I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which major contemporary translation is not shown on this chart…

* * * * *

This week’s passage was 1 Peter 4.1-6, but I just want to focus on the first two verses, especially 4.1b. First in the NIV, then the TNIV that I was reading along with, followed by the NLT and HCSB, which I also use quite frequently:

1 Peter 4:1-2

At first glance, it seems evident that to avoid the NIV’s masculine “he/his” in 4:1b, the TNIV editors simply updated the text with “those/their” and changed the verb accordingly. This is all well and good, unless your pastor chooses to dwell on the “he/his” as a typographical example of Christ. That is, because we have the example of Christ, who suffered in his physical body in order to conquer sin, we should not shy away from suffering for the will of God, but bear it along in our hope and faith of his salvation. Christ is the one who is done with sin, not us — we can only be done with sin through Christ, not of our own physical suffering.

Note that the HCSB even more explicitly takes the approach that my pastor did – by marking off the phrase in question with parenthetical dashes and capitalizing “One”, it is made clear that they consider this passage to be solely referring to Christ and not ourselves.

So what happens when you read this in the TNIV? The passage become more inclusive – not only from a gender perspective, but also placing our suffering alongside that of Christ. He suffered and we suffer. He finished with sin, we (will) finish with sin. Our suffering is shared in his suffering (cf. 4.13).

The NLT adds an explicit “for Christ” to this passage–effectively denying the HCSB’s interpretation and placing the emphasis back on the reader, though the NLT Study Bible *does* admit the possibility of the Christ-focused interpretation in the study notes.

Note the change in voice in the NLT as well, as v.4:1b-2 pick up the second person “you” and modify the text accordingly. It seems to me that, if a Christ-centric interpretation was preferred, the TNIV could have hewed somewhere between the NIV and NLT:

Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin. As a result, you need not live the rest of your earthly lives for evil human desires, but rather for the will of God.

In this manner, it is clear what is “you” and what is “he”. Whether it is correct or not, I couldn’t say.

Of the texts considered, I happen to think that the HCSB is the clearest text here from a plain reading approach. However, the question in my mind begins to coalesce around the point of whether the NIV and more specifically the HCSB have chosen their wording in order to avoid a whiff of suggestion that it is the effect of our physical work and/or an aesthetic of suffering that is victory over sin.

To be more blunt, is this a Protestant interpretation that seeks to keep the source of salvation centered on Christ rather than on our own effort? And is this interpretation accurate for these few verses?

Note:

* * * * *

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that my church is standardized on the NIV for its pastoral and pew Bible translation. As a conservative evangelical Baptist church, this shouldn’t raise any eyebrows, except perhaps for the fact that we don’t use the ESV. However, I’ve never used the NIV myself, preferring the NASB in my youth and an eclectic mix of translations for the past few years. Instead, I usually bring a TNIV or HCSB to church with me – I’ve found that more often than not those two translations are close enough to the NIV that “readalong distractions” are minimal.

There were a few discrepancies today (April 26), however, that held my attention a little longer – mostly because they were directly related to the point that the pastor was making. So I wanted to take a closer look – first at the NIV “original”, then at the TNIV that I was reading along with, plus the HCSB for comparison sake.

For the past six months or so, we’ve been studying 1 Peter, verse by verse – today was 1 Peter 3:17-22, plus a few verses out of Romans.

1 Peter 3:18

Is the preliminary point that Christ died or that Christ suffered? And where did the universalism go in the TNIV?

Romans 1:17

This verse is consistent with the criticism that N.T. Wright levels against the NIV – that the “righteousness” is positioned as something given to us, rather than something inherent to Him, as in the TNIV and HCSB.

Romans 3:25

The TNIV reads the clearest (to me) here, but I do like how the HCSB retains “righteousness” instead of switching to “justice” and manages to include a “passover” reference in this passage. My issue with the NIV and HCSB is that it is unclear who is placing faith in Christ’s blood – us or God.

I told my friend about my “favorite four” post above. He said, “That sounds good but which one would you choose if you could have just one; you know, the deserted island thing?” I hate the deserted island question. It’s not based in reality but I played along and said “It depends.” “Depends on what?”, he queried. “Are there any other people stranded on the island with me or am I alone?” “What does that matter?”, he said with a puzzled look. So I explained… “If I was alone, I’d pick the HCSB. If I was with someone else, I’d pick the ESV because it would get read out loud.” “No other reasons?”, he asked. I said, “Sure, but that pretty well sums it up. They’re both good for multipurpose use.” He shook his head, then shrugged his shoulders and said “Hmmmm” So I added, “And since I live in a world with other people around me, where the bible is read out loud, I tend to use the ESV most.” to which he replied “I’m ok with that I guess.” We smiled and we left it at that.

