Translating the Bible

We have come a long way with the biblical text. In Unit 3, we saw that it was written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In Unit 6, we learned how scholars piece together the earliest wording from thousands of handwritten copies.

Now we arrive at the final step, the one most of us cross every day without even noticing. How do those ancient texts in three languages become the English words you read? That step is translation, and in this unit, I want to show you why it is one of the most important and often overlooked parts of the whole story.

Let me start with a key idea for this unit: every translation is an interpretation. This is how meaning moves from one language to another. Whenever a translator picks one English word over another, they are deciding what the original means. A different choice would create a different sentence.

Translating always involves interpreting. There is no way to move meaning across languages without making choices.

Let me explain why with an example from Unit 3. Remember the Hebrew word that can mean breath, wind, and spirit at the same time. When a translator comes across this word, English forces a choice.

There is no single English word that covers all three meanings, so the translator must decide. Is the passage about wind over the waters, the breath of life, or the Spirit of God?

Sometimes the context helps, but sometimes the original text may have meant all these ideas together. Still, the translator has to pick one English word, and some of the original meaning is lost. English readers usually do not see the choice that was made; they see the final result and assume that is what the text says.

Now imagine this happening in every sentence of the Bible. Ancient languages use idioms that do not make sense if translated word-for-word, just like telling someone to “break a leg” would confuse a non-English speaker.

These languages have grammar and cultural ideas that English does not, and vice versa. Words often have meanings that do not match any single English word. At each of these points, the translator has to decide, and every choice affects what you read.

I want to make it clear that this is not a reason to worry. Translation is a valuable and necessary skill, carried out by teams of experts who care deeply about accuracy. The point is not that translations are unreliable, but that reading a translation means reading the result of many careful human decisions.

Knowing this can change how you read. It encourages you not to rely too much on a single word in one English version and to wonder why different Bibles sometimes say things a bit differently. It also leads to a helpful practice we will discuss later: comparing translations to understand the meaning behind them better.

Keep this idea in mind: every translation is an interpretation, not because translators are careless or biased, but because moving a meaning between languages always involves choices.

The English Bible you have is a remarkable achievement, shaped by many people working to bring an ancient text into your language as faithfully as possible. Next, we will look at how translators make these decisions and the different approaches they use.

If every translation involves choices, the next question is: what guides those choices? Translators do not choose randomly. They follow a certain philosophy or basic approach to their work. Understanding these main approaches will help you see why your Bible reads the way it does and why it might differ from someone else’s.

Imagine a spectrum. At one end is an approach called formal equivalence, which is basically word-for-word. This type of translation tries to stick as closely as possible to the original words and sentence structure, matching each Hebrew or Greek word with an English one when possible, even if the result sounds a bit odd in English.

The main benefit is that it keeps you close to the original wording, which is great for careful study and for noticing repeated words or patterns. The downside is that it can sometimes sound stiff or awkward, and it may keep old idioms that confuse modern readers, because it values faithfulness to the original words over smooth English.

At the other end of the spectrum is dynamic equivalence, which is often called thought-for-thought. This approach tries to bring the meaning of the original into clear, natural English, focusing on the idea and the effect on the reader instead of matching every word.

If the original uses an idiom that would confuse modern readers, this method translates the meaning, not the exact words. The main strength is that these translations are easy to read and understand, making them good for reading longer sections, for new readers, or for hearing the flow of the text.

The trade-off is that, by making things smoother, translators make more decisions for you, which takes you a bit further from the exact words of the original.

Beyond that is the paraphrase, which is even looser. A paraphrase does not work directly from the original languages in the same careful way. Instead, it restates the meaning in a very free, everyday, and often vivid modern language.

Sometimes, a single author writes a paraphrase instead of a team, which reduces many of the checks and balances that tend to be baked into the process. Paraphrases can be refreshing and can make familiar passages feel new, which is valuable. But they are more like lively retellings than precise translations, so they are not the best choice when you want to study the exact wording.

Here is an important point: no real translation fits perfectly at one spot on the spectrum. Even the most word-for-word translations have to move away from being strictly literal, because a completely literal version would often be unreadable or not make sense in English. And every thought-for-thought translation still connects to the original words, even though they are a bit freer in doing so.  

In reality, each translation falls somewhere along the spectrum, leaning more to one side or the other, and translators choose how far to go. If you read the preface of a good study Bible, it often explains where the translators aimed to be on this spectrum, which is why reading the preface is such a helpful habit.

Think of the spectrum as your guide. Formal equivalence, or word-for-word, keeps you close to the original wording but may be less smooth. Dynamic equivalence, or thought-for-thought, offers clarity and flow but involves more interpretation by the translators. Paraphrase brings freshness but less precision. No translation is just one thing, so knowing where your Bible fits helps you understand its strengths and what to be aware of.

I want to finish off this unit with two things: a story and a demonstration. First, the story, because the history of how the Bible was translated into English is one of the most dramatic parts of this course, and I promised in Unit 1 that we would cover it. Then, a practical demonstration to help you experience everything we have discussed using a single verse.

The story of Bible translation is, in more than one chapter, written in courage and even in blood. But it is also, and this is the part usually left out, a story of astonishing ordinariness. For most of Christian history, translating Scripture was simply what the church did when it arrived somewhere new.

Long before English existed, the Hebrew Scriptures were rendered into Greek, as we’ve discussed. But Greek was only the beginning. As the faith spread outward from the Mediterranean, it kept crossing language lines, and each crossing produced a Bible.

In Syria and Mesopotamia, Christians read the Peshitta, a Syriac Bible whose Gospels were in circulation by the fourth century and whose Old Testament roots reach back further still. Syriac-speaking churches carried that text along trade routes into Persia, India, and eventually as far as China.

