Which Bible?
All translation is interpretation. Unless you’re working with the original language, you are in some way at the mercy of other people doing at least some of the interpretation for you (for good or ill). The different kinds of versions reflect the differing degrees to which translators get involved in the interpretative process.
No translation does it all. Translations are designed to meet specific needs and marketed to specific groups of people. It is quite problematic to ask an NIV to perform the tasks the NASB has been designed to perform, and vice versa.
The Bible is a compilation of thousands of documents. Contrary to popular assumption, there is no single ancient document of the Bible out there that we translate into English. The New Testament alone uses over five thousand different documents in its effort to recover the original form of the New Testament. The branch of scholarship that deals with this is called Text Criticism. Text critical scholars work with a well-honed set of rules which they update all the time to decided which documents are reliable, or where does an ancient document likely deviate from the original. Most of these concerns are nothing more than words accidentally left out, or added, or switched, or misspelled, etc. None of them actually lend any question to the general tone or thought of the New Testament.
The kinds of versions
Verbal Translations
Verbal translations are those that attempt to recreate a word-for-word representation of the original texts. So they see the Greek word “sarx” and translate it as “flesh” or “meat.”
These translations tend to be a little more difficult to read because less attention is paid to whether it reads well in English and more is paid to getting corresponding English words for Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek words. Furthermore, Hebrew and Greek sentence structures are different than normal English sentence structures. Verbal translations only try to alter these when it would make no grammatical sense in English. What this means, though, is that verbal translations tend to have more complicated sentence structures. But the pay off is that you get to see in English something very close to the original.
The role of the verbal translation is to function as a study text. Students in biblical studies or ministry, etc., should use a verbal translation for their study. Primarily because less of the thinking has been done for you leaving more of the original text in tact allowing you to make your own judgments.
However, verbal translations are not really the best for public reading or casual reading. For such activities you’ll want to use a dynamic version.
Current verbal translations in order of preference: New American Standard Bible, American Standard (1901), New King James Version, King James Version.
Dynamic Translations
These are translations of the original language which attempt to represent the ideas of the text more than the words: idea-for idea, rather than word-for-word. An example of this is that dynamic translators of the NIV, for example, see the Greek word “sarx,” and where the verbal translators would translate it as “flesh,” the dynamic people translate it as “sinful nature.”
You can probably see what they’re getting at with such a translation, but most English readers would assume that lying beneath the English phrase “sinful nature” would be two Greek words for “sinful” and “nature.” Furthermore, “sinful nature” promotes a certain theological position that not everyone agrees with, but if they read it in the text, they’d potentially assume the legitimacy of that position.
So the idea for idea goal is great. But as suggested with the example of “sarx,” its main drawback is exposed by the question: whose ideas? The translators of a dynamic version have to decide what the ideas are before they render them into English. This means that the translators engage in interpretation a lot more than verbal translators do. And this is okay, so long as you know that that’s the case and you accommodate that fact in the way you choose to use a dynamic version as a resource.
The dynamic translations tend to be easier to read, most of them are aimed at the reading level of the average 10th grader in the USA. Again, this is a big plus for younger readers or readers who don’t read anything more complex than that on a regular basis. But with this benefit comes a toll. When you reduce the grammatical complexity of documents written by some of history’s more sophisticated thinkers (consider Genesis, Job, Matthew, Acts, Romans, etc.) you necessarily reduce your ability to represent their more complex ideas accurately.
All this should alert you to the fact that dynamic translations have a specific role to play and should only be used in that role. That is, they are not designed for studying closely (even if some of them are called “study” Bibles), but they are good for causal, general or public reading. By all means compare a verbal translation to a dynamic version for study purposes, but in the end, don’t ask the dynamic to carry the burden of being a resource for close study of the Bible.
It is important to note that the dynamic category is a very broad one. They start with translations like the NRSV and NET, which try to temper the idea-for-idea approach with some word-for-word moments. They end up with pure idea-for-idea versions, such as the New Living Translation, which is perhaps the very best purely dynamic version out there.
Some Bibles in this category are, in order going from least dynamic to most dynamic: New Revised Standard Version, The English Version, New English Translation, New International Version, Today’s New International Version, the New Living Translation, the Message.
Paraphrases
Paraphrases aren’t actually translations; they are “paraphrases” of the same language. Paraphrases are usually produced to meet very specific needs of minority groups or social categories outside the adult mainstream (children’s Bible for example).
Some paraphrases are: The Living Bible, The Children’s Living Bible, The Black Bible Chronicles, The Cotton Patch Bible, etc.
