Translated and Re-Translated?

"The Bible's been translated and re-translated so many times, no one knows what it means."

I was in college the first time I heard those words. The accusations went on: "Modern Bibles just change the King James into modern English, and it was translated from Latin. No one knows what the Bible said when it was written."

It's hard to believe someone can fit so many inaccuracies into such a small space.

Every skeptic isn't necessarily as poorly informed as that person was, but it's still common to hear that we cannot trust the Bible because it's been "translated and re-translated". How do we respond to that?

It seems these folks think the Bible was written in Greek then translated into, say, Syriac which was used to make a Coptic translation that was used to make a Latin version that was translated into English. That's not how it worked.

I've now read several books on the topic of the history of the Bible now, but even when I first heard this in college, I knew it wasn't true. While I'd grown up in church, I had only recently started reading the Bible for myself. Being the nerd that I am, I had read a very under-read section of the Bible: the preface, which began:

"The New International Version is a completely new translation of the Holy Bible made by over a hundred scholars working directly from the best available Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts."

Every mainstream modern version* has similar verbiage about what texts their translation is based on.

Once upon a time Bibles were translated from the Latin because that was what they had available. Since then, thousands of copies of the New Testament in Greek have been discovered as well as the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Hebrew OT texts. We also are better able to translate those texts.

But in truth the Bible has been translated and re-translated many, many times. And that's a good thing. We don't just have Greek texts and research showing what those Greek words mean. We have translations into Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and many other languages made by people who spoke Koine Greek like a native. When they translated the Greek into Latin, they told us what they thought that Greek word meant. The rich tradition of translating the Bible into local tongues is a priceless gift to Bible translators and to the Church.

Don't let people snow you. Any mainstream Bible you can put your hands on is a good translation of (to a high degree of certainty) what the prophets and apostles wrote into our modern languages. We can trust the text we hold in our hands.

If you want to go into more detail on the subject, I recommend How We Got the Bible, which goes into the history of how we got the manuscripts used for modern translations, how we use them to reconstruct the original text, and how we translate them into modern tongues.


* Roman Catholic Bibles apparently still use Latin versions of some books of the Bible.

Image: P. Chester Beatty I, (𝔓45) folio 13–14, containing portion of the Gospel of Luke; public domain image