Translating Scripture from Greek

Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast.
I am Corey J.
Mahler. And
I'm still Wo.
Today's Stone Choir is the final, final, final episode of the Septuagint
series. This is what we've been calling the bonus episode up to
this point.
We haven't selected the name for yet, so you know what it's
gonna be, but I don't know as we're beginning recording what we're
gonna call it.
The prequel episode number ninety nine with the context window in this
episode are two parts that are book ending the seven parts content
of the Septuagint story itself proper.
This episode is going to exclusively focus on what the process should
look like for a future translation of the Septuagint into English, so
that you as a reader don't have the problem that we have
had for the last eighteen months working on this project, which is
very simply this.
Brenton, Lexum, Nets, another one that we'll mention, all have the same
problems, which are that they don't necessarily exclusively rely on the Septuagint
Even though they call themselves septuagin translations, there are decisions in terms
of the content included or excluded or word choices that are sometimes
derived from the rabbinic text.
Which when you are endeavoring to discover exclusively what is in Greek
without any rabbinic influence, becomes useless.
So on one hand, you know, many of you have already gone
out and bought one of those Bibles, that's great.
Use it.
Not criticizing them and saying they're terrible for the sake of being
a Bible, in the sense of here's what I read at home,
here's what I study, here's what I you know look at.
The problem is if the question you're trying to answer is does
this say exactly what the Greek says, you can't know by looking
at any of those.
Even the Nets, which has lots and lots of footnotes, it's a
very academic version.
It's not necessarily going to identically reproduce what's in the Greek.
So that problem has yet to be solved today.
What we're going to describe, many of you are going to laugh
at. I'm going to tell you right up front, it's going to
seem over the top some of the rules that we've come up
with, some of the processes we're gonna recommend.
This is by far the most INTJ episode that we've ever done.
Both Corey and I are trying TJ's we love contingency planning and
working through things in elaborate fashion.
This is one of those.
And while that seems silly for most people in most of your
life, I want to give you a couple examples of places where
you see the same sort of processes and assiduous attention to detail
that doesn't strike people generally as crazy because you know why they're
doing it.
One example would be as we're recording this, I'm gonna be having
surgery next week, the one I was deferred a while ago.
By the time you're listening, I will have already had surgery.
So before the surgeon cuts me open and puts his hand inside
my body, I hope that he cleans his hands really well.
I hope he scrubs good and long all the way up to
his elbows.
Like when you've seen a surgeon scrubbing down, usually in a TV
show, it looks ridiculous.
It looks like this guy is crazy.
If you knew nothing about germs and you watched a surgeon scrubbing
for surgery, you would think he had lost his mind.
It seems like a bizarre ritual that serves no purpose whatsoever.
But once you understand germs and you understand surgery, that a man
is being cut open, his body is being rent in a way
that's not intended by God to solve a problem in this case,
you know, it's not something mean, it's something beneficial.
Then the fact that the surgeon is doing this seemingly over-the-top cleaning
ritual makes perfect sense.
You don't want to introduce any contaminants into the body past the
skin barrier that's there to keep that stuff out.
Because although our immune systems are very good at fighting off pathogens,
they have a much harder time once they get past certain layers
of defenses.
So God has given our bodies layers of defenses, and the surgical
theater also has layers of defenses to keep germs away from when
the two collide, when the external environment collides with the inside of
the surgical patient's body, you don't want anything getting in or out
except for what is intended.
Means no germs.
It's a very simple process once you understand why it's happening.
If you knew nothing about germs, it would seem ridiculous.
And two hundred years ago if you saw surgical theater, it would
seem like butchery compared to today.
And that's why.
Another example of contaminants causing problems or something I mentioned before I
used to own and operate a distillery.
A distillery is basically like a brewery or a winery with the
additional step of boiling for purification, essentially.
When someone is brewing or fermenting wine, the hard part that they
have is that they have their liquid, their water, they have their
sugar source, and they have their yeast.
And when the yeast feeds on the sugar, it produces lots of
delicious alcohol and lots of other flavors as well.
The problem for the brewer or the ventner is that any flavors
that are produced in that process that are off-flavors, which would typically
be introduced by some external contaminant, those go into the product.
Because after a brewer's finished brewing or a ventor is finished with
wine making, aside from light filtering and maybe some aging, it goes
into a bottle and that's what you drink.
So in my case, distilling was the much easier version of that
because what we brewed wasn't particularly good beer.
It was very, very sour beer.
The purpose was never the flavor of what was in Those giant
vats as we were producing that beer.
The purpose was the alcohol on some of the flavors, but not
all of them.
So when you distill, you're stripping away most of that stuff.
You're throwing it away entirely and leaving the pure distillation of a
much smaller portion.
So distilling is much more forgiving than brewing or winemaking for that
reason. When you look at the cleanliness and purification steps that are
necessary in brewing in wineries, they seem over the top too.
They do a lot more than we necessarily had to do in
a distillery.
Not that we were being sloppy by any means, but simply that
no flavors that we would be concerned about wouldn't get stripped out
by the spirit making process.
When it goes into the bottle and you drink it without anything
apart from filtration, contaminants will do damage to the process.
They'll do damage to the final product.
So that's just a couple small examples in the world where we
see that keeping things pure as you're going through the process sometimes
looks a little silly from the outside until you understand what it
is that you're trying to keep out.
Very simply, the process that we're going to describe today, what it
is intended to keep out, is the contamination of the rabbis.
Once we have made the case, as we did in the previous
seven episodes, the Greek scripture is breathed out by God, we simply
don't want anything else.
And we don't want anything that's been influenced by anything else other
than the Greek.
So the process that we described today will seem over the top
to some of you.
To some, it'll make perfect sense, but that's the reason why.
We have to keep contamination out at every step of the process,
because otherwise the leaven of the Pharisees is going to get back
into the system.
The whole point is to get it out and keep it out.
I mentioned there are the three examples of Brenton, Lexum, and Nets,
which are available today.
You can download all those online.
They're fine Bibles.
I've mentioned specifically Brenton.
I like it the least, primarily because it is basically King James
English. I was looking this up earlier to see if I could
make this claim.
What I wanted to say was that Brenton's is basically about a
two hundred year old translation of the King James using the Septuagint.
What I wanted to say was that that was the first translation
into English after the King James, which turned out to almost be
true. There was one significant translation of scripture prior to Brenton, which
was around eighteen forty four, was when it came out, so you've
been working on it for a while.
The previous translation was from a man named Charles Thompson.
I'd never heard the name, some you probably have, but most you
probably haven't.
Charles Thompson's one of the founding fathers.
He was an Irish born man, he was an orphan who became
the secretary of the Continental Congress for all fifteen years that it
was convened.
Later in his life, he translated the entire Septuagint into English and
he published that in 1808.
And he was obviously living in America at the time, he was
speaking American English.
So the Thompson translation has significantly less archaic formulations than Brenton.
We'll link in the show notes in a link to his page
because it's just very interesting.
I had no idea when we began that one of the founding
fathers made the earliest Septuagint translation into English.
That's really cool.
Friend was looking at it earlier today as I was working on
final prep for this episode and seemed like some of the renderings
were pretty interestingly different from the others in ways that hopefully are
consistent with the Greek.
Yeah, we'll go look later.
So there's a fourth one in the mix that you can consider
and it's certainly worth checking out just for its historical value In
2027, there is another translation that will be coming from Oxford University
Press. It's going to be called the Ancient Christian Study Bible.
And the intention is for that to become basically the new or
the next Orthodox study Bible.
But the team that's working on it is ecumenical, as on just
Orthodox guys.
They're Protestants or Catholics working on it.
Which I think is a very good thing.
I think it's important for that sort of project not to have
your own particulars creeping into the translation decisions you're making.
Because remember, when we're talking about a translation, we're talking about plain
words. We're talking about men communicating with other men.
And theology is an additional layer on top of that.
So one of the beauties of the fact that the Septuagint was
recorded in Quine Greek is that there are many other examplars of
Quin Greek from that period, both before and after, that a translator
can look at to help understand how did they speak in that
day? How were they using various words and phrases?
What concepts when they're expressed in one form in Greek would translate
as a concept, as a thought, into English?
It's very valuable when you have a big corpus available to you
beyond just the text you're translating.
Because there are some cases where if you're just looking at the
text, you may not be able to tell exactly what the author
meant. Now, in the case of a book, it's you do your
best. In the case of scripture, that's not acceptable.
And so the blessing that the church has is a God put
scripture into a very accessible, relatively simplified version of Greek that translates
fine and down in other European language, and a number of others,
but like European languages going to be the closest cousins.
This is a tremendous boon to anyone who's doing translation work because
they can get the thoughts clearly into another language.
And then if there are certain ways that certain traditions want to
articulate their theology on top of that, you can You explain it.
That's why there are pastors and priests to come along and say,
Here's what this means in our context.
That's fine.
It's good for the language itself to be neutral as much as
possible, not influenced by anyone's theology.
Because as we've said many times, when we have disagreements among the
various bodies, at most one of us is right.
So given that rule, it's best not to be messing with the
text of one simple language, translating into another simple language.
Let the language be the language and let the theology be the
theology. The theology doesn't have to reshape the language just to make
sure no one gets anything wrong.
That's a bad approach.
That's why we have these bookstores that are so full of books
today. You have Bibles for kids, Bibles for women, Bibles for role
players, like it's it's insane.
Let the Bible be in English and let there be one of
them. So we'll get to that in the end.
We'll put a link in the show notes to the Ancient Christian
Study Bible.
It's certainly not going to meet our criteria that we're going to
present here today.
Maybe it would be a better option than the other four.
I hope so.
That'd be great.
Because the things that we're going to describe today it's going to
be many years before such a thing exists.
In the meantime, we need to be reading the Bible from the
original Greek as best we can.
So I hope that this ancient Christian study Bible bans out.
You know, I'll get a copy when it comes out and we'll
see. Whatever.
It's going to be better than what we have.
And that's one of the most important things.
The Masoretic text, the rabbinic text derived Bibles that we have today
are worse than any of the Septuagint Bibles that are also out
there. Ultimately, what we want to have is a Bible that's free
from the yeast of the Pharisees.
So what we're gonna describe today is basically the team structure.
Basically I'm gonna be describing a project management role.
This project of translating the Septuagint cleanly with no interference, what should
that look like?
This is by no means exhaustive.
This is by no means moral.
These are pragmatic rules.
So when we say do it like this, it's to achieve the
sort of cleanliness I just described.
The point is to keep the contamination out.
We believe that these rules, if they are followed, will keep the
contamination out.
