future episodes in this Restoration Theology series.
Hi Sean,
I started watching the very interesting lectures on “Restoration Theology.” However, I don’t understand the spoken word very well because I’m from Czechia. So I use transcripts, which I translate myself. But from the “Restoration Theology 5” section onwards, the transcript doesn’t display. Is this a problem on my end, or are they not available?
Thank you for your reply.
Jiri
I’m guessing from your comment that you are using YouTube. If that is the case, YouTube auto-generates its own transcript. If you listen on Spotify, that also auto-generates a transcript. Also, each episode on this website has a transcript in the show notes under links. You can click on that, and it will pull up a text document that you can read along with.
*edit*
I just noticed that some of the links were wrong in the recent episodes and have corrected them. Please try again, they should all work now.