This is the transcript of Restitutio episode 640: Restoration Theology 6: Bible Translation and Detecting Bias

This transcript was auto-generated and only approximates the contents of this episode.

Audio file
640 Restoration Theology 6.mp3

Transcript

00:00
Hey there, I'm Sean Finnegan and you are listening to Restitudio, a podcast that seeks to recover authentic Christianity and live it out today.

00:12
Would you agree that every translation of the Bible has some sort of bias in it?

00:16
Even the most literal translations have a good deal of bias baked into them.

00:21
What can we do?

00:22
Well,

00:23
You could learn Hebrew and Greek, so you can read the Bible for yourself instead of depending on a translation.

00:30
Okay, but if you don't have the inclination, motivation, or time to do that, what can you do?

00:37
Well, this episode of Restoration Theology is going to take you step by step through an English-only process of detecting bias in translation.

00:47
You'll learn a little bit about the translation process as well as how to spot bias in translation.

00:52
And this is a necessary component in our quest to evaluate doctrines against the text of Scripture in Restoration Theology.

01:00
Here now is episode 640, part 6 of our Restoration Theology class, Bible Translation and Detecting Bias.

01:17
We've looked at the text of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and now we've got to be able to read it.

01:24
There's only two options for reading Scripture.

01:27
One is to learn the languages in which it was written, and the other is to get a translation in your language.

01:34
We're going to talk about translations.

01:36
Have you ever thought about translating?

01:39
If you know another language, that there are no two languages that are perfectly aligned with each other.

01:44
They're always a little off this way or off that way.

01:48
The vocabularies are different.

01:50
And so as a result, many words don't...

01:53
just have like one other word in a different language that they always correspond to.

01:58
Sometimes it's this word, sometimes it's that word, and then words affect each other, right?

02:02
In the same sentence, a word will affect what another word means, and there can be lots of ambiguity.

02:08
Ambiguity is where there's uncertain meaning.

02:10
So consider this sentence, the chicken is ready to eat.

02:15
This could mean three different things.

02:17
It could mean I've cooked the chicken, it's now ready for us to eat.

02:22
Is that what you thought when you read it?

02:25
Probably.

02:26
It also could mean our family pet chicken is ready to eat.

02:29
Go feed her.

02:31
Or it could mean the cowardly human is ready to eat.

02:34
Somebody that you're calling the name chicken.

02:37
And that's the ambiguity of language.

02:40
Language is determined by context, always.

02:44
Translators are always making assumptions based on context, and the process

02:50
is exacerbated in English because in English, we have such a long tradition of translating the Bible going back 500 years to William Tyndale.

03:02
And so in English, we're used to hearing the Bible sound a certain way.

03:08
We're used to certain turns of phrases.

03:11
And when we don't hear that, we don't like it.

03:15
We're used to hearing it a certain way.

03:17
And that's not necessarily a good thing.

03:19
So it's hard for translators to even read the Bible differently than they've always read it because of tradition.

03:27
Let's talk about the process of translation.

03:30
I've got four steps for you.

03:31
Number one, select your source for translation, or in the case of the Bible, sources, because we have the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have different sources.

03:41
So you have the Hebrew text, you have the Aramaic, you have the Greek.

03:45
Then you have to decide on a translation philosophy.

03:49
There are two major translation philosophies, formal correspondence and dynamic equivalence.

03:56
And they're basically opposite of each other.

03:58
Formal correspondence is where you're trying to find a word in your target language that corresponds with your source language.

04:07
So you want to always find the same word to correspond.

04:11
Whereas dynamic equivalence is thought for thought.

04:15
Correspondence is all about being literal.

04:17
If you ever hear of the phrase a literal translation, that's formal correspondence.

04:21
Whereas dynamic equivalence is thought for thought and the idea is readability.

04:27
The dynamic equivalence advocate would say, what good is the Bible if people can't understand it?

04:34
If you get excessively formal in your correspondence, you get bad English.

04:39
Because Hebrew is not the same

04:42
structure as English.

04:43
Greek does not use the same grammar as English.

04:46
They use, they just have different moves.

04:50
Then you have to translate the source text into the target language.

04:54
That's the actual work of translation.

04:56
And that can be done by an individual or a team.

05:01
And certain Bible translations are done by an individual and others are done by a group or a committee.

05:08
Lastly, there's the review and revise

05:10
process.

05:11
Usually an editor or committee of editors will go over the English version and they might not even have any biblical language knowledge at all.

05:20
And they're just going to look at the English and they're going to review and revise the English.

05:25
And they will make changes to smooth out phrases and also a lot of times reject controversial readings in favor of traditional readings.

