I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?

  You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics, explains;

Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.

  You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.

  Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more complicated when you add translation from other languages.

  That is why it is important when studying scriptures to look at various translations. The word of God is pure, but our translations are sometimes lacking.  Some folks will latch on to a favorite translation at the expense of clarity that can be found in multiple ones.  Our teaching can then be confusing to those that are not up to date on the ancient uses or take passages in a way differently than what it really means.

  Trying to promote a single translation as the end all and be all might cause some to view the Bible as unreliable; if our translation uses the terms for mythical creatures such as unicorns and satyrs.  Some might be misled into thinking the Bible contains the holiday of Easter or that man is born inherently sinful since some translations have those quirks.  “Quit you like men” doesn’t have the same ‘act manly’ connotation today than it did in 1901.  If might be better to use a translation that will link what is said to the words people can understand best.

 Translation battles often become more about why my pick is better than yours, rather than looking at translations as tools to help us get to the original meaning.  It’s more important to know what the person meant when he wrote it rather than what one group did while interpreting it.  That is best done by looking at the whole rather than focusing on one work.

  Like any tool, some translations are better at multiple jobs, some have specific uses. Some are of high quality, some of low quality.  Some are easy to use, some require some special skills.  We should work to make sure we have an understanding of all the tools so we can use them to help build us into the person God wants us to be.