Wednesday 13 July 2011

CEB - the best "broad spectrum" translation yet?

The complete Common English Bible has been unleashed at last, and it may give the NRSV and other "broad spectrum" translations real competition.

The CEB attempts to bring together readability with high standards in scholarship. Literal translations are famously 'wooden' making them almost impossible to use as spoken English.  Evangelical translations are, by their very nature, agenda driven, sometimes deliberately mistranslating in order to preserve 'proof texts', as with the ESV.

The controversial release of the latest NIV revision - and its troubled reception at the recent Southern Baptist convention - illustrates just how vulnerable modern translations are to haranguing from the 'cheap seats', and the resulting pressure to compromise.

The CEB promises something much better, and that is, well, uncommon.

6 comments:

  1. It's nice to have one more reference around, isn't it?

    It's a shame that most people never look into the history behind the Bible. Sometimes, I just know that if I introduce Bart Ehrmann into a discussion, or broach the topic of textual criticism, there are probably COGgers out there who say to themselves, "Textual criticism? How could anybody be in favor of tearing apart or talking bad about the Bible?"

    Not a clue!

    BB

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  2. The Methodist bookstore here in town has the NT for 6.00. I picked it up the other day. Will start checking it out to see how much different it is.

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  3. I think they should just rewrite the whole book and just start over. It's just not right that a divine author should only publish one book, that is, if he want to continue to be an author.

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  4. "....broach the topic of textual criticism, there are probably COGgers out there who say to themselves, "Textual criticism? How could anybody be in favor of tearing apart or talking bad about the Bible?"

    Must be a splinter group thing, Bob. Church literature all the way back to the 1950s, was teaching us how it was useful to use many different translations (and even to read many different translations), and instructing the world at large how much of the text had been mistranslated, to fuel a politico-religious agenda, decades before it became au courant to do so.

    Most of us in the WCG had several different translations, as well as a few concordances, not to mention copies of books like The Dead Sea Scrolls in our libraries. In fact, the congregational library had those, as well....

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  5. I frankly don't know anyone who has a pair of rose coloured glasses quite like the ones you've got bolted on Velvet. Suffice to say, playing pick 'n mix with bible translations so you can quote the one that best serves your agenda isn't quite what textual criticism is about.

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  6. "Suffice to say, playing pick 'n mix with bible translations so you can quote the one that best serves your agenda isn't quite what textual criticism is about."

    I am referring more to such things as the translation of John 13:2, which, in modern translations, now reads "during supper" --- which it did not, during the heyday of the KJV in the mainline professing Christian churches, which read after supper.

    In the 1964 Ambassador College Bible Correspondence Course, this mistranslation was pointed out. As was the mistranslation of Acts 12:4, where "Passover" (now to be found in any "mainline" translation) was replaced by "Easter" instead.

    I can think of no other Christian church, in the 1950s and 60s, that was pointing these things out. Yet, it seems par for the course, to be pointed out in today's "textual criticism."

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