Comments on NLT Blog: The NLT Through the Years: Galatians 3:26-28

Thank you for your blog. I finally found an answe...

2008-11-28T16:18:00.000-06:00

Thank you for your blog. I finally found an answer to my questions today.

English is my second language and I found the NLT clear and easier to read. I was using my kids' for reading and for memorizing. I remember Ann Graham Lotz said that this translation was meant for being read in public. I thought it was perfect for that, too. After my kids lost their Bibles, I wanted to get another one just like it but noticed they were different and couldn't figure out why. Now I know. Mine was the first edition.

Akemi

Interesting blog! I wish other major translations ...

2008-11-19T11:05:00.000-06:00

Interesting blog! I wish other major translations have a blog like this too. Hmm... let me google the other translations to verify that :)

I just don't like the idea that a Bible translation can be revised so frequently. How can I build trust in a translation that is revised within 3 short years?

And as poor John Hart found out, he bought a Bible that was obsoleted practically immediately.

A Bible is suppose to last a lifetime! I still have the NIV that I have been reading since 1985 and I have grown up on those precious words that have been a rock to me throughout these past 20 over years. These precious words have been memorised, meditated on, chewed over, struggled with and finally ministered with to touch lives...

Whatever happened to the idea that the Word Of God is unchanging? :) Ok ok I know the original languages don't change but you know what I mean right? :p

I can accept a revision to update arcade language like the NASB did in 1995 but it was done after almost 20 years! And it has been stable for 13 years now.

I really doubt anyone will take the NLT seriously if it is going to revise itself every few years or so.

Keith, Thanks for the comment on Dave Enjoys. I'm ...

2008-11-07T23:16:00.000-06:00

Keith, Thanks for the comment on Dave Enjoys. I'm glad you liked the list. I'll try and get my hands on one of these NLT Study Bible's. I lead a youth ministry at my local church and am always looking for new ways of connecting the student's with God's Word...Perhaps this would be one. Take care!

I actually have seen a copy of the New Translation...

2008-11-02T18:22:00.000-06:00

I actually have seen a copy of the New Translation, but not at work.

It has come up ocasionally in conversations with my direct boss, Mark Norton, as we have talked about the history of the NLT. I actually saw a copy in a used bookstore while on vacation in St. Petersburg, but it was selling for $25, so I didn't pick it up.

I haven't spent any time reading through the translation, but this passage is a very "tight" translation of the Greek. The only two things that are different from a standard formal translation are the translation "children" in v.26 and the opening of v.27 ("all of you who"). It also smooths out the connectives in v.28 rather than showing the divergence in the third pair, but this is standard practice among the translations (NLTse and ESV2007 being the only exceptions I can think of). Another excellent translation in the "Tyndale" tradition. ;)

Thanks for posting it Rick!

Mark, I got my copy of the New Translation when it...

2008-11-02T13:32:00.000-06:00

Mark, I got my copy of the New Translation when it was first released and showed it to a friend of mine, Greg Bennett. He bought one and we both read it all the way through. Since it was published by Tyndale House, we saw it in relationship to the original Living Bible which we compared it to, but we also compared it a good bit to the NIV. Even though the New Translation was not yet mature (and never was to be), there were a number of passages that in our opinions were superior to the NIV.

Greg actually used the New Translation more than I did. I remember him quoting from it in a number of Bible studies and on handouts from that time.

Of course, that was back in the day before individuals such as yourself were easily accessible on the internet. I never thought about writing to Tyndale to see what the status of the New Translation was. And once the NLT was released in 1996, and after I compared the two together, I realized that the NLT had gone in a different direction.

The New Translation is therefore a bit of a novelty in Bible translation history, but, Mark, you can be glad to know that there were at least two of us who appreciated this version very much. I still pull it off the shelf now and then.

Wow--I'm surprised that anyone out there is famili...

2008-11-02T11:39:00.000-06:00

Wow--I'm surprised that anyone out there is familiar with The New Translation (not to be confused with the New Living Translation). I daresay my colleague Keith Williams has never even seen it!