It’s a brilliant conclusion and one worth remembering for those of us who live with stacks of different Bible translations by our computers. Like it or not, the vast majority of us live in community with other people and I’m not meaning the blogosphere. For me, it happens to be a “NIV community”, though I prefer the TNIV or HCSB as similar translations. My “desert island” translation is the NEB or REB, but it’s hard to find common ground with other people when using an idiosyncratic text that I may not even understand completely.

I have concerns about the long-term viability of both the TNIV and HCSB, as most recently illustrated here, so I am still faced with a dilemna of choice, assuming that I do not adopt the NIV as my primary text. It seems that, from a marketing perspective in the early 21st century, the mainstream evangelical translations will be the ESV, NIV and NLT – so which community do you identify with?

NLT’07 for everyday reading and study; HCSB or TNIV for my “church” Bible (we are a NIV church and I’ve found those two translations work really well for reading along with the NIV). And (too) many others for comparison’s sake.

The point of this post is not that answer. However, to get to the point, I will need to retread some related background. Long-time readers of this blog will remember that I used the NASB almost exclusively for 20 years and long subscribed to the “literal is best” mindset. After a little experimentation, I kicked off this blog with the purpose of finding a current translation that satisfied my sensibilities for modern English and that could be used in a variety of settings, including devotional reading, personal studies and at church. The four translations that I considered alongside the NASB — the NLTse, TNIV, HCSB and REB — have all rotated through my hands at various points since then (and still do).

Looking back at my time with the NASB, it was a very simple experience – the Bible was the Bible and my “quiet still waters” were not muddied by translation debates. I find myself longing for that type of experience again and am continually challenging myself on whether comparing and interacting with different translations is a selfish “wisdom of this world” desire.

If I were convicted about the appropriateness of functional translation before my blogging “sabbatical”, I am even more so now — convinced that to enter into a living, breathing dialog with God’s Word, the Bible needs to be not just read, but lived in language that allows the narratives of our day-to-day lives to enter and mingle with the details of God’s story. Everyday stories aren’t told in the stilted language of scribes or theologians, but of fishermen, carpenters, tentmakers, shepherds, web designers, youth leaders, parents and children. There will always be trained theologians like Paul who write with difficult words for a specialized audience, but, for me, to be in a lover’s relationship with the gospel means I must enjoy and reflect everyday intimacy with the Word, not the lechery of enjoying the text for the purpose of my own enjoyment.

For some, this intimacy comes from understanding and exploring the Greek and Hebrew texts; for others, what they believe to be a literal representation of those texts in English. As for me, I am finding intimacy in contentment, in knowing that even though the translation I use (whatever it may be) may not convey every shade of possible meaning of an original text, the meaning that is there is sufficient to kindle an everlasting flame and keep it well oiled.

In a similar discussion about the BBB’s question, blogger Tim McCormick pondered whether it is good to use different Bibles, then commented that:

Sometimes the key might just be accepting a translation, knowing its positive and negative features, and just sticking with it. I think I just lose out in building a relationship with the Sacred Text when I am always switching translations.

After so much time spent pondering and comparing translations, I am coming to agree with Tim. This concept of consistent relational reading has been in the forefront of my thoughts lately as I’m reading Eugene Peterson’s book Eat This Word. We get very insulated when we sit surrounded by multiple translations and compare this phrase or contrast that verse. It’s much like saying “what can I get from the Bible today?”, when the real question is “what can I give from the Bible today?” In Eat This Word, Peterson writes:

We do not read the Bible in order to find out how to get God into our lives, get him to participate in our lives. That’s getting it backward.

And then later:

If I am not participating in the reality — the God reality, the creation/salvation/holiness reality — revealed in the Bible, [....] I am probably not going to be much interested in reading about it – at least not for long.

That is, our interest in reading the Bible is driven by our active participation in the reality of the Bible, in God’s Kingdom. When we cease to participate in God’s work, we cease to be interested in understanding God’s Word. It becomes a circle, with our participation leading to greater understanding of God’s word, which informs our participation.

I pursue the way of Your commands, for You broaden my understanding. (Psalm 119:32, HCSB)

In this way, faith leads to work leads to wisdom and back again. As such, I wonder if the actual question might be:

What are you doing in the Kingdom of God that is driving your choice of Bible translations?