We equally believe that if these rules are not followed, the risk
of contamination goes way up, even by degrees, these little one rule
at a time, you strip it away, you increase the risk of
contamination. One of my favorite movies, one of the only movies I
like from before about the early nineties, is the Andromeda Strain.
It's based on a Michael Crichton novel from nineteen sixty nine.
The movie came out in seventy one.
It's dated, but it's not that dated in terms of the ridiculousness
of it.
The reason I came to mind as I was thinking about this
is that one of the key elements of the Andromeda strain is
basically they have a microbe from outer space and they're going to
try to deal with it in isolation because it was killing people,
it was hurting people, they get it into this facility though specifically
designed to contain some xenosourced pathogen.
And the structure of the facility and all the rules that they
came up with in anticipation of such an event was specifically designed
to keep in any earthbound contamination out.
So when they worked on the pathogen, they knew that that was
all they were looking at.
So a lot of the book and a lot of the movie
is detailed around the specific layers of defenses.
And if any one of those layers those defenses were breached, the
pathogen could get out and something from Earth could get in and
confuse the whole thing.
So when we describe this process, the same mentality is in mind.
You know, when the surgeon cuts me open and he didn't scrub
his hands that well, maybe it'd be fine.
Maybe his hands happened to be clean before he got there for
surgery. And so all the scrubbing that day didn't turn out to
be necessary.
But you don't want to take the chance.
You do it not because you know it's absolutely going to prevent
the problem.
You do it because it significantly reduces the risk of that sort
of problem.
So just keep that in mind.
These are not moral rules.
I say that because right off the bat we're gonna be getting
to some things that some people will feel they're moral condemnations.
That's not the case.
These are hygienic matters.
They're cleanliness rules, they're not moral rules.
In other contexts and other places, they wouldn't matter at all.
Basically what we're going to be describing here are four teams that
will be working together.
You have a core translation team that would be working directly on
the text.
You have a non air gapped research team that would be giving
sources to that core team, and the non air gapped research team
is the one that's able to interact with sources that are going
to be contaminated by the rabbinic authorship, or by church fathers and
others who were themselves contaminated to some degree by what the rabbis
said. So the non-air gapped research team is going to be interacting
with external sources like patristics that may well have been themselves influenced
by the rabbis.
Their job is to keep the rabbinic influences away from the core
team. So nothing that the core team ever sees will be unvetted
for that sort of contamination.
There's also going to be an advisory team or an editorial team.
But in this context, they're not managers.
They will be reviewing basically what the librarians are sending in, and
they'll be reviewing what the translators are sending out, just to sort
of make sure that everyone's on the same page.
The rules that we're going to describe that are most stringent for
the translators won't apply to these other two teams because they kind
of have different purposes and we'll explain that in a minute.
And we're going to have a legal and clearance team because a
lot of what is going to be used here will be externally
sourced sourced from copyrighted materials.
And one of the fundamental goals at the end of such project
needs to be to release an English translation of the Septuagint that
is unencumbered by copyright, free for reproduction, as well as the apparatus
that includes everything that the translation team used, documenting in Greek or
whatever other languages.
Here's exactly what the guys who are translating the Bible, here's what
they were looking at showing the entire genealogy of every word choice
made in the Bible, both because it would be incredibly valuable for
studying, and also to sort of let external viewers read and vet
and determine that, yeah, this was a good translation effort.
If mistakes, rares, or whatever crept in when the apparatus is published
side by side, then sure you can see all of it.
You need a legal and clearance to you because it will require
permission from a bunch of rights holders to also publish their stuff
for free.
So you need negotiation, you're gonna need checks to be cut.
And all that is a necessary part of producing the finished work
that will bear fruit for centuries to come.
Part of the reason that some of this may seem excessive or
extreme to some of you is that just just how easy it
is to ignore the things that influence you, even not to notice
them at all.
It's extremely easy to miss those things.
And I thought about this yesterday when I was writing an article
that maybe it will be out by the time this episode is
released, but there are probably a dozen different things that I reference
or straight up cite in that article that have clearly influenced me
to the degree that I am aware of them.
I've memorized them.
I was writing these things down, citing them from memory, not looking
them up.
And so even if I recognize That initial layer, that first layer
of influence, insofar as just the sheer fact that the thing exists
in my memory.
And even if I account for that, if I deliberately ignore that
and make sure that I don't permit it to influence other downstream
thoughts, the problem is, at some point it becomes sufficiently attenuated in
any man's mind that you can no longer do that.
And so maybe there's that second order or third or fourth order
effect where you don't realize that you've made this particular decision because
of some influence three or four rungs up the ladder.
That is the reason we want to take this level of precaution.
As Wo said, sometimes you'll see church fathers or others, and there's
no citation to the rabbis, there's no citation
even to the rabbinic text, but if you look at the argument
that they are making, it's clearly drawn from rabbinic sources.
Because that was a second or even a third order effect.
And so the goal is to minimize that, to eliminate it to
the degree that it is possible.
And that is the reason for taking these sort of seemingly extreme
measures Measures.
for those of you who speak German though sort of as an
aside, but it ties into this because of the structure of the
thing. There are some editions of the Septuagint translated into German you
can buy today they exist.
Some of them are pretty good.
You have the Ralphs, the Göttingen, the Göttingen is the and I
mean that in uppercase letters.
It is the academic version of the Septuagint, other than obviously the
Greek itself, because obviously that has the Greek, it has all the
sources, it has all the annotations, it has the apparatus, but everything
else is basically in German.
So you're going to have to know German for that one.
But as far as not academic versions, just for everyday reading, although
with quite a healthy number of footnotes, there is the Septuagint Deutsch,
which was released in two thousand nine.
I happen to have that version on my desk right now, it
is also a good option.
And then the Ralphs.
The reason that the Ralphs and the Göttingen are relevant is that
they will be relevant as we go through this episode simply by
virtue of the Of their position in the academic landscape.
But the structure that the German Bible Society, I'll just give the
name in English, used when they were creating the Septuagint Deutsch, the
most recent version in modern German very readable translation, they did a
little bit of what we're recommending.
They did not use the same sort of safeguards, they didn't do
the air gapping and the isolation, but they did have small teams
of academics who were versed in relevant areas translating this, and then
they had an editorial oversight board that helped to organize this, and
then obviously because it's the German Bible Society, a decent sized corporation,
they had the legal team as well.
The step that they did not take that we want to take
for this version and for any other similar project in any other
language, whether it's a European language or if it's say Japanese or
Korean or something else, whatever it happens to be.
The vitally important step that we want to take is that isolation
of the translators themselves.
And the ability to restrict the sources they're using, not in the
sense, many here restrict and they think negative, not in the sense
of a negative, but rather in the sense of not permitting things
that have been contaminated to be in front of the translators when
they are doing this vitally important work.
You don't want to permit any sort of contamination, as Wo mentioned
with the examples that he gave.
There are certain contaminants that may seem very small, but they can
have profound effects downstream.
Another example of that would be, for those of you who are
more familiar with working in the kitchen, say, canning.
If you don't properly sanitize the can, what goes into the can,
then what you get back out of the can is not going
to be what you wanted.
As we all know very well, it's going to be the little
expanded can that will probably kill you if you eat it.
Another example that comes to mind simply because I moved a bunch
of chicken feed yesterday.
When I fill up the drums that I use to store the
chicken feed long term, I dust diatomaceous earth on top of it.
The reason I do that, it's a similar concept here, it's not
exactly the same.
But the reason that I do that is that it removes some
of the insects that inevitably get into feed.
Anyone who's been around animals, worked on a farm knows.
Granary weevils are basic omnipresent.
You can almost not get rid of them.
But if you dust the feed with diatomaceous earth, you can It
will kill them or at least the larva so they won't continue
that life cycle in your grain and you won't open up your
50, 60 gallon drum six months in the future and realize that
it's full of bugs.
The same sort of process.
You're trying to get rid of that contaminant before it reaches the
final product.
That's what we want to do with this structure and with this
setup for the translation.
The goal is to have a faithful translation of God's Word without
any of what the rabbis tried to pass off as God's Word.
As we went over in the previous episodes, there are a lot
of problems.
We're trying to get rid of those problems, and so the extremity
as it may seem of the effort of the design is absolutely
warranted because it's the only way to be certain.
And as well said, each additional layer, each additional step just decreases
the odds of that contamination reaching the final product.
Any step you take, any additional step you take in order to
increase that gap, in order to increase that security, in order to
cut down on the risk of contamination, is a good thing.
Are they all necessary?
Perhaps not.
Maybe you'll get lucky.
But each additional one increases the likelihood of the product being what
you intend instead of what you did not intend.
So the rules for the selection of the sort of men, and
obviously they would only be men on the core translation team, which
would probably be in the neighborhood of a dozen men.
You know, it's I think a dozen is a nice number.
It's a number of a jury.
And I think that in some ways we are looking at creating
a jury here, although they're gonna work to some degree independently on
which portions.
We'll talk a little bit about the process of how they work
through things.
You don't want to be too big or too small.
You want enough men in the mix that different viewpoints and different
opinions will even each other out and what is produced in the
end is not a compromise, but a purification and a manifestation of
the ideals that would take them all into the sort of project,
which is probably going to take 10, 15, maybe 20 years to
accomplish. For this core translation team, I think rule number one needs
to be absolutely zero knowledge of Hebrew.
Maybe get the outside if somebody like knows the Hebrew alphabet kind
of suspect, but literally no more than that.
If they can read it, if they've studied it, just write out,
period. And that is going to seem like one of the most
ridiculous ones.
In particular, you think well that's going to exclude so many types
of yeah, exactly.
We are excluding so many types of men here.
The purpose of the rules, the purpose of keeping things out of
the clean room is exclusion.
So you are right that a whole bunch of guys don't get
to come into the inner sanctum where the real work is being
done. This is deliberate.
This is the sort of the most extreme of all the rules,
in the most absolute, but I put it up front because we
need to understand if we believe that the rabbis should never have
had any influence on Christianity, then we have to get the so-called
Hebrew language entirely out of the mixture.
And anyone who has ever studied to any degree the so-called Hebrew
language is contaminated.
This is something that we see in scripture in other contexts.
When you look at, for example, the rules for who can be
a pastor, it excludes a bunch of guys who were fine for
all sorts of other things.
But God specifically says for this one thing you cannot be in
that role.
It excludes men who were fine as kings, and yet they can't
fulfill that particular role.
This is not alien to the Christian faith.
And so I said at the outset, this is not a moral
claim. It's not saying, well, you learned Hebrew, you're going to hell.
I don't think that.
My dad knows Hebrew.
Like it's fine.
It's not fine.
It was dumb.
It was a waste of time.
But everything that everyone has told all of these men to this
point is you need to learn Hebrew if you want to understand
the Old Testament.