For the rest of you, The New Translation was a personal project created by my father, Kenneth Taylor (better known as the translator of The Living Bible). He worked for a number of years on a dynamic-equivalence translation of the New Testament that would be more literal than The Living Bible but more understandable than the standard translations available in the marketplace. He worked with some top-notch Greek scholars at Wheaton College as reviewers of his work, but in the end they were unwilling to have their names publicly associated with the project.

About the time The New Translation was published, Tyndale House was beginning the process of pulling together a team of 90 Greek and Hebrew scholars to revise The Living BIble--the project that would eventually be published in 1996 as the New Living Translation.

Rick is correct in referring to The New Translation as Tyndale House's step-child. It saw only one printing, and it was never enthusiastically supported by the rest of the Tyndale team, even though their boss had created it.

I'm late coming to this party, but I thought I'd t...

2008-11-02T01:40:00.000-05:00

I'm late coming to this party, but I thought I'd throw in to the mix the rendering from Tyndale's "forgotten step child":

The New Translation 1990
For you are all children of God though faith in Christ Jesus. For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile,* there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
*3:28 Literally, "Greek."

Even before the NLT six years later, the New Translation had captured the shift to second person as well as adding a footnote for "Greek" in v. 28. This is also clearly the most literal of the various renderings represented here, especially with phrases such as "clothed yourselves with Christ"

Thanks for the link, Wayne. I hope to continue doi...

2008-10-30T10:41:00.000-05:00

Thanks for the link, Wayne. I hope to continue doing posts like this on approximately a monthly basis (though future installments will probably be limited to one verse at a time, if possible).

I like the new site for the BBB. Very clean, organized, and helpful. I especially like the header image :)

Keith, I've linked to your post at the new Better ...

2008-10-30T10:28:00.000-05:00

Keith, I've linked to your post at the new Better Bibles Blog location.

I like these kinds of posts. They show the care for accuracy that the Living team has had for its translation wordings.

No worries, Michael. Thanks for being part of the ...

2008-10-23T14:14:00.000-05:00

No worries, Michael. Thanks for being part of the conversation.

Sorry about that. Rough morning and no coffee. Y...

2008-10-23T12:46:00.000-05:00

Sorry about that. Rough morning and no coffee. Yes yes, children does look agreeable.

Here is a direct link to the post Chaka pointed ou...

2008-10-23T10:17:00.000-05:00

Here is a direct link to the post Chaka pointed out. It is definitely worth the read.

Rich Rhodes at the Better Bibles Blog had a great ...

2008-10-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Rich Rhodes at the Better Bibles Blog had a great post about "sons" versus "children." Go to this page and scroll down to "A view from the Planning Commission."

@john hart: The 2007 changes were rolled out in tw...

2008-10-23T09:42:00.000-05:00

@john hart: The 2007 changes were rolled out in two stages. In late 2005, one set of changes was introduced, but they weren't significant enough to issue a new copyright date. When the rest of the changes were finalized in late 2007, we needed to give a new copyright date. So Bibles printed between December 2005 and November 2007 will have some, but not all, of the 2007 changes.

The text will be stable for the forseeable future--at least the next 5 years.

@michael: Your alternative translation is another option that might work, but it can become clunky.

But again, your claim that the translation "children" is "changing the words of Scripture" is actually mistaken. "Children" is absolutely a good and widely accepted translation of the Greek word υἱοὶ, especially in this construction (υἱοὶ + genitive).

For example, look up Luke 1:16 in your ESV (or KJV). The Greek there is υἱοὶ Ἰσραηλ, and the translation is "children of Israel."

This is not an isolated case, and it is not a criticism of those translations. It is a reminder that there is not one-to-one correspondence between any two languages, and that there is always more than one way to accurately translate a text from one language to another.

"...they were "sons" in the figurative sense. So t...

2008-10-23T08:59:00.000-05:00

"...they were "sons" in the figurative sense. So the NLT renders the phrase in this context as "children of God.""

This makes absolutely no sense. It would be better, if we're changing the words of scripture, to just add "and daughters", using this logic.