05:35
Now, our focus for tonight is bias.

05:41
Some people will say, oh, I don't trust translations done by a single individual because those translations have bias.

05:50
That's true.

05:52
Every single individual, including this individual, has bias.

05:58
And more often than not, we don't even know what our own bias is.

06:02
We just think it's the right way to think or read or talk.

06:07
But then when you come to a whole committee of translators, they also usually have bias as well.

06:14
And that's because publishing is a business.

06:17
And publishers are always starting with an audience in mind when they begin a project.

06:24
Who's the audience for this Bible?

06:25
They're not going to make a Bible for all people for all time.

06:28
They're going to make a Bible for evangelicals, or for Catholics, or for Jews, or for mainline Protestants.

06:37
right?

06:37
they have some sort of audience in mind, and then they select a committee based on that audience, and that excludes any kind of outliers a lot of times, or outlying translations.

06:50
In other words, publishers are not interested in producing books that don't sell.

06:55
Publishing is a business, and it's not nefarious or anything, it's just the nature of it.

06:59
It's just capitalism.

07:01
And if you produce a Bible that doesn't sell, then guess what?

07:05
it's going to flop.

07:06
And as a publisher, you'll go out of business.

07:10
Hopefully not with just one miss, but let's talk about the problem with committee translations.

07:16
David Bentley Hart talks about this in his New Testament.

07:20
David Bentley Hart translated his own New Testament.

07:24
So he's a single translator of the New Testament.

07:28
And this is what he says.

07:30
The inevitable consequence of this

07:33
talking about decisions made by committees, is that many of the most important decisions are negotiated accommodations, achieved by general agreement and favoring only those solutions that prove the least offensive to everyone involved.

07:46
This becomes, in effect, a process of natural selection, in which novel approaches to the text are generally the first to perish, and only the tried and trusted survive.

07:58
And this can result in the exclusion not only of extravagantly conjectural readings,

08:02
but often of the most straightforwardly literal as well.

08:06
In the end, even the most conscientious translations tend, at certain crucial junctures, to use language determined as much by theological and dogmatic tradition as by the plain meaning of the words on the page.

08:21
And in some extreme cases, doctrinal or theological or moral ideologies drive translators to distort the text to a discreditable degree.

08:31
Certain popular translations like the New International Version and the English Standard Version are notorious examples of this.

08:38
may represent the honest zeal of devout translators to communicate what they imagine to be the correct theology of Scripture, but the preposterous liberties taken to accomplish this end often verge on a kind of pious fraudulence.

08:54
So in other words, committee translations tend to toe the line.

08:57
The decision makers are often those who are established with the most to lose, rather than the young scholars who just got their PhDs and are out to make a name for themselves.

09:08
So if I could put it this way, on the one hand, we have the editors, the people that are well-established, that have much to lose, and they tend towards conservative readings.

09:19
And then on the other hand, you have young scholars who are out to make a name for themselves,

09:24
And, if they can come up with a new reading, then, hey, they can become famous for that, or they can become, tenured as a professor for discovering something.

09:32
You have to do something new in research a lot of times in order to get any kind of funding or recognition.

09:39
Certainly, a PhD is only awarded to someone who's doing a new idea.

09:43
You can't just do the same PhD somebody else already did.

09:47
And so there is always a little bit of tension there.

09:50
But bias is a reality.

09:51
There's no escaping bias.

09:54
We all have bias.

09:55
We all have our preferences and our sense of tradition.

10:01
Other than learning the biblical languages yourself, there is no escaping other people's bias in translation.

10:09
So what can you do?

10:11
We must be able to detect bias by comparing translations from different camps.

10:20
You need a bias detector.

10:24
That's what you need.

10:26
You need a bias detector, and I'm going to give you one.

10:29
I've got a solution for you.

10:31
I believe you can do this, even if you don't read biblical languages.

10:34
If you do, it's even easier.

10:36
But it's simply the idea of different translation camps.

10:40
So think about all these different tents.

10:44
Each tent represents a different camp of

10:48
Christians or Jews, or maybe neither.

10:52
Sometimes translations can be done by just secular people that are really good at languages, right?

10:57
So there are different kinds of camps.

11:00
So we have the Jewish camp, and we have Jewish translations, and we have the Catholic camp and the Catholic translations,

11:08
And then there's mainline translations.

11:10
Mainline, I think you know what Jews and Catholics are.

11:13
Mainline are more liberal leaning Christians, tend to have big, beautiful churches and well-established, played a big role in the United States in the early years and centuries of this country, those mainline denominations.

11:30
Then you have the evangelicals.

11:31
These are the real ******** Bible-believing folks.

