I had several duties as the research assistant to the translation committee of the New Revised Standard Version in 1987-88,.  Probably the most difficult involved trying to make sure that there was a consistency in the translation, from one biblical book, passage, and verse to another.   How does one determine if a translation is internally consistent?  It’s not easy.  I had to work through the entire translation, and whenever I came across a key term in the Hebrew or Greek that had been rendered into English in one way in one passage, I had to check whether it was rendered similarly in other passages where the same word occurred. The translators were absolutely not bound and determined to translate the same Hebrew (or Greek) word the same way every time it appeared in the Bible.  In some contexts a word will be better translated one way, in others another.  But they at least had to be aware of the fact that the term appears in various passages and they had to be cognizant of how [...]

I have mentioned that as a graduate student I was asked to be one of the “secretaries” for the New Revised Standard Version translation committee when they were meeting twice a year to make decisions for the new translation, recording the decisions they made for changing the older Revised Standard Version translation.  I did that for several years until they had finished their translation.  I graduated from my PhD program in 1985, and I was already, at that point, teaching at Rutgers University. My position at Rutgers was a rather precarious one, professionally.  In the language almost universally used today, I was an “adjunct” instructor, that is, a temporary faculty member without full (or much of any) benefits and paid as part time, even though I was teaching the full load of courses (with larger classes than most of my colleagues).  Rutgers had a special title for me.  I was called a “Coadjutant Casual.”  I never did know what that meant. At the time, my wife had decided to go back to school to finish [...]