Epistle to the Ephesians 6.13-17

[Hibernicus]

Here are four excellent examples of why referring to the original GREEK is useful, but also requires someone familiar with the military equipment of the era.

A scholar might read "aspis" and translate it it as "shield" etcetcetc

4 translations:

"Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. Stand firm therefore, having girded your loins with truth, and having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; in addition to all, taking up the shield of faith with which you will be able to extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God."

Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:

Clothe yourselves with the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood,but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness,against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. For this reason, take up the full armor of God so that you may be able to stand your ground on the evil day, and having done everything, to stand. Stand firm therefore, by fastening the belt of truth around your waist, by putting on the breastplate of righteousness, by fitting your feet with the preparation that comes from the good news of peace, and in all of this, by taking up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvationand the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

[Magnus]

Where are those different ones from Hib? Thanks for the different versions.

[Hibernicus]

Matt

it was way too easy.. and there are more!

I grabbed them off the Net

Searched the by name, chapter and verse

Search also by Bible name

King James Version, New English Bible, Roman Catholic Bible, Masonic Bible and on and on and on


Sean

[Octavianvs]

indeed I am wondering how much is affected by translations alone

[Jona Lendering]

indeed I am wondering how much is affected by translations alone

The Filioque debate is partly caused by a mistranslation; what in Latin needs to be said with two extra words, filio que, can in Greek be expressed through the verb. I never understood the details, but this is what the Pope and the Patriarch agreed during Second Council of Florence, in 1439.

[Hibernicus]

indeed I am wondering how much is affected by translations alone

and political motivation, and religious intent of the author(s) and translators and scribes and later scribes and the scribes who scribed using older sources not known to one or another scribe and biases and other passages and how they were or were not translated and scribed accurately or with what intent or biases........

Sean

[Octavianvs]

it would be like getting jack and jill went up the hill to get some water from jim and joan went to thier spot of woods on the hill again with a few liters af gin.

[M. Demetrius]

Hibernicus, the "multiple translation = changed meaning" theory isn't really valid, as we have copies (and fragments of copies) of many of the New Testament books only a few transcriptions removed from the originals, and they read just like our modern versions. The differences are in the choices of translation words, like "armor", "breastplate", etc., not in the underlying words or their meanings (as in the military analogy of thorax protection, for example).

The Old Testament is no different. Once believed to be so very far removed from the older texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown essentially identical writings when compared to other ancient and modern Hebrew Bibles. Since Hebrew letters are also numbers, the copyists/scribes used a numerical check to make sure each line was the same as the one they were copying, and if there was an error, they either noted it as such in the margin, explaining what the error was, or discarded the copy and started over. One of the scrolls apparently contains the entire book of Isaiah (about 9 meters long).

The various Bible texts we have are much closer in copy number from the original than, say, De Bello Gallico's oldest, and yet it is considered reliably copied. Within the context of a particular passage, you can rest easy that most of the modern translations (not the paraphrases) follow the oldest available texts as closely as the translators could. But I'm skewing off the original thread.

[Octavianvs]

just when i thought i had it now i am totally lost :? oops: .

[Hibernicus]

Skew away!

Part of the problem especially with "new testament" is that we do not have the originals.. and all we have are oldest copies... and we now know that the oldest copy of an epistle (for example) may not be the most accurate since the preponderence of newer copies (dated to within a few years or decades of the oldest) agree with each other and contradict the "oldest"... all of them with thousands of small and large changes, copying errors, deliberate alterations, alterations undone or altered again, with more copying errors and typos, toss in some ancient translations : Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English sometimes using translations of what we now know to be really bad translations with all their deliberate altertions to make one "letter" or "witness" consistent with another or consistent with a preconceived idea of how to present one aspect or another or how to portray individuals. Do you use a 4th C translation of Aramaic into Latin as a source or an older Aramaic version discovered in the 19th C? But what if that Aramaic version is also known to be a copy? And knowing that copying errors occur and that deliberate laterations occur.. which do you believe?

But, the alternate translations I posted as examples are a hint of what modern scholars have to deal with when using older copies..

The early translators changed pomegranate to apple so that they'd have to stop explaining to Europeans what a pomegranate was. Eve handed Adam a pomegranate. Yet modern translations with all the info they have and claims of trying to translate accurately still leave in "apple" because they believe that the species of fruit isn't important (Eve and the avacado? .. cacao pod? ... stalk of maize? .. ahah... tomato!!)

So why not with descriptions of armor and weapons? Folk don't know the differences between an Aspis and a Scutum (but what variety of scutum!?!).. it's only important to know that it was a "shield". Now "shield" has become a metaphor when it may have actually been important to the oroginal author or scribe to use the word he chose.

Can't you imagie Paul's scribe: "But sir, those city folk in Ephesus don't know what a scutum is. They use the word "aspis"....

[Jona Lendering]

Part of the problem especially with "new testament" is that we do not have the originals.. and all we have are oldest copies... and we now know that the oldest copy of an epistle (for example) may not be the most accurate since the preponderence of newer copies (dated to within a few years or decades of the oldest) agree with each other and contradict the "oldest"...