False in so many ways that we proved over the last seven
episodes. By the time we get done with this full series, it's
gonna be about twenty hours.
This is a long case to make for how to evaluate and
then fix this problem.
We have made the case that you cannot have Hebrew in the
mix. And an expansion of no Hebrew, but a separate rule nonetheless
is no theological training whatsoever.
Guy who's gone to seminary, a guy who has been a theologian,
whatever, flat out.
And again, you think, well, that's going to exclude so many guys.
That's going to exclude our church experts.
Yes, you're bloody well right.
The men who have been looking at this stuff their entire lives
and missed it, who failed to get this right, they don't get
to be the ones making the decisions.
They have proven that their judgment is unsound and everything that they
know is contaminated by the very sort of thing that we don't
want to have in the room.
Now, what do we want in the room?
We want faithful Christians, but just faithful Christians who have not been
deeply involved in study.
And that's kind of one of the not the wishy washiest, but
it's the one that's going to require the greatest degree of judgment
when these teams are being selected.
And as Corey said, like I care about English because it's the
only language I speak, but this same model could be exported to
Japan. It's gonna be even easier in Germany because as Corey said,
many of the sources are already in German, so there's less work
for them to do.
But at the end of the day, you have to have some
degree of discernment on which men should be included.
They have to be faithful Christians.
Obviously have to buy into everything that we've sort of represented here
that the Greek scripture is breathed out by God and that nothing
else belongs in the Bible that we're reading at home to our
kids. That's a very simple goal, but it's very difficult to achieve.
And when you look at what's taught in seminaries, when you look
at what someone who's been deeply involved in theology for many years,
I would be disqualified, even though I don't even meet the deeply
involved in theology test.
But I have been sufficiently attentive to what the rabbis have taught
that I have absorbed it by osmosis.
I can't get it out of the wash.
It's one of those stains that just doesn't come out.
It has nothing to do with damnation, has nothing to do with
stupidity. It's a simple fact that were I looking at a Greek
translation, at a Greek source, assuming that I were fluent in Koine
Greek, it is simply a fact that it would be impossible for
me to extricate from my mind the various English translations that I've
seen of that.
That's naturally going to guide my thought process.
You can't get away from that.
Which means that the ideal sort of man for this is a
Christian, not a new convert, but not someone who has been deeply
involved until fairly recently.
Ideally, one who once he does really care in a In a
best case, he wouldn't study a bunch of theology from guys who've
been influenced by this stuff, which is hard.
Like we'll get to the end about how this is only step
one of this process, but if you include a man who has
studied too much theology, or certainly a man who's actually been trained
formally in theology, you're going to end up with someone who has
too many priors.
And remember what I said earlier about the translation process.
We don't want theology to be informing the output.
We want philology.
We want straight up what does the word say, what is a
normal reading of this?
If a pagan Greek man in AD fifty five read the Septuagint,
what conclusion would he reach from the text?
Now, as we saw with the Ethiopian eunuch, obviously there are cases
where you need someone to explain it to you.
There are things you require faith for you to understand.
But he could read perfectly well what the words were there.
There was no confusion for this Ethiopian reading in Greek which was
not his first language.
He knew exactly what the Greek said.
He just didn't understand it.
So I hope that makes sense in the context of a translation
committee. You don't translate it into something that will fix all of
the theological problems.
You translate it from Greek into English or German or Japanese or
whatever, such that the native reader understands exactly what the words mean,
but maybe they don't understand the theology.
That's where the translation needs to be.
And so we'll talk a little more about the process with some
of the groups like the editorial group, the advisory group.
Those are going to be men who are going to be well
informed in those things, who will act as a check to make
sure that the translators don't inadvertently create bad theology by their word
choices. Because that's entirely possible.
So although we have men who are Christians, but they are not
deep theologians at the time that they go into this process, that
doesn't mean that we're just going to create an agnostic or atheistic
Bible. That's the last thing that we want.
We want to faithful Christian Bible that truly espouses Christian theology, but
you don't need to bring a ton of that into the room
with you.
You need to bring language experience, but you don't need to bring
theological experience.
It's a distinction that from the outside might seem like you wouldn't
think that would work.
It doesn't seem like you can have one without the other, but
it's simply the case that especially when you're not talking about oral
tradition, when you're just talking about simplified Koine Greek, translated into English,
if it's any Koine Greek source from the first century, whatever it
is, forget the Bible, translating anything written in the first century in
Koine Greek into English is a straightforward process, it's a solved problem.
Anyone who's a domain expert in that is going to be able
to do a good job with it.
And then because it's the Bible, you additionally need checks by men
who are more familiar against decisions to make sure that it doesn't
accidentally introduce misleading wording that could produce down the road bad theology.
But we don't want theologians in the room.
We don't want scholars in the room.
Unless it's strictly secular Greek writing.
That's fine.
If someone's a Greek scholar, that's the ideal case.
Unfortunately, classics departments are so polluted at this point that I think
it might be difficult to find someone who's gone through a classics
department that isn't a rabid atheist, but if you could find someone
who was totally ignorant of scripture until you recruited him, made him
a Christian, but he was fluent and coined a Greek, was very
good at that, that would almost be the ideal candidate.
Now he would obviously have to be a Christian for a few
years and get up to speed on things before you set him
loose on the Bible.
But the additional layers outside of the core translation team help to
guard against even that eventuality.
And
it is certainly worth pointing out that, as Woe mentioned in his
intro, one of the advantages of Greek certainly is that Greek has
this existing corpus of works, and I'm talking about the ones that
came prior to the New Testament at least, prior to the Septuagint.
Because you have all of the ancient Greek texts, you have these
things that you can rely upon for your translation choices with regard
to words and what they mean, their etymology, the history, their nuance,
and
unlike using certain other materials that have been influenced by the rabbis
influenced by Hebrew, we don't have this concern with ancient Greek.
Ancient Greek was not influenced by rabbis, so the translators can certainly
rely on those materials when they're making some of their translation decisions.
Similar to what Woe said about himself, I am also certainly disqualified.
It's not really a task for either of us for various other
reasons, but even if we were inclined to want to participate in
this, we're certainly disqualified from being part of the core translation committee
the core translation team any of those teams if there are multiple
teams for that so you can compare across them say similar to
what was done with, of course, the Septuagint.
But I'm disqualified as for one reason, certainly I mentioned in a
previous episode, that as I was going through the Psalter, for instance,
I was comparing some of the stuff in translations of the Septuagint
mentally with the ESV, because I have read it so many times
that I have memorized large chunks of the ESV.
For those who don't know, I've been doing a daily devotions podcast
for six years now, about this point two thirds between two thirds
and three quarters of the way through year six.
And so I read from the ESV translation of the Psalter, I'll
be switching over to the Septuagint as soon as there is a
usable version available, but I've been reading from the ESV version every
single day for six years.
With no breaks.
The only time where I have not done it the recording part
on a specific day is when I have gone hiking for multiple
days or something and I've recorded it in advance.
But I have read that so many times that it is permanently
in my memory.
And so if I am reading, say the Koine Greek, if I
am reading what is in the Septuagint, inevitably I am also going
to have in my mind at the same time the ESV translation
that came from, at least in part as we demonstrated, not entirely,
but in part the rabbinic text.
So I'm disqualified.
I cannot be part of that part of this project.
It is vitally important to make sure that we have the right
men doing the different parts of this task.
It doesn't matter if a man is otherwise competent or even exceptionally
competent in some particular area he may very well be disqualified from
some other portion of the task for some reason that doesn't say
anything bad about him as a man.
We're not passing judgment on men who happen to have some disqualifying
knowledge or whatever it happens to be, were saying that because of
that, there is no way for them to be sure that they
are being entirely objective in the necessary way to perform the task.
And so Woe and I are both disqualified, and so are very
many other men.
As we said at the outset, we recognize the difficulty of the
task, the challenge simply of finding the men who are capable of
doing this, but this is a long term project, as well said.
It would probably take 10, 15, 20 years.
There are additional steps after that initial translation as well.
This is not something that can be done overnight.
This is a massive undertaking.
Even in the case of the Septuagint Deutsch, which as we pointed
out a couple times already, most of the materials are already available
in German.
In fact, in very readable German because German you can still read
German from centuries ago fairly easily if you know modern German.
The German language has not changed as much as English.
So as I pointed out before, if you're reading, say, Middle English
or something, if you want to read Chaucer.
You're going to struggle, as a modern English speaker, unless you happen
to know that form of English, because the language has changed a
lot. German hasn't changed as much.
You can read Luther if you know modern German.
That's a 500 year difference, but you can still read it.
These men are dealing with stuff, sources, that are much more recent,
and yet it still took them nine years to translate from those
materials into the Septuagint Deutsch.
So this is a bigger undertaking than that.
It is going to be something that will take some time.
Part of making sure that you don't do that in vain is
ensuring that you follow the safeguards and select the right men.
Not because you like the men, not for any external or extraneous
reason, but because But because they meet the qualifications and do not
have any of the disqualifications.
And
so because we're looking at such a difficult problem of learning learning
contamination creeping into a man's knowledge even without his awareness.
And we're looking at a multi-decade project where ideally you would have
the same core team working the entire time.
I think that ideally the men involved in the core team would
be no older than thirty years old.
I think it would probably even make sense to set a hard
cap at say thirty-five years old.
These numbers are arbitrary, but if you want someone who's still going
to be able to work when he's 55 or 60, assuming that
the project is still ongoing and he's in good health and he
has all his faculties, no issues, and you want a man who
has not been contaminated just by exposure to the rabbinic teachings in
the world, you're basically gonna come down on the thirty to thirty-five
at the upper limit anyway.
So the other two main groups that would be involved in the
day-to-day here are the team of researchers or librarians.
You probably need somewhere between six to twelve, maybe more, depending on
how many requests.
Yeah, we'll get into the what those requests would be like later.
And the advisory team, the sort of semi executive team, except they're
not really the decision makers, and we'll talk about that later.
Those men need to be faithful Christians, but most of the other
rules can be relaxed.
Some of them, you know, theological knowledge, frankly, is a benefit.
Some knowledge of Hebrew may well be a benefit, particularly for some
of the librarians.
Not a requirement, but as Corey said, when you're looking at a
patristic source
to potentially see if you need to sanitize or exclude it before
you send it into the clean room, if you don't know what
the rabbis were saying, then you're not necessarily going to pick up
on it.
Because we don't expect everyone to be an expert on both the
Septuagint and the Hebrew texts.
We expect that they're just going to be assiduous in their determinations
as they're evaluating each of these things on a case-by-case basis.
So the advisory team and the research team probably are going to
be significantly more knowledgeable to some degree about theology and maybe even
about the rabbinic text.