In regard to the Post2004ScholarTable, which you l...

2008-10-22T22:29:00.000-05:00

In regard to the Post2004ScholarTable, which you linl to in your post, I have a large print NLT purchased earlier this year that has about half of the changes shown in the table. I guess it went to print when they were half done! The Bible is the "Personal Size, Large Print edition, ISBN-13: 978-1-4143-1871-4. I'm about half through the text comparing with the change list. Odd, huh?

@mike: I was thinking more about communicating mea...

2008-10-22T16:39:00.000-05:00

@mike: I was thinking more about communicating meaning than i was about English style. I think the relationship between 3:26ff and what precedes is causal/clarifying, not inferential. Either is a possible meaning for γὰρ.

I don't really like "because" here, as it would make the syntax quite awkward. Perhaps "you see" would be a good alternative to "for"?

@michael: I was going to say pretty much the same thing Mark Taylor said, only he said it better than I would have :)

@steven: The Living Bible had "made the winds," but the phrase has been "stirs up the winds" since the 1996 NLT. Perhaps I'll take a closer look at the passage in a future NLT Through the Years post.

I have a question about another passage altogether...

2008-10-22T11:56:00.000-05:00

I have a question about another passage altogether (sorry for changing the subject): Amos 4:13.

Having called the faithless Israelites to judgment with the powerful statement, "Prepare to meet your God, O Israel!", Amos then describes the God before whom they are being summoned to court.

In particular, my question is about the phrase rendered in the NLT as "stirs up the winds." The verb in the original is bara', the same one used in Genesis 1:1 and one in which God is exclusively the subject in the Qal stem.

The argumentation about whether or not bara' connotes creatio ex nihilo aside, "stirs up the winds" seems overly tame compared to the raw creative power of God, particularly in light of the uses of this verb elsewhere in the OT. Contextually, this translation doesn't seem to fit.

Any light on this particular choice? Was there a flow from earlier versions of the (N)LT?

I'll respond to Michael's query, but I want to rec...

2008-10-22T11:09:00.000-05:00

I'll respond to Michael's query, but I want to recast the question as follows: Why is huioi translated children?

The Greek word huios/huioi (sorry, I don't have a Greek font) means different things in different contexts, just as the English word "son" means different things in different contexts. The most common meaning of both huios and son is a male child in the next generation. (I am my father's son. Jeremy is my son.) But the term is also used figuratively. For instance, in Matthew 1:1 the NIV reads "A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham." This is a figurative use of huios/son, since Jesus was not a "son of David" in the same literal sense that Solomon was, and David was not a "son of Abraham" in the literal sense that Isaac was.

In Gal 3:26, Paul uses huioi in the figurative sense. The expression huioi theou (literally "sons of God") does not mean that Paul's readers were male descendants of God. His readers were both male and female, and they were "sons" in the figurative sense. So the NLT renders the phrase in this context as "children of God." It is still used figuratively, but the term "children" helps the English reader recognize that this figurative use applies to both males and females.

Why is son translated children? That's a differen...

2008-10-22T09:52:00.000-05:00

Why is son translated children? That's a different word...

I agree that for has for the most part been out of...

2008-10-21T22:19:00.000-05:00

I agree that for has for the most part been out of common usage for quite a while. (3 fors there). If you were to try to use it in that way in conversation or a casual blog post it would sound awkward. We're so used to it in the Bible we probably don't even notice it.

It's also used as the word because. I like how the HCSB uses because, in the Beatitudes for example.

Using the word for less would seem to fit with NLT's translation philosophy although I'm not a linguist or translator--just commenting on what things sound like to me.
Jeff

Hi Keith, in terms of English naturalness, I'm goi...

2008-10-21T21:30:00.000-05:00

Hi Keith, in terms of English naturalness, I'm going to have to disagree with you on your preference for "For" rather than "So" (But I'm also not the majority on this one too, I think).

There have been a number of debates about this on the Better Bibles Blog - that in English we don't use "For" to begin a sentence. But we do often use "so" - at least in everyday speech.