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The Plastic Bible - Moriel Ministries

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Feature Article – Continued<br />

brew says, we can get a copy of something<br />

called Young’s Literal. We can get Young’s<br />

Literal and it will follow pretty much<br />

word-for-word what it says in the original.<br />

We can also get <strong>Bible</strong>s where we would<br />

have interlinear, where they put the English<br />

word directly underneath the Greek or<br />

Hebrew word. <strong>The</strong>n we could have a <strong>Bible</strong><br />

that tries to achieve the same thing by putting<br />

in brackets or parenthesis the meaning<br />

of the original words for people who<br />

do not know Greek and Hebrew. <strong>The</strong>y call<br />

this “amplified.”<br />

<strong>The</strong>se very literal approaches are very<br />

good for people particularly who do not<br />

know the original languages for study purposes.<br />

<strong>The</strong> problem is they are unreadable.<br />

We cannot read it! You certainly cannot<br />

preach from it or witness from it. If someone<br />

is preparing a teaching and they want<br />

to get into the thing OK, but it is not readable.<br />

It has its purpose, these things have<br />

their value, they are great study aids, but<br />

they are not readable.<br />

So some people come along and say,<br />

“We can’t be that literal so what we will<br />

do is take a literal approach but we will<br />

interpolate.” When someone interpolates<br />

it is not exactly literal, but it is literalist.<br />

What happens when someone interpolates?<br />

<strong>The</strong>y insert words, sometimes two<br />

or three words, in italics that are not in the<br />

original Greek or Hebrew, but they make<br />

the text readable in English. By italicizing<br />

them they are telling people it is a word not<br />

in the original language, but this is what it<br />

means so we can read it.<br />

Unfortunately, the King James-only<br />

kooks claim if something is italicized it has<br />

been taken it “out” of the Word of God, not<br />

realizing that the King James is the same<br />

thing without italicizing. Most people I<br />

know take a literalist <strong>Bible</strong>. <strong>The</strong>y will take<br />