That's fine, because crucially, they're going to have no contact whatsoever with
the source text itself.
They will never touch the translation.
The translation is output only.
They can send questions in, the librarians will sanitize and send data
in, and we'll talk about that process a little bit, but they
will never influence what is in the translation overriding what the translators
determine. So it's okay if they have some of this contaminated knowledge
that we want to keep out otherwise, because in theory, with the
structure, they can't do any harm to what the core team is
working on.
And of course it's crucial they need to be in agreement on
every other aspect of this whole project.
They can't be mad that they're excluded from the translation committee.
If they wish they were in the room and saw those other
guys 'cause they're really more qualified, that man has no business being
involved at all.
And frankly, if you get in five, ten years and you have
someone who is regularly bucking at these rules or gradually seems like
he's more of a problem, he needs to be removed.
You may well have alternates involved, have a few extra men who
are participants, but maybe not the main guys.
Like these are decisions that they don't need to be hard and
fast rules.
We just understand we're dealing with men.
Men have personality conflicts, men have
evolution and how they view things.
You know, maybe when they get into the project they agree and
then later on someone gets in their ear and poisons them.
I think that'd certainly be a likely possibility that someone would try.
I mean these men would very much be a target for the
influence of anyone who wanted to destroy this sort of process.
So
it doesn't need to be a hard and fast rule, but you
just need to be aware that at the end of the day
if someone is going against all of these principles, not necessarily the
rules, but the principles involved, they are a liability that needs to
be removed.
And if there were particularly egregious misconduct of some sort discovered, perhaps
you have to scrap whatever they had been working on for the
last few years and start that from scratch.
You know, I would hope that that weren't possible, but it's always
conceivable that someone would
either sneak in or would change somehow in a way that then
became harmful.
This happens.
It's like it's contamination is spiritual as much as it is about
knowledge So that's part of the reason for the advisory team.
It's also part of the reason to have these multiple segregated teams
that are not adversarial by any measure, but they are going to
be evaluating from the outside what the others are doing.
So that as a collaborative measure, they would all come to agreement
on, yeah, this is the way to go, or no, we have
a problem here, let's work through it.
If they're all Christian men, that will automatically be a straightforward, non-acrimonious,
professional conversation.
If you have deviation from that, then you know you have an
additional problem.
So now we move on to what are the textual sources that
the inner core team are going to be using the translators.
And this is really important.
The determinations of which Greek sources, which patristic sources, which which secular
sources are incorporated for the translation team to make their judgments is
vital. If you have the best team in the world and then
you put a bunch of junk in front of them that has
some of these problems built in, we've solved no problems whatsoever.
So essentially the restricted sources for the Septuagint itself need to be
the so-called Alexandrian text types of the Old Testament.
So those are the codices Vaticanus, Cyanaticus, and Alexandrinus.
Each of those is is predating any influence from the rabbinic texts.
Each of them is exclusive of any of the sort of the
harmonizations that we see in the Byzantine text types later on.
For example, we have the Lucianic recensions and others where they attempted
to harmonize things in a way that got away from what was
recorded in the Greek Septuagint and started to gradually change some of
the Greek text types to represent more like what was in the
Masoretic text and the rabbinic text.
That's simply impermissible.
If we assume for the sake of argument what we said in
the last seven episodes, you can't have any of that.
So job number one is only the three great unseals for the
Old Testament.
The second significant source of information, obviously, less significant than the Septuagint
itself, would be any sort of secular Koine Greek text from the
era. Anything like that is fair game.
For the simple reason that there will be some cases, especially when
you look at the HapAx Logomena, where you have
only one example in the entire Old Testament of a word.
How do you know what it means when you can't look in
context? Like when I was a kid, I have a big vocabulary
and I grew up with a dictionary next to me, but most
of the words that I've learned I learned by osmosis.
I didn't learn by looking them up in the dictionary and memorizing
it. I learned English mostly by just reading a bunch of junk
fiction, like I didn't read fancy books.
I just read authors who were decent authors and when they used
a word I didn't understand, I could generally infer from context what
it meant.
And in some cases like I don't have any idea what he's
talking about, then I will look at my dictionary.
That's how we learn language.
That's just how it works.
It's entirely acceptable and in fact necessary for the same sort of
approach to be used when you're translating scripture from a two thousand
year old language.
Quinne Greek is effectively a dead language now, so when you look
at the past examples that are fixed in time and you look
in the context
of that world in that day, the Greek world, which is the
language God chose to give us scripture in, their understandings of things
will necessarily inform how translator is going to choose to make clear
what the thought in Greek means in English.
Because remember, we want the thoughts to transmit.
We don't want just straight word for word.
We'll talk about that near the end.
But it's crucial though when we as an English speaker, whatever language
you're fluent in, when you're reading a Bible translation, you want to
know what words God was using.
Doesn't need to be identical.
You don't want a wooden translation That you can't understand because it's
such poor grammar.
You want one that clearly conveys the thoughts.
And using contemporaneous sources from you know third, second century, first century
BC, and a century or so afterwards, not only is it fair
game, but it's vital, because that is going to give a degree
of understanding to the translator of what the sort of man who
did not know God did not know anything about theology, when he
picked up the Septuagint and he picked up the New Testament written
in identical language, what was he gonna read?
And then when he asked someone, explain this to me, tell me
what does this mean?
Then the theology comes in, but not before.
And as I mentioned, we have fewer concerns about sources when it
comes to sources that are used purely as it were for Greek
knowledge, because the Greek sources were not influenced by, tampered with by
the rabbis.
These are from, in many cases, ancient Greek sources, because it's not
just Koina Greek that you would use for this, because obviously as
a language develops, you wind up with terms in a particular version
of the language that come from or at least came to you
through previous versions.
And so many of the words that we have in English came
from Middle English or came from earlier versions, came from German.
So you can look at the etymology and still be safe from
any of this potential contamination because when you're dealing again with ancient
Greek, you're not dealing with rabbinic contamination.
Unfortunately, many of the
go-to sources for Greek knowledge can't be used for this task.
For instance, I have BDAG, which is basically the source for biblical
Greek. I have it open
It can't be used in a translation project because it is littered
with Hebrew.
So it is contaminated.
It's one of those things that cannot be used.
It would have to be redacted in order to be passed on
to the translators.
And so many of these compendiums that we have where we have
compiled various references, various usages
of particular Greek words in order to have a more well-rounded, a
fuller understanding of the true meaning of the word, the lexical scope
of the word, they can't be used as is, because oftentimes they
were undertaken by men with the specific goal of creating this resource
that could be used alongside the Bible.
The problem with that is they were created by men who didn't
realize that the Hebrew was not God's Word.
And so like I said, Bedag and others are littered with Hebrew
comparisons to
the Hebrew Old Testament, which is say the Rabbinic text, alongside explanations
of what the Greek means in references to, say, Homer and others.
And so that contamination that you have from the Hebrew makes the
source source unreliable.
However, insofar as it is simply referencing ancient Greek sources, it can
still be used.
Because again, those ancient Greek sources themselves are not contaminated.
So if you want to know what a word means, part of
the way that you can look up what a word in Greek
means, these days we're all accustomed to, well, you just right-click on
the word, and then yes, that's very convenient, but it's because of
all of this work that has already been done by other men.
And so the way that you actually do it, if you had
to figure out the meaning of a word for yourself and you
didn't have access to these resources, you would have to go and
find it in other sources in that language, and then figure out
how it's used in that context, and then compare it across sources,
and then you would develop what would eventually become a dictionary definition
or a lexicon, whatever it happens to be.
And so you would go and look at, say, the word in
Homer. You would see how he used the word, and then you
can figure out how it developed, and you can of course look
at etymology as well.
But given this great wealth of resources that are available in Greek,
in the relatively minimal danger with regard to contamination, because again the
rabbis were not fiddling with ancient Greek epics, as much as I'm
sure they would have loved to have done so, they did not
have the opportunity.
These things are pure in the sense of being pure representations of
the Greek language without contamination from the supposed Hebrew.
They can be used by the translators without any risk for the
specific purpose of figuring out what words mean.
As Woe said, sometimes the word appears once in the Old Testament.
You probably can't figure out with absolute certainty what the word means
simply by looking at the Old Testament in that case.
It's not to say that God's word is incomplete or that God's
word is unclear, but God's word is written in a specific language,
and in fact you have to know the language to read it.
You typically don't just pick up a book and start reading it,
if you don't know the language.
Now, granted, that is partly how you can acquire a language, but
that's not suitable for translating something like God's Word.
And so sometimes, yes, the translators will need access to resources that
are external to God's Word for these specific purpose of figuring out
the usage of the Greek terms and being able to translate them
faithfully as they are used in the Old Testament.
And
so this is the reason why we have both the translation core
team and we have the library and research team.
And those two teams are firewalled.
The core team, the translators, they begin with a blank slate.
They don't get anything on their own.
The librarians are going to vet every single thing that's put in
front of them.
And in as we've been saying, in the case of the three
great unseals, in the case of most secular ancient Greek sources, the
degree of vetting that's necessary by librarians will range from little to
none. Because when he looks at it, it's like, yeah, well, there's
clearly no rabbinic contamination here, free for all.
And anything that's then passed through the firewall, the translation team, is
basically available to them in their own private internal library permanently to
be used as a resource.
As we said at the beginning, one of the goals is that
all of those resources will be published in parallel with the Bible
when it's presented, so that anyone can use it for study, anyone
can see exactly where everything came from.
There's zero ambiguity about the inputs when you're looking at the output.
And the research team is fulfilling that role in a way that
exposes them to contamination, but only so they can remove it when
they give it to the translation team I think one of the
last main examples of what the translators would want to have access
to would be any patristic sources from the first through fourth centuries.
Basically anything before Jerome is pretty much fair game.
The principal problem that the librarians will have in vetting and redacting
that sort of thing is that the modern compendia for those have
not followed the same rules that we have.
So they will not be cut off at Jerome.
They will not be concerned about rabbinic influence.
They just don't care.
They're solving a different problem.
And yeah, there's some tremendous resources that exist today in the modern
world. They have not existed previously that would be tremendous assets to
this project.
One of those would be from the University of California Irvine, their
thesaurus lingui grici.
It is something that has been compiling a huge trove of patristic
quotes. I think they go up through at least like the seventh
century. Obviously the librarians would want to cut it off as soon
as they start getting into where we have rabbinic pollution, probably sometime
after Jerome doesn't have to literally be the year that he started
working on the Vulgate.
But it can't be too long after because one of the examples
we gave previously by way of metaphor was low background steel.