These are some initial thoughts and impressions on physically using the Kindle:

• The vertical line cursor and wheel button are quite intuitive. The shiny reflective cursor is very visible unless viewed obliquely.
• The keypad is where it needs to be, but feels awkward if I try to use it with one hand. The functionality is much better with two hands holding the Kindle, but that means I have to take it out of its protective case.
• Speaking of the case, the factory included one is almost impossible to use for reading as you have to keep one hand gripping both the case and the Kindle to keep the latter from falling out. Eventually I’ll spring for a third-party upgrade.
• Love having the Back button for browser-like navigation (not page navigation) – would really like to see a Forward button too.
• Popular books are generally $9.99 or less, though academic titles are considerably more, e.g. Witherington’s “The Problem with Evangelical Theology” is $19.22. Even so, $10 feels expensive for a few hundred Kb of data; even worse, a pulp paperback like some of the new Star Wars stuff is $7.99 paperback/$6.39 Kindle. I’ve gotten really used to buying used books from Amazon et al. for pennies on the original dollar – paying the premium price makes me think twice.
• Through the experimental “Basic Web” feature, I can enter my blog’s URL and access current content and links, including comments. I can even post comments!

Of course, the real value is in interacting with content. As I mentioned above, I’ve downloaded several samples, including HCSB, NLT, TNIV, NASB, KJV and NET translations of the Bible. I think it’s important not to make the Kindle be something that it’s not – i.e. dedicated electronic Bible software. The Kindle is first and foremost for reading. For example, the Search feature allows you to look up words in the text, but searching for “Genesis 17″ will give you results in the Table of Contents index, not the actual chapter in the book.

The following are some brief impressions of the translations that I’ve looked at so far:

• NASB (Lockman) — If you want a paragraph-formatted NASB, this is the one! Great TOC aligned to the right with the selection cursor/wheel. A right-aligned TOC is a great way to see if the publisher is “in tune” with the way the Kindle works. Like most of the editions considered here, you have to know where you are in your reading, as the Bible book and chapter are not provided in the header info.
• HCSB (Holman) — TOC is right aligned, with multiple book options on each line. This allows more TOC content to be shown on each Kindle “page”, but also means you have to drill down an extra layer in picking the chapter and verse to read. The HCSB sample unfortunately does not include any actual scripture content, just the TOC details.
• NLT (Tyndale) — The TOC is left aligned, meaning that the entries are physically separated from the selection cursor, forcing me to more-or-less guesstimate which item I’m selecting. A nice feature of the NLT, however, is that I only have to make one selection in the TOC to get to the text – selecting a book takes me to Chapter 1, verse 1, with a mini TOC at the top for other chapters.
• TNIV (Zondervan) — The TOC is center aligned, which is a compromise of sorts, I guess, but doesn’t make much sense to me. The TNIV has single book entries (compare to the HCSB) and a lot of white space in the TOC, which means that you have page through several pages of content if you’re looking for something later in the book. And you have to select Book, Chapter *and* Verse before getting to the content itself – that’s three levels of menu selecting before being able to read.
• NET (Biblical Studies Press) — The TOC of the NET Bible is not premarked – that means that you either have to page forward from the beginning every time or make your own bookmark on the appropriate page.  Like the NLT, the TOC is left-aligned, which makes it very difficult to be confident on what you’re selecting.  Whereas they were maddening in a print edition, the NET’s use of “1:1″ for “chapter:verse” within the text body is very appreciated in this electronic edition as chapter numbers are not given in the header info (or in any other translation edition I looked at). None of the NET’s footnotes are included – this is a text only edition.
• KJV (Diana Mecum) — This edition of the KJV text features a center aligned TOC with the same type of selection system as the NLT (selecting a book takes you to 1:1, with a mini TOC at the top of the page). Verse-by-verse text formatting with the NET-style “1:1″ numbering ensures that you always know where you are. I am interested in this one because I wonder if the new electronic format will allow me to move beyond any internal hangups regarding the “old language” – the presentation is very readable.

All that said, I wonder if the Kindle would shine more with some of the daily reading Bibles, like the One Year Bible or the new 24/7 Chronological Bible from Tyndale. The latter doesn’t appear to be available for Kindle yet, so I’ve sent a note to Tyndale wondering when/if they plan to make an electronic version available. I’d also be interested in an electronic version of a daily devotional like Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest, which is also not available yet for Kindle.

As you may or may not know, I used the NASB almost exclusively for 20 years, until just 4-5 years ago. I also had a NEB from college, which led to the REB, but by and large I was toeing the “literal is best” line. Ironically the first crack in that position was the ESV – implicitly marketed as “a more readable NASB”, I used it for a year or so before continuing to search for “more readable”. I already had the REB in my hands, but spent a year or two comparing it to the TNIV, HCSB and NLT (which my wife uses regularly) before deciding to stick with what I knew.