11:35
And then you have biblical Unitarian translations, which a lot of people don't even know about, but it's a totally different camp.

11:41
And really, what is the goal here?

11:43
The goal is to detect bias.

11:46
How can you detect bias?

11:48
You have to have contrast.

11:51
If you don't have contrast, somebody to read against something else, then you can't see any bias.

11:57
So that's why you need to look at a Bible translation from a different camp than your own.

12:02
I'm going to show you an example of this.

12:03
Genesis chapter 1, verse 2 in the evangelical translation known as the ESV says, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the spirit, capital S, of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

12:21
So we come to this and we ask the question,

12:24
Why is that S capitalized on spirit?

12:27
What is the deal with that?

12:29
There's no capitals in the original Hebrew, or I would like to say probably they're all capitals.

12:35
There's no lowercase, but whatever the case, there's no capital marker in Hebrew, certainly not ancient Hebrew.

12:42
And so why is the S capitalized in the ESV?

12:47
Well, I know why.

12:50
If you think about it, you probably know why too.

12:52
It's because the translators of the ESV are evangelicals.

12:54
Evangelicals believe in the Trinity.

12:56
The Trinity affirms the personhood of the Spirit.

13:00
And so they look at the Spirit as someone that is a person of God, like the Father and the Son, right?

13:08
So they want to capitalize Father, they want to capitalize Son, they want to capitalize Spirit, wherever it occurs.

13:15
And so let's say you don't even know that.

13:17
Let's say you're just like, you know, I'm just curious.

13:20
I'm going to go look at some other translations.

13:22
So you pull out the Legacy Standard Bible from 2020, and you're like, oh shoot, that has a capital S on Spirit 2.

13:29
Then you're like, you know what, let me look at the old New American Standard Bible, or the new American Standard Bible from 2020.

13:36
It capitalizes the S on Spirit 2, as does the Christian Standard Bible, the New Living Translation, the New International Version, the New King James Version, and pretty much every other evangelical translation there is.

13:49
And you look at, what is this, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 translations plus the ESV.

13:53
You've looked at 7 translations.

13:56
What an overachiever you are.

13:57
What an incredible student.

13:59
Seven translations.

14:00
Surely the S should be capitalized if 7 plus translations all capitalize it.

14:06
But here is the problem.

14:09
Every translation you've looked at is from the same camp.

14:13
Different publishers,

14:15
different translation teams, but same commitment to beliefs as the evangelical camp.

14:21
The moment you step outside the evangelical camp, guess what?

14:25
The S is no longer capitalized.

14:27
So if you look at a biblical Unitarian translation, the REV, it says, and the Spirit, lowercase S, Spirit of God, was hovering over the face of the waters.

14:37
If you look at a Jewish translation, like the NJPS, it says, and a wind from God sweeping over the water.

14:44
Totally different, right?

14:47
That's because the word translated spirit also means wind.

14:51
Or the NRSV, updated edition, says, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters, or the Catholic Bible, which is called the New American Bible Revised Edition, says a mighty wind.

15:05
So in this case, rather than a wind from God, it's a mighty wind.

15:09
They took the word Elohim as an adjective instead of as a noun.

15:14
Now the evangelical bias pops out.

15:18
It's like, whoa, you guys, you guys inserted that capital S.

15:23
Nobody else is doing that.

15:24
That's just in your camp.

15:25
In your camp, all your translations do that.

15:27
Yeah, sure.

15:28
But as soon as I get outside your camp, then it's like, oh, that's just your bias.

15:31
So that's what I mean by detecting bias.

15:33
How do you detect bias?

15:34
You find translations from a different camp that you can contrast with it.

15:40
All right, let's talk about the Protestant burden.

15:42
This is a quote from Jason David Badun's book, Truth in Translation, and it's really helpful.

15:48
Protestant forms of Christianity, following the motto of Sola Scriptura, we've talked about that, scripture alone, insists that all legitimate Christian beliefs and practices must be found in, or at least based on, the Bible.

16:03
Look, I'm just going to go ahead and strongly agree with every single word that I just read to you.

16:10
I love this.

16:11
is great.

16:13
Our beliefs should be based on scripture alone.

16:17
He goes on, that's a very clear and admirable principle.

16:21
The problem is that Protestant Christianity was not born in a historical vacuum and does not go back directly to the time that the Bible was written.

16:31
Protestantism was and is a reformation of an already fully developed form of Christianity, Catholicism.

16:40
When the Protestant Reformation occurred just 500 years ago, it did not reinvent Christianity from scratch, but carried over many of the doctrines that had developed within Catholicism over the course of the previous thousand years and more.

16:54
In this sense, one might argue that the Protestant Reformation is incomplete.

