tdh86
Puritan Board Freshman
Tim,
The requirements for Scripture that is to be used in the pulpit are not the same as those elsewhere. We come to worship to hear the word of God. A high view of worship and reverent hearing of God's timeless and eternal character in His special revelation saturates the previously given quote from the WCF. The majesty of the style of the translation and its heavenliness speaks to its spiritual, linguistic, educational, and cultural transcendence. When the ordained servant declares from the pulpit, "this is the word of God, he who has ears to hear, let him hear" do we in the pulpit sit in judgment of that declaration?
We need not dilute the special revelation of God presuming that the everyman is incapable of discovering its truths with the aid of the Holy Spirit. We need not concern ourselves with making things "easy" or presume that the church has somehow got it all wrong and great changes are needed. Rather, we are reminded in the Confession that it is the Church that has received the translation, and held it to high and reverent esteem. The Scripture is not a mere conversational discourse as we would have in the streets. When we hear the word of God we should be provoked to reverence that stops us in our daily tracks and quiets the conversational noises of our minds. Study of Scripture is a lifelong endeavor, its riches likely never to be fully plumbed. The attitude that reading of Scripture is a "one and done" activity bewilders me. All the stories of persons having to read and re-read in order to understand given as evidence of "issues" speaks more to lack of discipline and modern fast-food mentalities, not manifest needs for translation updating.
You assert in your OP that you have done a lot of research into the matter. Where is it? What does it conclude that has been overlooked by those that have come before us? What are the readability research results you have found? How do they compare to say, this: https://www.puritanboard.com/threads/most-literal.92577/#post-1129861 ? Where on the literal scale shown therein will your translation fall? Above the ESV? What about readability? Above the NLT, which is but a poor man's commentary? What quantitative methods did you use and how do they compare to, say, this: https://csbible.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Quantitative-Translation-Evaluation-by-GBI.pdf ?
Given these small samplings of the wealth of research that exists, how is your endeavor to be distinguished? Finally, what academic linguistic and textual skills do you bring to the effort? Are you translating a translation with help from lexicons? Are you beginning with the best Hebrew and Greek versions (which are exactly?) and going from there?
I am going to bow out now. Your OP solicited inputs. They have been given. It may be just me, but it seems the inputs you seek must be aligned with your own views else they are to be subjected to argumentation and dismissed. I think you are a wee bit entrenched in the methods you are using and no amount of input is going to move you off that position.
OK...just quickly... There are two very different issues here. One, which I agree with you on, is the issue of the truths of The Word being spiritually discerned. It's absolutely the case that someone who is spiritually blind will read without understanding until the Holy Spirit does His work. But does that mean they will not understand the language used? Of course it doesn't mean that. Otherwise the Catholics were right. Why did Tyndale need to translate the Bible at all? Of the language is only understood spiritually too then it might as well be in Latin! Why bother changing it?
I am certainly not advocating a Bible with improved readability in order for people to get a quicker fix of the Bible and move on. The point is that our efforts in studying should be all about understanding the truths of scripture rather than having to decipher the words in your own language first. We should spend more time in the word not less.
I'd just like to say that I really appreciate all the responses and the opinions given. However I did try to be very clear in my initial post that I am at the editing stage of the NT. In other words, it's pretty much finished so I was looking for people who were interested enough in the project to consider proofreading it for me. I have a considered method which I'm following and you'll forgive me for being 'entrenched' in my approach at this stage and not wanting to just scrap the entire NT and start again on a whim. While I appreciate the broad brush comments re translation methods etc that wasn't what my initial post was asking for so you're correct, I'm not looking to change my approach. But again, thanks for your thoughts.
T