Why are there so many different Bible translations?

G’day everyone, Dave Deane here, and our question for the week is: Why are there so many different Bible translations?

The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. It is estimated that there are up to 100 million copies sold or given away every year around the globe and a significant part of that statistic is the enormous amount of time and energy that has and continues to go into Bible translation.

Now, the Bible we hold in our hands today isn’t just ‘a book’; it’s essentially a library of some 66 different books written by over 40 authors from 3 continents across some 1,600 years with the single uniting theme of God’s redemptive plan for humanity.

It was originally written in three languages – Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic – and Wycliffe.net estimates that, of the 7 billion some people in the world today, speaking a total of 7,360 languages,

• The bible has been translated into 704 languages reaching 5.7B people
• The New Testament has been translated into 1,551 languages reaching a further 8.2M people
• Various portions of the Bible have been translated into 1,160 languages reaching a further 4.6M people
• But there remain 2.6M people speaking 3,945 languages that are yet to have any translation of the Bible or portions of the Bible in their hands today

So a lot of work has been done and there is still a lot of work to do in translating the Bible.

But with all of that said, what’s the deal with the different translations? I mean, take English as an example: we don’t have just ‘the English translation’ we have like, I think it’s around 450 published English versions or something… Admittedly many of those are revisions and some certainly don’t rise to the dignity of being called a translation in any formal sense, but there is a lot even in the English – probably around 50 or so mainstream versions like:

• KJV: King James Version (1611)
• RSV: Revised Standard Version (1946, 1971)
• NIV: New International Version (1984, 2011)
• NLT: New Living Translation (1996, 2004, 2007)
• ESV: English Standard Version (2001, 2007, 2016)
• NASB: New American Standard Bible (1971, 1995, 2020)
• NET: New English Translation (2006, 2017)

And the list goes on!

So what’s the deal with all these English translations? Why do we have so many versions?

First: The Bible Contains A Universal Message.

To begin with, I think one of the reasons we have so many translations is because the Bible contains a universal message for all of humanity. In a sense, Bible translation is one example of the way Christians have historically embraced their evangelistic mission to “make disciples of all the nations”, literally πάντα τὰ ἔθνη [panta ta ethnē, or ‘every people group’ (Matt. 28:19). Irenaeus, a Greek Bishop from the second century, put it this way in one of his writings:

“the Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it… For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same… as the sun, that creature of God, is one and the same throughout the whole world, so also the preaching of the truth shines everywhere, and enlightens all men that are willing to come to a knowledge of the truth.”

In fact, even before the establishment of Christian Church in the first century, there was translation work being done to bring the Hebrew Old Testament into the lingua franca, the common language of the day, which was Greek. With the Jews being subjugated by foreign rulers and dispersed around the Mediterranean, many of them didn’t have access to the Temple or Hebrew education so there was a need for their Scriptures to be translated into the language of their place. And the first widely recognised translation of the Hebrew Old Scriptures into the Greek came in the 2^nd century BC known as the “Septuagint”, which means ‘seventy’ or in Roman Numerals, “LXX”, because there were 70 or so Jewish scholars involved in its translation. Interestingly, the Septuagint served as the basis for many of the New Testament authors who cited passages from the Old Testament in their Greek writings.

So that’s one reason why we have so many translations today, because the Bible contains a universal message for all of humanity. The Bible is not a book only the initiate can read; it is a common book for all people to be accessible in their own languages so they can know more about their Creator God and His relationship to the world and or relationship to Him through the person and work of Jesus.

Second: The Bible has so Much Source Material!

But to get a little more specific, a second reason why we have so many translations is because we have so much source material to translate from!

One of the first things a student of Bibliology comes to realise is that we do not have ‘the original bible’ today. You know, it’s not like you can go over to Europe somewhere and go to some library and find ‘the bible’ behind a security alarmed glass screen. Again, the Bible isn’t one book, it’s a library of different books. But even then, we don’t have any original manuscripts of the individual 66 books either! But that’s not a problem for the Bible, it’s just a fact of history! We don’t have original manuscripts for anything from antiquity. But that doesn’t mean we don’t know what was originally written, especially when it comes to the Bible.

The sheer number of manuscripts or parts of manuscripts that we have to reconstruct the original books of the Bible is – by all ancient historical standards – unparalleled and unmatched.

Just take the New Testament as an example. The official record of how many manuscripts we have is kept in Germany at an institute founded by Kurt and Barbra Aland called the Institute for New Testament Textual Research (INTF). Last time I made contact with the institute was on August 30, 2016, where the number of New Testament manuscripts stood at 5,851 constituting 2.5 million pages of written Greek text, of which:

• around 300-350 contain the book of Revelation
• around 650-750 contain Acts and the general letters
• around 700-800 contain Pauline epistles, and
• around 2000 contained either full or partial copies of the gospels – one of which is the earliest fragment we have, P52 or Papyri catalogued as number 52, containing a snippet of John’s Gospel dated to somewhere within 50 years of when John wrote!