In Egypt, the Scriptures were translated into Coptic, and not into one Coptic, but into several dialects, Sahidic and Bohairic chief among them, so that believers in the Nile Delta and believers in Upper Egypt could each hear the text in their own speech.

There was an Armenian Bible, produced after Mesrop Mashtots invented an alphabet for the purpose in the early fifth century, an achievement so central to Armenian identity that the translation is still called “Queen of the Translations.” There were Georgian, Ge’ez (Ethiopic), Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Arabic, Nubian, and Sogdian versions. Ulfilas, translating for the Goths in the fourth century, reportedly had to invent letters as he went.

Meanwhile, in the Latin West, the older “Old Latin” translations were eventually superseded by the work of Jerome, who around the turn of the fifth century went back to the Hebrew for much of the Old Testament, which was a controversial move at the time.

His Vulgate (“the common version,” a name that itself tells you the goal was accessibility) became the standard Bible of Western Christianity for a thousand years. In the East, Greek remained dominant.

So the medieval West was unusual, not typical. Latin held on there long after it had ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue, and that created a genuine gap between the text and the people. Even so, the gap was never total.

Bede is said to have been translating John’s Gospel into Old English on the day he died. King Alfred put vernacular Scripture at the front of his law code. Ælfric produced Old English versions of much of the Pentateuch.

Across medieval Europe there were French, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, and German renderings; psalters, gospel books, glossed manuscripts, harmonies, and paraphrases numbering in the hundreds. Eighteen complete German Bibles were printed before Luther published his New Testament in 1522.

The picture of a locked book in a dead language, opened only at the Reformation, is a good story and a poor history.

What was contested was not translation as such, but translation outside of church oversight, especially where it traveled with movements the hierarchy considered heretical. That distinction matters, and it is where the drama begins.

In fourteenth-century England, John Wycliffe and his circle produced English Scriptures from the Latin. Because those Bibles became the calling card of the Lollard movement, the response was ferocious. The 1409 Constitutions of Oxford effectively banned unauthorized English translation, an unusually severe measure by European standards. On the Continent, Jan Hus and his followers in Bohemia met a similar fate for similar reasons.

Then came William Tyndale. Working in the sixteenth century, and, crucially, going behind the Latin to the Hebrew and Greek, Tyndale produced an English New Testament of extraordinary beauty and clarity. For it he was hunted across Europe, betrayed, imprisoned at Vilvoorde, and finally executed: strangled, then burned.

And here is the astonishing part. His phrasing was so good that when the King James Version appeared in 1611, it leaned on him heavily; by common estimate, a substantial majority of its New Testament wording descends directly from the man who died for daring to write it. When you hear the cadences of that translation, you are hearing, in part, the voice of a martyr.

The King James Version went on to shape the English language more than nearly any other book. In modern times, as older and better manuscripts came to light, as our knowledge of Hebrew and Greek deepened, and as English itself kept moving, new translations followed. That is why you have so many choices today, each produced by a team making exactly the kinds of decisions we examined earlier.

And it is why the abundance is not a symptom of confusion. It is the same impulse that produced the Peshitta, the Coptic dialects, the Armenian alphabet, and Ælfric’s Pentateuch: the old, stubborn conviction that this text belongs in the language people actually speak, and that it is worth considerable trouble, and occasionally considerable blood, to put it there.

Now let me show you the demonstration I promised, which brings together everything in this unit. Take a single verse and look at it in several different translations; this is something I encourage you to try after this lecture.

Pick a well-known verse and compare it in three or four Bibles: one from the word-for-word end, one from the thought-for-thought end, and maybe a paraphrase. Read them one after another. If you don’t have different Bibles at home, you can compare these online at places like BibleGateway.com.

You will notice that they are clearly the same verse and share the same main meaning, which is reassuring and shows the stability we discussed in Unit 6. But you will also spot small but real differences: a word chosen here, a phrase made smoother there, an idiom translated literally in one and explained in another.

Each difference shows a choice the translators made. Where the translations differ, you learn the most, because those differences reveal where the original allowed for different interpretations.

Comparing translations like this is one of the best tools for readers who do not know the original languages. It helps you see the range of meaning by looking at several careful attempts to express it.

Now, I do have to add an uncomfortable note here, as this course is committed to honesty. Because every translation involves choices, and because translators are human beings who belong to traditions and hold convictions, translation choices can occasionally be shaped by theology.

A team that holds a particular belief may, at a point that is rather ambiguous, lean toward the rendering that fits their conviction. This does not mean translations are untrustworthy, and it does not mean anyone is being deceptive. It means that where the original is open to more than one reading, the choice made can reflect more than pure linguistics.

This is one more reason the practice of comparing translations is so valuable, because it helps you see where those choices are being made, and it is one more thread we will pick up in the deeper course.

With all of that, it is worth mentioning the translation and the Bible that I lean toward. For me, I prefer the New Revised Standard Version, and now the Updated Edition. Specifically, I like the Society of Biblical Literature Study Bible, as I think it is possibly the most scholarly option out there.

So, to sum up Unit 7: every translation is an interpretation, because moving meaning between languages always involves choices. The English Bible you have is the result of many careful human decisions. These decisions are guided by a philosophy that falls somewhere on a spectrum: from formal equivalence (word-for-word) to dynamic equivalence (thought-for-thought) to paraphrase.

Knowing where your Bible fits on this spectrum helps you understand its strengths.

The story of the Bible in English includes the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and a dramatic, sometimes dangerous effort to make Scripture available to everyone, led by people like Wycliffe and Tyndale. Their work still shapes the King James Version and others today.

The best tool for readers who do not know the original languages is to compare several translations of the same passage and learn from their differences.

That is the story of the final step, from the original languages to the words you read.