Coming into this year then, I had resolved to keep using the REB as my primary translation, augmented with the HCSB and TNIV as secondary resources when appropriate. For example, my church uses the NIV as its pew and pulpit translation, so the TNIV comes with me on Sundays more often than not, though it is not my regular private translation. The HCSB more-or-less replaced the NASB and ESV as my preferred “formal” translation, though I still refer to the NASB regularly. For the most part, these are the three translations that I used in 2008, though certainly the blogging world’s spike in interest with the NLT led to increased use there as well.

I do also have to say that I’ve referenced the NEB more this year as well. Whether it’s just checking what has changed in the REB or reading the NEB for its own pleasure, I have definitely given the older translation more visibility in my personal reading and writing here on the blog.

It was at this point in my original draft of this post that I began to speculate on my similar 2009 translation usage: NEB/REB, HCSB, TNIV, etc. etc. However, for Christmas my wife gave me a new gadget “toy”: Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. I’ve been a hesitant technology adopter in the past, so this normally would be a stretch, but after playing with it for a few hours now, I can see this being very useful, especially on my bus commute to work. I normally have my backpack stuffed with 2-3 books and a Bible for reading, but this would/could replace all of that!

My dilemma is that the REB is not available electronically, so my primary time for reading – if given to the Kindle – would require a different translation choice. The TNIV probably makes the most sense, but I’ve been thinking about the KJV too – having it as a reading resource might finally push me over the edge and “open” it more regularly. In all likelihood, I’ll have multiple translations downloaded – now it’s just a matter of sorting through the reviews and trying to determine which Kindle edition of each translation is the one to get.

As for print Bibles in 2009, I will say that I’m going to make a better effort to use the NJPSV/Jewish Study Bible as a regular reference point for Old Testament studies. Perhaps the NLT or Lattimore as an additional New Testament translation reference. I did end up with a full edition of The Message and I plan to possibly look at The Voice as well, though I suspect those will not be primary translations.

In the meantime – any recommendations on Kindle editions?

• What Makes a Bible Translation Authoritative? My Top Five

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.

I’ve been reading the first few chapters of Fee and Strauss’ “How to Choose a Translation For All It’s Worth” with a nodding smile on my face, given the general endorsement of functional, idiomatic translation as their preferred approach to the Bible (and translation in general).

In addition to the standard Formal-to-Functional spectrum of translations, Fee and Strauss discuss the polarity of original meaning vs. contemporary relevance. Most Bibles place greater emphasis on original meaning as a means of conveying semantic accuracy, but all make accommodations for contemporary relevance, if only to convert ancient units of measure to modern equivalents, e.g. miles instead of the Greek stadia.

Some recent translations make even more accommodation to achieve contemporary relevance. The NLT is built on the premise of “the truth made clear” in an effort to communicate the message of the Bible clearly and naturally. Marketing language from Zondervan emphasizes the contemporary relevance of the TNIV:

[The TNIV has] the up-to-date language of today for readability. This rendition of Scripture provides a new choice for those who desire a contemporary [...] translation.

[...] a new translation that speaks the timeless truth of God’s Word in the language of today.

Yet, as readable as the NLT and TNIV are, they still keep the Bible’s time and culture at arms’ length, creating cultural foreignness as an essential means of retaining “accuracy”. The language may be “of today”, but the time and culture of the TNIV is not – it is of millenniums ago.

Should God’s Word be culturally isolated and passed on as a carefully preserved relic? Or should it be living and breathing and constantly reinventing itself to be relevant and applicable? Is the message in the words or in the meaning? If we translate to the meaning, shouldn’t we be translating within our own time and culture as receptors of the text? It is popular these days to laud the NLTse as an accurate functional translation (and it is), but I wonder why the more idiomatic First Edition still has so many devoted fans who refuse to “upgrade”. Is it because the language of the original, and the Living Bible before it, is closer to our own time and culture and speaks a “heart language” that the newer revision does not? Is the “heart language” of the Bible a theological treatise – or is it a vivid proclamation of the relationship between God and his people?

To this end, Eugene Peterson tried to “intentionally eliminate historical distance not only with reference to language but also with reference to time and culture.” (F&S, p.33) Fee and Strauss quote Matthew 23:27 from The Message:

You’re like manicured grave plots, grass clipped and the flowers bright, but six feet down it’s all rotting bones and worm-eaten flesh.

As you scramble for your preferred translation to see “what the text *really* says”, think about what you find. Chances are, there’s a reference to “whitewashed tombs”. Do you know what that means? I mean, RIGHT NOW, without thinking about it. This isn’t about theological nuance – it’s about your instinctive response to the English language. Personally, I know which one sounds foreign and which one sounds relevant…  and that’s why I say that the most significant – not the most formal, functional, accurate, readable, dynamic, literal, literary or idiomatic – the most significant version of the Bible available today is The Message.

And I don’t have a copy. For shame…