16:59
Amen, brother.

17:01
That it did not fully realize the high ideals that were set for it.

17:05
For the doctrines that Protestantism inherited to be considered true, they had to be found in the Bible.

17:11
And precisely because they were considered true already, there was and is tremendous pressure to read those truths back into the Bible, whether or not they are actually there.

17:23
Translation and interpretation are seen as working hand in hand.

17:28
and is practically indistinguishable because Protestant Christians don't like to imagine themselves building too much beyond what the Bible spells out for itself.

17:37
So, even if most, if not all, of the ideas and concepts held by modern Protestant Christians can be found at least implied somewhere in the Bible,

17:46
There is a pressure, conscious or unconscious, to build up those ideas and the concepts within the biblical text to paraphrase or expand on what the Bible does say in the direction of what modern readers want and need it to say.

18:00
That's kind of interesting, Want and need.

18:03
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the tail wagging the dog.

18:10
You have your beliefs?

18:11
And now you're a Bible translator or a committee of Bible translators.

18:14
You're like, all right, let's translate the Bible.

18:16
Let's do an updated edition of whatever version of the Bible we're working with.

18:21
And they come across something and it can be translated, let's say it can be translated 2 different ways.

18:26
In one way, agrees with their historic creeds.

18:29
And the other way, contradicts or just doesn't support their historic creeds.

18:32
What are they going to do?

18:34
Every time they can, they're going with the idea that supports what they have always believed to be true.

18:41
But we do not change the Bible to fit our beliefs.

18:47
We change our beliefs to fit the Bible.

18:51
Are you with me?

18:54
Look, if your beliefs disagree with the Bible, change your beliefs.

19:00
The Catholic does not have the Protestant burden.

19:03
Catholic Christians

19:05
They don't have sola scriptura.

19:06
They have the authority of the church.

19:08
They have a whole different way of thinking about it.

19:10
And therefore, Catholic scholars, a lot of times, have more freedom to translate it what it really says than making it fit their beliefs.

19:18
This is a great irony because several centuries ago, the Catholics were killing people who didn't agree with their beliefs.

19:25
And now they're transparently honest about what it says because, you know, the church tells us what to believe.

19:31
It's actually helpful for you to have a Catholic translation.

19:35
And the one I recommend is the New American Bible Revised Edition, which is done in 2011.

19:40
It was an update of the 1970 New American Bible.

19:44
Then they also have the New Jerusalem Bible, which was an update of the Jerusalem Bible.

19:50
That's a little bit more of a paraphrase-y translation.

19:54
All right, let's look at some Jewish translations.

19:58
Jewish people have totally different, well, they have a lot of the same beliefs, but also some different beliefs in Christians.

20:04
And so their translations are really helpful to look at as well.

20:09
And so here's a list of Jewish translations, the Revised Jewish Publication Society, which is from 2023.

20:16
Robert Alter's translation.

20:18
Robert Alter is a single translator of the Old Testament.

20:22
The Korin Tanakh of 2009, the Stone edition Tanakh of 1996.

20:27
It's kind of hysterical that they spell it differently.

20:30
That's not my mistake.

20:32
It's just Tanakh is not really an English word.

20:34
So there's different ways to render it, to transliterate it into English.

20:38
Then there's the Shockin Bible by Everett Fox, and then the classic NJPS, New Jewish Publication Society of 1985.

20:46
Let me just highlight the last two on this list.

20:50
The new JPS

20:51
of 1985 is like the bread and butter standard English Jewish translation that you're going to see.

20:57
They did an update in 2023, but I don't think they really changed that much.

21:02
They just kind of changed some of the gender language a little bit.

21:05
But it's like a very standard translation accepted by at least Reform Judaism, but also maybe some other branches too.

21:13
This other one here, the Shockin Bible of Everett Fox.

21:18
This is a lesser known Bible.

21:20
And he hasn't finished the whole Old Testament yet, but he's got 2 volumes out, the Torah and then the earlier prophets.

21:26
It's a really great Bible for, if you want, well, I'll just tell you what I use it for.

21:33
I use it pretty much every day I use it because it's super literal to the Hebrew, like crazy literal.

21:40
So literal that the English is bad and he knows it and it's on purpose.

21:44
because he's trying to give you the unfiltered, full flavor translation in the English language.

21:51
So he doesn't really care too much about breaking the rules in English, so long as he's being authentic to the text.

21:57
And so I think for that reason, it's really helpful, not just if you're learning Hebrew, but if you're trying to see that influence.

22:05
Most of us don't know about these Jewish translations, but they provide a fresh take on scripture for Christians.

