Beware “The Pure Word” New Testament!

There are way too many English Bible translations and way too many people claiming – as in this case – to have the one true guide to its interpretation.

These are the stars that I sail by when I evaluate a Bible version or guide.

Fortunately, one new publication, The Pure Word – New Testament (TPW), has made my job simple: the TPW, far from helping the Bible student, in fact takes the reader farther away from the plain sense of scripture. This is why my thoughts in this article will seem brusque and more black-and-white than usual.

Part One: What is “The Pure Word”?

What they claim to do and what they have actually done are two different things. They claim to have (at long last!) gone back to the original Greek to produce the perfect and pure paraphrase of the King James Version, one which they imply will take away the misunderstandings in the Christian church to evaporate! [see their video on their page] So Arminians and Calvinists, Baptists and Pentecostals will finally be able to see the light and shake hands all around!

Let the buyer beware of claims that a new key has finally, after 2000 years, unlocked the true hidden meaning of the Bible. That is why my stomach clenched when the first thing I saw was “The Pure Word is an unprecedented New Testament resource, over 20-years in the making, that reveals the original Koine-Greek depths-of-meaning from the time of Christ…[allowing the reader to] experience deeper scriptural meaning that has never before been achievable in English.” Oh, and their claim that all, 100%, of Bible translations are “riddled with inaccuracies that never referenced the original Greek scriptures” and “incredibly rarely did they ever go back and look at even of the few original Greek words. Never mind this project which took over 20 years and a major scholarly group looking at every single word in the Greek.”

This last statement is either incredible hubris or simply a complete lack of awareness of what English Bible translators have been doing in the original languages for the past 500 years! (more…)

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Published in: on August 4, 2018 at 3:00 pm  Comments (6)  
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Is the NIV 2011 a Satanic, Homosexual, PC Bible? Part I

Search for comments on the new NIV by Google, and you will find bloggers talking about its “feminist agenda”, “Satan’s lies”, “end-time deception” and that “the homosexual community is excited about the new perversion of the Bible.” (They provided no statements from gay groups, expressing their glee). At its annual convention last year, the Southern Baptist Convention went so far as to condemn “this inaccurate translation of God’s inspired Scripture”, implying that it does so because as Baptists they believe that God’s Word is infallible – and by implication the NIV is not.

What’s the fuss? After all, every Bible version is updated and revised over the years; these revisions do not imply that the message of God’s Word is being altered: the NASB of today is not the original, but the 1995 revision. Nor is the “original” King James the 1611 version; it was updated continuously over the centuries. The ESV wins the prize: it was a revision of the National Council of Churches’ RSV (1971 edition); the ESV was published in 2001, revised in 2007 and revised again in 2011. The NIV itself was revised in 1984, and hardly anyone noticed. But few updates have caused a stir as the NIV 2011 has.

I’m not capable of evaluating the whole edition; nevertheless, for the last decade I have worked closely with the Greek text of 1 Corinthians, writing a Spanish-language commentary for CLIE publishers in Barcelona, Spain; my comments therein are based on the Spanish version of the NIV, called the Nueva Versión Internacional (NVI). Therefore, I do regard myself as qualified to evaluate the NIV 2011 rendering of 1 Corinthians, and I will do so with reference to NIV84, the Nueva Versión Internacional, the Nestle-Aland 27th edition of the Greek Testament [which is identical to the newer 28th edition] and other translations. Since 1 Corinthians is a long book, we will look just at chapters 1-7.

I happen to believe that calling a Bible “satanic” is a fantastically grave act, and one that must be backed up with a careful evaluation of evidence, not with broad-brush comments that it is a “politically-correct perversion”.

I’ve gone through and compared 1 Cor 1-7 word-for-word and will mark the important changes in the NIV 2011 as an improvement on the 1984 version, inferior to the 1984, or equal to the 1984. Other alterations, which are not listed, are mere changes of order or the substitute for one word for another (for example, “in” becomes “within” in 1 Cor 1:5). Part II of this essay will deal with the hot button issue of gender and the use of English pronouns in Bible translation; here in Part I we will deal with everything else.

My broad conclusion with reference to 1 Cor 1-7 is that the NIV 2011 is generally more reliable than the Spanish NVI and even more trustworthy than the NIV84 – that is, that it is the best NIV of all. If anyone wishes to respond to my comments, please focus on these facts rather than sweeping generalizations; one can access the NIV 2011 here. (more…)

Published in: on April 11, 2012 at 6:48 pm  Comments (13)  
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