Ep 11: Will the Best Bible Please Stand Up?

00:00(upbeat music)

00:02- You can go visit the cave in Bethlehem

00:06where he spent 30 years translating his, his ball get.

00:11But this was a transl--

00:12- These dudes in their caves.

00:14Caves were a big deal back then.

00:16- You gotta get yourself a cave.

00:17You want to do some good work?

00:19Get a cave.

00:20- Very cool in the summer,

00:21but they could get pretty drafty in the winter.

00:23(upbeat music)

00:26- Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:29- And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:30- And this is the Data Over Dogma podcast

00:33where we try to increase public access

00:36to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:38and combat misinformation about the Bible and religion.

00:42Other Dan, how are you?

00:43- I'm doing well, man.

00:45I'm excited about this episode.

00:48It's one of those ones where people have been clamoring for it.

00:53It's, hopefully you'll get some useful information

00:56though you may not get the answer

01:00that you're desperately looking for.

01:02We're talking about Bible translations this week.

01:07- Or translations of the Bible, whatever your preference,

01:09we're gonna talk about those and yeah.

01:12(laughing)

01:13- And not just translations either.

01:15Versions, we're gonna talk about like all the things.

01:18- Gonna be some discussion of a, a, a,

01:20versional discussion, yeah.

01:22(laughing)

01:23- We're gonna sacrifice a version on the altar.

01:26(laughing)

01:28- Did you ever see Monster Squad?

01:31You remember that?

01:32- No, I don't think, I don't think I did.

01:33- Hilarious movie, check out Monster Squad.

01:36- Okay.

01:36- But they've got to find a, a virgin to read this Latin

01:41in order to get this spell to work,

01:42to send these monsters back to their realm.

01:45- As you do.

01:47- As you do and they, they're trying to figure out

01:50if they know any virgins and one of them's sister

01:52that are like, ah, they're trying to figure out

01:55a good way to ask this.

01:56(laughing)

01:58They don't go about it very well.

02:00And then it turns out she was lying.

02:01She's like, I thought you, they were like,

02:03I thought she said you were a bird.

02:04She's like, well, once with Todd,

02:06but that doesn't count, doesn't count.

02:08(laughing)

02:11- And then they get the, a little,

02:13their five year old sister to do it instead.

02:15And she sends the monsters back, but it's.

02:17- Well, that's, that's, that's for the best.

02:19- Yeah, but if you ever hear somebody say,

02:22Wolfman's got nards, that is from Monster Squad.

02:26So anyway, that is beside the point.

02:29We're gonna be talking about translations of the Bible.

02:31One of the most common questions I get on social media,

02:33I don't know about you, Dan,

02:34but one of the most common questions I get

02:36is what is the best translation of the Bible?

02:39And hopefully after this episode

02:43of the Data Over Dogma podcast,

02:44you will never want to ask that question again.

02:46- No.

02:47- Because you will be more confused.

02:49- Yes, you don't want to know the answer.

02:51- You'll be more, you'll leave more confused

02:54than you went in, but edified and educated.

02:57- Yes.

02:58- And that's what we're here for.

02:59- Your edgification.

03:01What, edg, oh gosh.

03:03- No, I think you got it.

03:04I think I nailed it.

03:05- I'm gonna move on.

03:07- So, all right, Dan, I'm, let's just launch into this.

03:11- Let's do it.

03:12- Let's talk first about where this all comes from

03:18because there isn't, because what we're getting to,

03:23eventually, is English translations

03:27of a compiled group of books that we now call the Bible.

03:32But that's not where it started.

03:35- It's not where it started.

03:36- So, take us back all the way to the earliest

03:41translations of the Bible to, I mean,

03:46and the Bible is multiple things, right?

03:49We're talking about the Hebrew Bible,

03:52we're talking about the New Testament,

03:54these are very different things that happen

03:55in very different times.

03:57- Guide us through it.

03:57- Yes.

03:58- Yeah, and the idea that the Bible represents

04:01a single book or even just a single collection of books

04:04is something that has a past and something that occurred

04:09in a rough point in time and translations of these texts

04:14predate the existence of what we might call the Bible.

04:18So, we go back to literature that's being produced

04:21in and around Jerusalem, the Northern Kingdom

04:25in the middle of the first millennium BCE.

04:28When we get to, and a lot of this is being produced

04:31in and after the exile and in the Persian period

04:34and a bit into the Hellenistic period.

04:37So, this is between around 600 BCE

04:40and down to around, I think 164-ish BCE

04:45is the date of the most recent text

04:50of the Hebrew Bible that was composed.

04:53But with the exile and the return from exile,

04:56you have members of Judeans who are kind of spreading out

05:01in a few different directions.

05:04Some are in Babylon, some go to Egypt

05:07and we know of some communities within Egypt

05:12that were made up of Judeans.

05:15But once you get a few generations into these places,

05:18people are speaking other languages.

05:19They're not speaking the Hebrew

05:21in which these texts were originally written.

05:23And so, our earliest translation of any kind

05:26of which we know of any text

05:28that would ultimately make it into the Bible is into Greek.

05:31And this was likely executed in the city of Alexandria

05:37in Northern Egypt.

05:38So, in the Nile Delta, one of the kind of economic

05:43and intellectual centers of the ancient world

05:46in this time period.

05:47Probably somewhere in the third century BCE.

05:51So, somewhere between around 300 BCE and 200 BCE,

05:55we have translations of the Jewish scriptures.

05:59And in this early period,

06:01it's starting with what we know as the Torah,

06:04the first five books of Moses, the Pentateuch.

06:06And so, you have Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus,

06:08Numbers and Deuteronomy are translated

06:10from ancient Hebrew into Greek.

06:13And these are, there's a text called the letter of Aristaeus,

06:18also known as pseudo-Aristaeus

06:21that purports to tell the story of how this all happened.

06:25But this is a legendary letter.

06:28It's very, very convenient.

06:30There are some miraculous things going on.

06:33The king in Egypt is deferring to the knowledge

06:37of these Jewish scholars who are on loan from Jerusalem.

06:42So, I think we've talked about it before on the show,

06:45but that's one telling of how this happened.

06:47In reality, it was probably something

06:49that took place a little more organically

06:51among the communities in Egypt.

06:54And so, it was a way to give access

06:57to what was considered scripture,

07:00to people who did not speak the original languages

07:03of the scriptures.

07:04- Would you say that Greek was sort of,

07:07I mean, I know that there was a lot of Greek in Alexandria.

07:11Was it?

07:11But, I mean, we're talking about a city in Egypt.

07:15So, like the Egyptian people didn't speak Greek, did they?

07:20- So, in this time period,

07:22Alexander the Great had come through in the previous century.

07:25And we refer to this--

07:29- He must have been surprised when he got to a place

07:31that was called Alexander.

07:33He was like, we have the same name, that's crazy.

07:35- It's a divinely instituted.

07:39So, yeah, a lot of funny stories about Alexander in Egypt

07:45and about Alexander in general.

07:48But, so he dies around 333 BCE.

07:52And after that, his generals and other leaders

07:56are fighting over control of his kingdom.

07:59And it kind of gets split up.

08:01And the two most relevant groups of people

08:05for our purposes are the salutids.

08:07And they are in Syria, Palestine area,

08:12and then the Ptolemies, and they are in Egypt.

08:15And so, this is a period of Hellenization

08:18where Greek is kind of taking over

08:21as a lingua franca in the region.

08:23So, Greek was probably the most widely spoken language

08:28by the next century.

08:30So, by the time of the translation

08:33of the earliest texts of the Septuagint into Greek.

08:36So, within that area.

08:38And this was just to facilitate access

08:40on the part of those who did not speak the language.

08:43There's a theory out there, an interesting theory,

08:46that the purpose was actually to provide

08:48a bit of an interlinear.

08:50So, that people could get kind of a better grasp

08:55on what this Hebrew was saying.

08:57So, some people think it wasn't necessarily

08:59for people who didn't speak Hebrew,

09:00but for people who didn't speak it particularly well.

09:03So, there's this interlinear theory of the Septuagint.

09:06I don't think that works with all the data,

09:09but we have this translation.

09:12And there are some texts of the Pentateuch,

09:15at least the translations that have been preserved down to us,

09:18are very, very literal, overly literal.

09:21Like they're rendering the Hebrew into Greek

09:25that doesn't sound very Greek, but sounds more Hebrew.