If you remember, there's a certain type of steel that only exists
if it was smelted prior to the detonation of the first atomic
weapon. After the Trinity test in nineteen forty-five, certain radioisotopes were released
into the atmosphere that because they're just in the air, they're in
the room with you right now, not in any quantity that can
do any harm whatsoever.
But in the process of smelting steel, so much oxygen
is used in that process.
Some of those radioisotopes get into the steel that's made after that
date on nineteen forty five.
As soon as those winds whipped around the world, all the steel
made after there was slightly more radioactive, which means that in certain
medical and research contexts, that steel is worth its weight in gold,
or it's worth more than its weight in gold if it was
produced prior to the Trinity test.
Because it's gonna have a lower background radiation than the stuff that
was smelted after.
There's no getting around it.
Once it's in the world the damage is done.
in the case that we made in the Septuagint series, particularly the
first two episodes, is that Jerome did that damage.
Jerome was the Trinity test for the release of rabbinic radioactive pollution
into all theology.
So I don't know exactly when that date is, the researchers will
have to figure that out.
But sometime right around four hundred AD, you have to draw a
hard line and say no resources after there And again, the main
value in looking at patristic resources prior to that date, to looking
at them at all, is to see what the early church was
saying. Because that's entirely valid and incredibly helpful because those were native
Greek speakers.
Remember the whole point is what did native Greek speakers think about
this? The very most valuable native Greek speakers that we have on
record will be the early church fathers who never gave any thought
to the Hebrew, who only viewed the Greek as scripture as we
now view it, those men, what they say about scripture, is incredibly
valuable in the context of understanding what the words mean.
That's not to say we subscribe to all their theology, absolutely.
They all disagreed with each other, so we can disagree with them
too. It's as not a submission to their theological chops.
It is a submission to the fact that we have church fathers
who spoke Greek, who were writing in Greek about the Greek Old
Testament, what they say is in its context worth its weight in
gold? That is our low background steel when we're looking at church
theology, 'cause it's all that exists.
Once Jerome sets off his atomic bomb, there's no more left.
From that point on, everyone who could have possibly looked at what
Jerome translated is going to be looking at what the rabbis taught.
So this is another example of incredibly valuable resources that undoubtedly the
translators are going to want to incorporate and view as they're looking
at this stuff, particularly when there's something difficult or ambiguous or whatever.
And this is also a case where the fourth team, the legal
team, is going to be really important because as we said, not
only do we want the translators to be using these things, but
ultimately we want these things to be published alongside.
And when you're talking about these commercial endeavors, these things are available
for subscription.
I you can I think it's like a hundred bucks a year
for the TLG to subscribe to it.
For someone to do this sort of project and actually publish what
we're using would be used in this project for free for everyone,
would involve cutting them a check.
You're gonna need to have lawyers that would go talk to them
and say, Look, here's how we wanna use it.
And we'll talk about that more at the end.
But it's important at every stage that the best resources be used
and be used with full knowledge that at some point we're gonna
need to either have legal clearance
or the citation is going to strictly be see here, this citation,
we can't reproduce any of it for legal reasons.
I find that intolerable, but unless the world collapses, that's what we're
looking at.
Now, if the world collapses in the next 20 years, I think
it's pretty likely.
All this copyright stuff goes out the window and this gets a
whole lot easier.
So I'm not saying pray for the end of the world in
you know the civil sense, but it would certainly make translating a
Septuagint a lot more practical.
I would also include Göttingen and Ralph's and some of those other
German examples as well.
All those things, obviously, they're going to be the translators are going
to want them in the room with them, and they should be
in the room with them.
They simply have to be stripped of anything that could ever been
a text.
And everything else needs to be there in their private library, which
ideally, at the end of this project, would be published as an
apparatus to the scripture.
And
of course, the perhaps obvious resource to which they would have access
is a proper Greek grammar.
There's
sort of no objection to that as long as the one that
they are actually using hasn't been contaminated by something else.
Which when it comes to an actual Greek grammar is relatively unlikely.
For those who are less familiar with how translation and things like
that work, yes, even when you are using a language in which
you are fluent, it is still very useful to have access to
a proper grammar book, which is perhaps an alien sentiment to English
speakers since we're no longer taught grammar in school, which is deeply
unfortunate. Most English speakers don't learn grammar until they take a foreign
language, learn the grammar in that language and then have to backport
it into the understanding of English, which is intolerable, but it's the
reality of the situation in which we find ourselves.
So having a grammar of the Greek language present with you when
you are doing the translation is of course useful so you can
look at how specific phrases are constructed in things because perhaps you
don't keep all of that in your head at any given time.
That's just the reality of using a language that has the complexity
and nuance of any European language certainly, and definitely Greek is included
in
that
I've mentioned before that that was my exact experience and my brief
stint with Latin.
I didn't really end up learning any Latin, but I learned English
a whole lot better because I was exposed to that structure.
So I think someone young learning Latin or Greek is very valuable
'cause it's gonna teach you English.
To me that's the most valuable thing.
There are other things that become accessible, but if nothing else, you
will learn English really well by learning one of those languages.
So moving on now very briefly to the translation rules.
These are really simple, I've already alluded to most of them.
Essentially number one is just thought for thought.
I looked up earlier without asking Corey which would have saved me
some time.
I was curious about what's a really long, ridiculous German word.
One of the longest words that they have, and I even write
down what it was, there's a thirty six letter German word for
motor vehicle liability insurance.
Now when you hear about translation types, the two most common are
thought for thought or word for word.
Where word for word is sometimes literal.
They mostly mean the same thing, but not exactly, because again, this
is what we're talking about.
Even translating English into English can get confusing.
If I were doing a word for word-for-word translation
from that 36-letter word in German into English, the word means motor
vehicle liability insurance.
But if I were choosing word-for-word translation, I would have to just
call it insurance.
Now have I lost context by doing that?
Have I made it less clear what I'm talking about when I
say insurance?
When it means motor vehicle liability insurance?
Every one of those words is load bearing in that phrase.
That's not a compound word in English, that's a phrase.
Motor vehicle liability insurance, so long I can't even pronounce it.
There's a lot going on there, one word in German, four words
in English.
Sometimes language behaves that way.
There's nothing wrong with it.
And I picked on German here because I knew that I was
guaranteed to find a long ridiculous German word that would do this.
But at the same time, there are short words and long words
in one language that will translate sort of perpendicularly into another language.
In doing this work for the last eighteen months, I found a
number of cases where a short sentence in Greek becomes a very
long sentence.
You might have seven words in Greek becomes fifteen words in English.
If you're sticking to a word for word translation rule, you freak
out, you're like, oh no, I got too many words in my
sentence now.
it's not an authentic translation.
That's rubbish.
What does the thought mean?
What would the native speaker have heard when someone said that to
him? He would have heard seven words in Greek.
He would have heard 15 words in English.
So if you're translating into English, you give him fifteen words.
It's just that simple.
We cannot be sticklers in this sort of process in a way
that sort of woodenly translates things when the whole point is to
remove ambiguity.
It's not simply a question of removing the rabbinic pollution.
We need to make sure that whatever comes out, and this is
true regardless of your source text.
You always want your you should.
I mean, this is my personal preference.
For most purposes, most people, if you're reading, if you're studying, generally
you want a Bible that conveys the thought that was captured in
the original language.
Because you don't have to think about it.
Ultimately what we're going for here, the reason for this is very
simply, for the last eighteen months, Corey and I have been looking
at the various Greek Septuagint translations in English and realizing over and
over that we still don't know what the Greek says.
Because sometimes their disagreements are to the point that when you compare
them side by side with, for example, the ESV, you can see
that at least one of them is saying the same thing as
the SV, which is a dead giveaway, as opposed to the other
two, that they're not using the Greek.
So just looking at any single Greek translation today doesn't tell you
what the Greek says.
And that's unacceptable.
Any man in his native language should be able to read the
words of scripture and know what was recorded in the Old and
New Testaments in Greek.
It's gotta be thought for thought to get there.
The typical range for translations, insofar as type is concerned, ranges from
sort of the woodenly literal to the fully dynamic is sort of
the spectrum.
And we're leaning somewhat more toward the fully dynamic for the very
reasons that Wo just said.
The goal of having scripture in your language is so that you
Is so that you can read it and understand it.
If we simply wanted something that was woodenly literal, just and word
for word isn't even possible, so it's almost a ridiculous thing to
even say.
But But if you just took the core, the predominant, the most
likely sense of any given foreign word, and used that and did
that as the wooden translation, one, you'd end up with something that's
completely incomprehensible.
But two, it would be entirely unreadable, in addition to being incomprehensible.
This is a problem that we see sometimes with relatively literal so-called
translations of really any work.
If you get something that leans a little bit too much into
being woodenly literal or academic to use a specific sense of academic
and almost abuse the term literal, you wind up with something that
is not usable by those who speak the target language.
This is a criticism that I have leveled at the ESV, and
one of the reasons for that is if you have someone stand
up and start reading from the ESV, most likely he's going to
stumble over the word sometimes because it doesn't flow like English, because
it tries to match the underlying grammar of, unfortunately, in the case
of the Old Testament, the so called Hebrew, but it also does
it with the Greek.
Greek grammar is not the same as English grammar.
Different languages use different word orders.
Even just going from German to English, the word order is notably
different in German versus English, even though it is trivially easy typically
to translate German into English, even if you have to use more
words in some cases or fewer in others.
German, for instance, well when I were discussing this before we started
recording, typically German is a little longer than English, except for a
number of times where there are exceptions in which German is significantly
shorter because German has specific words that mean things that are entire
phrases in English.
One that has become popular in recent years and at this point
it could probably be considered a proper official German word.
Some people like to try to say that it's an informal word,
but German has a different relationship to that than English because you
can create new words in German.
But the word is Fremshaman, which is just a combination of Fremd,
other alien, and shaman, which is shame.
It's vicarious embarrassment.
So we have the same term in English, obviously it's much longer
in English, but if you add potential on the end of that
in German, then it's the potential to cause vicarious embarrassment.
It takes more words to say that in English than to say
it in German.
But we But
the point is you can translate it, but you have to do
it in a way that is thought for thought.
Because if you literally translated that word, all you would have is
alien shame potential or foreign shame potential, which
sure you can kind of understand what that means, and in context,
of course you can understand what it means.
But it's not a true translation into English because you haven't made
it into English.
You have just taken something that was a foreign language, done again
to abuse the term, but a woodenly literal translation into English, but
not proper English.
And that's not the goal.
We want an English Bible that is actual English that people can
read and understand.
And part of the reason that's important is because if you are
reading the scriptures in your own language, you should one be able
to read it fluently because it's your language, but two, it should
be natural in your language so that you can memorize it, so
that it sticks with you.