Now that’s just the ancient and medieval Greek manuscripts! We haven’t even begun to talk about 20,000 or so translated manuscripts or the 1 million plus citations of Scripture in the various writings of the early Church commentators. We have the best data imaginable to reconstruct the original manuscripts.

But as always, don’t take my word for it – you can check all of this out for yourself at the INTF database (link in the description below).

Feel free to pause and digest this image later if you want, but for now what I want to point out is William Tyndale up the top right. It’s impossible to overstate Tyndale’s significance. He translated much of the Bible into English from the original Greek sources he had, producing 5 revisions of the NT alone. And you can see how some well-known English translations are based on his work even down the bottom there, while these others go back to many of the source texts, they have invariably been influenced by Tyndale’s work in one way or another

So all of that to say, a second reason why we have so many different translations today – at least in the English – because translations have different textual genealogies.

Third: There are Different Methods of Translation.

A third reason why there are so many different translations today is because there are different methods of translation. The idea of “translation” is very broad, but within this more narrow focus of biblical translation we’re talking about here, we might simply define translation as: “an act of communication by which the meaning of the original texts of Scripture (in the source languages Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek) are reproduced in a receptor language in such a way that a reader of the receptor language text can accurately and reliably understand the original message.”

In other words, the goal of Bible translation is communication—accurate communication of an objective, historically-rooted, written divine revelation. Translation is not simply paraphrasing or summarising the bible’s message, it is the attempt to convey all the meaning precisely as possible.

But how do you do that? Because anyone familiar with different languages knows that you very rarely get a word-for-word correspondence between two different languages.

Take, for example, Romans 6:1-2a:

• The NIV reads: “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!”
• The NLT reads: “Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not!”
• The NASB reads: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace may increase? May it never be!” 
• The KJV reads: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.” 

Now that last sentence there with the exclamation mark, the Greek word is μὴ γένοιτο (mē genoito). The direct translation is “never may it be” but if that’s all we write in English, we miss the force of the phrase because in Koine Greek this phrase is a way of saying “no” in the strongest way possible, like “NOOOOO!” Are you kidding me? We don’t have a word for that, but in this instance I think the KJV gets it the best when it says “God forbid”. The Greek doesn’t use the word “theos” or “God” in the verse, but in English, that’s the kind of force being used.

And of course, there are other instances where the KJV doesn’t get it right and others do.

But all of this to say: translation invariably involves interpretation on part of the translator. And amongst scholars there are basically two different approaches on something of a spectrum:

• On the one end is the formal equivalence method which attempts as much as possible to reproduce the grammatical and syntactical form of the donor language as closely as possible in the receptor language. So for each word in the Greek, for example, the translator tries to find the same equivalent part of speech in the English and reproduce it in the same sequence. Translations that are on this end of the spectrum include the NASB, ESV and so on.
• On the other end of the spectrum is thefunctional equivalence method which focuses more on the meaning of the text and attempts to accurately communicate the same meaning in the receptor language, even if that means using different grammatical and syntactical forms. The previous example that we saw with Romans 6:2 is a clear example of this (although that’s not to say that the KJV as a whole is on this end of the spectrum). Examples of more functionally inclined translations would include the NIV and NET.

Again, there are others out there under the label “translation” like the message, and these do have a place and can be very edifying to read, but given the amount of interpretation that goes into them I tend to see these kinds of works as paraphrases or commentaries rather than translations.

So to sum up: there are at least three reasons why we have so many different translations: because the Bible contains a universal message, because the Bible has so much source material, and because of different translation methods.

Now, just quickly – I’m often asked which is the ‘best’ English translation – because clearly there are better and worse translations out there. But the way the question often comes is: ‘which is the most accurate word for word English translation’? But can you see the presumption in that question? That word-for-word = most accurate? But as we’ve seen, sometimes the most formally equivalent translation loses the meaning or impact of the original text (like we saw with Romans 6:2). Equally, sometimes the most functionally equivalent loses the structure of the text or goes too far with translator interpretation.

So my personal view is something of a balance; formal and functional equivalence are not mutually exclusive options. I think the best translations are those which strike a balance, functionally communicating a balanced view of the texts meaning while preserving, so far as possible, the formal elements of the original text.

Which Bible is that? Well, there isn’t a single ‘one’ so I like to go between both formal and functional translations. I love the NET, I love the NIV, I love the ESV and I also love the NASB; they’re probably my personal favourites, especially the NET for its copious amount of footnotes detailing all of these kinds of variations I’ve been talking about.