As can been seen, there are many to choose from. Yet, they are described as being good translations. Then how can some be considered better than others?
The advice given so far is for reading daily and ordinary use, pick one that you can consistently read, comfortable with the use of the language, that you know the recognized problems of translation and has extensive notes on the pages.
If you are engaging in serious Bible study, you should have at your hand more than two Bibles at hand. You should do your own research to aid your understanding why and how these translation differ. In a future article the selection of a good commentary will be addressed.
Some translations are the work of one man while others are a product of vast committees.
In each of these cases, there are choices to be made. When the work is of a single individual, sometimes the personality of that person comes through the fabric of the translation and the choices made. When a large committee produces a translations, sometimes the result is less personal.
Regardless how the translation is produced, the translator(s) are faced with two types of choices. They are textual and linguistic.
Textual has to do with the word Used in the original text.
Linguistic has to do with the translator(s) own theory of meaning of the word used.
What about the original text?
In each case of translation, group effort or solitary individual, the effort is to use a word that has the closest meaning in today's English (2011) language as possible as the word used in the text.
Here is the problem. We do not have any original copies of the manuscripts of the books of the Bible. Maybe, just maybe the closest thing that we have is part of the Net Testament book of John that comes in at 125 AD Even that is speculation.
We do know that the texts of the Bible were hand copied over and over again by scribes for hundreds of years. For the most part these scripts are with out variations. A few of them contain variation attributed to human error.
For one example, in one transcription of the ten commandants one scribe left out a word and the command was” you shall commit adultery.” These kinds of errors are easy to spot. Others are not so clear cut.
There are thousands of hand copied manuscripts in existence, produced up to the time of the printing press. The printing press solved many problems of uniformity. Before the time of the press, all manuscripts were copied by hand, a human hand, with all the potential for errors. In spite of all of this these manuscripts are substantially identical. That being said, there are many variations between manuscripts Some of the variations occurred because of the source of the translation from. Many variations from the earlier transcripts recently discovered and were hand copied and stored away at a much earlier time in history.
The problem for the modern translators is to determine which of the variants represent which one most likely represents the original text.
This is a large task.
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