You Asked: Would God Allow His Word to Be Mistranslated?

Jesus vs. America

In this episode, we answer a viewer’s question about what the work of Bible translation involves, and whether God would allow the scriptures to be inaccurately translated. Our conversation begins with an acknowledgement that even the most conservative views on the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture affirm that these views only apply to the original manuscripts, and not to translations, and those original manuscripts are no longer available to us. For that reason, even before we consider translation, we need to be familiar with the scholarship involved in the transmission of the text, the field of study that seeks to recover the text of the original manuscripts by studying the thousands of copies that we do have. Contrary to the common notion that the books of the Bible have been changed so many times that we cannot be sure of its original text, we reference those scholars who do not subscribe to the Christian faith but who nonetheless attest to the remarkable care in which the Bible was transmitted. We then consider the challenge of translating from the foreign languages in which the scripture was written by the biblical authors, and acknowledge the interpretive decisions that need to be made anytime we translate any writing into a different language. Those decisions and the implicit theological positions of the translators can result in slightly different translations of certain words, some better than others. Finally, we conclude with a genuine note of thankfulness to God for the fact that we have so many translations available to us, even while acknowledging that some people groups still have none in their language.