09:28And then there are other texts that are more free.

09:31But one of the most interesting things

09:33about the translation of the Septuagint,

09:35is it seems to witness to Hebrew manuscripts

09:40of the Hebrew Bible that don't always line up

09:43with the manuscripts that we have now.

09:45The Masoretic text is the traditional authoritative text

09:50of the Hebrew Bible.

09:51And this is a text-

09:53- And I think you've mentioned them before,

09:54but talk about the Masaretes,

09:57is that who we're talking about?

09:59- Right, so these were Jewish scribes

10:02who primarily lived in the Galilee in the medieval period.

10:05And they did a handful of things

10:08with the text of the Hebrew Bible.

10:09They created a system of vocalization.

10:13So Hebrew is not written with vowels.

10:15And there have been a couple of different attempts

10:17in the early centuries of the common era

10:20to create a system of vowels

10:22because you had fewer people who were speaking the Hebrew

10:25that they used anciently.

10:27And it was just, it made the text more clear

10:30if you could clarify precisely what vowels

10:32we understand to be intended here.

10:36And so they created the system of vowels

10:39and they created this text

10:41with their specific vocalization

10:43or the addition of vowels that they like.

10:47And then they also created a couple of other parts

10:49to the text, what they call the Masora Magna

10:51and the Masora Parva

10:53or the Great Masora and the Small Masora.

10:56And these are notes about how frequently words occur,

11:00notes about words that may only occur one time.

11:05And just some kind of technical notes about that.

11:10And also you had what they called kativ and karei readings.

11:14So they marked certain places

11:16where you were supposed to read this differently

11:19than what is written on the page.

11:21And then other places where you were supposed

11:24to follow a different vocalization.

11:26So they did all this

11:28and we have the Aleppo Codex

11:32previously understood to be the earliest version

11:35of the Masoretic text dates to around 900 CE.

11:38And that is mostly complete.

11:41A lot of the Pentateuk is missing.

11:43Some of it probably burned, some of it is just,

11:47we don't know where it is.

11:49And then the Leningrad Codex

11:51is the oldest complete addition of the Masoretic text.

11:54And that dates to about 10010 CE.

11:58And then we just had the sale of the auction

12:00like within the last month

12:02of I think Codex Sassoon, the Sassoon Codex,

12:06which is many scholars think maybe a little bit older

12:09than the Aleppo Codex.

12:11But these three manuscripts are almost exactly identical.

12:15Like they very rarely deviate from each other.

12:18And when they do, it is primarily

12:20in like accentuation marks and things like that.

12:23So they created a very, very consistent system.

12:27And so that tradition, the Masoretic text

12:31is what is considered most authoritative

12:32within Judaism today.

12:34However, when you go back to the Septuagint,

12:37it seems to be very different in places.

12:39So the book of Jeremiah.

12:40- What is the Septuagint?

12:42I don't know what that is.

12:43- So the Septuagint is this ancient Greek translation

12:46of the Hebrew Bible.

12:47And we have some early translations of certain texts

12:51that we sometimes refer to as the old Greek.

12:53And then the later Greek translations

12:56that became a little more authoritative

12:58that were probably done around the turn of the era.

13:00So around the time of Jesus,

13:02we generally refer to those

13:04as the more traditional Septuagint.

13:06And like I said, it started with the first five books

13:08of Moses and then over time,

13:10all the other books of the Hebrew Bible.

13:13As we understand it now, we're translated.

13:15But when this was being translated,

13:17they did not have what they knew as the Hebrew Bible.

13:20There was not a closed canon of texts.

13:23And so you have other texts

13:24that were also translated into Greek.

13:27And you had other texts that were being composed

13:30in Hebrew and in Aramaic and in Greek.

13:32So our earliest translation is the Septuagint,

13:35which is also a text critically important

13:38because it witnesses to source texts

13:41that may be earlier than the Masoretic text.

13:45What is most authoritative now?

13:48The Dead Sea Scrolls, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls,

13:51over a thousand different manuscripts,

13:53many of them biblical manuscripts

13:55and many of them line up with either the Masoretic text

14:00or the tradition we find in the Septuagint

14:02or an unknown tradition.

14:04And so I mentioned the book of Jeremiah

14:07is about one sixth shorter in the Septuagint,

14:11which indicates either that the translator

14:14of the Septuagint was just erasing things left and right

14:18or they had a source text that had not yet had

14:22all that other stuff added to it.

14:24And we discovered some manuscripts of Jeremiah

14:27among the Dead Sea Scrolls that agree more

14:30with the Septuagint readings than with the Masoretic text

14:33indicating that, yes, the Septuagint probably

14:35was translating Hebrew manuscripts that were shorter,

14:38which would indicate Jeremiah as we have it now

14:41has been the product of some textual expansion

14:44that someone has added to it.

14:46And there are a handful of other situations

14:49that are very similar to the books of Samuel

14:50and the books of Kings, for instance,

14:52can be very different in the Septuagint.

14:55So that's our earliest known translation.

14:58And then I mentioned you had Aramaic speakers as well

15:02in the East and Babylon.

15:04And so we have some Aramaic translations.

15:07Now, these are a little more free.

15:09These are referred to as the Targumim or the Targums.

15:13And these are translations into Aramaic

15:14that are a little more expansive.

15:17So they seem to be introducing more changes

15:20and it seems to be more intentional.

15:22And so from a text critical point of view,

15:25in other words, if we're trying to reconstruct

15:28what their source text looked like,

15:30it's a little more difficult

15:32and doesn't really seem to give us as clear a view

15:35of their source.

15:36But there's a theory that the Targumim

15:39were actually translated on the fly.

15:42That's in a service they would have stood to read

15:45in the Hebrew and they would have had someone next to them

15:49who would be translating on the fly into Aramaic.

15:53- Oh, wow.

15:54- That's one theory about how some of the Targumim

15:57got to be so different from the source texts

15:59as we understand them.

16:00And there are other theories about the Targumim

16:02and we have different versions of the Targumim

16:06that expand on some things, try to harmonize passages

16:10where there are conflicts in the Masoretic text

16:12or where there's something that's interesting

16:14or we don't have a lot of information,

16:16they will expand on that.

16:18And so that's our, the next early translation

16:23is into Aramaic, what we now know as the Targumim.

16:26And I think the earliest manuscripts of that

16:28come from like the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE.

16:32And so that's, those are the two that predate

16:37the development of what we might call a biblical canon.

16:40'Cause it's right between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE

16:44that we have kind of the crystallization

16:46of the boundaries of what could be considered scripture

16:49within Judaism and Christianity.

16:52- This may be a weird question.

16:54I'm gonna make you define something that,

16:55it's a phrase that even I've used so far in this

16:59and that is the Hebrew Bible.

17:01What are we talking about when we say

17:04the phrase Hebrew Bible?

17:06- So I use Hebrew Bible because this is a bit more

17:08of an academic standard, but more or less

17:12it's the same as the Old Testament.

17:14The content is the same.

17:16However, when I refer to the Hebrew Bible,

17:18I refer to it as it is found within the,

17:23for instance, the Leningrad Codex

17:25and if a Jewish person were to open up their scriptures today,

17:29it's a different order of the books.

17:32Primarily it has to do with the order that the writings

17:36and the prophets go in.

17:37The Pentateuch, the books of Moses are the same,

17:41but the order of the rest of the books are a bit different.

17:45And some of it has to do with the rhetorical goals

17:48of this arrangement, this collection of books.

17:51So in the Christian Old Testament, it ends with Malachi,

17:56which is this finger wagging threat about Elijah

18:02and the great day of the Lord and everything,

18:05burning like stubble and all this kind of stuff.

18:07And this kind of sets the table for the New Testament

18:13because we've got this promise of this something

18:15that's coming, Elijah is coming and then we go,

18:18hey, look, somebody was born, somebody very special was born.

18:22And so it's kind of segueing into the New Testament.

18:25Whereas if you look at the Jewish arrangement

18:30of the Hebrew Bible, it ends with second chronicles,

18:34which is ending with a description of the return to Israel

18:39and the promise of restoration.

18:43And so from a Jewish point of view,

18:45you wanna end the collection ends with looking forward to

18:50and hoping for the restoration of this kingdom.

18:55So I refer to the Hebrew Bible

18:57because I primarily am studying it

18:58as it was put together for an ancient Judahite,

19:03Judean slash Jewish audience

19:07rather than the Christian Old Testament.

