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This may be off-topic but is there any consensus on what is the most accurate translation of the bible into English?

I studied Greek, Hebrew, and Bible translation for an undergrad, so I'll toss my two cents in.

Accuracy depends on what your aiming for. There are two schools of thought on modern english translations, dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence.

Formal equivalence tries to maintain as much as possible the linguistic and syntactical features of the original languages and will often prefer to leave ambigous language or difficult readings as they are. Sort of a 'window' into the original language. The English Standard Version is probably the best representative of this perspective.

Dynamic equivalence tries to maintain as much as possible the affect and intention of the original languages, and so will often remove ambiguities, paraphrase passages, and make translation choices that limit alternative readings. The New International Version is both the most popular and pioneering translation in this regard.

Which is why most Christians (I know, in UK) use several translations. I go with NIV, NASB, MSG and if construing particular words will use blueletter to look at Greek/Hebrew.

If you want to aim for the epic feel of, say, Tolkien, try the New English Bible (“NEB”) from the dynamic equivalence school, which reads like literature and formats poetry as poetry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_English_Bible

Tolkien was at Oxford in 1925 - 1959, and wrote The Hobbit and LOTR during that time frame.

NEB was kicked off in Oxford and Cambridge in 1946.

There is no consensus since “the most accurate” isn’t a single goal. For instance, you could try to translate word-by-word, but then you’ll lose a lot of idioms. Or one translation might well preserve the poetic nature of a part of Genesis while leaving out the understanding of what specifics the poetry referred to. One commonly acclaimed translation is the ESV, which I’m familiar with and like the translation of, but it certainly has its problems.

I know it's outside of the academic translation studies conversation, but I really enjoyed Douglas Hofstadter's Le Ton Beau de Marot, which contains dozens of translations of a single French poem, to emphasize how difficult a task translation is, how many different ways of doing it there are, and how many different purposes it can serve.

Not only is there to such consensus, but there is an important (important beyond religious issues) lack of consensus of what is the most accurate text to be translated.

Modern societies weren't the first to find absurdities and contradictions in holy texts. Early scholars decided to search for the "actual" underlying meaning. For if the gods are infallible, and failures in the text must be human failures trying to translate their gods' word into lowly human expression. In christianity this "hermeneutic" scholarship laid the groundwork for modern linguistics, hermeneutics and semiotics.[1]

As for translations: I was surprised to learn that the biblical supposed prohibition on homosexuality dates in the English bible as far back as...1946. [2]. Which makes some sense; until at least Pope Urban, the Catholic Church was happy to perform both mixed sex and same sex marriages [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_hermeneutics

[2] https://medium.com/@adamnicholasphillips/the-bible-does-not-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions#Pol...

>Which makes some sense; until at least Pope Urban, the Catholic Church was happy to perform both mixed sex and same sex marriages

That's not what your [3] says.

>Nevertheless, Historian John Boswell argued that Adelphopoiesis, or brother-making, represented an early form of religious same-sex marriage in the Orthodox church.

>Alan Bray saw the rite of Ordo ad fratres faciendum ("Order for the making of brothers") as serving the same purpose in the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

John Boswell died of AIDS. No mention of how Alan Bray died, but he was also homosexual. Hardly impartial sources.

I don’t particularly see how how this person died has a bearing on what he said.

Heterosexuals also have relevant biases. And your statement regarding John Boswell's death is crass and offensive.

The prohibition on homosexual intercourse is ancient. What your [2] says is that the word "homosexuality" did not appear in an English Bible until 1946, which is unsurprising, since the word didn't even enter the English language until the end of the 19th century.

Also your [2] is highly eisegetical.

Just to be clear, the oldest texts unambiguously condemns male-on-male sex under penalty of death:

"If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

(NIV translation https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+20%3A...)

The translation just doesn't use the specific word "homosexuality" which would be misleading and anachronistic anyway. The modern idea about homosexuality is about being attracted to persons of the same sex. Leviticus doesn't concern itself about any of that, it condemns the specific act of two men having sex.

You can argue that the Bible doesn't condemn sex between women though.

Male on male sex was also a fact of life across many Christian communities, including/especially with monks, eunuchs, and other segregated communities, and people were certainly not frequently put to death for this. You can look up medieval crimes and punishments around the 12th century I think for a decent record of this.

Note I am being super reductive, lmk if you want better sources.

I'm just pointing out the biblical prohibitions against male-on-male sex is not a recent invention as the GP comment suggested.

Of course people did it anyway.

The bible prohibits many things that never really took root as social mores; I think the transition into society is super fascinating and arguably is an invention of sorts.

