Why most Christians have never read the Bible… (the translation echo chamber)

Because we live in the shadow of the reformers, so to speak, it’s easy to think that we are unencumbered by the academics, the scholars, the translations, and the traditions that arose during the medieval period.

However, I would argue that in the english language today, we’re actually starting to run this risk of living in an echo chamber where there’s so few people who are actually in the original sources that we’re talking, and I’m not talking about scholars necessarily, but certainly in the church broadly, we are in english text so much that we’re actually not breaking out of our own culture and our own echo chamber to actually ask the question of, well, what actually was going on in the history of the church.

Now, as language and culture changes, what we see is that words, turns of phrase, and even ideas become filled with different meanings as time goes on. And as a result of that, as time progresses, our understanding of those words changes and becomes filled with new meaning. And we don’t become aware that we’re actually sitting in this kind of echo chamber, if you like, where what we’re saying to one another isn’t necessarily what was originally said a few hundred years ago, never mind back in the early church.

And so we run the risk, I think, being so english oriented, of living in this echo chamber, where we were never challenged in our views, we’re never challenged by the original text of scripture as we could be if we were back in the original languages. Last week we looked at one, Thessalonians 510, and we saw there some of the difficulties with looking at this verse because of the way it brings, you know, tries to bring things into English.

We saw four different translations and four different ways of translating this verse. If you’re interested in that video, check the link up here to find out more about it and go watch that. You don’t have to watch that to follow this video. This video is really just trying to say, how would you work through a situation like that without knowing Greek, with the goal of saying that there is actually real benefit for each of us to go away and actually spend some time learning Greek.

Hi, I’m Darrell from biblical Mastery Academy, and I’m here to help you with the tools, habits and systems to master the Greek of the New Testament. If you are interested in learning biblical Greek, check out BMA to get started, to get a bit of a head start on what the process looks like. One of the things about the greco roman world, and particularly when it comes to the New Testament, is the New Testament, like the Old Testament before it was written in everyday language, the kind of language everybody could understand.

And today, when we translate the Bible into English, we’re trying to translate it into some semblance of everyday language. Although there are different translation goals, some translators try to get the exact, or at least as close as they can to the original Greek transferred into English. Others are actually trying to make the Bible understandable, and therefore they are going to make decisions that are going to make it easier to read rather than try and make it more exact.

So there’s all these different trade offs when it comes to Bible translation. But for us, who live 20 centuries later on, we’re faced with some really large gaps that translations are really never going to be fully able to bridge for you. So no, no matter how good the translation is, there’s always going to be gaps. And this is why we talk about reading and studying the Bible in the original languages, and not just reading it in the original languages.

For one thing, there is just a time gap, which means that we actually don’t even have the original text because they perish with time. So we end up with these copies. And that means then that we have to work through text criticism to understand the differences between all the copies we have. And don’t get me wrong, we’re spoiled for choice when it comes to the copies that we have available.

But this is still a gap that we need to understand and consider. Most obviously, there’s a language gap. And one of the things I’ve talked about in the past on this channel, I think, is that the way the greek language works and the way the english language works, or any other language for that matter, are just different. English, for instance, is a very time oriented language, and Greek works fundamentally different.

It’s aspectual in its orientation, not temporal in its orientation. So there’s a fundamental difference there, which means that when greek writers or speakers put something a certain way, there’s no exact equivalent way of putting that in English, which is one of the problems we saw in our last video when we looked at first Thessalonians 510. There’s just a different way of working between English and Greek, which means we can’t transfer that stuff into our modern english language, at least not without some level of approximation, which then leads to different translation choices.

Now, of course, there’s not only a language gap, but there’s also a massive cultural gap. We don’t understand how the greco roman world works unless we actually go and do a whole bunch of research to find out. And one of the things about working in the original language is. It does force us to actually understand the words that are given and then try and understand, well, what does this word actually mean?

Where does this word come from? How would a first century reader have actually understood this? Because when we read things in translation, sometimes the words are actually updated for us so that we can relate to it, rather than being left in their original kind of meaning. And so we end up, and even we have to be careful with glosses here as well. When we’re learning vocabulary is, we need to actually be willing to go back to what the original meaning of that word is so that we can see how it functions in its context and what that would have meant in a first century cultural context.

But, of course, you never get to see this in English because, of course, we just know all the english words because they’re designed so that we can easily understand them. And, of course, all of this goes to support the way the Greeks thought and processed the things that happened around them in the world. Which means to say then, that they actually had a whole different way of viewing the world to what we do today.

They had different expectations. They had different anticipations of family. Things like honor and kinship and patronage are things that are largely, well, very different, if not absent entirely in our modern culture, but yet were infused into and part of the ancient culture in which weve just lost, but also shaped the way the greco roman mind would actually function and work and expect things. So all of these are gaps that we have to deal with as 21st century readers.

And, of course, when we look at an english translation, the English language itself is shaped around our current worldview, which means that were largely blind to a lot of the cultural differences, even between us and them. And we assume that, you know, the Bible, the first century people were american or New Zealand or australian or just like me. And the reality is that there’s a big gap there, and we just miss that reading in a translation.

And all of this means that we aren’t actually reading the greek texts for ourselves. We’re actually depending on somebody else to actually bridge those gaps for us and then give us a translation that we can actually understand. And so for the vast majority of the church, we actually have never really read the actual Bible. We’ve read translations of the Bible. And that’s good. And that’s okay. We’ve got to be not trying to say that’s a bad thing.

It’s better than nothing. But it does go to show that we’re actually disintermediated from the original texts because of our translations. And as a result of that, we’re really second handers. We know our faith secondhand through the work of other people. Now, I don’t know about you, and it’s perfectly okay if you’re content with that, but my personal interest, my personal desire is to understand Christ, to understand the revelation that God has given to us as best I can, which means I need to go back and learn the languages.