19:09- Interesting, is the word Hebrew

19:12in that a linguistic reference or a cultural reference?

19:15- It's a bit of both.

19:17The majority of the texts are written in Hebrew,

19:20but there is some Aramaic parts of Ezra,

19:22parts of Daniel, a couple of words

19:25and verses here and there are in Aramaic.

19:27So it's not unilaterally Hebrew,

19:29but it is overwhelmingly Hebrew.

19:32And so the name is not perfectly accurate.

19:36It's not a perfect name,

19:37but it has become the academic convention.

19:41- Sure, I don't mean to get hung up on it.

19:42I'm just trying to-- - No worries.

19:43I'm glad to keep it all straight.

19:45- Yeah, I'm glad to make that clarification

19:47because I do get questions about that

19:49from time to time as well.

19:50- Okay, so, is there more to get into

19:55with the sort of ancient translations or--

19:58- Well, I think we talked about the ones

20:01that can't come before the development of a canon.

20:04And they kind of go beyond what we understand

20:09as the canon of the Bible,

20:11whether we're talking about the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

20:13and we haven't even talked about the New Testament yet,

20:15but we can get into the earliest translations

20:18of the Bible after we can talk about canonization,

20:23if you like.

20:24And that's still ancient, but not as ancient.

20:26- Well, and presumably through this,

20:29as we talk about canonization,

20:31there were manuscripts,

20:33there were books that fell out of favor

20:36or that became less popular.

20:39And so just sort of didn't make it through

20:43into more, I hesitate to use the word modern

20:48because we're not there yet,

20:51but into popular usage.

20:56- Yeah, there were a number of them.

20:58The Apocrypha that is found in the Catholic Deutero canon

21:02and the Orthodox canon.

21:04And there are others that we refer to now as pseudopigrypha

21:08that were some of them were composed

21:10anciently in Hebrew and translated into Greek,

21:13some of them were composed in Greek.

21:15And this was one of the criteria

21:17that some people use kind of retroactively

21:21to explain why the Hebrew Bible ended up the way it did,

21:24why things like the First Enoch and Jubilees

21:27and these other texts,

21:28why they were omitted from the canon

21:31and a lot of people would suggest

21:32is 'cause they were written in Greek along with

21:35some of the apocryphal books, the books of Maccabees,

21:37for instance, were not included in the Hebrew biblical canon.

21:42And then ultimately they were omitted.

21:44Well, they were relegated to deuterocanonical status

21:49for the early Christian church,

21:50but we also have what we might call apocryphal

21:53and pseudopographical Christian texts as well

21:57that weren't included,

21:58but still get translated by scholars today.

22:01In fact, there are a couple of different books.

22:03If anyone's interested in some of the non-canonical texts

22:06that were considered authoritative

22:09and were very popular in early Judaism, in early Christianity,

22:14there are a couple of different places you can look for,

22:18the New Testament, for instance,

22:19there is a translation called the New New Testament,

22:24where if you look that up,

22:26it's gonna give you a lot of the apocryphal

22:28and pseudopographical gospels and other texts.

22:31- Wow.

22:32- And then Bart Erman and Zlatko Plashe

22:36also translated a text that they called the other gospels,

22:40accounts of Jesus from outside the New Testament.

22:42And this is translations into English of,

22:47ooh, let's see, how many texts are there?

22:4839, 39 different texts that are about Jesus

22:53or are secondary gospels, many of them Gnostic,

22:59but some others as well.

23:00You can find great English translations of all of those

23:04and that text, the other gospels.

23:07And then Old Testament or Hebrew Bible,

23:10Apocrypha and pseudopigrapha,

23:12there are a couple of series right now

23:14that are translating these into English,

23:17but James, is it Charles?

23:20No, no, no, no, Charles' worth.

23:23There's a gentleman named Charles' worth

23:28who translated or borrowed translations

23:32of a lot of the Apocryphal and pseudopographical literature

23:35of the Hebrew Bible that you can find as well.

23:40I think one volume was called,

23:43or no, they're both the Old Testament, pseudopigrapha.

23:46One is apocalyptic literature and testaments.

23:49One is, I don't remember what volume two is called.

23:54- Can you tell me what you've said, pseudopigrapha?

23:58- Pseudopigrapha, yeah.

23:59I mean, I pseudo, I understand what that means.

24:04I know what a pig is, but something tells me

24:07I've gotten that wrong.

24:08- So pseudopigrapha means false writings.

24:12And the idea is that these are texts

24:15that were written in the name of some famous

24:17or significant figure from ancient Jewish

24:20or Christian history, but that was clearly written

24:23well after that time period.

24:24And so it was not written by that historical figure,

24:27such as--

24:28- Well, for some reason, we're not applying that word

24:30to Matthew Mark Lou.

24:31- Yeah, well, that's the tyranny of tradition.

24:35'Cause those things get into the canon

24:40and they're kind of the beating heart of the Christian canon.

24:43And so pseudopigrapha is a name that came along much later

24:48as scholars were looking at other non-canonical stuff.

24:50So you had that tyranny of tradition,

24:52but many scholars today think maybe words like canonical

24:56and non-canonical are problematic in and of themselves.

24:58They give these texts a pride of place

25:02in many discussions about periods

25:05that predated their canonization.

25:07And so that can be problematic as well.

25:11- Interesting.

25:12- So if we move then into the period

25:16following the canonization of the Bible,

25:18so in the fourth and fifth centuries,

25:20we already have other translations that are taking place.

25:23Within early Christianity, we have the translation

25:26of the Bible into Latin.

25:29And this takes place first, I believe,

25:31around the third century, they call that the,

25:36there's an early Latin translation.

25:40- So the Vulgate?

25:41- So the Vulgate is the secondary translation.

25:43There are manuscripts of Latin translations

25:46that were in circulation for a century

25:48before we get to the Vulgate.

25:49But the Vulgate was translated at the very end,

25:52up to around 400 CE by a man named Jerome.

25:56And you can go visit the cave in Bethlehem

26:01where he spent 30 years translating his Vulgate.

26:06But this was a transl-

26:07- These dudes in their caves.

26:09- Caves were a big deal back then.

26:12- You gotta get yourself a cave.

26:13You wanna do some good work?

26:14Get a cave.

26:15- Very cool in the summer, but they could get pretty drafty

26:18in the winter.

26:20And so we have the translation into Latin,

26:22we have an early Latin,

26:23and then we have the Vulgate around 400 CE.

26:28And this is being done primarily from the Septuagint.

26:31And this is an interesting thing.

26:34Early Christians overwhelmingly used the Septuagint.

26:37They didn't use the Hebrew manuscripts.

26:40And so when we look in the New Testament,

26:42most of the quotations from the Hebrew Bible

26:45are quotations of the Greek translation,

26:48which is why they frequently differ.

26:50- Yeah, that's really interesting.

26:53- It is.

26:54And if Christians compare the quotes in the New Testament

26:57to their Old Testament,

26:59which is going to be a translation from the Masoretic text,

27:02not the Septuagint in most instances.

27:04If we're talking about Greek Orthodox Church

27:07or other Eastern traditions,

27:08they still use the Septuagint,

27:09but you're gonna see differences.

27:11And those differences are sometimes very, very meaningful.

27:14Sometimes they're not as big a deal,

27:16but sometimes they're very meaningful.

27:18And they were so convinced that the Septuagint

27:21was the true version of the scriptures

27:24that you have a lot of accusations

27:26that the Jewish folks have altered the text of the Bible

27:30to make it less messianic,

27:32to make it not point to Jesus.

27:36And in reality, what was going on

27:37is they were using a Greek translation

27:40that had been executed in a period

27:43when there was a lot more fervent messianism.

27:47And so the Septuagint feels more messianic

27:50because it was translated in a time

27:52when they were interpreting a lot of these texts messianically.

27:56- They were trying to point to Jesus.

27:58- Well, to a messiah.

28:00And then the Jesus tradition developed in light of

28:04what was being expected in that text.

28:07And so the early Christians would look at the Septuagint

28:10and say, yeah, this is about Jesus.

28:13Why are they using these Hebrew texts

28:15that aren't about Jesus?

28:16And so they accused them of altering the text,

28:19which was the opposite of what the case was.

