About those Literal Translations

I highly recommend reading this entire article by Ken Collins. It is only a few paragraphs long. Entertaining too. How often do we remember that priests are presbyters. Or are they? When does a cognate lose touch with its origins?

Then there are vocabulary problems. In the New Testament, the Temple has hierarchs and the church has presbyters. Most translate hierarch as priest, which is really incorrect, because priest is just an English contraction of the word presbyter. But if the translators put down priest for presbyter, it looks like they are discrediting churches that do not call their clergy priests. But if they put down presbyter, which is the untranslated Greek word, or elder, which is the word’s meaning, they discredit the churches that are so old that the word presbyter turned into priest as the language of their members changed. So there is no neutral, literal solution. The same is true of the Greek word episkopos, which means supervisor, but is the source of the English word bishop.

And then there is this,

All translation is interpretation, and none is strictly literal. When someone calls their translation of the New Testament a ‘literal’ translation, it means one of two things. It could mean that they are sacrificing an easy read for a responsibly accurate rendering. In that case, they are just using the word ‘literal’ in the naive sense. Or it could mean that they have a doctrinal ax to grind and are using the word ‘literal’ to make you think that the Greek made them do it. So in the latter case, the word ‘literal’ is synonymous with ‘tendentious.’

Well, I grew up with a few literal translations of the Bible. Darby, Young's, New American Standard. But the Good News Bible has been my companion since 1982! Why couldn't someone preach from that. So much logomachia! No chresimon, katastrophe for the hearers. Okay, either preach from the Greek or use real English.