Diagnostic Bible Verses by Dan McClellan, Transcript

(97) Diagnostic Bible Verses - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FybnqoVgNL8

Transcript:

(00:00) What Bible passages will I flip to in a new translation of the Bible to get a brief sense of how good I think the translation is? Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan. I'm a scholar of the Bible and religion, and I'll usually start in a very good place to start, that is, the beginning. Not the absolute beginning, but the beginning of something, specifically the beginning of Genesis 1. I'll check to see how the translation renders the very first word of the Hebrew Bible, which is likely in the construct, at least that's what most scholars agree on these days. What that means is that it doesn't mean "in the beginning something happened" in an absolute sense. Interpreting it in the construct sense would mean it's saying "in the beginning of something," specifically "in the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth." In other words, it's a temporal clause that then goes on to describe the state of affairs at the point in time when God began to create. You can look in the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version, Robert Alter's new translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish Publication Society's translation of the Tanakh, and several other translations. What they render is "when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was tohu vavohu," however you want to translate that, "and the spirit of God or the divine wind or whatever was hovering or moving over the face of the deep or the abyss." If a translation has "in the beginning," then I know they're not up to date on the scholarship and they're not willing to deviate from the tradition. So, the tyranny of tradition is exercising control over that translation. Then I'll usually flip the page and look at Genesis 2:19 because in Genesis 1, animals are created before humanity is created on day six. In Genesis 2, the animals are not created until after Adam had been created and placed in the Garden of Eden. Then in verse 19, it says, "And then God created the animals from the dust of the ground." Again, if the tyranny of tradition is exercising influence over this translation, specifically the tradition of inerrancy and univocality and inspiration, then a translator might try to obscure the reality of this contradiction between the two creation accounts and will render the verb at the beginning of verse 19 as a pluperfect, as we see in the NIV and the ESV. So that passage will read, "And now God had created all the animals or formed all the animals from the dust of the ground," to make it sound like this is an event that occurred prior to the creation of Haadam, the human. That's just a mistranslation, pure and simple. There is not a good case to make for interpreting the vav conversive at the beginning of Genesis 2:19 as a pluperfect. So that's another place I'll look. Then at some point, I will usually flip to Deuteronomy 32:8-9. There's a very interesting textual variant at the end of verse 8. In the King James Version, this passage talks about the Most High dividing up the nations or the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel, Ben Israel. That's how the Masoretic Text, the traditional Jewish manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, reads. However, we know from many different manuscripts of the Septuagint that the translators would render either "children of God" or "angels of God" rather than "children of Israel." Scholars concluded that since the Septuagint translators liked to interpret Ben Elohim in the Hebrew, "children of God," as "angels of God," that was probably the earlier reading, "children of God." Then we discovered a manuscript at Qumran that reads precisely that. So most translations, if they're staying up to date with the scholarship and are willing to let new manuscript discoveries influence how they interpret the text, will have something like "divine beings" or "gods" or "children of God" or "sons of God" at the end of verse 8. But verse 9 is also interesting because it goes on to say, "And Adonai's portion was his people, Jacob his share of the inheritance." This sounds an awful lot like Adonai is among the Ben Elohim, the children of God, and is receiving the nation of Israel from a separate deity named Elyon or the Most High. In the Masoretic Text, verse 9 begins with a particle "ki" that can be interpreted in a disjunctive way. Some translations will say "however" or "but" or something like that to make it sound like what's going on in verse 9 is a deviation from what's described in verse 8. The idea there is that the Most High distributed the nations but then decided to keep Israel for themselves. Again, we can go to the Septuagint, and the beginning of verse 9 suggests that the translator had in their source text "vav" rather than "ki," which would just be the standard past-time narrative sequence pattern, meaning it's just describing in more detail what's going on, which would lend to the interpretation of Adonai as distinct from Elyon. So I'm interested in seeing how translators are treating both verse 8 and verse 9. Then I'll look at places like 2 Samuel 21:19, where we have Elhanan killing Goliath, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver's beam, which is exactly how the Goliath that David was supposed to have killed is described in 1 Samuel 17. This is probably an earlier tradition, but in the much later 1 Chronicles 20:5, the text seems to have been fiddled with, and so it says that Elhanan killed somebody named Lahmi, who was described as the brother of Goliath. In the King James Version, in 2 Samuel 21:19, they have added "the brother of" to the text to harmonize it with 1 Chronicles 20:5. Rarely, but sometimes, you will see contemporary translations do the same, where they'll just add "brother of" arbitrarily to 2 Samuel 21:19, and that's simply not in the Hebrew. So that's another example of the translators overruling what's actually in the manuscripts to harmonize a text that they expect to be univocal. Then I'll also check some passages in the New Testament to see how scholars are handling New Testament text-critical issues because there are about 16 passages that are commonly omitted from contemporary translations of the New Testament. We know they weren't there in the earliest manuscripts; we know that this is not what the authors wrote, something that was added in by later scribes and editors. For instance, Matthew 17:21, where Jesus tells his disciples, "This kind doesn't come out except by fasting and prayer," is not in the earliest manuscripts. We even have in Codex Sinaiticus a later scribe who has scribbled that verse into the margins of the manuscript and then put a little symbol down in the text to indicate that's where it should be inserted. In still later manuscripts, you have that inserted directly into the main body of the text. We can reconstruct the different stages of the manuscript where this passage was probably pulled over from somewhere in Mark and originally scribbled into the margins and then later on inserted directly into the body of the text. It's likely not original to the Gospel of Matthew; the author of the Gospel of Matthew did not write that. Many contemporary translations will just omit it, but if it's in there, then that means your translation was unwilling to deviate from the more traditional reading. In my opinion, that's a strike against a translation. So those are the main places I'll look when I get a new translation of the Bible, just to see in general how the translators are handling some of these interpretive text-critical issues, some of these passages that problematize or undermine a univocal reading or an inherent reading of the text. Then I'll go in usually and also look at how they render certain passages, what the language register is like, how accessible it is, whether it prioritizes literary concerns over concerns for accessibility, what kind of language it uses, and whether it's something that someone who is a second language speaker of English or someone who is younger might be able to understand or not. I'll also try to understand what the translation is trying to be because a translation is successful to the degree that it achieves its rhetorical goals, which has to do with the target audience and things like that, how they want it to function. That can be different from one translation to another, but those are the main things that I will look at just to get kind of a bird's-eye view of what I think about a translation before I dive in deeper and take a closer look. The fit for this video is for all those who aren't into the whole brevity thing.

Summary

Dan McClellan, a Bible and religion scholar, evaluates new Bible translations by examining specific passages to assess their adherence to contemporary scholarship versus traditional interpretations. He begins with Genesis 1 to see if translations reflect the construct interpretation of the Hebrew Bible's first word. He checks Genesis 2:19 for consistency in creation accounts and Deuteronomy 32:8-9 for textual variants regarding divine beings. McClellan also examines 2 Samuel 21:19 for harmonization with 1 Chronicles 20:5 and reviews New Testament passages often omitted in early manuscripts, like Matthew 17:21. He evaluates translations based on their handling of text-critical issues, language accessibility, and rhetorical goals, aiming to understand their target audience and purpose.