28:24And you have origin of Alexandria creates

28:27what's called the hexapala,

28:29which is a bunch of different versions

28:32of the Hebrew Bible side by side in columns,

28:35including a transliteration of the Hebrew

28:38and a translation into Greek.

28:40And then we have these different,

28:41what we call recensions of the Greek,

28:43which are basically someone took the Greek and redacted it,

28:48edited it a little bit to kind of bring it

28:52into alignment with the developing understanding

28:56of a standardized Hebrew Bible text.

28:58So there was a trajectory from more variation

29:01towards what would ultimately become

29:03the standardized masoretic text.

29:06And so I will say I read,

29:08I was in sort of trying to do research for this episode.

29:13I was reading just on Wikipedia about that,

29:16about, you know, the, what did you just call it?

29:21- The recensions?

29:22- Yes.

29:23And it's, I'm sorry, the name of the guy who did that.

29:29- There were three main ones.

29:30Simicus is one, is that who you're thinking of?

29:34- No, you had just talked about him, gosh dang it.

29:37I'm trying to find him on the page.

29:39- Oh, origin?

29:41- Yeah, yes. - Okay, yes.

29:42- Yes, we're talking about origin stories here.

29:45And I read this sentence and was like,

29:49I don't know what I'm doing here.

29:51You'd think that on Wikipedia,

29:53I'd at least be able to understand what I'm reading.

29:56But when I read the sentence,

29:58his eclectic recension of the Septuagint

30:01had a significant influence on the Old Testament text

30:04in several important manuscripts.

30:05I was like, I don't know.

30:07I know, here's the thing, I know the word eclectic,

30:11but I don't think I know it

30:12in how it's being used here.

30:15Recension is something, Septuagint is something.

30:18It was, yeah, so I'm glad that we're doing this.

30:22So, because eclectic isn't like,

30:25he just had a wild way of doing it.

30:27That's not what we're talking about.

30:29- A eclectic means drawing from different sources.

30:31- Right.

30:32- And so the hexapla is taking these columns

30:37of the text from different sources.

30:38Some of it's coming from a straightforward translation,

30:42a transliteration, one of these recensions.

30:44So, aquila, simicus, and theodosian

30:47are the three men in the second century CE

30:50who create these recensions of the Septuagint.

30:53And so, the text is being altered and developed

30:57and negotiated as we're going,

30:59both in Hebrew as well as in translation.

31:03And so, Jerome was actually one of the ones

31:06who wanted to return to what he called the Hebraika Veritas,

31:10or the truth of the Hebrew.

31:11He advocated for the primacy,

31:15the priority of the Hebrew manuscripts

31:17over and against the Septuagint.

31:18He still used this Septuagint in creating the Vulgate.

31:23And, but that was kind of the turning point

31:27where Christianity went from the Greek is right,

31:31the Hebrew is wrong to kind of going back and saying,

31:34okay, fine, the Hebrew, the Hebrew is right.

31:36But the Vulgate would become the master

31:42document, the database, basically for the scriptures

31:46for the next thousand plus years.

31:50That would--

31:51And so, this is in Latin.

31:53This is in Latin.

31:54And so, now we're talking about like the Catholic church

31:58has really started to,

32:03has really taken hold as the sort of dominant,

32:07as the only Christian organization in at least Eastern Europe,

32:12or Western Europe.

32:16Western Europe, right?

32:16Yeah, yeah.

32:17The Catholic church was the main institution

32:19of Christianity in Western Europe.

32:21And in Eastern, in the Eastern church,

32:23they were still using the Septuagint.

32:26But we also have another tradition

32:28in the early 4th century around the time of Nicaea

32:33and the development of our canon.

32:35We had some missionaries who went south to a place

32:38called Aksum, which is the kingdom

32:41that is now known as Ethiopia.

32:43And they took the manuscripts of the Septuagint with them.

32:47Now, this is before they had whittled it down

32:50to what we now know as the Hebrew Bible

32:53and the New Testament and even the Apocrypha.

32:55So, what they took down to what we now know as Ethiopia

32:59was a much larger set of texts.

33:02And Christianity took hold in the kingdom of Aksum,

33:07independent of what was going on up north

33:09and with the Western church and the Eastern church.

33:12And they're doing their thing and they're fighting

33:14and they're arguing and they're having schisms.

33:17And down south, they're just carrying on.

33:21And so, their canon is the largest canon in the world.

33:25The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawakado church

33:28has all the texts of the Hebrew Bible

33:32and the New Testament, as well as the Apocrypha,

33:35as well as other texts.

33:36So, they still have versions of First Enoch

33:41and different books of the Maccabees

33:43and even some other texts that don't have a counterpart

33:46in our Hebrew and Greek canons and Deutero canons.

33:51And so, one of the other early translations

33:54was into a language we call gaz or Ethiopia.

33:59And in fact, our earliest manuscripts of the book of Enoch

34:04are in Ethiopia, at least our earliest full manuscripts.

34:08And then we found some fragmentary manuscripts

34:10of First Enoch among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

34:13And so, we're kind of able to kind of look at

34:16the development of the texts

34:18between the Hebrew of some of the fragmentary Hebrew

34:22manuscripts and the Dead Sea Scrolls

34:24and then our Ethiopia, oh my gosh.

34:27Etheopic manuscripts, which are primarily

34:30from like the 11th, 12th, 13th century CE.

34:34So, while all this is going on up north

34:36with Greek and Latin, we also have the etheopic,

34:40the gaz translations going on in Africa.

34:42And then there's also some translations into Gothic.

34:47As missionaries, they're trying to branch further,

34:50branch out further into Europe.

34:51There are very early translations in the West

34:54into Gothic languages, and then in the East into Slavic languages,

34:58like Old Church Slavonic and things like that,

35:01going on in the 5th and the 6th century CE.

35:04And so, these translations, these ancient manuscripts

35:09are also very important for text-critical purposes,

35:13for trying to understand the development of the text.

35:15And I think I left out Syriac.

35:18So, I guess that is another, it's a type of Aramaic,

35:22but early Syriac Christianity and what is now Iraq,

35:25some of our earliest translations of the New Testament,

35:28as well as some of the Hebrew Bible,

35:31as well as translations of the Hebrew Bible,

35:32are into Syriac, and they were in use

35:36among Christian communities in Iraq,

35:39and some of those communities still exist down to this day.

35:41And that's one of the reasons that Aramaic still exists.

35:45It's largely known as Neo-Assyrian today,

35:48but these are pockets of Christian communities

35:50that have existed in Iraq since the 2nd and 3rd century CE.

35:55So, there are translations that are taking place

35:58in all of the places where Christianity is getting a toehold,

36:02whether it's Africa or Italy,

36:05or deeper into Germanic Europe,

36:08or into Eastern Europe around Russia,

36:13or among the Syriac/Aramaic Christians in Iraq.

36:19So, lots of different translations going on very quickly

36:22once the canon develops.

36:24- Interesting that the Goths

36:26would get their own translation,

36:28but everybody in Western Europe, so far,

36:33they have to hear it in the Latin.

36:35- And that's primarily because of the institutional concerns.

36:38The institution wants to unify,

36:40and wants to be able to oversee what's going on,

36:44and so they want things to be carried on

36:48in the ecclesiastical Latin,

36:50and that's going to be the thorn in the side

36:54of early English translators of the Bible.

36:57- Right, and I propose that we take a break right now,

37:02and we will come back and get to English translations.

37:06(upbeat music)

37:06- Excellent.

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37:51(upbeat music)

37:53- All right, and we're back,

37:55and when we last left this humble little book,

38:00it had been stuck in the Latin,

38:04and the Gothic, and the Slavic, and the Gads,

38:07but the poor French in English had nothing.

38:10The Spanish, forget about it.

38:13So we gotta get it into our language.

38:15How does that happen?

38:17- Well, that actually starts off pretty soon

38:20after all these other translations are being rendered.

38:24We, our earliest translations into English

38:27are glosses and interlinear translations,

38:31basically attempts by people to take the Latin translation

38:35and render it in a way

38:35that's going to be more accessible to the common folk

38:38who may not know Latin as well,

38:41and these were kind of, we might call them rogue translations.

38:44They're not endorsed by anybody.

38:46They're not official, but influential Christians

38:49in the church started rendering glosses

38:53primarily of the gospels and the book of Psalms,

38:56and so the venerable bead who was most active

39:00in the early 8th century CE

39:02is said to have translated the gospel of John

39:04into English shortly before his death.