Interesting that you chose a modern translation (1973). I just randomly scrolled to another (the orthodox jewish bible) and it says no such thing: "If an ish also lie with zachar, as he lieth with an isha..." So I don't think you can say "just to be clear"

I am neither gay nor part of any religion so I don't have a dog in this fight. But I am interested in hermeneutic philosophy, translation, and, separately, the nature of disagreement.

> "If an ish also lie with zachar, as he lieth with an isha..."

What does that mean then?

> most accurate translation of the bible into English?

It's not really possible to do that. First of all many of the Hebrew words have multiple meanings, and all the meanings are intended.

So how do you translate that? Pick one for the main translation, and add notes maybe on alternate meanings? Some translations do that.

But there's more. Jews have a long history of what the words in the bible mean, but Christians don't. So when Christians translate the bible they will do so in a way that's different from what Jews do.

Now you have a complicated question to answer. Who's right? Who has the correct translation? Christians will typically go by their best understanding of the Hebrew, but Jews will use their tradition.

Next you have questions of intent. Take an idiom in English - if you translate it to another language it makes no sense. So what do you do with similar situations? Translate word for word? Try to understand that intent? How do you do that? Use the Jewish tradition on the intent? Something else?

In summary: If your translation doesn't have an associated commentary almost as long as the main text you can be pretty sure it's not going to be accurate.

My personal preference (for accuracy, anyway) is Thomas Nelson's "The Expanded Bible", which provides alternate and literal translations, as well as important commentary (such as "wind" and "spirit" being the same word in Greek). No deuterocanon, unfortunately!

That is a nice translation available under Bible software based on the SWORD project if I remember correctly. I too like to use that one from time to time.

The NET bible has very extensive translation notes. Basically anytime something is even slightly ambiguous there's a note with information on what the ambiguity is and why they went with the translation they went with.

There's a reason traditional Jews read the five books of Moses in the original Hebrew (and why I was raised to be fluent in Hebrew, and also studied Aramaic, in addition to the Yiddish we used for daily conversation at home and the English I used outside in the United States).

Do you still have occasion to speak Yiddish?

Sure! When I'm hanging out with Hasidim.

I think the consensus is there can't really be a "best" translation. A quick google led me to this page which matches well the reasoning I've heard from most practicing Christians: https://www.biblesociety.org.uk/explore-the-bible/which-is-t...

The NRSV is commonly used by scholars, but there is, of course, no such thing as a "most accurate" translation of the Bible.

Nor indeed of anything, from any language to any other.

My “to-read” list is too long, so I haven’t actually read it, but personally I’m interested in “The Art of Bible Translation” by Robert Alter.

Heard an interview with this guy on NPR about a year ago [1].

He made some comment about how he tried to make it more poetic than most translations. Then proceeded to give several examples where his translation sounded distinctly more awkward to me than the text he was replacing. For example, replacing "anoint" with "moisten" and "soul" with "life breath".

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/14/684120470/after-24-years-scho...

I don’t remember how I learned about that book at all. But I appreciate having another data point about the author. Thank you.

Um "anoint" and "moisten" have very different meanings in English.

Robert Altar's book "The Art of Biblical Poetry" is mandatory reading for understanding Old Testament poetry. Hebrew poetry is based primarily on parallelism, as opposed to meter or rhyming as in English. Wonderful part about that is that parallelism, as opposed to rhyming or word-plays, translates well across languages.

I’ll put that on my “to-read” list as well. Thank you.

I’m personally a fan of the New World Translation [1]. It was first released in English, but has since been released in about 160 other languages as well.

[1]: https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/study-bible/books/

Is that the Jehovas Witness translation? The word Jehova is itself a mistaken translation.

It agrees with the Byington translation, as well as early King James versions and many other translations in that respect.

But the most interesting testament to the accuracy of the NWT, I think, is that it uses parallel translations of texts from the era in languages other than Greek and Hebrew (for example Sumerian) that have definite article. This means that scriptures that are ambiguous due to the lack of grammatical constructs in Greek, are accurately represented. For example, John 1:1 reads “the word was a God” rather than “the word was God”.

The same constructs elsewhere are assumed in most translations based on context, but modern context is based on doctrine, and doctrine is uninteresting for literary science.

NWT apologists often fail to mention that the Byington translation was published exclusively by Watch Tower until the copyright expired. I personally suspect they published it for the sole reason of justifying translation errors in the NWT.

> The same constructs elsewhere are assumed in most translations based on context, but modern context is based on doctrine, and doctrine is uninteresting for literary science.

