Bible Language Part 2 — Bible English - Glenn Conjurske
Bible Language
Introduction: The Nature of Bible Language
We have endeavored to demonstrate in a previous article that the New Testament was written in a language of its own, a language replete with theological terms that never formed any part of secular Greek. The Hebrew of the Old Testament is, of course, “Bible language,” for the Jews never had any other language, their religion being an integral part of their existence. In the wisdom of God—and we might say in the necessity of the case—God gave the Scriptures of both Testaments to a people already in possession of a religious heritage, and therefore in possession of a religious language, in which the oracles of God could be written. This being the case, we suppose that it was never the design of God that the written Scriptures should be given to a people not already in the possession of the divine religion. In the beginning, He established the church first, and then gave to it the Scriptures. This is our pattern, and it is certainly thus that missionary operations ought to be carried out. God sends men to preach the gospel. When that is done, and the church is established—and a Christian vocabulary necessarily established in the process—it will then be time to translate the Bible.
The Unspiritual Intellectualism of Modern Times
But the unspiritual intellectualism of modern times has completely repudiated this. Eugene A. Nida, “Ph.D.,” whose influence and principles have been one of the leading factors in corrupting the Bible in our times, wrote fifty years ago, “In many instances missionaries have fallen into the habit of using a specialized vocabulary, and the natives at the mission station have learned to mimic it to perfection, so that the translation may seem perfectly understandable to this small group but quite inadequate for more extensive distribution and use. Non-Christians may not understand all of the Bible, but it should make some sense to them. The real test of the translation is its intelligibility to the non-Christian, who should be reached by its message.”
Nida’s Criticism and Its Faults
But Nida faults the missionaries for doing precisely as they ought to do. That “specialized vocabulary” which he deplores is not only desirable, but necessary to a proper translation of the Bible. We entirely agree with him that “Non-Christians may not understand all of the Bible, but it should make some sense to them,” but the latter clause of this sentence is a gross overstatement of the difficulty. We doubt that it is possible to translate the Bible in such a way that will not “make some sense,” even to the most ignorant and ungodly, while it remains certain that they will “not understand all” of it. But Nida grossly overstates the difficulty, thus to give countenance to an over-reaction against it. The real test of a translation is not its intelligibility to the ungodly, but its faithfulness to the original. Let it be faithful to the original, and those whose hearts are in tune with its Author will understand it. God gave the Bible to His own people, and it was evidently never His design to replace the evangelist with the Bible.
The Fruit of Misguided Approaches to Translation
We grant that the opposite plan may bear a certain kind of fruit. This was notably the case in the early days of missions in Burmah, where a widespread spirit of inquiry—though but few converts—was established primarily by the broadcast circulation of the printed page, including portions of the Scriptures. Yet concerning Adoniram Judson, the founder of that mission and its most spiritual man—as well as one of the most spiritual missionaries of all time—we are told, “But far more important than the work of translating and distributing tracts, catechisms, and portions of the Scriptures, was the oral preaching of the Gospel. For this Mr. Judson had rare aptitude, and in it he won his most signal triumphs. While engaged in the necessary work of translation, he was always pining for the opportunity of imparting the message of salvation with the living voice. In a letter to Dr. Bolles he says: `I long to see the whole New Testament complete, for I will then be able to devote all my time to preaching the Gospel from day to day; and often now the latter appears to be the more pressing duty. May the Spirit of the Lord be poured out!’ When eye meets eye, and the mind of an objector is confronted by a living, loving personality, he receives a deeper impression of religious truth than he can ever get from the leisurely perusal of a printed book. The press can never supplant the pulpit. The truth, which, when pressed home by the earnest voice of the speaker, carries with it conviction, and arouses the conscience, and kindles the affections, is often weak and thin when presented on the printed page.” This is the very truth, and very well spoken. Judson feared “that the Scriptures will be out of the press before there will be any church to receive them.”