39:07- We met him talking about Easter.

39:11- Talking about Easter, right.

39:12He wrote this long text on the reckoning of time

39:16and gave us a lot of great information

39:18about their calendar.

39:20Calendars, anciently, were so much more important

39:23and significant than they tend to be today,

39:26but we have a handful of other folks

39:29who are either writing translations of the English

39:32in the margins of manuscripts of the Vulgates.

39:35- Oh, wow, okay.

39:37And those are some of our earliest translations

39:40into English in between around 600 and 1,000 CE,

39:45and this is Old English.

39:47So not the kind of thing someone today

39:49is gonna be able to easily recognize or read.

39:53And then we have some Anglo-Saxon translations

39:56after the year 1000 that are very much in a similar vein,

40:01only they're branching out beyond the gospels

40:03and the book of Psalms to Genesis and Exodus

40:08and things like that.

40:09- So these aren't important translations,

40:12they're just sort of jotted down.

40:14- Yeah, they're not phenomenally influential translations.

40:20They were no doubt used in their time and in their place

40:23and were probably very helpful for folks

40:25who otherwise couldn't have accessed the text

40:29or gained much purchase on understanding the text,

40:32but yeah, they're not incredibly influential.

40:37Now the first full translation of the Bible

40:43into English that we get is known as the Wycliffe Bible

40:48after John Wycliffe or Wycliffe, if you're nasty.

40:52And scholars are pretty sure that he is not responsible

40:57for translating the whole thing though.

41:00It was probably him and his followers

41:03who were responsible for translating that Bible,

41:07but it was based on the Latin Vulgets.

41:10So it was an English translation of the Latin Vulget

41:13rather than something that went back to the source text.

41:16And the same is true, I probably should have mentioned it,

41:19but the same is true of these other translations,

41:21these glosses of Psalms and the gospels

41:23and everything, they're translating the Latin.

41:25They're not translating the ancient Hebrew

41:27and the ancient Greek.

41:30And that was published around 1382.

41:34And this is before the printing press.

41:36So this is hand-copied manuscripts that we have.

41:40So they were not widely disseminated.

41:44- Was Wycliffe, Wycliffe, was he a monk?

41:49Was he a holy man of some sort?

41:52- Yeah, I don't remember exactly what position he held,

41:58but I can pull it up real quick.

42:00An English scholastic philosopher, theologian,

42:02biblical translator, reformer, Catholic priest,

42:05and a seminary professor at the University of Oxford.

42:09- And all of those things tended to overlap with each other.

42:09- Okay, so--

42:13- To some degree, yeah.

42:14- Scholarship, you was almost exclusively done by priests

42:19and that sort of thing.

42:21- Yeah, priests or people who held university posts,

42:25and they were frequently given to priests.

42:27- Right.

42:28- And things like that.

42:29So Wycliffe is kind of marks the transition

42:32into what we might refer to as the Reformation.

42:36And then we get Martin Luther,

42:39who is translating into German.

42:42And one of Martin Luther,

42:43one of the first things that Martin Luther does

42:46is translates the New Testament

42:49and then the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament into German.

42:53But rather than going from the Latin,

42:56Martin Luther is gonna go directly from the Greek

42:58and from the Hebrew.

42:59- Oh wow.

43:00- Now the problem was up until this point,

43:02you couldn't easily access a critical text

43:07of the Greek New Testament.

43:10You had manuscripts of certain books

43:13of the Greek New Testament available

43:15at a variety of libraries,

43:17but you couldn't go to the store

43:18and get a Greek New Testament.

43:20Latin was the easiest to do.

43:22And there was this Dutch scholar named Desiderius

43:25Erasmus, who was working at the end

43:29of the 15th, beginning of the 16th century CE,

43:33who wanted to put together an addition

43:36of the Latin, the Vulgate New Testament,

43:38kind of a new translation.

43:41But one of the things he came up with

43:43in an effort to kind of outshine

43:48the other additions that were gonna be out there

43:50was he wanted to provide the Greek source text

43:54so that he could show his work.

43:56And so what he ended up doing was created a dual column,

43:59Latin translation of the New Testament and the Greek.

44:02And this was, and he went to his library

44:05in Basel, Switzerland, and he said,

44:07"Give me all the Greek New Testament manuscripts you've got."

44:10And that numbered six.

44:12There were two main ones that covered

44:14the majority of the New Testament.

44:16And then there were four others

44:18that he used to kind of fill in some gaps.

44:20And there were places where he was like,

44:21I think that probably was more original than this one

44:24from my main manuscript.

44:26And so he cobbled together from these six manuscripts,

44:30a Greek New Testament.

44:32No, he didn't have a manuscript that covered

44:35the last few verses of Revelation in Greek.

44:37So he took the Latin and back-translated into Greek.

44:41And so the way he showed his work was not by showing

44:45the Greek source for his Latin,

44:46but translating the Latin back into Greek.

44:48- Oh my gosh, that's so funny.

44:50But do you remember there was a Saturday night live sketch

44:54where they translated a song, I don't know,

44:57the whole setup was that this was French singers

45:01who a song had been translated into French

45:04and they had translated it back into English for the people.

45:07Anyway, yeah.

45:09- I don't think I remember that one.

45:10Was that in the early days?

45:13- Yeah, I think that was in the early days.

45:14Anyway, yes, it is a bit of a blunder.

45:18You don't wanna, it's a game of operation

45:21or a game of operator at that point.

45:23- Yeah, telephone or whatever.

45:26- But what was so special about what Erasmus produced

45:29was this was the first time that anyone had produced

45:32what we now would refer to as a critical edition

45:35of the Greek New Testament.

45:37And so now people could access the Greek New Testament.

45:41And so Martin Luther used that as the source text

45:44for his translation of the New Testament

45:46directly from the Greek.

45:48And another dude by the name of William Tyndall

45:52or Tyndale, if you're nasty,

45:54decided he would do the same.

45:55Inspired by Martin Luther, he was going to translate

45:58the New Testament only this time in English.

46:01And he had to go into hiding in order to do this

46:03because the church had outlawed

46:05what we call vernacular translations

46:08or translations into local languages and dialects

46:11and English was considered one of those.

46:14And these were direct acts of rebellion against the church.

46:18- Absolutely.

46:18And while he was doing this,

46:21he was also publishing treatises and things like that,

46:25attacking the church.

46:28But one of the things that Tyndale did was

46:30he changed some of the words that were used.

46:34Like he didn't like the fact that the New Testament

46:36and Latin referred to a church as like an organization

46:39and institution.

46:41He thought this is just a gathering of Christians

46:45in the New Testament.

46:46So he changed it to, I think he used assembly

46:50or congregation, I think he used.

46:53And then for the priests, he went back to elder

46:58and changed a handful of words that were used

47:03to support the institution of the church

47:06but that Tyndale thought, nah, we're not gonna do that.

47:09We're gonna try to understand the text

47:11as it was understood, anciently.

47:14And Tyndale's translation of the New Testament,

47:17which was first published in 1525/26.

47:21We're not exactly sure which year it was published in

47:25has become the single most influential translation

47:29of the Bible that we know.

47:31This inspired Shakespeare, a lot of Shakespeare

47:34is taken from Tyndale.

47:36There are all kinds of turns of phrase and words

47:39that we use in English.

47:41- In part because Shakespeare was writing

47:43just a little before another very famous edition.

47:48- Edition of the Bible, yeah.

47:49So Tyndale puts the New Testament out there

47:53and then he starts to translate the Hebrew Bible,

47:57the Old Testament.

47:57He gets through the Pentateuch

47:59and gets through Samuel and Kings

48:01and I think he does Jonah as well.

48:04But he's able to publish that before he's ultimately burnt

48:07at the stake and famously cries out before his death.

48:10Oh Lord, open the King of England's eyes.

48:13And there's a, yeah, there are a bunch

48:16of very fascinating biographies of Tyndale,

48:19but that set the stage for the English translations

48:22that would come after.

48:23So we have this other guy named Coverdale

48:26who comes in and he wants to complete Tyndale's

48:29translation of the Old Testament,

48:30but he doesn't know Hebrew.

48:33And so he actually takes.

48:34- That is a bit of a stumbling block.

48:36- It's, he found a way to get around it.