Because when you have something that is so stilted that it is
difficult to
parse as a native speaker of the language in which the thing
is supposedly written, you are going to have more trouble remembering it.
It will not stick with you.
This is similar to the sort of three levels here, more than
three, but three core ones here.
It's similar to how if you set something to music, you remember
it better.
Well, one step below that is just having it in natural language,
you remember it better, and then the step below that is something
that is so stilted and unnatural that it's difficult even to read.
Scripture is something in which you should be spending time, something you
should be able to memorize, and even if you're not the one
reading it, because of course, as we've mentioned previously, scripture
is meant to be read aloud, in many cases, yes, read on
your own as well, but originally meant to be read aloud.
That's why it references that a number of times in scripture.
Well you're not going to remember it hearing it if it's not
natural language, because your brain is going to have that cognitive burden
of trying to process what on earth is going on in this
sentence instead of paying attention to the content.
If you have that additional layer of difficulty in processing the thing,
you are going to dedicate resources, cognitive resources, to the processing instead
of the understanding and the retention.
So it has to be thought for thought.
It has to be a dynamic translation.
Not the sort of translation that you have that claims to be
literal but really isn't because again that can't be done because words
have a lexical scope, and the lexical scope is not identical from
one language to the next.
And so in some cases it's very clearly almost the same, and
so fremmed in German and foreign in English are almost identical.
Their lexical scopes are very close to being the same.
But you will get words where they have additional senses
in one language that aren't present in another.
You have to take that into account when you're doing the translation,
and so you translate thought for thought.
Instead of just that literal core sense you may have to use
a different term.
But you do that so that the speakers of the target language
understand it.
That is again the goal of this.
There's no point in the project if you just produce something that
is supposedly faithful to the original language, but is useless in the
target language.
We want an English Bible that is the actual word of God.
And in order to be that, well it has to be English.
Or it simply fails that initial test of being an English Bible
instead of something else.
None of this is to say that we cannot have an academic
translation, because having something that is literal in that sense is entirely
fine. But in that case, it's going to be marked up with
the apparatus, it's going to have footnotes, it's going to give the
lexical scope of terms, it's going to give alternative readings.
That is a different beast.
That is for study.
It is not for reading, it's not for liturgical use, it's not
for reading aloud, certainly, because you can't even read that sort of
thing aloud.
What we are talking about in this episode is a version of
the scriptures, is an English translation that is readable to speakers of
the language we are using right now.
The language we are using for this episode.
We want it to be in our language.
And we want the same thing for every other people in their
own languages.
We want there to be a German version and a French version
and a Finnish version, a Russian version, a Japanese version, and we
want it to be in language that can be understood by the
actual speakers of those languages.
Instead of something that pretends to be faithful to the Faithful to
the underlying text, but utterly fails in the actual goal of being
comprehensible to the speakers of the target language.
This is the reason that right about two years ago when we
did the last listener feedback episode, the second one, we specifically commended
the CSB Bible.
I wouldn't use the CSB as a study bible, but as far
as readability and speakability, it's outstanding.
It's a great Bible to read to your family, to read to
your kids, because it's easy to understand, it flows easily, you're not
going to stumble over words.
And it's pretty good.
I've heard rumors that the CSB team may actually be working on
a Septuagint for.
Translation 2.
I hope that's true, because it will be similarly readable.
It's not gonna meet any of these rules that we have here,
but until we have the right, best good version, good enough is
what we're gonna have.
So I hope to see more good enough Bibles that we can
choose from.
And we'll talk at the end about that proliferation because ultimately that
shouldn't exist either.
So until we get to that endpoint, good enough is the best
we can hope for, and that's fine.
Eventually we have solved all these problems.
We need something to tide ourselves over.
Another thing that the translation committee is going to have to keep
in mind is that chapters and verses are completely fake.
is not a call for removing them entirely, they're valuable.
Printing the Bible is a separate question from translating it.
I think it should be printed both ways.
Obviously, we made that case previously.
In fact, in the listener feedback episode.
The reason this is so important to remember that chapters and verses
are fake when you're talking about translation is that if you think
of the translator's job as just translating one verse at a time
He's going to break the text badly.
When you look in the New Testament in particular, and when you
look at Paul in particular, the man went on for pages and
pages and pages with his argument, and it's glorious.
He will go four chapters making the same point because he didn't
know there were any chapters.
Paul had no concept of chapters.
Paul was making one point in one epistle.
And so when you read it, that comes through much more clearly
when you get rid of all that peripheral garbage, that visual pollution
that so many of our Bibles have.
That's why we also commended readers' Bibles.
When a translator
gets tunnel vision on one verse and tries to make a translation
decision about a word in the context of that verse and that
word at that time, he's missing half the point because he's looking
at an author and he's looking at a book.
That's what matters.
So if at the beginning of chapter one, Paul begins making an
argument about a certain idea, a certain concept, and he uses a
particular word, and then he repeats that word in peripheral and related
words three, four chapters later, still making the same argument.
One of the pernicious impulses in the English speaker, and I'm victim
of this as much as anyone, and more than most, is pursuing
novelty. I already use that word, I don't want to use it
again. I don't want to sound repetitive or redundant.
Scripture has no such problem.
God has no such problem.
He will repeat the same phrase several times, verse after verse.
That repetition must be preserved in the text as it was in
the original.
We don't vary it just to make it sound better for our
English ears.
Because this isn't a question of readability.
This is a question of just itching ears.
That's cultural itching ears.
That's not a moral failing, but it is idiotic.
Just leave the text alone.
If Paul is making an argument in chapter one using a certain
word, and he uses that word thirty eight times over the next
four verse the next four chapters, translate the word the same every
time. It's gonna be repetitive.
Guess what?
God repeated that word for a reason.
Leave it alone.
This is particularly a warning to English translators.
It's less of a problem in some other languages.
I've spent a couple of years reading Russian and some other Eastern
European authors a long time ago, and that's one of the things
that smacked me in the face.
They are very repetitive to the point of being lyrical about it.
And so I quickly realized like this is weird and alien.
And I grew to appreciate this is a very different approach to
communicating and it's cultural.
It's baked into those races in a way that is lost in
us. It doesn't mean we can't understand it.
So when we're looking in English at a two thousand year old
book that repeated a bunch of words we repeat 'em exactly the
same way every time.
This is the sort of harmonization that within a text is entirely
necessary. Which is the last point that I want to make about
translation rules.
There must be zero harmonization of the Old Testament to the New
Testament. As we gave some examples in the last couple weeks where
the New Testament and the Old Testament don't match, and the Septuagint
is not being quoted in the New Testament, we leave it alone.
If for whatever reason the Holy Ghost quoted a Hebrew foreloga in
the New Testament, that is what it says in the New Testament.
When that quotation is coming from the Old Testament and the Septuagint
says something different, we leave it alone.
That is one of the places where you do want a footnote.
A footnote that says this Old Testament verse is repeated in this
New Testament verse with different wording.
That is a fine, that is a good, that is a glorious
thing. That is no cause for concern any more than the synoptic
gospels are any cause for concern.
We don't bother footnoting all the places where the same story is
repeated in slightly different ways with different wording.
It's what God does, it's fine.
He repeats himself.
So the very harmonization that we do want to see internal to
books and certainly chapters and you know pieces.
When we're looking between the Old and New Testament, and there are
going to be differences in a textual basis, leave it alone.
Now, on the other hand, the question of wording the New Testament
Greek in harmony with what is in the Old Testament, I think
that should be done.
We talked about that a little bit in the last couple episodes.
There are a bunch of cases where the New Testament is quoting
the Old Testament, and either for the sake of obscuring the fact
that the translators were relying on the Septuagint without admitting it, or
just because they were translating into English, and so they were feeding
the itching ears that wanted variety, they deliberately avoided using the same
phrasing in the New Testament as the Old Testament.
Personally, I think as a translation rule, the If the New Testament
phrases a quote in one way, and the Old Testament is what
is being quoted, and the Greek is essentially the same, I think
that those should be quoted as much as possible verbatim.
Now when things are reworded because of you know singular versus plural
or e versus i, that sort of thing, obviously you leave it
alone. That is inspired, we don't mess with it.
But all the words that have not changed, they've just been rearranged
or whatever, but it's reads basically the same.
When you read a quote of the New Testament, you should recognize
it without the footnote.
You should say, hey, I just saw that in Isaiah.
I'm reading this long section, I see a bunch of Isaiah quotes
here, because they're going to read the same.
Because if the underlying Greek text is the same, the English translation
should be identical.
That's not harmonization.
That's just not messing with something for the sake of novelty.
So now I'm gonna briefly run through what this workflow would actually
look like.
Because we've been given a bunch of rules and describing some of
these moving parts.
Let me describe what it would look like in motion to give
you a sense of what we mean.
Translators and the inner team are going to be requesting sources from
the librarians.
Those librarians' tasks is to sanitize those sources, add them to the
work in progress apparatus, consult legal and say, hey, we're pulling in
the source from this external group.
Go talk to them, see if we can secure rights to publish
independently later on.
You don't need permission to use it as a reference, but you
don't need a permission to cite it.
But you do need legal clearance to produce the apparatus that ideally
would come out at the end of this.
The translators as they go.
I think ideally you would want three men working on any particular
passage, not in parallel identically, but I think it would make sense
to have a three man rule for whatever is translated piece by
piece, you know, verse by verse, but you know section where it's
it's coherent.
Three guys should sign off on it and all be in harmony
that yeah, this is we think this is good enough.
And obviously the all twelve translators or how many ever they're gonna
be can could solve with each other freely, but I think you
would always for any particular passage wanna have a three-man rule for
w anything that's passed out to the librarians.
Once the translators have finished a piece, they pass it out, they
give it to the librarians.
The librarians can look at it.
They're not really editors.
They're not really reviewers, but obviously their opinions matter.
The advisory board would review whatever is produced, and between the advisory
board and whatever concerns the librarians may have, if there are any
reason why say there was some theological issue that maybe these less
theologically knowledgeable translators might have introduced through a word choice, any concerns,
questions or whatever would be passed back through the librarians to the
translators for reevaluation or clarification or whatever.
Crucially, the advisory committee is not permitted to speak to the translation
committee directly.
The librarians, the research middle ground, the firewall, those are the only
ones who can ever talk to the translation committee because their paramount
job is to make sure nothing of the rabbinic influence ever gets
inside the clean room.
And that would include
pointed questions coming outside.
So collectively, that group, the the librarians and the advisory team are
gonna have to fight it out amongst themselves.
Is this the rabbinic corruption creeping back in?
Are we making a mistake here?
Have they done the right thing and we're just coming from the
wrong place?