Context determines meaning. If you discard context you cannot translate documents accurately, in any language. The NWT has the worst of both worlds. It discards the context of the original document in order to support doctrine. This can be seen in John 1:1. The language is not particularly ambiguous. https://carm.org/john-1-1-word-was-god

Matt Slick, the author of that article, is one of the worst Bible commentators you’ll find. He has zero credibility and does not understand Greek grammar. The NWT is correct and does not discard the context, which says that the Word was “with God”, and therefore could not be God.

John 1:1 is one of the easiest verses to translate, yet most translations get it wrong because they are biased towards the Trinity or Oneness doctrines.

I don't know about the New Testament, but I'd recommend Robert Alter's The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary for the Old Testament.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BN5HWWX

Donald Knuth made his own translation (of some part of the Bible): https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/316.html

Read the book “Truth in Translation” by Jason BeDuhn[1]. He examines, IIRC, 7 different Bible translations and shows why many have translated specific passages in a biased manner. And he more or less declares a “winner”, with some caveats. It’s a really good, down-to-earth read that’s not too technical in terms of language discussion.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Translation-Accuracy-Translatio...

Fair warning: Brace yourself.

It sounds on-topic enough. After years of being a Christian and reading and studying a number of Bibles and studying a bit of Hebrew, Aramaic and Koine Greek (in order to read the source material, even if it's just to study simple words or phrases) I've got a few translations that are noteworthy.

The most noteworthy for me is the Cepher Bible[0]. This one is pricey, but it covers everything I've seen and liked from the other Bible translations I will list. It restores the Aleph Tav throughout the Old Testament, which is all over the Bible and ommitted in basically all mainstream Bible translations. The significance of the Aleph Tav can be understood when you read the New Testament where Jesus in Revelation says "I am the Alpha and Omega" well this translation in Greek makes no sense, but if you take it to be "Aleph and Tav" and that He indeed said this to Hebrew Israelites, he is literally saying that He is the scriptures of the Old Testament, which flows with other claims such that He fulfilled the Old Testament. It's worth investigating. There's other things such as the mathematical error in Matthew being fixed up, which is a result of a mistranslation from Aramaic to Greek (check out Shem Tovs Matthew, considered to be the Original version of Matthew which was written in Hebrew not Greek!). There's other things like pointing out (and if you study that the New Testament was really written in Aramaic and then translated to Greek, not a popular thing, but if you do, you'll hear of some of these changes) that the whole phrase about a rich man getting to heaven is like a camel going through the eye of a needle was actually written in Aramaic to say it is like a ROPE going through the eye of a needle! Meaning they have to take apart all the different threads surrounding their soul, so they can fit through, or become humble, after all, you wont take your gold nor jewelry with you when you die.

Then there's The Scriptures by ISR[1]. This one attempts to restore the names of God by showing them in Hebrew form, and the name of Jesus (Yeshua) in Hebrew as well. It also restores some of the names of different characters throughout the Bible similar to what the Cepher does.

There's the HallelYah Scriptures[2] which seems to be really closely related to The Scriptures by ISR. This one's a little more extreme about restoring some names, and even more words, they also do not put any words in red like a number of Bibles because they found it 'too religious'.

There's also the Aleph Tav Scriptures[3], which last I checked was only the Old Testament, but I believe the author's worked on the New Testament as well. I've written about the Aleph Tav in the former paragraph about the Cepher, if you really want to understand the Aleph Tav, this Bible is going to take you deep enough.

Then for just plain regular reasing the CSB (formerly HCSB) is my personal choice. It's something you can read to people in a Bible Study who aren't interested in the depth of the scriptures. I wont link to this one since it's mainstream but one thing I do appreciate from them is the fact that usually in the front of their Bibles they will have a chart explaining where "Lord", "Lord God" and "God" come from in regards to Hebrew. There's too many Bibles that don't clear this up and it becomes confusing to follow the text, they also point out some other things.

[0]: https://www.cepher.net/

[1]: https://isr-messianic.org/publications/the-scriptures.html

[2]: https://www.halleluyahscriptures.com/

[3]: https://alephtavscriptures.com/

One final note: You can also get the app for the Cepher, they have a free version without some books that are not even in Catholic bibles.

I leave one final note for anybody wanting more from the Bible as a fellow Christian / from a Christian perspective: scripture is revealed more than anything by God. So pray before you read. Some of my best readings have resulted from prayer.

>"I am the Alpha and Omega" well this translation in Greek makes no sense

It makes perfect sense; alpha and omega were the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet at the time. It's equivalent to the modern English phrase "A to Z".

Makes more sense to a Greek than an Israelite maybe. But it loses its deeper meaning where He once again calls Himself the Word just like how the Gospel of John starts.

Edit: When you see how often the Aleph Tav is in the Old Testament. It is insane. It is all over. And it has deep meaning when studied further. It is even in the first verse of Genesis.

