Peter Lopez has written a “better late than never” response to my post on the authority of Bible translations:
After a good discussion with several links worth checking out, Peter comes to the conclusion that “the only Bible translation that is in the top five in terms of sales and also in the top three in terms of historical objective excellence is the KJV. I suppose this should come as no surprise, but it should confirm what most already suspect.” The NASB, NIV, NLT and NKJV round out his top five.
Peter used CBA sales to determine the “popularity authority” rankings and, ironically, subjectively leans toward scoring formal translations higher in the “objective excellence” category. I wonder if it would be better to establish some criteria for scoring translations against what they pruport to be, e.g. formal or median or functional. That is, a formal translation like the ESV or NASB could potentially get the same “objective excellence” score as a functional translation like the NLT if both were judged against relative criteria.
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If only we hadn’t been divided up at Babel, we wouldn’t have to be deciding these questions.