HCSB - Bible Translation

Navigating the Horizons in Bible Translations

E. Ray Clendenen, David K. Stabnow

• Publisher: Holman Reference
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781433614767
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

In Genesis 3: 1 the serpent asked the woman, "Did God really say, 'You can't eat from any tree in the garden'?"What has God really said?Before we can obey Him, we must know what He has said.The Psalmist prayed twice in his affliction, "Give me life through Your word" (Ps 119: 25, 107).When Jesus was afflicted by the Devil in the wilderness (Mt 4: 1-11), He defended Himself with the sword of the Spirit (Eph 6: 17) - God's Word.But Christians must know what God has said if we are to find strength and healing from affliction and defense against the Devil.Bible translation is not a casual enterprise because it involves bringing the life-saving Word of God to people in their own language.And selecting a Bible translation is not on the order of picking out a sweater.It's more like picking a doctor - someone you can trust.This book is about how Bible translation is done.And it commends a particular translation - the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) - as a trustworthy guide to what God has really said.

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Text-Critical Philosophy and Practice

This chapter is for those Bible readers who are excited by such terms as “variants,” “manuscript discrepancies,” “majority text,” and “Alexandrian text-type.” It is also for readers of the HCSB who want to understand such translation notes as “Other mss add for us” in 1 Co 5:7 or “Some Hb mss, LXX, Syr, Vg read watch over” in Ezk 34:16. In other words, it provides an introduction to textual criticism and how the HCSB handles it.

The Nature of Textual Criticism

The discipline or process of textual criticism1 is necessary anytime a “critical edition” of a text is to be produced from multiple copies in the absence of an original. For example, we have no original manuscripts from ancient Greece and Rome. Our knowledge of the history and literature of the classical period is based on critical editions of such works as Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Aristotle, Strabo, Xenophon, Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch. Copies of their original works were made by hand, and then copies of those copies were made, and so forth, until finally scholars began to collect the copies, compare them, apply the principles of textual criticism, and produce critical editions. Our critical editions of Thucydides’ (d. 400 BC) Greek history depend on eight manuscripts dating as early as about AD 900. We have 35 surviving books (of an original 142) of Livy’s (d. AD 17) Roman history based on about 20 manuscripts, only one of which is as old as the fourth century.2 Even our editions of the plays of Shakespeare (d. 1616), who wrote over 100 years after the invention of the printing press, lack the aid of any original manuscripts and contain hundreds of variants among the existing printed copies, thus calling for the aid of textual criticism.

Even before copies of a work may be compared, individual manuscripts must be examined for genuineness and place of origin. One of the most famous examples of this was during the Renaissance when the document known as the Donation of Constantine was examined, by which the Roman Catholic Church claimed that Emperor Constantine had bestowed vast territory and power on Pope Sylvester I (reigned 314–335) and his successors. In 1440 the Italian humanist scholar Lorenzo Valla proved the document to be a late forgery, based on the lateness of the document’s Latin. His work seriously damaged the prestige of the papacy, and it helped fuel the revolt against Rome and the Protestant Reformation.

Next, the copies of a work are compared, differences are examined, and manuscripts are grouped into “families” based on the common occurrence of many of the same “variants.” A variant is a particular instance of a difference between manuscripts. For example, the many copies of a work may exhibit more than one spelling of a word in a certain place. Each of the spellings is called a variant. Such variants may involve different tenses of a verb, a completely different word used in a certain place, or the presence of a word (or more than a word) that is absent from other manuscripts, or vice versa. Sometimes there is a combination of these. Some manuscripts may not have a word in a certain place, other manuscripts may have one word there, while still other manuscripts have another word.

How did ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: The Birth of a Translation
• English Bible Versions
• What Bible Translators Do
• English Style
• Inclusive Language in Bible Translation
• Issues in Pentateuch and Narrative
• Issues in Poetic and Prophetic Books
• Issues in the New Testament
• Text-Critical Philosophy and Practice
• How Language Works
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Inclusiveness Comparison