Our next session of School is tonight starting at 7pm where we’ll cover:

• An overview of the New Testament – brought to you by Andy Dixon; and
• The authority and inspiration of the Bible – in what ways is the Bible God’s word and what does that mean for us? – presented by Greg and Strahan.

One topic we touched on briefly at School last week was why we have so many translations of the Bible.

I mean, why can’t there just be one standard-issue Bible that we can all read from and there be no contention?  That way, when someone reads their Bible from up the front on Sunday, you could be sure that you could follow along with the same words in your own Bible – instead of sometimes feeling like you’ve just got lost in translation… [cue reference to film title to show that even though I am a Christian, I am still culturally relevant - and witty at that]

Well the answer is quite simple.  The Bible is a collection of writings that were originally written in another language – either Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic. And when you try and translate those writings into English, you inevitably find that the translation does not quite marry up perfectly because of the differences in grammar or meaning.

For instance, the Greeks apparently had four different words for the one English word “love”.  How can we capture these different senses of these Greek words in English then?

And what happens when the English language itself changes over time, as it is known to do?

Well, it means that translators do the best they can, either emphasising a word for word approach (such as the King James Version translation) or a thought for thought approach (such as the NIV translation) or even restate the message entirely in a paraphrase (such as the Message translation).

As no English translation is going to be perfect, it is useful to be aware of the approach taken by the translation that you’re reading currently, and it may even provoke you to get a range of different translations so that you can get the benefit of these different approaches.

For more on this, see the notes from the first session which you can download at http://groups.google.co.nz/group/school-at-edge-kingsland.

See you tonight at 7pm.

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