I’ve come to really appreciate biblical translations and scholarship that work to capture the weirdness of the Bible, particularly the New Testament. Between generations of translations that have sought to make the biblical text more readable and the mental callouses many of us have built up through Sunday School memorization contests as kids and repeated readings throughout our lives, it’s easy to forget just how foreign the world of the biblical writers is to life in the 21st century. Without thinking much about it, we assume the writers of the Bible have the same general mindset and worldview that we do, forgetting even the most basic reality that the Bible wasn’t written in our native tongue and that the work of translation inherently puts us further away from what the biblical writers were actually trying to say. That’s not to say their meaning is lost or that translation inherently corrupts the text. Rather, it should be a reminder that the words we read are not literally what the biblical writers wrote. They’re a translation, a best approximation of what the writers meant. Combine that reality with the radically different world of the first century and certain assumptions of the biblical writers are, well, lost in translation.
The Kingdom Of God Is Like An Invasive Weed
The Kingdom Of God Is Like An Invasive Weed
The Kingdom Of God Is Like An Invasive Weed
I’ve come to really appreciate biblical translations and scholarship that work to capture the weirdness of the Bible, particularly the New Testament. Between generations of translations that have sought to make the biblical text more readable and the mental callouses many of us have built up through Sunday School memorization contests as kids and repeated readings throughout our lives, it’s easy to forget just how foreign the world of the biblical writers is to life in the 21st century. Without thinking much about it, we assume the writers of the Bible have the same general mindset and worldview that we do, forgetting even the most basic reality that the Bible wasn’t written in our native tongue and that the work of translation inherently puts us further away from what the biblical writers were actually trying to say. That’s not to say their meaning is lost or that translation inherently corrupts the text. Rather, it should be a reminder that the words we read are not literally what the biblical writers wrote. They’re a translation, a best approximation of what the writers meant. Combine that reality with the radically different world of the first century and certain assumptions of the biblical writers are, well, lost in translation.