22:11
Sadly,

22:13
they do tend to just stick to the Masoretic text of specifically the Leningrad Codex, or a lot of times they will go from the Aleppo Codex, but it's just a Masoretic text.

22:23
And they won't bring into it the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Septuagint and stuff like that very much.

22:29
Sometimes you'll get a footnote, like in the NJPS, they'll give you footnotes.

22:36
Then there are mainline translations.

22:38
Mainline translations include the new revised standard version.

22:44
So this is just kind of silly, but it is what it is.

22:48
Let me start at the bottom.

22:50
So you have the OG, the original, King James Version, 1611.

22:55
About the year 1769, they say, look, all these words have changed spelling in the English language.

23:00
We got to update this thing.

23:01
So they updated it in the year 1769.

23:04
And that's pretty much what everyone thinks the King James is, but it's actually the 1769, not the 1611.

23:10
Then in the year 1905, they did another update called the American Standard Version.

23:15
And then in 1971, they updated the ASV to the Revised Standard Version.

23:20
And they're like, you know, we need a new one of those.

23:23
New Revised Standard Version.

23:24
They're like, all right, let's do a new, revised, okay, we'll call it the New Revised Standard Version, updated edition.

23:31
Right?

23:31
So it's just getting silly at this point where this stream of translations is just like, okay, it's updated every so many decades or centuries, in fact.

23:41
It is actually a really good translation.

23:43
It's the one I use for preaching.

23:44
New Revised Standard Version, updated edition.

23:47
And then there's this other stream over here.

23:50
the New English Bible and then the Revised English Bible of 1961 and 1989.

23:56
Those are actually pretty cool too.

23:58
I read the New English Bible some years ago.

24:00
I really enjoyed it.

24:01
It's more of a paraphrase.

24:02
It's not a very literal translation, but it's very delightfully British and I think helpful.

24:10
Now, the NRSV is the standard version used in colleges in the USA and mainline Christians

24:16
tend to be more scholarly, the people that work on it, politically progressive, morally progressive.

24:23
So like we're talking about more on the liberal side of a lot of issues.

24:27
So that's where they're coming from.

24:29
That's their bias.

24:30
But they also don't necessarily believe in scriptural authority to the same degree as evangelicals do.

24:38
So they don't necessarily need the Bible to defend their positions.

24:42
You see what I'm saying?

24:43
They're kind of a little bit looser.

24:45
historically than evangelicals on inspiration, which frees it to be a little more honest.

24:52
So I think actually it works out pretty well.

24:55
And they incorporate recent scholarship much more aggressively than evangelicals do.

24:59
All right, over to biblical Unitarian translations.

25:03
There's quite a few of them at this point.

25:06
There's the revised English version.

25:07
I don't have a date for that because it's ongoing.

25:10
And what's interesting about the REV is that as they make their way through the revision of, they're actually revising the American Standard version, I believe, of 1905, if I'm not mistaken.

25:23
And as they're going through revising that, they're uploading to their website and their app constantly.

25:30
I would say probably at least weekly or maybe monthly.

25:33
sometimes daily as things are getting translated.

25:37
So we don't have a finished date on that yet.

25:40
Then there's the 2025 artificial intelligence critical New Testament.

25:44
This was an AI project where the translators basically said, look, we really want you to not be biased on the subject of the Trinity.

25:52
We just want you to translate it without trying to push the Bible towards the Trinity.

25:57
Don't necessarily need to push it towards Unitarianism either.

25:59
Just give us as unbiased of a translation as you can.

26:03
And that was the product for that.

26:04
It's online for free and you can get a paper copy as well.

26:08
Then there's the 2019 Kingdom of God version of Ray Faircloth, the 2017 New European version of Duncan Heaster, the 2014 OGFOMMT of Anthony Buzzard.

26:17
I didn't have enough space to write out one God, the Father, one man Messiah translation.

26:21
And then in 2013, there's the Jehovah's Witness translation, New World translation.

26:27
People think I'm crazy for not hating on the Jehovah's Witnesses.

26:31
I think their translation is pretty decent.

26:33
All right.

26:34
It's very literal.

26:36
And there are some corners where they use like specialized language that their group has a certain meaning for that other groups don't recognize.

26:44
Yeah, that's true.

26:45
But overall, their Bible is actually pretty good.

26:47
And then in the 2008 McDonald idiomatic translation.

26:53
So just to show you some examples here of these different Bible translation camps, let's look at Romans 9.5.

27:02
When I was looking for Romans 9.5, I said to myself, I want a Jewish translation.

27:07
Well, Jewish people don't tend to translate Romans because it's not part of their Bible.

27:12
The Jewish Bible doesn't have the book of Romans in it.