48:38But he took Tyndale's Old Testament,

48:42what he had translated and then he took the Vulgus

48:45and he took the German and he took other translations

48:49of languages that he spoke, Latin and German, for instance.

48:52And he translated from those languages into English.

48:55And so in 1535 we have,

49:03the first printed full Bible that was published

49:08by Miles Coverdale.

49:10And it is the work of William Tyndale

49:13and Miles Coverdale together.

49:15So the Coverdale Bible is the first full printed

49:19English Bible translated directly from Hebrew manuscripts

49:23and Greek and Aramaic manuscripts.

49:25And then this gets revised and published by others.

49:30You have the Matthews Bible, you have the Geneva Bible,

49:34you have the Great Bible, you have the Bishops Bible,

49:37which is first published in 1568.

49:39And then we have this Hampton Court Conference in 1604

49:43where a gentleman by the name of Reynolds stands up.

49:47And this conference is basically between Puritans

49:52and the Church of England trying to haggle over

49:56how to get along better.

49:58And this guy named Reynolds stands up and says,

50:00we need a new translation of the Bible

50:02that we can all unify around.

50:04And this guy, this new king and King James

50:08decides he likes this idea.

50:10And so commissions a new translation of the Bible.

50:14And he's hoping that it will replace the Geneva Bible,

50:17which at the time was the most popular English Bible

50:20translation, but was also very anti-monarchical.

50:24It weren't happy about the king.

50:26And in fact, the Puritans who make it to the Americas

50:31are primarily trying to escape from under the thumb

50:35of monarchy and the Geneva Bible

50:37is what they took with them.

50:39And there were a lot of marginal notes,

50:41explanatory notes about how in support of this idea

50:45that you find in a few places in the Bible

50:47where our king should be the Lord,

50:50shouldn't have any human king.

50:52- Talk a little bit about,

50:54because one of the confusing things about this,

50:56'cause I know that we're going to get into the,

50:58now that we're getting into King James

51:02commissioning this new Bible.

51:04And I know that that is a lot of the decisions

51:08made in the process of making that Bible

51:13were political decisions,

51:14were decisions that were made to, you know,

51:18allay the fears of this group or that group.

51:20And, you know, there's compromises happening.

51:24Talk about how a translation of the same book

51:29could be more or less monarchical

51:32or more or less in support of one thing or another.

51:35- Yeah, well, one example is the idea

51:39and for some reason I'm blanking on where it is,

51:42oh, that's going to bother me.

51:44But we have this discussion where the text refers

51:49to a king as a tyrant.

51:52And this is something that is found in the Geneva Bible.

51:55And this was one of the things that King James says,

51:57"No, we're not going to use that word."

52:00Because we don't want the biblical texts,

52:03the word of God, to be characterizing a monarch

52:07as a tyrant.

52:08We want to try to--

52:08- Even if it was an ancient monarch that isn't,

52:11like this isn't about King James himself,

52:14but he's like, look,

52:15even the concept of tyrannical kings,

52:21let's just avoid that.

52:23Let's just get out of that business.

52:25- Well, if you had folks like Puritans and others

52:27who could hold up the holy book

52:30and say this book condemns tyrants and you're a tyrant,

52:34then that's a weapon that can be used against the king.

52:37And from an academic point of view,

52:40you may sit down and push up your glasses

52:42and say, well, no technically actually that,

52:44and try to well actually the folks holding up the book,

52:48but that doesn't mean anything to them

52:50in the early 17th century when what was important

52:53was whether or not you could gather a group around you

52:56and start a movement against the king.

52:58So one of the other rules was that there would be no

53:02explanatory footnotes.

53:04You would only have footnotes in so far

53:07as it was absolutely necessary to explain the sense of a word.

53:12And this was aimed at removing all the anti-monarchical

53:16footnotes.

53:17We were not going to have any exposition,

53:19any interpretation about why monarchs are bad

53:22or why the Lord has to be our king

53:25in this translation of the Bible.

53:28- Interesting.

53:29- Now you say in this translation of the Bible,

53:29- Yeah.

53:32but actually the King James is not a translation.

53:36Is that right?

53:37- That is.

53:39- My understanding is that we're now inversion territory.

53:42- Yes, so the King James is a very, very conservative

53:46revision of, I believe it's a 1602 edition

53:50of the Bishop's Bible.

53:51So this translation that was first translated in 1568.

53:55And so the translators, there were around 50 of them

54:00separated into companies.

54:02They were sent hard copies of this Bishop's Bible

54:05and they literally wrote the changes into the margins

54:09of this printed edition of the Bible.

54:10So they'd scratch out a word and then write another word

54:13in the margin or they would put a comma here

54:16or a semicolon there.

54:18And those hard copies were all gathered up

54:21and then collated into a master copy

54:25and they then sent that back out for review.

54:29And so it was a very, very conservative revision.

54:31And scholars have looked at the 1611 King James version

54:35and suggest that the Hebrew Bible matches

54:40the Coverdale Hebrew Bible about 74% of the time.

54:45It's word for word what Coverdale had

54:48and the New Testament matches Tindall's New Testament

54:51over 80% of the time.

54:54It's exactly word for word what Tindall had.

54:56So over the course of almost a century,

55:01you had very, very little change

55:03between these translations.

55:05But this also meant that the language that was being used

55:08in this translation was almost a century out of date.

55:12And when the King James version was published in 1611,

55:16it was not widely louded.

55:19It was criticized for using language that was out of date

55:24and obscure.

55:25- All of that stuff that we think of that we read now

55:29and we're like, oh, I don't understand this.

55:30They were having trouble with it then.

55:32- Yeah, it was already language

55:35that your grandfather used. - Oh, interesting.

55:38- Yeah, and so it did not become the most popular Bible

55:41for decades, I think in 18, not 18 Gs.

55:45In 1660, the Geneva Bible goes out of print.

55:49It no longer has the support of the crown.

55:51And so now they can start pushing the King James version

55:55and that is going to be the only one

55:58that is going to have the support of the crown behind it

56:03and it's just going to flood the market basically.

56:06And there are a number of ways that the King James version

56:10is very deficient when it comes to a translation of the Bible.

56:15But I don't want to get stuck too deep in the weeds on that.

56:21I'll just add that we had a number of new printings

56:25and revisions of the King James version.

56:28Most King James versions today

56:31are based on one of these revisions and not on the 1611.

56:35They're based on one that was published in 1769.

56:39- Oh, wow. - By Benjamin Blaney.

56:40Yeah, so over a century and a half later,

56:44Benjamin Blaney revises the King James version

56:47and publishes through Oxford his revision.

56:50And that became known as the authorized version.

56:53And that is the version that is followed

56:55by the overwhelming majority of publishers ever since then.

56:59So if you get a 1611 King James version,

57:03that's not going to be the same as your off the shelf KJV

57:08that you can find at Barnes and Noble.

57:11It's going to be a very different translation.

57:14I had no idea about that.

57:16I have seen that there is a revised King James version

57:20or a new King James version or whatever,

57:23but I didn't realize that like the old King James version

57:27or at least the version that I know as the old King James version.

57:31Isn't the one that came out of like King James never saw it?

57:35- The man himself would never have seen that version.

57:35- Right.

57:38It was a hundred years later.

57:39- Yeah.

57:40And the differences are not huge.

57:43They're pretty small, but there are lots of differences.

57:47And then an interesting thing is happening around this time period

57:52in the 18th into the 19th century.

57:55You're having a lot of scholars.

57:56Remember, Erasmus based his textus receptus.

58:01That's what we later began to call his edition

58:05of the Greek New Testament.

58:07He based that on six manuscripts from his library in Switzerland.

58:12His second edition added a seventh.

58:14And then by the time he was done,

58:17I forget exactly how many editions Erasmus published,

58:20but he had maybe 12 manuscripts that he was using.

58:24We've since discovered over 5,000 manuscripts

58:28of the New Testament.

58:30- That's not a small number, my friend.

58:31- Not a small number.

58:32And we now have access to manuscripts

58:35that Erasmus only had occasional

58:37and very, very limited access to like Codex Vaticanus,

58:41Codex Alexandrinus.

58:44In the 19th century, we discovered Codex Sinaiticus.

58:47And these are all fourth century, fourth and fifth century

58:50manuscripts of the full New Testament.

58:52And we have, who knows how many papayri

58:55that's predated even some of those manuscripts.