The Priority of Preaching Over Printed Scriptures
Nevertheless, when the Scriptures were translated, Judson favored their widespread distribution, “a plan,” he said, “that will tell more effectually than any other to fill the country with the knowledge of divine truth.” He lived, however, to change his mind. “He spoke also of his favoring the distribution of so many Bibles, after his revision, as the greatest mistake of his life”—for the precise reason that there was no church to receive them. “He once said, in relation to a man who had stumbled on the Old Testament, and apostatized: `It is the last thing such a fellow as he ought even to have touched. I am more than ever convinced that our business is to propagate the Gospel, scatter the good news of salvation, and let everything else alone.” This may be too strongly stated, though certain dispensationalists will doubtless like it well enough as it is. But the fact is, the printed Bible is not what Burmah needed at that time, but the preached Gospel.
The Necessity of a Theological Vocabulary
This, however, is only a correlative point. The point upon which I insist here is that the church must be planted, its doctrines and heritage inculcated, and a theological language developed, before the Bible can be properly translated. And to translate the Bible into the language of a land in which Christianity has been but lately planted is necessarily a different matter than to translate it into a language in which Christianity has been established for centuries. Any such language certainly possesses a well-developed theological vocabulary, and a well-developed mode of religious speech, and that speech of course ought to be used in translating the Bible.
The Development of Bible Language in English
Now it is a fact as clear as the sunlight that we possess such a “Bible language” in English. Indeed, in a certain limited sense, we might almost say that English is Bible language. The contents of the Bible have so thoroughly permeated the customs and the thinking of English-speaking peoples that the English language itself has been thoroughly tinctured with them. That this was always the case we would not pretend, any more than we would pretend that there is a “Bible language” in every heathen tongue scattered over the globe. In order for any such Bible language to exist, there must first be a people of God, who are conversant with divine things. Such a people must, by the same process which took place in the Greek language, adapt their mother tongue to the things of God, and so raise it up from the level of the natural, or the pagan, to the divine and the spiritual. This process has of course long since been accomplished in English. We have a “Bible language,” and in the limited sense already mentioned, it might almost be said that English is a “Bible language.” Isaac Taylor wrote concerning the English language, nearly two centuries ago, “This language, now pouring itself over all the waste places of the earth, is the principal medium of Christian truth and feeling, and is rich in every means of Christian instruction, and is fraught with religious sentiment, in all kinds, adapted to the taste of the philosopher, the cottager, and the infant. Almost apart, therefore, from missionary labor, the spread of this language insures the spread of the religion of the Bible. The doctrine is entwined with the language, and can hardly be disjoined.”
The Prevalence of Bible Language in English
A great deal of this remains to the present day, so that the facts of revelation—God, Christ, hell, and damnation—are constantly on the tongues of the most profane and wicked of those who speak English. Not that they much understand the things of which they thus profanely speak. We live in a very shallow generation, which seldom thinks at all, and I would be the first to grant that most of those who use these sacred terms as profanity have never given a passing thought in all their lives to the meaning of those terms. They use them only as language which is profane, and use them with no grammatical sense at all. The only man I ever knew who actually knew how to curse was my grandfather. Nevertheless, the prevalence of such sacred language among the most ungodly is a proof of what English once was. We are well aware that the past few generations have seen an increasing secularization of life, and a steadily decreasing consciousness of divine things, so that the glowing account quoted above from Isaac Taylor is no longer true today. At least it is certainly not true in the same degree. Though much of the historical content of the Bible may remain entwined with the language, its theological content is largely lost.
The Continued Relevance of Bible English
Nevertheless, there remains among the people of God a “Bible language” in English, as surely as ever there was one. It is, in general, the language of the King James Version. This is true even of its archaic diction, and even the world knows it, so that when the men of the world wish to say something religious, they will often adopt archaic language for the purpose. They may do this facetiously, but still they do it. This is often done by shallow and ignorant folks, who do not know how to use the old English correctly, but still they are conscious that the old English is Bible English. An article on Bible versions in the secular Time magazine for Sept. 9, 1996, entitled “The Power of Babble” (sic), contains a good example of this. The end of the subtitle reads, “What hath they wrought,” while the article begins, “Yea, verily.” We do not relish such a facetious usage of the old English, but the fact that it is so used is proof enough that the world itself recognizes it as “Bible language.” The old English has been the “Bible language” of the English-speaking people for more than half a millennium, and only in the past generation or two has anyone dreamed of displacing it.