the New English (this is very good) or the<br />

New American Standard. Those are two<br />

good ones. <strong>The</strong>y are quite close, as close<br />

as you can reasonably get to the original<br />

Greek and Hebrew where it is still readable.<br />

<strong>The</strong>y go nuts with all kinds of stuff,<br />

because the King James-only people only<br />

follow the Textus Receptus and Masoretic.<br />

If someone puts in a footnote in the literalist<br />

approach that says, “Not all manuscripts<br />

contain this verse,” you are only being<br />

faithful to the manuscript record. But<br />

they begin screaming, “You’re saying it’s<br />

not canonical!,” ignoring the fact that they<br />

have got stuff in the King James that is not<br />

in the Masoretic anyway. “If I forget the<br />

Old Jerusalem may I forget my right hand.”<br />

(Ps. 137:5) <strong>The</strong>y say, “May my right hand<br />

forget its cunning.” <strong>The</strong>y are doing the<br />

same thing. This is a literalist approach.<br />

So far I do not see a lot of reason for<br />

controversy except the kooks make trouble<br />

over it. As long as you recognize what Nehemiah<br />

did, the priority is on the original<br />

autographs.<br />

Dynamic Equivalence<br />

But then there are people who come<br />

along and say, “Well, we have to be seeker-friendly”<br />

or perhaps, “We’re trying<br />

to reach unsaved people.” And the King<br />

James presents a problem. Try knocking<br />

on a door and saying to somebody, “Verily,<br />

verily I say unto thee you must be born<br />

again,” (Jn. 3:3) and they will look at you<br />

like you are crazy. What is “verily?” We<br />

have the same problem in that we have to<br />

find a way to translate the idea. This is not<br />

my ideal, but there are those who follow<br />

something called “Dynamic Equivalence”<br />

and there are those who decry the New International<br />

Version, which I admit, in my<br />

opinion, is not a very good translation – I<br />

do not like it for a couple of reasons.<br />

<strong>The</strong> problem is when someone tries to<br />

make it into a theological argument, they<br />

have walked into a quagmire. This is because<br />

the first dynamically equivalent<br />

<strong>Bible</strong> was not the NIV, the first dynamically<br />

equivalent <strong>Bible</strong> was the Septuagint.<br />

And the New Testament autographs, when<br />

they quote the Old Testament ( with a partial<br />

exception of Matthew and certain other<br />

things) do not quote the Hebrew, they quote<br />

the Septuagint. We may not like “Dynamic<br />

Equivalence” – I do not care much for<br />

it myself in English, but to try to make a<br />

theological argument it is “bad” presents<br />

a problem because the inspired writings<br />

of the apostles use it. <strong>The</strong> New Testament<br />

was written in Greek. People could not understand<br />

the Masoretic so they had to quote<br />

from Greek.<br />

Some of these guys go nuts. I had one<br />

of these King James kooks who was so<br />

irate that he claimed the Septuagint was a<br />

forgery of the Early Church. In fact it was<br />

translated in Alexandria, Egypt over a hundred<br />

years before the birth of Christianity.<br />

That is how crazy they can become.<br />

<strong>The</strong>re are also things called “Targums”<br />

but I won’t go into that now. Targums were<br />

simply Aramaic translations of the Old<br />

Testament.<br />

Jesus, we know for sure in some cases,<br />

spoke the Hebrew, Aramaic and probably<br />

the regional dialect of Galilee. This can<br />

be seen on the cross when He says, “Eloi,<br />

eloi, lama sabachthani.” (Mt. 15:34) That<br />

is Aramaic, not Hebrew. Remember, He is<br />

fully human, fully divine. When people are<br />

in a crisis they tend to revert to their mother<br />

tongue. When they recover black boxes<br />

from airplanes that go down, even though<br />

by international convention the language<br />

of aeronautics is English, if it is a French<br />

plane or a Chinese plane they go back to<br />

their mother tongue. When people are in<br />

trauma they tend to go back to their mother<br />

tongue; they go back to the language they<br />

can think in the best. Jesus was human as<br />

well as divine and He is speaking Aramaic.<br />

“Talitha kum!” (Mk. 5:41) It is close to Hebrew,<br />

but it is not Hebrew, it is Aramaic.<br />

“Little girl, get up!”<br />

So there is Dynamic Equivalence. <strong>The</strong><br />

way I put it is “this far, no further.” But<br />

now something happens. Now the line is<br />

no longer “blue,” now it is almost black.<br />

We go to the next level, paraphrases.<br />

Using a Paraphrase<br />

In my own view, there are two conditions<br />

where as a temporary provision I<br />

would have the faith to allow for the restricted<br />

use of a paraphrase for a limited<br />

period of time. Specifically it must be a<br />

good paraphrase, but a children’s <strong>Bible</strong>.<br />

When someone has a kid who is 5 or 6 who<br />

can only read “See Jane run,” “See Spot,”<br />

and they want to get them reading “See Jesus;<br />

see Jesus and Peter” until that kid is<br />

old enough to read fluidly and fluently. I<br />

have got no problem telling kids bedtime<br />

stories about Jesus that paraphrase biblical<br />

narratives in very simple language as a<br />

temporary provision until the kid can read.<br />

I have no problem with it as long as it is<br />

well done – theologically accurate, parentally<br />

supervised, pastorally approved. I can<br />

go along with it under those circumstances.<br />

Again, it must be a good paraphrase and it<br />

must be for specific purpose for a limited<br />

period of time, a temporary provision to<br />

meet a specific need.<br />

<strong>The</strong> second is when the Wycliffe translators<br />

or one of the <strong>Bible</strong> societies go to<br />

a tribal culture who have no written language,<br />

no alphabet, and they can teach<br />

them this to try and get people saved. So<br />

they begin by paraphrasing.<br />

<strong>The</strong>re was a true story of a tribe in Equatorial<br />

Africa sometime in the 1950’s or early<br />

60’s who did not know what snow was.<br />

<strong>The</strong>y had never seen snow. <strong>The</strong>y lived hundreds<br />

of miles from the nearest snow which<br />

was on top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and they<br />

had never seen it. <strong>The</strong>y did not know what<br />

snow was so the missionaries rendered Isaiah<br />

1:18 “Your sins shall be white as snow”<br />

as “Your sins shall be white as coconuts.”<br />

That is what they did. In time these people<br />

got an alphabet, the missionaries showed<br />

them pictures of snow, but when trying to<br />

get people saved or teach them the Gospel,<br />

the basic truths, as a temporary provision I<br />

do not have a problem in principle within<br />

those restricted parameters of the missiological<br />

use of a paraphrase. But that is it.<br />

<strong>The</strong> problem is once we cross that line,<br />

now we still have paraphrases. And we begin<br />

to get into stuff that is not restricted,<br />

<strong>Moriel</strong> Quarterly • March 2010

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