I think this a bit too skeptical. True, for about two centuries now, the variants have been investigated, and it turns out that manuscripts do indeed contain errors, and that any "next generation copy" contains the errors of its original, plus new ones. So it potentially becomes a mess. However, we can evaluate those errors and establish families of manuscripts, and once this has been done, we are in a good position to reconstruct the original text. (See the Wiki article on Textual Criticism, which is good or -if we take Wiki standards- excellent.)

The most important edition of the NT is the Nestle Aland, now in its 27th edition. I think scholars are able to reconstruct the original text of the NT with a very high degree of precision. Any "new" text that is discovered (for example in the Egyptian desert) is a check - and it hardly ever happens that we have to reconsider the NA; the differences between the NA27 and my own NA25 are minimal.

The most amazing this is, perhaps, that of the 8,000 verses of the NT, 5,000 verses have no variants at all. Every manuscript (and there are dozens of them) contains exactly the same information.

[M. Demetrius]

We don't have the originals of the Iliad, the Odyssey, De Bello Gallico, Beowulf, Ovid's poetry, heck, just about any of the ancient documents and writings. Yet there's not a lot of controversy over "correct translations" in those. That argument, Jona, I agree, is somewhat skeptical.

I think the big fuss over Biblical authenticity is an overglossing of what the book claims to be, and rebellion against that. How do I know? I used to be in that camp, and was a vocal detractor, albeit a profoundly uninformed one.

The early translators changed pomegranate to apple so that they'd have to stop explaining to Europeans what a pomegranate was. Eve handed Adam a pomegranate. Yet modern translations with all the info they have and claims of trying to translate accurately still leave in "apple" because they believe that the species of fruit isn't important (Eve and the avacado? .. cacao pod? ... stalk of maize? .. ahah... tomato!!)

I wonder which modern translations you are using, Hibernicus, that call the fruit "apple". All the ones I have simply call it the "...fruit of the tree [of the knowledge of good and evil]...." None of them say apple. If it were an apple, it would be foreign to us, odds are, because ther is no such tree around today, and the Garden is no longer accessible, you know? None of the texts say pomegranite, either, in this context, though there are numerous times pomegranite is used in the OT. Do you have a reference text for the "early translators changed..." statement?

Sources I've used to support my view: King James, New American Standard, New International Version, Young's Literal Translation, Contemporary English Version (paraphrase), Amplified Bible (paraphrase).

You can search translations here in many languages: http://www.biblegateway.com/

[Jona Lendering]

We don't have the originals of the Iliad, the Odyssey, De Bello Gallico, Beowulf, Ovid's poetry, heck, just about any of the ancient documents and writings. Yet there's not a lot of controversy over "correct translations" in those.

The problem is actually worse than this. If we have two manuscripts, we can see a difference, and realize there's a problem. If we have only one manuscript (e.g., Tacitus' Germania), we do not have to think about the correct reading, and immediately accept the text as correct. However, in 40% of the cases, there must be an error in it (if the statistics of the NT can be applied more generally). NONE of our sources is reliably transmitted, the Bible being exceptional because there are so many copies.

Please note that the copiists faithfully rendered words that must have struck them as weird. Think of all the latinisms (speculator, centurion, prefect...). And how do you want to open the alabastron in Marc 14.3, unless you have a sledge hammer? The text is really insane, but the copiists never "improved" it. (The solution in this case is that "alabastron" was in the first century a technical term for a type of phial now known as Isings 11; but this expression was no longer used in the second century. The text was no longer understood in the fourth century.)

[M. Demetrius]

In my worldview of Biblical interpretation, at least, the writers (assuming what we have now is exactly what they wrote, in accurately translated form) knew what they were writing, and the people that first received the epistles, etc., knew exactly what that meant. In a nutshell, that is the literal interpretation viewpoint. Our task in correctly reading any ancient text is to try to wrap as much understanding of life, times, culture and technology around what we read, and try to read it through the eyes of the people to whom it was originally written. Apply Occam's Razor, and you can get the simple meaning, just about all the time. Mark Twain is credited with saying, "It's not the things in the Bible I don't understand that bother me: it's the things I do understand."

I have studied a little Spanish, a little Latin, and once was fluent in Italian, and know a few words in a couple of other languages (mostly, "I'm sorry, I don't speak [language], do you speak English?"). I can say that in that limited study, I have encountered quite a few words that simply don't translate in a single word to English.

New Testament Greek is certainly no exception: sometimes a prefix added to a root appended by a suffix needs six English words to get close. That's not mistranslation, though, it's just the nuances of different languages.

I think I've been a willing participant in dragging this topic entirely off its original. Forgive me, ok? I got involved in the conversation's turn.

[Hibernicus]

All I'm getting at is that using any translation to determine, as per this thread, what kind of armor or shield is referenced is impossible.

Hibernicus