The Importance of Bible Language in Translation
Yet they have all partially abandoned it, and their principle of translating the Bible into common English will lead them always further down the same wrong path. It will lead them to take out the common theological language of the church, and put in its place something which they suppose to be the common language of the natural man.
The Necessity of Retaining Bible Language
But I must speak more particularly of this “Bible English.” Since I began to write this article, I have read the chapter on “The English Bible” in Lectures on the English Language, by George Perkins Marsh. In so doing I found that he repeatedly expressed my own thoughts exactly, in language as cogent and forcible as any which I could employ myself. This being the case, I supposed that I could do no better than to quote what he has said so well—to give my thoughts, that is, in his words—for I suppose it likely that the observations of such an authority on the English language will carry more weight than anything which I might say. Meanwhile, I highly recommend the careful perusal of the entire chapter. The book may no doubt be found in any good public or university library.
The “Consecrated Dialect” of the Bible
Marsh refers to this “Bible English” as a “consecrated diction,” saying, “Wycliffe and his school in the fourteenth, Tyndale early in the sixteenth, Coverdale, Cranmer, the Genevan, and other translators at a later period, had gradually built up a consecrated diction, which, though not, as it certainly was not, composed of a vulgar vocabulary, was, nevertheless, in that religious age, as perfectly intelligible to every English Protestant as the words of the nursery and the fireside.”
The Necessity of a Special Dialect for Theology
It may be necessary to remark upon this that the word “vulgar” as Marsh uses it is not to be taken in its modern sense of base or filthy. In its original meaning, the vulgar language is the common language of the people, and Marsh here rightly asserts that the vocabulary of the King James Version “certainly was not” the common language of the people, though perfectly intelligible to religious people. In this it was an accurate representation of the original from which it was rendered. It may be further necessary to remark that “Bible English” certainly did not begin with Wycliffe. It was in use four centuries before him. Yet the language was rapidly changing in those times, due undoubtedly to the inability of the masses to read and write, so that “Bible language” as we know it did not crystallize until some time after the Reformation. But whatever it may have been then, there is no question that it exists in a stable form now.
The Enduring Nature of Bible Language
Marsh repeatedly describes this “Bible English” as a “consecrated dialect,” a “sacred phraseology,” a “special nomenclature,” and a “religious dialect.” It is not only right, but absolutely necessary that such a Bible language should exist. The Bible itself could hardly exist without it. The subject matter of the Bible requires it. The same is true in every other specialized field. I recently read a very brief item on a football game in the local shopping paper, but I could not understand it. I could not understand the terminology—have no idea, for example, what a “sack” is. The same thing will certainly be the case when the ungodly, with no Christian background, read the Bible. This is necessarily so, and it is really folly to endeavor either to deny or to alter it. Every special field—from football to psychology—has its own language, which the uninitiated cannot understand. To attempt to produce a Bible, then, in the common language of the uninitiated—in the common language, that is, of non-Christians—is simple folly and ignorance.
Conclusion: The Necessity of Bible Language in Translation
On this theme, Marsh writes, “In fact, the English Bible sustains, and always has sustained to the general Anglican tongue, the position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unprofessional life; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art—all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard, that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean?”
These are words of solid wisdom. Marsh continues, “There is one important distinction between the dialect of the scriptures, considered as an exposition of a theology, and that of a science or profession. The sciences, all secular knowledges, in fact, are mutable and progressive, and of course, as they change and advance, their nomenclature must vary in the same proportion. The doctrine of the Bible, on the other hand, is a thing fixed and unchangeable, and when it has once found a fitting expression in the words of a given language, there is in general no reason why those words should not continue to be used, so long as the language of which they form a part continues to exist.”
Final Reflection
Marsh’s observations are indeed insightful and deserving of careful reflection. As we consider the language of the Bible, may we continue to appreciate its sacred diction, which communicates not only the truth of God’s word but also preserves the unique character of the Christian faith. The Bible language is a treasure to be preserved, and the task of translating the Bible must not forget this vital truth.