27:16
But Messianic Jews do have the book of Romans because they believe in the New Testament.

27:22
And I found a Messianic Jewish translation that was interesting.

27:26
It's called The Complete Jewish Bible by David Stern.

27:29
And this is how they render Romans 9.5.

27:32
It says, the patriarchs are theirs, and from them, as far as his physical descent is concerned, came the Messiah who is over all.

27:40
Period.

27:41
Praised be Adonai forever.

27:43
Amen.

27:45
Evangelical translations read like this.

27:47
To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever.

27:55
Amen.

27:56
You see a little contrast here?

27:58
In the one case, we have a period here.

28:01
In another case, we have Christ being called God overall.

28:06
Okay, so that's very different.

28:08
The mainline translations, to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Christ, who is overall God blessed forever.

28:16
Amen.

28:18
So is he God or is he blessed by God?

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You know, it could go either way.

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The Catholic translation says,

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This is the NABRE.

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There's the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, is the Messiah, period.

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God, who is over all, be blessed forever.

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Amen.

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So you see what's going on here.

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We have a variety.

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Of course, the biblical Unitarian translation, I just threw in the New World Translation from the Jehovah's Witnesses to show you it's not the spawn of Satan or something crazy.

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To them, the forefathers belong, and from them, the Christ descended according to the flesh, period.

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God, who is over all, be praised forever.

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Amen.

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So we really have three options for translation.

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It could be saying, Christ is God overall, or it could be saying, Christ is overall God blessed.

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Or it could be saying, Christ, period, and then praising God, God overall be praised or be blessed forever.

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Do you see how we're detecting the bias here?

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This is your bias detector.

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Let's look at our camps again.

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I have translations from all of these camps, from the Jewish camp, from the Evangelical camp, from the Unitarian camp, from the mainline camp, from the Catholic camp.

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And you can get paperback versions for them.

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If you're a Bible software kind of person, then you can get these translations in Logos or in Accordance, the two main Bible programs that are out there.

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You can get them online on websites like biblegateway.com, or you could just ask AI.

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I know I keep saying that, but we need to embrace this tool.

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It's like so helpful.

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I ask AI for Bible translations all the time.

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And you know what?

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AI in our stage is so flawed in so many areas.

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And I'm going to get into where the limitations are currently.

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But you know what it's really great at?

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A very clear, bounded text that is specific and well-defined.

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In other words, Bible translations, right?

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And AI has total access to most Bible translations and will just give you exactly a verse from that version or another.

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And so it's a really helpful tool in that sense.

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Now, when you ask AI, you have to prompt it correctly.

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If you say, AI, detect for me bias in this Bible translation

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of Romans 9.5.

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It's just going to be like, it's going to make something up because AI does that.

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We know it's not going to say, well, I'm not sure.

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I don't think it's capable of saying that.

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It's going to come up with something.

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And it probably will have some good thoughts because that's kind of a famous verse.

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But if you did Romans 9.6, which is not a famous verse for this kind of translation question, then it might not have very many thoughts.

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So you have to be able to prompt the AI.

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So when you ask it, you could say something like,

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I need to set some defaults for you.

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And you say, okay, for Jewish translations, I want you to set the default as the NJPS, the New Jewish Publication Society translation.

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For the Unitarian translations, I want you to use the REV as your base text.

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For the evangelical, use the NIV.

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For the mainline, use the NRSVUE.

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And for the Catholic, use the NABRE.

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I know that's like a lot of letters all at once, sorry.

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But my point is, you pick a translation for each one, and then you say, I want you to work through all of these, analyze Romans 9.5 based on Jewish, Unitarian, evangelical, mainline, and Catholic translations, and point out the significant differences, and boom, there it is.

31:52
It will do it for you.

31:52
It'll do all the heavy lifting, and you'll be able to see where are

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differences between these translation camps.

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If a verse can be legitimately translated different ways, then you're going to have it show up in different English translations differently.

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It's not always going to be the same.

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It's just a fact of translation.

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It's not even necessarily that anyone's trying to be evil or sinister.

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It's just the nature of translation.

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So in conclusion, most of us need translations to read the Bible.

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I recognize that.

32:26
We need translations to read the Bible.

32:28
Some translations are more literal.

32:31
Some are more thought for thought, easier to understand.

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But all translations have bias.

32:39
The way to detect bias in translations is not just to read a bunch of translations.

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It's to read translations from different camps where there are different biases baked in.

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If you're reading the Old Testament and you're a Christian, you owe it to yourself

32:56
to at least look at one Jewish translation.

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Like, these guys have had the Bible for thousands of years.

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They kind of know something.

