BBB wins Baloney Buster award

BBB visitor and missionary Bible translator, Lingamish, has just awarded this blog his Baloney Buster of the Week award. We gratefully accept, yea, verily, we even tolerate, No Baloney! Seriously, this blog could not have earned the Baloney Buster award without the work of each of its contributors and the interactions with its good reading audience. Thank you to each of you!

In his award-winning, I mean, award-giving, post, Lingamish says:

This week's award for Baloney Buster goes to Wayne Leman and the crew at Better Bibles Blog for their work on promoting rational discussion of Bible translation. Few people have Wayne's ability to explain this topic in ways that the average person can understand and find engaging. Wayne presides over a blog blessed with some very talented contributors and all of them share a genuine desire to interact with people of differing viewpoints while still vigorously defending their beliefs.

Suzanne McCarthy's series on "rightly dividing" the word ORTHOTOMEO is a fascinating series of close to a dozen posts about a word that occurs only once in the New Testament.

For a sample of the kind of heated debate that only occurs among theologians and linguists check out Wayne and Michael Marlowe sparring over colloquialism in translation in the comments on the post "Is singular 'they' a colloquialism?"

Whether you are an academic or a layman you will always be treated with respect at Better Bibles. So don't let all the PhDs intimidate you: ask away!

As a Baloney Buster, Wayne is entitled to display the Baloney Badge on his blog. Congrats Wayne and BBB team!

Thanks, Lingamish. For the record, I think there is only one Ph.D among us contributors. It's Rich, our newest contributor, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. We all try, however, to post in a way that is as academically honest and grounded as we can be. We want to challenge each other and our readers to contribute to the cause of making better Bibles in English, and, of course, for the thousands of languages remaining which do not yet have any translation of the Bible.

Happy Birthday! I'll also take this opportunity to mention that this blog has been active now for one year. We began the Better Bibles Blog in April 2005. A year is a long time for a blog. I truly am grateful for each one who has helped this blog keep going. There is no end of good ideas we can blog about. My hope and prayer is that our efforts can make some difference in helping there be better Bibles, Bibles which are both exegetically accurate and which honor the natural linguistic patterns of the biblical languages as well as English. Such better Bibles are the ones which will communicate God's Written Word best to English speakers today.