58:58And so in the 18th and 19th centuries,

59:01we discovered a lot more ancient versions

59:04of the Greek New Testament.

59:06And scholars realized we have a better idea

59:11what the New Testament probably looked like

59:13in its earliest years.

59:15And so you had a movement develop

59:18to create a new version of the New Testament

59:20that was based off of the new manuscript discoveries.

59:25And we refer to this as the critical text.

59:27And the other tradition created by Erasmus,

59:31we refer to as the Textus Receptus,

59:33which is Latin for received text.

59:36And you have the first revision of the King James Version

59:40to create a New Testament that more closely follows

59:43after these new discoveries in 1881 with the revised version.

59:48And one of the things that the revised version does

59:50and later revisions that made a lot of people unhappy

59:55was it took some verses out of the New Testament.

60:00When we discovered, hey, these verses aren't in

60:03the earliest copies of the New Testament that we can find.

60:07And we even were able to account

60:09for how some of these verses got worked into the text.

60:13We see some things being copied over from one gospel

60:16into the margins of the manuscript of another gospel.

60:18And then in a later manuscript,

60:20they're actually worked into the very body

60:22of that text of the gospel.

60:25- Oh, wow.

60:26- And so those things are pulled out,

60:29but the Bible publishers don't want to renumber

60:33the verses in the whole chapter

60:35because then you got confusion.

60:36And so what they do is they just omit the verse entirely

60:39and just skip over it.

60:40The example is Matthew 17,

60:42where we have Jesus talking to his disciples.

60:45And if you look in the text,

60:47it goes from verse 19 to 20 to 22 to 23.

60:52And so verse 21, in most new translations,

60:55like the new revised standard version,

60:57has been completely omitted.

60:58Now it's usually relegated to a footnote

61:00and it says, some ancient manuscripts have this part about,

61:04but this kind comes not out except by fasting and prayer.

61:09And this is actually one of those things we see worked

61:12into the manuscript.

61:12That comes from the gospel of Mark.

61:15And someone scribbled that sentence from the gospel of Mark

61:19into the margins of Codex Sinaiticus.

61:22And then we have a later manuscript

61:24where what was scribbled in the margin of Codex Sinaiticus

61:27as now in the middle of the passage.

61:32And so verse 21 is taken out.

61:34And there are I think 16 verses in the New Testament

61:39that most modern translations of the Bible

61:44will omit because we are confident

61:47they were not part of the original New Testament,

61:50but were later additions to the text.

61:52- That's, yeah, I mean, when you pointed this out to me

61:57and I was going through the different places

62:00that you had pointed me in the direction of,

62:02it is really interesting to be reading.

62:05And you wouldn't catch it.

62:06Like if you're just reading it casually,

62:08you're not checking the numbers as you go.

62:11But yeah, when you skip from verse three to verse five,

62:14it's like, oh, oh, oh.

62:18- Suddenly you feel violated.

62:19You feel like somebody's broken into your car.

62:21Like where did the verse go?

62:24Or at very least you feel like, okay,

62:27this is not something, you have to look at

62:32fundamentalists who believe that everything

62:35is completely God-breathed and that the Bible is perfect.

62:41And that is a perfect document.

62:44Okay, which Bible?

62:46What are you even talking about?

62:48Like there are, you know, 5,000 manuscripts.

62:52Which one is the true Bible?

62:54Then, you know, the differences are probably minor

62:58in most cases, but if we're leaving out entire verses

63:02and, you know, we're changing the ending

63:05of an entire chapter on something,

63:09that's not insignificant.

63:11- Yeah, and there are a couple of places

63:13where we have pretty significant amounts of text.

63:17For instance, the story of the woman taken in adultery,

63:20that is at the very end of John seven

63:21and the beginning of John eight.

63:23In our earliest manuscripts,

63:24that's nowhere in the New Testament.

63:26It doesn't show up in our manuscripts

63:28until like the fourth century.

63:30And then it's one of our earliest manuscripts,

63:33it shows up in Luke.

63:34And then our later manuscripts,

63:36it's showing up in different parts of the Gospel of John

63:38before finally settling at the beginning of John eight.

63:42And so in many contemporary translations of the Bible,

63:46you will have double brackets around this story

63:48in a footnote explaining that this is not

63:52original to the New Testament.

63:53This is something that was added later.

63:54Now, many people will say, you know,

63:57it's probably historical, it sounds like the author,

64:00it sounds historical.

64:02That's, I would argue, wishful thinking.

64:05But this story is a later addition to the book of John

64:08that wasn't even the first try,

64:11didn't even put it in John, they put it in Luke.

64:14And the other example to which you alluded, I think,

64:17was the end of the Gospel of Mark.

64:20We have manuscripts that end to Mark

64:24with very, very early manuscripts that talk about

64:28the tomb being empty and they were fearful.

64:31Stop and, you know, full stop and seen.

64:37- Right. - There's nothing else.

64:39And then we have a shorter ending in later manuscripts

64:42and then a longer ending.

64:44And so if your translation of the Bible has Mark 16

64:49go all the way into like verse 29 or something like that,

64:52that's the longer ending of Mark.

64:54There's another that's only a couple verses,

64:56just talks about them going and preaching.

64:59But it's likely that the original version of Mark

65:04ended with the disciples running in fear.

65:08And some people think this may have to do with the fact

65:11that it could have been a performative text.

65:12This could have been something that was intended

65:14to be performed on stage rather than read.

65:17- Oh, that's really interesting.

65:19I've never heard that, that's fascinating.

65:22- Yeah.

65:23- And it is interesting because the different endings

65:27of Mark, you know, as I was reading that,

65:29yeah, in the initial one,

65:33if you just look at that first ending,

65:36it doesn't seem to comport with the longer ending.

65:38Like it, like, you know, these two, these women

65:42are just stopped in fear.

65:45And then the longer ending,

65:46they're actually going off and proclaiming things and stuff.

65:49It seems like it's a totally different unrelated thing.

65:52- And a lot of scholars think that originally

65:56the story ended with the tomb's empty, what now?

66:00- Right, yeah. - And then as the Jesus tradition develops,

66:03people went back and were like,

66:05"I'll tell you what, now we went and we..."

66:07And, you know, preach this post-resurrection ministry

66:12and all that kind of stuff,

66:14which aligns better with the other gospels.

66:18- Sometimes you gotta add in a little fanfic.

66:20It's just fun.

66:21- Yeah, the series ended and, you know, you're not satisfied.

66:25That's how my kids feel about Gravity Falls.

66:30I want a longer ending to Gravity Falls.

66:34- They told her right it in.

66:36Nothing stopping her. - Well, oh, they found plenty

66:38of fanfic on social media, some of it more appropriate

66:43than others. - I'm sure.

66:45- So we have interesting stuff going on

66:47in the New Testament.

66:48As a result of the fact that our translations

66:51usually don't derive from a single ancient manuscript,

66:54but from a collation, a study of bunches of manuscripts

67:00to try to reconstruct, cobble together,

67:02what we think the New Testament most likely looked like.

67:05And that's called an eclectic text.

67:09Now, the Hebrew Bible's a little bit different.

67:11We have that Masoretic text.

67:12We have the Leningrad Codex,

67:14which most translations are based on.

67:16And if you go look at a Jewish publication society,

67:20translation of the Hebrew Bible, it faithfully follows

67:23the Masoretic text as found in the Leningrad Codex.

67:26The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls opened up whole new vistas

67:30for the translation of the Hebrew Bible,

67:33because now we have a bunch of earlier manuscripts,

67:36a thousand years earlier, that offer different readings

67:40in many cases.

67:41So that raises questions for translators.

67:45What are we gonna do with a Jeremiah,

67:48a version of Jeremiah that's one sixth shorter?

67:51What are we gonna do about places where the text is very

67:54different in the Dead Sea Scrolls than we've talked before

67:57about Deuteronomy 32, 8, and 9 on our podcast?

68:02That's an example of a different reading

68:04that was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls,

68:05where many translators now have just abandoned

68:09the Masoretic reading and have just plugged in the reading

68:12that we find in the Dead Sea Scrolls,

68:14where instead of the Most High separated the people

68:17according to the number of the children of Israel,

68:19we now have the Most High separated the people according

68:21to the number of the children of God.

68:23And so there are scholars currently right now

68:27working on a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible

68:29that is an eclectic text, much like the New Testament.