33:04
All right, to not look at the Jewish translation, I think, is ridiculous for us as Christians.

33:09
I just want to say that.

33:10
I might disagree here and there with a couple of things, but by and large, the Jewish translations are absurdly underutilized by Christians.

33:21
So I want to recommend that.

33:23
If you're using the New Testament, if you're looking at a verse in the New Testament, look from different camps.

33:28
Look from different camps again.

33:30
Well, that's it for this topic.

33:31
Before concluding, I want to just put one more plug in for you to learn the original languages.

33:37
Why not learn Hebrew?

33:38
Why not learn Greek, right?

33:40
Why not take the time to learn it?

33:42
You know, what is all the stuff we learn anyhow?

33:45
Like our favorite TV show, all the words to our favorite songs.

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we could be learning the language the Bible's written in.

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And if you just stick with it day in and day out, eventually, if you're stubborn enough, you'll be able to read the Bible.

33:59
So that's a little plug for that.

34:00
I encourage you to look into that.

34:02
So far, we have worked up our levels on the tower, the Restoration Theology Tower.

34:08
We've talked about the text of the Old Testament.

34:11
We've talked about the text of the New Testament.

34:13
We've talked about the translation of Scripture.

34:17
I wonder what's next?

34:19
It's going to be interpretation.

34:21
Once you actually have the Bible in your language, you've got to learn to read it and interpret it well.

34:29
Interpret it correctly.

34:31
And so that's what we're going to turn to next is interpreting scripture in its literary context as we continue through our class on Restoration Theology.

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that brings this presentation to a close.

34:46
What did you think?

34:47
Come on over to restitudio.org and find episode 640, Bible Translation and Detecting Bias, and leave your questions, comments, corrections, and feedback there.

34:59
On episode 637, which was called The Primacy and Perspicuity of Scripture, I got a few comments I'd like to address.

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The first one came from someone who said, I wish that more people would let scripture challenge their tradition.

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Well, that's exactly the point of this class.

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I'm so glad that people are picking up what I'm putting down here.

35:23
That's the goal, is to challenge the tradition with scripture, let scripture be primary.

35:29
That's the whole concept of privacy.

35:32
Power Tool Apologetics wrote in saying, my only question is,

35:37
are we really going to say that 3 John is more authoritative than the Didache?

35:42
Well, that is an interesting and obscure question.

35:46
I know power to apologetics is Will, who I've met in the flesh.

35:50
Hello, Will.

35:51
And I would say that kind of a question takes us outside the scope for this class.

35:58
As with any topic or class,

36:02
one has to decide what are the boundaries?

36:05
Where do you start with everything?

36:07
And for theology, for restoration theology, just like any kind of theology, we always start with a series of assumptions that the apologists give us.

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And one of those assumptions that I had for this class is that the 66 books of the Protestant canon is how we're defining the Bible.

36:27
And the Bible is inspired, therefore authoritative.

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So

36:32
Really, those two assumptions, canon and inspiration, are baked into this class.

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I spend no time defending the 66 book canon of the Bible.

36:43
I spend no time defending the inspiration of scripture.

36:47
Those properly belong to the field of apologetics.

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Now, of course, I have plenty of thoughts on apologetics.

36:53
I've taught apologetics classes myself, but that's really to take us into a whole nother field than restoration theology itself.

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So that's why I haven't talked about canon in this class.

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Canon also is a really complicated topic and it's something that is definitely on the back burner for me.

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I would love to get to it should I live long enough and have the freedom to do the research and put something out there.

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I would love to research and come to a clearer understanding of canon as well as inspiration.

37:28
In fact, I have been collecting books on those two subjects over the years and have been following the Text and Canon Institute of John Mead and Peter Gurry in an effort to sort of like always be preparing for that topic, as I do with other topics too.

37:47
So just to answer,

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Will's question in a definitive way, yes.

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We are going to say that 3 John is more authoritative than the Didache.

37:56
Of course we are.

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3 John's in the Bible, the Didache is not in the Bible.

37:59
Ergo, the Epistle of 3 John is authoritative and the Didache is not.

38:08
In all honesty, I don't know anyone that believes the Didache was actually written by the apostles.

38:14
And that's probably because nobody else refers to it

38:18
as such and treats it as such, at least not in the early years.

38:24
Now, if I am wrong about that, I would love to know why.

38:27
I would love to see evidence for the canonicity of the Didache.

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And for the record, I love the Didache.

38:35
I'm actually a huge fan of this document.

38:37
And if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, just search for Didache and there are free public domain translations that you could read.