Or is there genuinely a theological problem that we can also see
the Greek supports what we're saying?
So do you guys agree that this would work better because this
actually makes a problem theologically?
Once all that is done, basically that could then go on to
being typeset.
Yeah, obviously it wouldn't all happen at once, but you could do
this incrementally as you go along, get things ready to go, so
you don't need to wait a ton of time after the whole
process finished before it's published.
The crucial part of this, I think one of the most important
things of this entire model is that the translation committee decisions are
final. No one outside of that hermetically sealed firewalled group has final
say for the precise reason that they are the least polluted by
the rabbis.
They are in the unique position to make decisions with the least
amount of influence.
Because remember, particularly since most of our audience, although by no means
all of it is Protestant.
One of the central conceits of the Reformation is sola scriptura, which
means, as we've said previously, by scripture alone.
Doesn't mean scripture alone, it means by scripture alone.
Which raises the question by what is the by scripture alone?
The judgment of sound doctrine is by scripture alone.
So if all we Protestants actually believe that's true, then we need
to trust the faithful Christian men inside a sealed room with the
Greek, don't need to have a bunch of guys arguing with them
about theology for them to make a sound translation decision.
Now, the theology, as we've said, is orthogonal, it's downstream, it's related,
but it's not central to translation, which is why this project really
should be ecumenical as well.
I would strictly prohibit all the guys at any portion of this
being all from the same denomination.
No way.
You need guys who fight tooth and nail over doctrine to be
in agreement before we can proceed.
Now, there are two ways that can go.
Either you can produce something watered down and toothless and neutered, or
you can produce something that is simply neutral, something that is faithful
to the text that no one can disagree with.
Yep. The Greek says this, the English is saying the same thing
as the Greek.
And then once I take this Bible, I'm gonna go in the
next room and I'm gonna make my own denominational arguments for it.
Fine. That's a separate fight from the translation fight.
This cannot be something that's dominated by only one denomination, which is
why I said earlier I'm happy that that new apostolic Bible has
Protestants, Orthodox, and Roman Catholics involved.
That's a good thing.
Because all those guys disagree about so many things.
If they can agree on what the Septuagint says, that's a good
sign. That's a good test.
That's a good Christian thing to do.
And then we fight about theology.
Let's all get the same Bible in front of us and then
argue over what it says.
That's fine.
That's a good thing.
But the translation committee is not the one making those choices.
Which is why every decision along the way is exclusively the translation
committee. That's why I said the advisory team, the librarians, those are
not the deciders.
Obviously the lawyers are not the deciders either, but they're really an
external form of the librarians.
They're really mainly there just to interact with external bodies for the
securing of rights.
Those legal clearances obviously need to be piled up and ideally they'd
be able to secure legal clearances for everything that would be in
the produced apparatus.
'Cause again, ultimately all that we want to publish here is a
an English translation of the Greek Septuagint and every single source that
was used to produce it, which would include whatever from Göttingen or
Ralph's, whatever from the Patristic sources, whatever from the ancient Greek sources,
all of which may be copyright encumbered, especially if they're translations, but
hopefully, because those are mostly academic groups on their end, hopefully they
would concede without too much money having to change hands.
In some cases, because we're talking about publishing entirely copyright unencumbered, they
may want a big check.
I don't know.
But I think it's a vital part of this process that there
be transparency and that again, the apparatus would be tremendously valuable as
a study companion.
Like here's to help you understand as you're reading your English translation
of the Septuagint.
Here's something to help you understand how those words and phrases were
used in that time.
I would love to have that.
Like we're talking about something that we wished existed.
Like this isn't just oh wouldn't it be nice?
I want this.
This is greedy.
This is a very selfish episode.
But I think it would benefit the whole world in every language,
because again, this model will work for everyone.
The last two aspects of all of this are
copyright, distribution, printing, and access.
Or fur back incorporate by reference everything that we said in the
early paywall and God episode and the episode on capitalist idolatry.
Very simply, nothing related to the Bible should ever be copyrighted in
a way that causes these problems we're talking about here.
The idea that I would need permission from someone else to reproduce
part of what they say the Bible says is unconscionable.
Now, that's not the argument the lawyers are going to be making
to their representatives we're trying to secure those rights, but we are
looking to set a new example here.
We laid out the case in detail in Paywall and God that
you simply don't do that when you're talking about God stuff.
Now both Corey and I think that copyright should be abolished entirely,
but I think that's what Corey believes, but even for the sake
of argument, only if we limit it to what is theological, nevertheless,
anything theological should not be copyright and cumbered.
We're talking about God's stuff.
We're talking about God's word.
You don't have to pay me for that.
I shouldn't pay you for that.
That should be freely exchanged for the benefit of every soul on
the planet.
So we'll put a link in the show notes to one of
the Creative Commons examples of a copyright statement that we think would
be ideally suited to this sort of project.
Essentially, what it does it says that this product, this Bible in
this apparatus, would be entirely unencumbered by copyright beyond the requirement of
an attribution, meaning if you want to say
that
we wrote this and you're writing something other than what we've translated,
you don't get to do that.
Now weed obviously doesn't include me, but for the sake of the
project. Attribution simply means basically a checksum.
Here is the septuagent produced by this committee, this group at this
time, on this date.
This is a completed work.
You're free to do anything you want with it.
You can make your own derivative works, you can alter it, you
can modify it, you can add, remove, whatever.
Any additions, removals, whatever, you don't blame us for it.
You say that you got it from us and then you made
changes and then you put your own copyright statement on it.
And the last rule would simply be for copyright purposes, commercial use
is fine, but you cannot encumber any derivative works with a more
restrictive license.
And this is a case where although we're opposed to copyright, we
are advocating using the copyright funnel specifically in a very moral direction
to say we're gonna unlock this down.
We're not locking it down further.
We are freeing this, and we're saying that anyone is free to
use this for any reason or any purpose, any way they wish,
but they cannot make it less free than what we have given
them. That's the way it should work.
And commercial use is necessary, obviously, because we want these to be
printed. And the question of translation is entirely separate from the question
of printing.
Now personally, I think that as they're going, I think that the
group involved should be typesetting, have somebody doesn't need to be the
libraries and researchers.
Someone could be on the side once the stuff is finished, begin
typesetting and getting it ready, such that when the whole project is
finished, you can go straight to press.
Once it's been reviewed and everyone agrees, that's a finished Bible.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
It's not very complicated, it has not very involved.
Some of the rules seem pretty strict, but I think I hope
we made the case that it's simply a matter of hygiene.
They're things you have to keep out, because once they creep in,
if enough problems occur, if enough of these rules are broken, eventually
in three hundred years a church is going to have to do
this again, or a thousand years, or God forbid two thousand years.
When the airs come in, they never stay.
Leaven does what leaven does.
It's yeast.
All it does is feed and reproduce and burp and excrete.
That's the life cycle of yeast.
And it's used for beneficial purposes when you're making bread or beer
or whatever.
If that yeast gets somewhere it doesn't belong, it can kill you.
They can do very bad things.
So all of these measures are simply hygienic.
These measures are intended to solve this problem once and for all,
at least in the English language.
Obviously, in the future, in other languages, things have to be translated
again, but we shouldn't have to go through this rigor again.
Between the vetted Greek sources and the Greek apparatus that would be
produced, any other committee should have anything they would need to relatively
quickly do the same sort of clean room implementation in any other
language. There may well be other rules, other procedures, but we think
that these are not necessarily complete, but these are certainly necessary as
a baseline to ensure that this and future translations will not have
the problems that we have today.
To say that what would be produced by this would be the
definitive English translation for all time.
Because as mentioned in previous episodes, one of the things that is
an aspect of an inherent attribute of living languages is that they
change over time.
We all know this.
You can read even English sources from fifty years ago.
You can read a novel written sort of at this point, more
than that, seventy, eighty years ago, sort of one of the peaks
of science fiction literature, you can read that novel, and the English
will be different from the English you speak every day, the English
you use every day.
Because the language is living and it changes.
Now, it doesn't change that much day to day, year to year,
even decade to decade, but those small changes add up over time.
One of the things that happens, one of the mechanisms by which
this happens most frequently is that that lexical scope of a term,
it's an umbrella under which you have a number of sub-definitions, as
it were.
There are a number of different senses for the term, and at
one point in time one will predominate, and that will shift over
time for various reasons, and another will predominate.
And so it will be the case that A century from now,
or whenever this is published, two centuries from then, three centuries from
however long it happens to be, it varies by language.
As I said, German is a little more stable than English.
Some languages are more volatile.
It just depends.
You will need to have incremental updates, not in the sense of
yearly issuance or an annual edition, not that kind of sense, but
a hundred A hundred years after, a century after, you may need
to go back and review what it was that you had in
the previous version and make some minor changes in order to align
it, not with the underlying text, because hopefully you did that right
the first time, but rather with the usage of the language, the
target language, the one you are speaking and using.
Because those changes accumulate over time.
This is not to say that we should have a ton of
different versions of the Bible, because of course we don't want that.
We want there to be one definitive version in each language.
We want there to be an English Bible.
We want the English Bible.
But it is the English Bible for our time.
It is not the English Bible for those who will follow us
three hundred years in the future, assuming God permits things to continue
for that long, they will need to have made some changes, some
updates, because it will need to reflect the evolution of the English
language during the intervening years.
This is the sort of project that has to be undertaken by
a civilization that wants to remain Christian.
It's not that, again, we need to go back Go back and
change things because we were unfaithful to the text, hopefully we were
faithful to the text in the first instance, it is because of
that natural evolution.
That is something that has to be taken into account.
We even do this with all sorts of secular works.
We reissue older books updated in modern language.
I use the example of Chaucer just because it's such a great
example, at least for anyone who's read any of Chaucer.
If you haven't read any of anything in that form of English.
When you are finished listening to this episode, just go and read
one sentence from chust pick one at random and read the sentence.
You will recognize it seems like English, but it's so fundamentally different
from the English we are using today that it is basically incomprehensible.
Which is why modern English translations of Chouser exist, so that you
can read them and understand them, because you can't read his English
unless you have actually studied it.
The same thing will probably be true three or four hundred years
in the future.
They will not be able to read without some help or without
updating the English that we are using today.
Because natural languages are not static.
That is the difference between a dead language like Latin and a
living language like English or German.
The living language changes over time.
It is perhaps one of the advantages of a dead language.
It's something you can translate into and leave it alone because the
language is no longer going anywhere.
What it says today is what it will say five hundred years
from today.
But that isn't solving the problem.
Because the problem is having a Bible in a language that we
understand, that everyone can read, that the native speakers of any given
language, whatever language it happens to be, can read without difficulty and
understand well.