68:33The Leningrad Codex, a critical edition,

68:36and what I mean by critical edition is a formal printing

68:39of a single text that translators can use

68:42to translate the Hebrew Bible.

68:46The New Testament is an eclectic one.

68:48The Hebrew Bible has long been what we call a diplomatic one.

68:51That means there is one manuscript

68:54and it's all based on that one manuscript.

68:56But now scholars are moving towards producing

68:59eclectic critical editions of the Hebrew Bible

69:02that incorporate the insights from the Dead Sea Scrolls.

69:05And so in the future, you can expect to see

69:07English translations of the Bible look a bit different.

69:12And I think that probably brings us to wrapping up

69:16with some observations about some of the newer translations

69:21of the Bible.

69:22- Well, I mean, and we've got to get to the question,

69:26which Bible should, which version, which translation

69:31should I be looking at when I'm trying to read the Bible?

69:36- The Bible.

69:37It's kind of like the dictionary.

69:39There is no the Bible.

69:42There are, let's say that's an abstraction.

69:45When I get that question, my response is usually to say

69:48it depends what you want to get out of it.

69:50If Latter-day Saints, for instance, read the Bible

69:52because they want to feel the spirit,

69:54they want to feel guided by the spirit.

69:56And in that case, you just want to find whatever Bible

69:59feels the most conducive to that for you.

70:03If you want to read,

70:05if you want a Bible that facilitates missionary work,

70:08if you want to be able to preach to non-believers,

70:10you're going to want to look for a Bible translation

70:13that is more accessible to someone outside the church.

70:16Does not use a lot of jargon.

70:17Does not use a lot of special terminology.

70:21That's a different translation that you want.

70:23If you want to try to understand the original text

70:26as clearly and as comprehensively as you can,

70:31you're going to want to look for

70:32a more technical scholarly translation.

70:34A lot of different reasons someone can be reading the Bible,

70:38which means there are a lot of different reasons

70:39someone can be translating the Bible.

70:42But the question usually comes to me from folks

70:45who want to know, they want to understand it as clearly

70:48and as comprehensively as possible.

70:51And so there are a lot of different ways you can go about that.

70:54Usually what I recommend for somebody who wants

70:56both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian scriptures

71:00of the New Testament is I will recommend

71:02the New Revised Standard Version,

71:04which is a revision of a revision of the King James Version.

71:09And this I think is widely considered

71:12the most academic scholarly translation of the Hebrew Bible

71:15and the New Testament.

71:17And there is actually an updated edition.

71:19I don't even have the updated edition yet and hard copy,

71:21but NRSVUE is what you want to look for

71:26for the most up-to-date version.

71:29And there's a good study.

71:31- Which is also my favorite law and order.

71:33Law and order, NRSVUE, it's really good.

71:39That's the one set in New Orleans, right?

71:42- Chengdong.

71:43- And there's a really good study edition of the NRSV,

71:49the new Oxford Annotated Bible is what I usually recommend.

71:53It's got wonderful introductions to the books.

71:55It's got wonderful explanatory footnotes that even has

71:57thematic essays in the back.

71:59So the NRSVUE is the Bible translation

72:03I would recommend for most folks,

72:05the new Oxford Annotated Bible

72:07and the fifth edition is probably the best edition.

72:10Another really good one is the Jewish Publication Society,

72:14Tanok.

72:15Tanok is an acronym for Torah, Neviim Katavim

72:20or the three different portions of the Hebrew Bible.

72:26And there is a second edition of the Jewish Study Bible,

72:29which incorporates the Jewish Publication Society's Tanok.

72:33So that's a really good translation.

72:35And if you can get their commentary series,

72:37particularly their Torah commentary series,

72:40the five different volumes that offers

72:42a lot of additional information that's wonderful.

72:46Robert Alter, also in 2019/2020,

72:49published his own translation of the Hebrew Bible,

72:51which is a wonderful edition.

72:53It's a more literary translation

72:55and Robert Alter is coming to it from the perspective

72:58of a scholar of English language and literature.

73:03So it's very, very literary

73:05and the notes are usually focused

73:07on how the Hebrew is functioning literarily.

73:10So that's a wonderful translation.

73:11I always also highly recommend.

73:14And then if you're looking for a New Testament,

73:17I would highly recommend the Jewish Annotated New Testament,

73:21which is the NRSV's New Testament,

73:23but the explanatory notes are all composed by Jewish scholars.

73:28And I believe Amy Jill Levine and Mark V. Brettler

73:32are two of the contributors to that.

73:35So it tries to give contextualize what's going on

73:39in the New Testament using early Jewish literature

73:42and tradition and things like that to explain

73:44how this makes sense within the context of early Judaism.

73:47So that's a wonderful translation as well.

73:50Yeah, I highly recommend that.

73:51And then there's also an Oxford Annotated Apocrypha

73:55if you wanna see those texts that were later taken out.

73:57And I didn't mention this,

73:58but when the King James Version

74:01was first translated and published,

74:02it included the Apocrypha.

74:04It did? Wow, I did.

74:06That is crazy.

74:08I had no idea.

74:09The now Martin Luther moved the Apocrypha,

74:13which was originally kind of just interspersed

74:15across the Old Testament,

74:17moved it all into its own section.

74:19So you had Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament.

74:22That's how Protestants originally

74:23were publishing their Bibles.

74:24In the 19th century,

74:25you had the British and Foreign Bible Society in the UK,

74:29and you had the American Bible Society,

74:31and you guessed it, America,

74:34who were trying to place Bibles in every home in America.

74:38They were doing a big push to try to distribute Bibles

74:41and to save cost on printing.

74:43They said, you know what?

74:44Let's just pull the Apocrypha out.

74:46Let's just do Old and the Testament.

74:48That became the norm.

74:50And that de facto omission of the Apocrypha

74:55became the de jury Protestant Bible.

74:58So we omit the Apocrypha from most Protestant Bibles today

75:02because we wanted to save costs on printing.

75:05- Wow.

75:06You know, they could have saved a lot more,

75:07that you can cut any, all the books if you want.

75:10(laughing)

75:12- Just, you can just do a hard cover with some blank pages,

75:16and so if you get the NRSV,

75:18that's actually going to include the Apocrypha as well.

75:21- Okay, that's good.

75:22- Yeah, and then there's one good translation

75:25of the Gospels by a translator named Sarah Rudin

75:29that I find very interesting.

75:31And it uses transliteration for some of the names

75:34and the place names.

75:35So it might feel a little unusual,

75:37a little alien to some folks,

75:39but it's a wonderful literary translation of the Gospels.

75:42But I don't think there's been a really good

75:44outstanding new translation of the New Testament

75:47like we have with Robert Alter's Hebrew Bible.

75:49So when people ask about a translation

75:51of the New Testament, I'm a little stuck.

75:53I would recommend the NRSV and there's not too much else.

75:57But you're going to find in those translations

76:00that some of those verses that were not

76:04in the original manuscripts,

76:05those are just going to be plucked out,

76:06and they're just going to leave that verse number out.

76:10So be prepared to be shocked

76:13if you've never seen that before.

76:15- I am going to make my own recommendation.

76:18I know that it blows your mind

76:20that I'm going to make my own recommendation.

76:22But if you want to have a good time

76:24and learn very little about what the Bible actually says,

76:28I definitely recommend checking out the message.

76:31It is a version that I stumbled on

76:34when I was looking at different versions

76:36of the Lord's Prayer,

76:37which go to Matthew, find the Lord's Prayer in the message.

76:41It's a treat.

76:44But yeah, you won't be enlightened in terms

76:47of like what the Bible actually is all about,

76:50but it's a lot of fun, anyway.

76:53All right, well, I know that we could go on

76:56for hours and hours about this,

76:57but we need to stop.

76:58Thank you so much, Dan, for enlightening us on this,

77:01and maybe we'll revisit some of these ideas

77:04down the road of pace.

77:05- I think that'd be cool.

77:07- But I think, yeah, I think for now we'll cut it off.

77:09If you, dear listener, dear viewer,

77:12would like to become a part of helping to make this show go,

77:17we encourage you to become a patron

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77:24Otherwise, you can always write into us

77:26if you have any questions, comments, or observations.

77:30Our email address is contact@dataoverdogma.pod.com.

77:35And other than that, we'll see you next week.

77:39- Have a good day, everybody.

77:40(upbeat music)

77:49(bell chimes)