38:46
It's, I think, probably around the length of Romans, the Epistle to the Romans, and it's just like a lot of the Sermon on the Mount remixed, as well as some other interesting content about how to spot a fraudulent prophet or a fraudulent apostle, as well as a little bit about how they did communion and the prayers they used for that.

39:07
I am actually a fan of the Didyche.

39:08
I love the Didyche.

39:09
I don't regard it as scripture, but I do regard it as a helpful witness of the earliest

39:16
Christian writings outside the Bible, along with First Clement, I would add to the Didache, both from a very early time, probably both in the late 1st century, although it's hard to say for sure.

39:31
User Marvel Not wrote in saying, I agree, the hard part is finding a consensus when people interpret the same scriptures in a myriad of ways.

39:41
It's not just obscure doctrines that people disagree over,

39:45
Men cannot even agree on who God is.

39:48
A great multitude of those that claim to believe the scriptures say that God is 3 persons in one being, when there is no verse that says that.

39:58
Yet they claim the scriptures do say it in some way, and many maintain that you must believe that to have salvation.

40:05
We can't even agree on even the most foundational doctrines.

40:09
Maranatha! Well, thank you for writing that.

40:14
Comment.

40:15
you have very well put your finger on the problem.

40:19
Now, I'm not the type to wallow in despair over problems.

40:24
I'm more interested in solutions.

40:27
So that's why I think method matters so much.

40:33
We have 20 centuries, going on our 21st century of Christian history, and we don't have people talking about method.

40:42
Why aren't we talking about method, ladies and gentlemen?

40:45
Why are we just talking about, well, I have this belief, you have that belief, this is my doctrinal package, that's your doctrinal package.

40:51
We see this creed as authoritative.

40:54
You use that confession that was written by these people hundreds of years ago.

40:59
What?

41:00
I'm sorry, but that would not fly in any other field of knowledge.

41:03
What we need is a method that can be as objective as possible, as unbiased as possible to measure up different beliefs.

41:12
And that's what this class is all about.

41:13
That's what restoration theology just is.

41:16
It's taking advantage of textual scholarship, biblical scholarship, hermeneutics, theology, and putting them all to use to figure out what is most likely to be the case for this or that doctrine.

41:31
And I am befuddled that this class, this concept, does not already exist, that it is not already a 101

41:41
type thing that every pastor learns when they go to seminary.

41:45
But sad to say, nobody's talking about it.

41:47
There's not a department in a university dedicated to arguing over the method of doctrine that I know of.

41:55
Now, I could just be underexposed and there could be wonderful resources out there.

41:58
And if there are, please let me know because I'm killing myself trying to put together top shelf content for you so that you can do this.

42:05
And if it already exists, I will focus on other things.

42:08
But I don't think it does exist.

42:10
And that to me is just heartbreaking.

42:12
As a former engineer with an analytic mind, I want to know that there is a method, preferably systematic and comprehensive, to arrive at beliefs.

42:24
Beliefs are really important.

42:25
They affect how we live.

42:27
They affect how we treat people.

42:28
They affect how we think about ourselves.

42:30
They affect how we think about God, most importantly.

42:33
And they affect how we interact with the world around us.

42:37
So getting a method down, I think, is absolutely critical.

42:41
The church needs this.

42:42
The denominations need this.

42:45
Independent people who are doing research on their own, of which there are many today, and I'm just so happy that so many of you out there are doing that.

42:53
Good work.

42:54
We all need this.

42:55
And I'm laying out here what I think is a well-reasoned approach that is comprehensive.

43:04
But I may be even missing some things.

43:05
So I want to hear from you.

43:07
If you have thoughts on this subject, or maybe you want to wait till the end of my class before giving your thoughts, because there's a lot more yet to come.

43:15
I'm all ears.

43:16
I believe in iteration.

43:18
I believe in doing something and then revising it and making it better, and then revising it and making it better over time.

43:24
And we can do that as a community.

43:26
And that's really the goal.

43:27
So thanks everybody for writing in.

43:29
If you'd like to contribute a thought, you can do that at our website, restitudio.org, where you can also leave a voicemail up to 90 seconds long.

43:38
Sadly, the people who tend to click the start recording voicemail service don't limit their comments to 90 seconds.

43:47
The recording auto cuts them off because I'm not paying for the full version.

43:52
And

43:54
if you can't say it in 90 seconds, then you're just going to have to type it out and put it as a comment.

43:58
But if you do want to leave a comment on, I use a service called SpeakPipe.

44:02
It would be great to hear your voice and hear what your thoughts are.

44:07
So take a look at the website, restitudio.org.

44:10
Also have a way for you to give a monthly donation.

44:13
Thanks to those who are doing that already.

44:15
I'll catch you next week.

44:16
And remember, the truth has nothing to fear.