QUESTION:
Dr. Ehrman, most of your readers in the ancient languages that the Bible was written in, therefore must rely on translations. Clearly no one translation is conclusive, but for clarity of reading and reliable research, can you recommend some translations to us? Conversely, do you have any that readers should avoid, because of clear bias or a little too loose?
RESPONSE:
When I published Misquoting Jesus, I received a lot of emails from a lot of people asking a lot of questions. But the one question I got asked more than any other was this one (in various forms): which translation of the Bible do I recommend? I should have answered it in the book itself; it would have made my life oh so much easier.
There are lots and lots of good translations that are available today.
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JUN
Well, isn’t it all the word of god. does not this god have the power to contradict, forge, invent, create any word it wants to? Then it makes no difference which translation of the “word of god” you prefer, it is the games this god plays with its creation, making it all the more interesting
Is it fair to say that the act of translate is an act of exegesis? If so, it is fair to say that the scope of an exegesis that is based on a translated text could only explain such a translation but not the source text of the translation?
It is easy to find examples of translation between spoken languages, nowadays, where the meaning just cannot be conveyed in a similar amount of words. At that point, sometimes, the translated text includes a reference to a footnote, where the meaning is explained with the needed amount of additional text. Is it fair to way that the result of the act of translation is the translated text whereas the result of the act of exegesis is the footnote text?
It all depends on what you mean by the terms “translation” and “exegesis.” I understand translation (to simplify things a bit) to the text of one language into the words of another; I assume that the process entails having the translation mean what the original text meant, insofar as possible. By exegesis I understand the methods and procedures used in order to interpret and understand a text. I think whoever agrees with those definitions would have to agree that it is impossible to translate a text without first doing an exegesis of it. That is, one cannot express the meaning of a text in a(nother) language without knowing what the meaning is; and the only way to know what the meaning is is through interpretation; and there is no way to interpret except through applying methods and procedures of interpretatoin — i.e., exegesis. So translation without exegesis is impossible, in my view. (And yes, one can do exegesis only on the words that are available — not on the source text, if that is not available!)