Do any other "modern-version-ers" besides me dislike the NIV?

"Children of wrath" is not an obsolete metaphore. And it is not the job of the translator to interpret the passage for us. The translator's job is to...hmm...translate. Hence why he is called a "translator".

In some places, I can see making a change to help us understand. But the children of wrath thing just doesn't warrant the change.

God gave us brains for us to think. Taking away everything challenging from the text of the Bible to help us "understand" just leads to Christians who don't know how to think. That leads to men like Brian McLaren who pick and choose from all religions to make their faith and Joel Osteen who doesn't talk about sin.

God inspired hard texts for a reason. The translators need to leave them hard and the churches need to be challenging their people. That is the way it's been for a long time. And I don't think it's time to change that now.

 

That arguement does not hold water. History is full of people that picked and chose what to believe and what to dismiss. David Koresh, Jim Jones, Mormons, ect. ring a bell. Some errant beliefs came when only one main Bible translation was used. Nevertheless, I prefer the more literal translations over the more dynamic ones. While the NIV does have its problems, it is not the worst one out there.

 

Oh there are deffinitely translations out there that are worse than the NIV. But the job of the translator is to translate the text, not interpret it for us. The NIV does a lot of interpreting...in fact, it interprets more than it translates. That would make it more of a paraphrase than a translation.

 

Hey Everyone,

Your putting other people's quotes into my mouth.

I think the NIV is a good translation and the one I prefer for preaching and teaching.

 

This was my point:

Let's see, the KJV translates "we all had our conversation" vs. the NIV's "all of us also lived among them." I wonder which one is more acurate?

In the very verse that someone was bad mouthing the NIV, we have the above words. Which is more accurate? The NIV or the KJV?

 

APuritanMindset said:

"Children of wrath" is not an obsolete metaphore.

Really. Who speaks like that today? Particularly when the relationship of "child of X" and "X" doesn't appear to be a parent/child one?

And it is not the job of the translator to interpret the passage for us. The translator's job is to...hmm...translate.

Translation is interpretation.

 

Puritan, I believe you know that a strictly-literal translation of Hebrew or Koine Greek into English would leave us with groups of words, rather than sentences as we understand them, as those languages operate more from word endings rather than the order of the words in a sentence, as English does. Therefore, the translators MUST apply their judgment as to how to arrange the English words within a sentence, and which adjectives, adverbs, punctuation, etc. to use when many of those clarifiers are not in the work being translated.

Have you ever used the translators within your PC to read a Greek or a Hebrew site? If so, have you noticed the rather singsong renderings? Would you want a BIBLE like that?

The AV translators picked & chose, rendering their work in English sentences & words according to their educated judgment. Thus, they have "Lucifer" at Isaiah 14:12, & "unicorn" at various places, to name some examples. And they made an occasional goof, such as "slew and hanged" in Acts 5:30. (However, I WILL defend their "unicorns", as they didn't know the exact meaning of the Hebrew "re'em", and seeing as how there was both a lion & a unicorn depicted on King James' coat-of-arms, they didn't know the unicorn is a mythical creature.)

The NIV corrects some of these things, while adding a few of its own. But as I said earlier, I personally favor the NASV & NKJV as modern translations over the NIV, while using the KJV, AV 1611, & Geneva as older ones.