The Challenge of Translating Truth

The Bible has faced opposition from Satan's world since the beginning, from supposed "friend" and foe alike. An innumerable number of faithful followers of God have paid with their lives to bring us the Bible in our language today. Even today, there is much pressure from the so-called Christian community and the scholarly world to be faithful to man as opposed to being faithful to God and the original language text when translating the Bible. The closing chapters will deal with that, for now, let's look at the hazardous duty of Bible translation and the lives of three great men. TRANSLATING TRUTH will deal with the process of going from the original language critical text to the Bible translation in English. Also, it will address the differences as well, so the reader can know which translations are to be most trusted. There are rules and principles to Bible translation that will give the reader the closest English equivalent of what God's Word had said in the original language of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. It is art to be balanced in the application of these rules and principles. While Bible translators are no longer hung or burned at the stake, there is still enormous pressure on their lives. If a translator does not color within the lines of certain groups, they can be ostracized to the point of being unable to work. They are privately and publicly mocked. For example, the literal translators are wrongly viewed as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals who cannot give up the dated way of translating the Word of God by the modern idealist way of carrying out the work of Bible translation by the dynamic equivalent, interpretive translators. Modern-day scholars and many within the so-called Christian community will treat the translator who is faithful to God and the original text with contempt, scorn, mockery, and derision, even outright hostility. The final section of chapters could never be exhaustive as to what could be said about the trustworthiness of our Bible but it is more than enough to give you a sense that what we have today is the closest to what we have ever had when it comes to our literal translations being a mirrorlike reflection of the originals in English.