And so it has to be in the language of the day,
which is why those little updates will be necessary over time.
And there's also the simple fact, sort of as a tangent from
that, but very related to the core matter of the episode, those
who do that update in a hundred years or two hundred years
or three hundred years will be even more removed from any potential
rabbinic corruption.
Because they will have been using the actual scriptures based on the
Septuagint in those intervening years.
They will not have the same problems that we have to consider
today, because we've all been reading the rabbinic text.
We've all been immersed in the rabbinic text, because we read books
that use it, we've read authors who use it, we listen to
pastors and others who have used it.
We have it all around us.
If this is done correctly, then those who take up this task
in the future will not have the same problems that we do.
They will simply be addressing the reality of a living language and
making minor changes here and there in order to make it still
readable to those using that version of the language in that far
distant future.
It's a fundamentally different
problem. It's not even really a problem for them.
If we do things correctly here and now, which is one of
the reasons that we have to make sure that we get this
as right as we possibly can.
Because we are setting up the stage for future generations.
We can create problems for them, or we can solve the problems
that were passed to us from previous generations and not pass on
problems to future generations.
Perfection, of course, is a goal.
A difficult one to obtain, certainly, and perhaps an impossible one when
it comes to language because just the inherent nature of the beast.
But we can come as close as possible, as close as humanly
possible. And personally I believe, and I know that Woe does as
well, God will guide the translators if we are faithful.
There's no reason to believe that God does not continue to preserve
his word in that way.
He promises that he will preserve his word.
He can't possibly just mean the one language.
That's not how human beings work.
That's not what God wanted, because God wanted his word to go
out to the entire world.
Necessarily part of that is translating that word into other languages, and
we already know that God does this because he caused the Hebrew
forlaga to be translated into Greek.
He already gave his stamp of approval once.
Now it's not to say that if we simply replicate what was
done with the Septuagint that naturally the outcome sort of, you know,
in the same sense of a mechanical or a machine will produce
this outcome because it's a machine.
It's not that sense.
But God is going to continue to guide the church, and I
firmly believe that He will guide us in this project as long
as we are faithful.
Because God has promises attached to His Word and attached to His
church. And the only possible way to fulfill that is to make
it possible to have His Word in the various languages of the
various peoples who comprise that church.
And so each nation needs to have its own Bible.
What does Revelation say?
One of the things that's a refrain throughout Scripture is that God
wants people from every tribe, nation, tongue, which is to say language.
And so certainly it must naturally mean that his language, his Bible,
his word must be translated into those languages so that those people
can understand his word, so they can have his word and read
it in a language that is theirs.
Part of that is translating.
And so yes, I do believe that God will guide us in
this project.
I'm not saying that the final product of this is going to
necessarily be inspired again mechanically, because if you do the thing, then
out pops the other thing.
I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that we can rely on God, and in so far
as we are faithful, God is also faithful.
And even when we are not faithful, God is still faithful.
And so I believe that He will bless us in this undertaking.
But we need to do is make sure that we safeguard ourselves
against this contamination, against the problems, and that we produce the best
possible thing that we can, so that future generations do not have
to come back and do the work that we failed to do,
like we are doing with regard to the generations that came before
us
While Corey was giving his closing, I was looking up something that
I hoped would be in there and I found it.
Talking about the evolution of language and how it's necessary to update
things. James 2 3 in the King James reads And ye have
respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him,
Sit thou here in a good place, and say to the poor,
stand thou there or sit here under my footstool.
Today, if I said, Hey, that guy's wearing gay clothing in church,
it would mean something different than when the King James was translated.
Obviously, it doesn't mean the same thing today.
And while you might be thinking, oh, that just means happy and
they corrupted it, well, that's not even what it meant four hundred
years ago.
It was something about splendid or bright, gleaming.
And even in Webster 200 years ago, the notion of gay as
Mary was a secondary definition.
So language changes.
That's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that.
I agree with what Corey said about timing.
I think that I think on the century mark is the absolute
earliest. I think every two centuries is ideal.
I think pretty much every two centuries you want to be looking
at updating for these reasons.
Not going back to the original and redoing everything from scratch catch.
That's stupid.
If you get it right you don't have to do it again.
But as language drifts and evolves and frankly devolves, mean most what
happens to language is devolution.
As long as English is the lingua franca, it's going to continue
to go down the tubes because one goes invariably with the other.
That's why Greek went down the tubes and got replaced.
And then Latin got replaced.
It's the natural evolution of empires and the devolution of languages.
One of the other things that obviously is not going to be
solved as part of this project, but is one of the other
30 things that needs to be solved pretty much simultaneously to fix
the world is we need to have godly princes in charge of
things again.
And that includes being in charge of Bible translations.
The notion that there's a section of a bookstore that's full of
Bibles and they're all different is not just a giant stack of
the Bible is an abomination.
Charlemagne was right when he worked with Alquin to figure out what
the original Jerome Vulgate was, and then reproduce it and send it
out to all of his churches and declare by Fiat as King,
this is the Bible.
Use this from now on, use this for preaching, use this for
reproducing other Bibles.
King James I did the same thing 400 years ago.
This is the Bible, use this.
This is our Bible now.
This is the English Bible.
That was exactly the right thing to do.
And it needs to come from the top.
And it stuck so well that it wasn't until 1808 that there
was another English translation by the man I mentioned earlier, one of
the founding fathers who happened to translate the Septuagint.
It's amazing.
I'm still reeling that I found that this morning.
The godly prince needs to be the one calling and convening these
things, because a man is not simply a church matter, is a
matter of managing an entire nation.
And this is entirely alien to our sensibilities and to our values
and everything about our Judeo-Christian moray.
That's the problem.
It's another problem that needs to be solved.
But don't think that because we are saying, hey, we need a
new Bible translation.
And by the way, here are three more Bible translations coming out
before 2027.
And you should have this, that, and the other, and then you're
gonna have another.
In 20 years you'll have this really good one.
None of that implies that we think anything about any of this
is good.
By fixing this problem with this process, the intention is to solve
it for centuries.
That's what we're thinking about here.
We're thinking in terms of centuries.
Once this Bible is produced, if it is done correctly, and it
withstands scrutiny as having been translated faithfully by that committee, there should
be no more Bibles.
There should be no new Bibles produced whatsoever, and the others should
fall into disuse.
They should be removed from circulation because they no longer serve a
purpose. Once we have the Word of God fully intact.
Now we're presented with a case where remember the wicked Bible example
I've given previously.
Centuries ago it was a Bible.
They inadvertently through a printer error, said thou shalt commit adultery instead
of thou shalt not commit adultery.
That Bible is rare today because it was only one printing and
wasn't very big, and most of them were destroyed.
They were destroyed because they were perceived as blasphemous.
Even though that every word from the mouth of God except for
one, was a pretty important word.
That was enough for them to destroy them.
We should have no less devotion to the word of God today.
Now there's nothing we can do about it right now.
If I were to say destroy all the Bibles without the Word
of God, we would have no Bible left.
That would be an evil thing.
I don't think that secretly I would never say that.
It's the wrong point.
But once we solve this problem generationally, such that our descendants in
two centuries can be reading the same Bible as we are, which
is the way it should be, it's the way civilizations work.
Once that is the case, yeah, no other Bible should be in
use. The fiat of Charlemagne, the Fiat of King James, should be
the fiat of the next goggly Prince as well.
Here's the Bible, use it, nothing else is suitable.
This is normal in Christian lands.
It has always been normal.
We are the freaks and the weirdos who have fifteen Bibles in
our houses and two hundred on our iPads.
It's bizarre.
It's not good.
The fact that the status quo ante is messed up is not
an excuse to perpetuate it.
Fixing this problem of the translation is one of the very most
important things that the church or civilization will ever accomplish.
And until we get there, we're going to have a series of
imperfect half measures.
That's fine.
As long as every half measure is a half step towards the
right thing, it's an improvement.
That's a good thing.
If you're overweight or whatever, you don't magically get better by just
waking up one day and the problem is gone.
You have to work towards fixing it.
We have to work towards fixing this problem of not having had
the Greek scripture.
Once we fix it, it will have been fixed.
Past tense.
It will be done.
It will be finished.
Getting there is going to take decades.
As we've said at the beginning, this is not something Stonequir is
going to be involved in.
I'd like for someone to produce something and I could recommend.
I really hope that happens.
But we're not gonna be the guys that are involved because
there's no point, there's no need.
There are other men who are far better suited for this particular
task. God creates different men for different purposes.
I look forward to those men showing up to producing, to working,
to laboring, to funding this project in such a way that these
and uh whatever the rules
end up making sense to get it done right once so that
in two centuries, six generations from now, when your great great great
great grandchildren are reading the same Bible as you did, that's because
we got it right.
It is achievable, it is normal.
It has been normal throughout church history.
We broke something and we have to fix it.
Getting there is gonna take a while.
So I hope that this series has been beneficial for you.
We hope that it has planted some seeds that will bear fruit
in the future.
I hope to live to see the outcome of all of this
work. This episode is the end of the Septuagint series.
This is also the last episode that we're going to be doing
for about a month.
We're going to take an actual little vacation, 'cause although we've had
some apparent hiatuses as we've been going along with this, there was
no break.
We were continuously working and things just kept coming up.
Now that we've concluded this, I'm totally burned out.
We're going to take about four weeks off before we get back
to producing new stone choir episodes.
I'm having my surgery next week as we're recording, so give me
a time to recuperate and get back to the point that I
can really walk around, hopefully I can exercise finally, first time in
years. We'll probably be at returning within a day or two of
the fourth anniversary of the first episode of Stone Choir, which I
think is notable.
It's kind of novel and monumental in a small way because we
never thought it would last this long.
We didn't know anyone would listen.
So when we come back, I don't know what the world's gonna
look like.
The week that we're recording this, a lot of really terrible things
have been happening Seems like every time I look at the internet,
something worse has happened.
There's nothing to say about those things beyond they were prophesied.
We've always been told that things would be bad and would get
worse near the end.
What we do in the coming season of Stone Choir we have
yet to determine, but when we come back we will see what
the world gives us.
There's plenty more to say, but this work on the Septuagint Along
with some of the other series that we've done previously, that gave
all of you the equipment and the grounding so that as you
see these events unfolding in real time, you were not caught flat
footed. You understood what you saw with your own eyes because we
told you years ahead of time.
Here's what that's gonna look like.
Here's why it's gonna happen.
There's nothing prophetic about that.
It was obvious.
They're just putting two and two together.
So please don't infer any claim of prophecy or anything.
We know nothing beyond what we see on the internet and read
in the Bible.
But being able to figure that out is something that we're happy
to be able to share with people.
We hope to continue to do that in the years to
come.