Reply to Why do some care about rules about gay people but ignore rule about shrimp, rape, and stoning women?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I translate documents quite often and always find it fascinating that people take the Bible literally when they haven't actually read the original scrolls. Translation ALWAYS involves quite a bit of interpretation on the part of the person translating. You don't just translate "word for word." (If you don't believe me, read 10 different Bibles from the past 400 years cover to cover to compare the different sentences for the same books.)

Lots of words have layers of meanings that do not follow that word into another language.  You can take a thing and find a word in each of 2 different languages to refer to that thing, but in one language the word *only* means that thing, nothing else, while in another language the word for that thing can also refer to something else entirely (just look in the English dictionary to see the many meanings behind individual words). Or a language may have only one single word that means a particular object. But in a different language, there might be 2 or more words that can mean that same object.

Translation is nuance. But it's also never, ever perfect.  See the Wikipedia entry for malakai above, for example.

Moreover, the oldest scrolls we have for biblical texts are almost assuredly not the original texts that whoever originally composed them sat down to write, pen to papyrus. And you know, when it comes to scribes copying texts to send out in the world, scribes make mistakes. Or they make their own corrections and revisions.  How do we know this? Because of ancient texts that have different versions, that's how.

So. You may feel that the Bible is an unalterable word of God, to be read "literally." But any scholar of ancient texts knows that there are multiple versions of those texts out there and it is debatable which are the closest to the original source.  When you go back to all the ancient sources out there, you'll find a paragraph or phrase here, a sentence or words there, in some scrolls but not others. The finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls changed translations of the Bible just in the past century, adding in new passages. Who decides which versions are the true word of God?

Never mind the ongoing debate between Protestants vs. Catholics over which books should be accepted into the Bible in the first place...[/quote]

The issue of words is worse for the Hebrew bible, because for the period earleir than the dead sea scrolls, we have hardly any writings in Hebrew other than the bible - and some words appear only once or twice in the bible, so it can be very difficult to tell what they meant in their time. People can look at other Semitic languages, but that is hardly proof. [/quote]

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