Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismorgan | Hacker News Reader

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Among those that read and study the Bible:

A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.

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¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.

² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³

³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.

The Catholic Church had similar tradeoffs with Latin, though I suspect the language and style were less motivated by majesty (though bias of use by the educated might have entered early — I am ignorant of the history). The New Testament Koine (Common) Greek was similarly a lingua franca. When the once common language is no longer broadly used, the language can become a class-oriented separating factor.

Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts (e.g., the Beatitudes — people also seem to use the archaic pronunciation of "blessed" as two syllables), presumably to ease acceptance of the change. This hints that some commonality is preserved. (Some words are also jargon, so not modernizing the word is more reasonable.)

Story outlines and concepts can also be preserved even though the "poetry" of earlier versions is lost in translation. Yet as contexts change even concepts may be less understandable and shared; "go to the ant thou sluggard" may be unclear not merely from language but from unfamiliarity with concepts. Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper" has lasted thousands of years, but is not a fundamentally human metaphor and even the human concepts diligence and foresight can have different cultural tones.

"A sluggard is someone who does not work hard." "Oh, you mean someone who works smarter not harder?" "No. It means someone who does not accomplish much." "Oh, you mean someone who is burnt out?" "No. It means someone who chooses not to do things that are profitable." "Oh, you mean someone who has recognized the futility of striving for accomplishments and has learned to be content with a simple life?" "No!"

> Even more recent translations seem to retain significant similarity in a lot of "famous" texts

Probably the best example of that is John 3:16, the best-known verse in the entire Bible: almost everyone understands it incorrectly, and the significant majority of current translations have knowingly rendered it incorrectly. KJV: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, &c.”. Trouble is, you can read that English word “so” in two main and quite different senses:

1. Thus, in this way. “For this is how God loved the world: he gave⸺” This is the sense the KJV meant. The “, that” would become just “: ” in modern English.

2. To a significant extent, of high magnitude. “For because of God’s exceeding love, he gave⸺” This is how modern readers will almost always read the sentence, even if the comma before the word “that” then doesn’t really fit.

The first sense is unambiguously the correct meaning of the Greek word Οὕτως, by itself and in that context, and I imagine it is how people read the KJV four hundred years ago. But the English language has shifted.

As far as I can tell, newer translations don’t tend to want to invite trouble (look at all the kerfuffle over the RSV’s rendition of Isaiah 7:14!) and so decide to keep the traditional English interpretation. Sure, it’s not quite what the text actually says, but what it means isn’t wrong, and there’s not a huge gap between “this is how God showed his love⸺” and “God’s love was so extreme that⸺” in reality.

And so they end up mostly going for something like “For God so loved the world that he gave⸺” (a mite worse in my opinion: the removal of the comma precludes the first sense). Some go all in on being wrong with “For God loved the world so much that he gave⸺”.

I’m genuinely surprised at how few have insisted on translating it correctly, given how widely I understand the problem is understood among translators. In <https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/jn3.16>: CSB, GW, HCSB, ISV, LEB, MOUNCE, NOG, NET, NLT, VOICE. MSG is perhaps the most interesting, artfully blending the two senses.

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