The Plastic Bible - Moriel Ministries
The Plastic Bible - Moriel Ministries
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