The Aleph Tav gets even deeper when you study the Paleo / Pictographic Hebrew:

https://www.cepher.net/what-is-the-aleph-tav.aspx

https://www.artscroll.com/Products/STOH.html

Short story: it’s complicated. But if you want to read up on something really fascinating about using technology to get the most accurate translation, look into CGBM: https://www.uni-muenster.de/INTF/Genealogical_method.html

Look into the Peshitta Bible. Whilst Greek manuscripts have come and gone. The Peshitta has remained untouched as far back as it goes.

The Douay-Rheims translation is the most accurate. You can directly reconstruct the latin[1] from it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douay–Rheims_Bible#Modern_Harv...

The Douay-Rheims is a translation of the Latin vulgate, which is itself a translation of the earliest Greek/Hebrew texts into Latin. The vulgate itself is imperfect, and the Douay-Rheims is more like a translation of a translation, so I wouldn't call it the "most accurate"

But Greek is the original language of the NT...

And there's definitely translations directly into English and other languages from Greek...

I haven't looked into it, but this might be interesting to you: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/magazine/hebrew-bible-tra...

That's a question that will invoke a lot of passionate (and different) answers in the right circles.

The NASB is probably the best word for word one.

Any translation has a profound impact on the way the bible is perceived, so perhaps it is worthwhile to look directly at the source.

Take this famous opener in the KJV bible for example:

John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Well just what does it mean by Word? Turns out this is Koine Greek λόγος, logos.

Logos not only means word, but it importantly also means reasoning, order, and logic. Logos has multiple senses that don't translate well into a single, word. This was a big revelation for me.

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Logos

"reasoning, order, and logic" still make sense to me because I believe in theistic evolution - evolution is basically a tool that God used to get us where we are today.

There is also Pandeism (where basically God ceased to exist because he became the universe). Scott Adam's book God Debris touches on this.

FYI, (I'm not Catholic, but) the Catholic Church today holds that view that Science explains the how, and Religion explains the why. It was actually a Catholic priest that came up with the Big Bang theory.

FYI continued, I believe everyone should be open-minded and respectful. I understand that my beliefs may be wrong (after all not all religions can be right at the same time). I believe people taking either side to the extreme does not help anyone, and I'm glad we can have reasonable, respectful conversations here on HN.

Logos comes from the stoics also.

Thats not correct, anthough many stoics adopted the common term. Its akin saying 'vibrations' today.

What is the cirlejerk around stoicism these days? Is life for coders really that bad?

> I believe everyone should be open-minded and respectful

That would be probably the biggest improvement for mankind since inventions of fire and wheel, but we're unfortunately often far from there. As an atheist/agnostic, the amount of crap I had to (and sometimes still have to) go through is significant.

Almost all religious people interact with me in fashion of 'oh-you-lost-foolish-boy-who-doesn't-get-the-one-and-only-truth-which-is-mine/ours, but-we-shall-be-kind-to-you-nevertheless' to some degree. That's not how respect looks like.

Probably the most respectful behavior was actually from various muslims while travelling, although for them it was sometimes hard to grasp that I can be fully working human being without faith in god (at least in usual sense). Its such an integral part of their existence, more than most Christians these days I believe. Most christians are way too self-righteous, and you can't even talk with them about it because they become immediately deeply offended.

I'm sorry about your experiences.

I think being offended about stuff and judging people isn't exclusive to religion though.

I do wish that everyone would become more intelligent and thus nicer to each other (I believe if people were more intelligent, they would realize they would be better off if they were nicer), but then again, I think humans are inherently flawed and thus we'll still have problems, just of a different variety.

Oh well. We have to make the best of what we can while we're here.

Won't do it justice, but there was a sermon I thought was pretty interesting a couple years ago relating to the passage where Jesus asks Peter if he loves him.

Basically Jesus asks Peter three times whether Peter loves him. And three times Peter says "You know I love you".

Seems like a pretty uneventful passage in English.

Our pastor elaborated a bit and explained that in the original (greek / aramaic, don't remember which), there are several kinds of love.

What Jesus is saying is basically "Do you love me perfectly, the way only God can?"

What Peter is replying is basically "I love you the way that man can, imperfectly."

This happens twice.

The third time Jesus asks "Do you love me imperfectly, the way that a man can?" And Peter gives the same refrain.

Put's a different spin on it since in the first it's just a repetitive exchange, but in the second form it's an instance of God coming down to man's level.

Thought that seemed really interesting.

The New Testament was written in Greek, though the original dialogue would have been in Aramaic. In the Greek version, Jesus uses the verb ἀγαπάω (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ἀγαπάω#Ancient_Greek) and Peter replies with the verb φιλέω (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/φιλέω#Ancient_Greek).

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