Global Food Crisis Day - 11 March 2009

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What exactly do I mean when I speak about a Bible Translation? Well the Bible as we know it was actually written many years ago by hand. It may surprise you to find out as well that it was not written in english but parts were written in Hebrew, parts in Aramaic and the new testament in Ancient or Biblical Greek.

The way that we have our english bible today involves a number of scholars getting together to translate the bible from it’s original languages to english (or spanish, or german, or any other language). This final product is known as a bible translation.

Types of Translation

In our discussion here, since this is an english blog, we will only be looking at english translations of the bible.

Sometimes just thinking about the number of english translations is overwhelming. Each bible translation team has used a slightly different method to translate their particular translation, and this is an extremely long and arduous task. As an example, if we look at the TNIV bible, it was translated over 10 years by 13 respected evangelical scholars. Or the NIV bible, which is a very popular translation, took 13 years to translate by the same committee.

Why is it so difficult?

When we think about the bible, we see that the writer is trying to communicate a message to us, the readers. Every message, or communication is encoded into a mechanism of transmitting that message to the person who is to decode that message. If you think about war time when on country wanted to communicate with their troops and they stood the chance of that message falling into the enemy’s hands, they will write the message in such a way that their enemy cannot understand what they are saying. The enemy would then need to employ code crackers who spent their days trying to break down the writing into something which has meaning.

This is the same with the original scriptures. They were written in a language which has a different form to the english language and this sometimes makes it difficult to understand. When you look at the sentences that I have formed here, you will be able to derive their meaning since you understand the english form. Although meaning is common through most languages, Form can be totally different for most languages. As an example, let’s look at the greeting “Good Morning”. If I say to you good morning, that generally means that I wish you to great you in the morning and wish you a good morning. In Hebrew however, the exact same greeting would be “boqer tov”, which literally means “morning good”. The meaning of this greeting is the same as in English, however the form of the sentence is totally different.

Another problem is that sometimes the same word , can express different meanings. An example is the word “mean”, you can say “That was no mean (insignificant) accomplishment” or “Those clouds mean (are a sign of) rain” and many other ways of using simply that one word. The diffuculty in Bible translation is that the translator has to transform the words from one language into another, without altering the meaning of the words in any way, and that is why we have so many different translations, because some translators have done a word for word translation trying to alter the form of the message as little as possible while still trying to keep the message understandable, while some translators have taken things into their own hands and tried to interpret the scriptures for you in their translations.

Next in this series

In the next post I will look at specific types of bible transalations, and we will see how the mean and form of a translation affects the ease of use of the bible.

Global Food Crisis Day - 11 March 2009

Orthotomeo.co.za Supports the Global Food Crisis day. All posts purchased on that day will be donated to Compassion International’s Global Food Initiative. Any subscriptions purchased on that day will result in the entire months subscription being donated as well. (Further months subscription fees will be used for normal site running)

If you wish to make a tax deductible donation to this initiative then please click on the banner above and follow the site’s instructions.

I am JMR and my passion is not only to give you a good understanding of the Word of God, but to help you develop the skills to study passages of your own choosing.

So What does Orthotomeo mean?

Orthotomeo is a greek word meaning to cut straight and is used in the bible in 2 Timothy 2:15. Cutting straight, or rightly dividing as some tranlations have the phrase, gives the idea of correctly interpreting God’s Word. Many people don’t learn how to interpret God’s Word for themselves as they believe that this is the pastor’s job. What they don’t realise is that the pastor will look at the entire church and preach according to the corporate needs of the congregation. A good pastor will never focus a sermon on the needs of an individual as there will be no edification for the rest of the congregation.

So if you want to have your own needs ministered to from God’s Word, then you are going to need to learn to study and interpret God’s Word correctly. This is where Orthotomeo.co.za comes in. Our mission is to take you through the steps of studying God’s word, and help you build the skills necessary to do this without even thinking about it. You will start applying these principles during every session of reading your Bible, even during church, and then the Bereans ( Acts 17:11 ) will have nothing on you.

So what does Orthotomeo offer?

Well that is an excellent question and one to which the answer will unfold before your eyes

My plan is to offer some advice on choosing the right bible, what the difference is between various bible versions, bible study tools and aids, bible study methods and various examples of bible studies. I plan to provide a variety of content which will help you to understand what God is trying to say to you through His Word.

Some of the content will be open or free  (free requires signing up for a free account) but this site is taking a huge amount of resources to run, this includes mostly my time but also various physical costs such as hosting and domain registration also need to be paid. This means that some of the content will require purchasing. Please visit the costs page to find out how much you can expect to pay for various posts. I will also have specials where you can purchase an entire series of posts cheaper than purchasing individual posts.

I also have some plans to get qualified pastors to offer their words of wisdom to the site and there may be costs involved in getting outside articles.

Well without further ado, I will sign off this, the first post of Orthotomeo.co.za

I am JMR and this is Orthotomeo.co.za teaching you to rightly divide the Truth.