And of course, that’s kind of what I did, and now that’s what I want for people like you as well. So that brings us to the problem of reading the Bible in translations and some of the challenges that we’re going to face as we do that. There are some who have argued that because we have so many different translations now, we really don’t need to know the original language, because all you need to do is read another translation, and of course that will give you a different view or another translation, and that will give you yet another view.

And between them all, you kind of end up with this understanding of what the Bible says. Now, to some extent, this is kind of true, right? But it also introduces problems. T. David Gordon, who has written a number of books, one of them why Johnny can’t preach. I’ll leave a link to this in the description below. He’s argued that because we actually read texts differently today to what the first century readers did, and because we read texts in English and we tend to speed read as well, and this is kind of amplified by the fact we have Bible in a year reading plans and all these kinds of things which are good, we want to do these things.

So I’m not saying these are bad, but the fact that we do these things and we tend to read quickly through our bibles is great for giving us a good sort of overview of the Bible, but it isn’t necessarily the same as reading carefully through the Bible. And so what tends to happen is it’s easy for us, according to T. David Gordon, to develop sort of a mnemonic, if you like, understanding where we can just sort of like hear words like, you know, for God so loved and we can fill in the blanks instantly because, well, we’ve read that text a whole bunch of different times and we can fill it in from memory.

But that’s different to actually reading carefully and deliberately through a text like that and really seeing the contours of the text, understanding it and enjoying the text, never mind actually drawing extra meaning out of the text as well. And one of the benefits of reading in the original languages is that it does slow you down and force you to read carefully, to think carefully about the selection the author has made of words and sounds and the way these words work together, and to hear different sounds and patterns.

Even as you hear the words read out loud, as you read them to yourself, or even as you sort of just view them in the text itself as well. This is one of the things he actually talks about. When you’re reading the original language in Greek and Hebrew, you’re forced to think through what you’re reading in a lot more detail, which means then you have a different appreciation of the word of God as a result of working in the original languages.

Now, even if we do learn to read carefully in English, we are going to start to see some of the issues, like what we saw with one, Thessalonians 510 in the last video I did, where we see four different translations of it. Now, the problem with seeing these different things when we do read carefully in our translation, and of course, there’s those of you who will say, well, it doesn’t really matter, and that’s fine, just this isn’t the video for you.

You’re welcome to move on. But if this, you know, if you do see these things and you are reading carefully and you are concerned about the detail there and you see these in an english translation and you don’t know Greek, you actually can’t resolve these problems when you find them, because there’s no way of understanding, without knowledge of the languages why the different translators translated it differently, and no way of understanding which one might be more accurate or better or how they impact one another.

And so what you’re left to do is to actually go look up some resources. But even that causes problems, because now you’re left with a question of, well, which resources do I go to? And of course, you’re going to go to a commentary because you’re smart, right? But there are three different types of commentaries, devotional commentaries, and we’ve talked about this before, and I’ll leave a link to the video discussing this up here.

The devotional commentaries are very brief, and they’re probably not going to deal with a detailed issue such as we see in first, thessalonians 510, like we talked about in that video. Now, an expositional commentary might deal with that, but they’re going to be working from the English, and that’s okay. If you don’t know Greek, this is probably the place to go, but they may not actually deal with the arguments behind why one translation chose this and another translation chose that.

So if you’re struggling with these things, you may actually not be satisfied with an expository commentary, because it may actually not give you enough reason or detail to be able to explain why it’s that way or why it should be this way or that way and what the implications are. So that means you’re left with exegetical commentaries. And, of course, the problem with exegetical commentaries is they’re working from the Greek.

They’re very technical, and they to require generally some form of knowledge of actual greek syntax and whatnot, to be able to make sense of what the author’s saying. And even then, that doesn’t mean, like, let’s just say you managed to get through an exegetical commentary, or even four, let’s say, and you find they’re all kind of saying the same thing, but maybe you find somebody else who has a slightly different view.

Well, how do you know which one is right? Well, the default is probably to go with the majority view, because that’s the safe bet. But in a case like first, Thessalonians 510, there is one like Leon Morris’s commentary on one Thessalonians kind of stands against the majority of commentators on this. And I actually think he’s got a strong argument. But again, without knowing Greek, you can’t evaluate those arguments.

So even if you are a careful reader in English, if you don’t know the languages, you’re going to find problems in the english translations that you just can’t resolve without knowledge of the language. Now, I think that this starts to paint a picture of some of the good reasons that we, as the church need to go back to the original sources ourselves. Now, I’m not saying everybody in the church needs to do this, but the point here is that the more we as a church are dependent on translations, the poorer we are for it, because we actually aren’t going back to those original sources.

Again, I’m not saying everybody should do this, but we live in a time today where there are unprecedented technologies and opportunities for us to learn more learning available within the church, and more time for leisure and entertainment than any other time in history before us. The original sources are there, the opportunity is there. And so let me ask you to consider learning the original languages. Now, if this video has struck a chord with you and you want some more detail around this, I’ve actually written this into a document which I hope to produce into a book at some point.

If you’re interested in getting a copy of it, it’s about ten pages. Go to BMA.to/greekbenefits and download a free copy today. Now, before I go, let me just ask you if you’ve got reasons that you think are compelling for learning to read Greek, leave a comment in the comment section below. I’d love to hear from you there. And if you got this far in the video, leave me a heart emoji down below.

And there are a couple of different heart emojis, so just pick one that you like. And I look forward to seeing your comments down below. But again, thanks for watching. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. We’ll see you there.

By Dr. Darryl Burling,
Founder of Biblical Mastery Academy