About translations… Many people ask, "What translation do you use in church?" They usually ask that question when they are thinking about buying a new Bible. So, here are the cliff notes on Bible translations.

Bible translations fall into one of three categories: formal, functional, and free. Formal translations (King James, New American Standard) seek to preserve the word usage and word order of the Hebrew OT and Greek NT. Formal translations are often considered the "most" literal.

Functional translations (New International) seek to put into the receiver language (in our case, English) the meaning or sense of the original Hebrew OT and Greek NT.

Free translations (The Living Bible, The Message) are paraphrases that place a priority on readability.

The following may help you understand the difference between formal and functional translations. Consider the following paragraph about a college student named Mary.

Mary is a student at the university in engineering. She got a summer internship with the county working on the erosion on the bank of a river. She hopes to bank most of her summer earnings. On her way home from work on her first day on her job she stopped at a bank to open a savings account."

The above paragraph uses the term "bank" three different ways: to refer to part of a riverbed; to describe saving money; a building. In a formal translation, the term bank would be used in all three sentences. In a functional translation the three terms would be translated to reflect the meaning the term had for the original readers. In the same way, the New American Standard translates the NT Greek term "sarx" as "flesh" whereas the New international translates it as "sin nature" or "body" or "natural descent" or "human nature". In each of those cases the King James translates the term as "flesh." The question is - did the original readers understand the term "sarx" as "flesh" in every occurrence or did they attach a different meaning to the term based on the context?

For the first 11 years of my life as a pastor I used the New American Standard Bible, a formal translation. For the past 16 years I have used the New international Version, a functional translation. In this discussion keep in mind that the most important thing is not so much which translation you use. The most important thing is actually sitting down regularly and reading the translation you have.

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