I’ll be honest … I like to select giveaway winners randomly just to keep things fair, but this time I did not. I read this comment and just knew the bible needed to go to miss Krista. I think anyone who wants a bible should have one and I’m so honored to give Krista the first of her own.
If you’d like to buy a copy, they are actually quite affordable. You can get a hardback for $24 or a paperback {like the one shown} for $48.
A handful of you had some questions and concerns about the use of the word Eternal rather than LORD – maybe getting the sense that it sounded new-agey and to be careful about any bible that doesn’t use the words Christ or Apostle or Angel.
These were concerns of mine as well. I certainly don’t want to be filling my mind with a false or misleading version of The Truth.
David Capes, one of the leading scholars who worked on this translation emailed me on monday and I was able to ask him a few of these questions. Rather than recap, I’ll post his complete response because he is way smarter than I am and words things a bit more eloquently.
Here’s what he had to say:
Emily,
Thanks for your email and questions. I have written a little book called The Story of The Voice which details a number of our translation decisions and our translation philosophy. We didn’t take these decisions lightly.
Regarding translating the word generally translated as LORD (note: all caps in most translations), I wrote 3 blog posts last year.
Here they are:
I think these should give you more information than you may want to know. If you want more detail than that, I can provide it. I am currently writing the entry “Lord” for one of the Oxford encyclopedias so I’m rather well-versed on these matters (or at the least the people at Oxford think I am 
.
Regarding translating the Greek word normally rendered “Christ” by “Anointed One,” that is probably the decision which created the most controversy. At least it did last year when I was interviewed on CNN. Until now all major Bible translations did not translate the Greek word CHRISTOS. They merely transliterated it Christ. The unfortunate effect is that people do not understand what it means. They think it is a name, not a title. And CHRISTOS happens to be the earliest honorific title given to Jesus. “Jesus Christ” is not a name. It is a confession: “Jesus is the Messiah.” The word “MESSIAH” is Hebrew for “Anointed One.” So we are trying to help people understand the titular meaning of the confession. You will note that at key places, we gloss a phrase like “Jesus Christ” (in most translations) with “Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King.” The addition of ‘the Liberating King” is there to unpack the meaning of the title “Christos” which is not self-evident to modern readers. It is part of our contextual equivalence approach.
In translation theory we work with “equivalence” not “exactness.” Whenever you move from one language to the next, you realize a given word has meaning and associations (or denotations and connotations). Take the difference between words like “home” and “house.” Though they mean the same thing . . . roughly, the former has associations the latter doesn’t have. Consider the phrase “apple pie.” In America there are associations which you don’t find in South Africa, for example.
To put it in mathematical terms 5 is 5 but 3+2 is equivalent to 5. In other words it might take 4 words to express the meaning of a single Greek word. This is probably more than you want to know.
Regarding Revelation 22:18. When John wrote Revelation, he didn’t realize it would be the last book of the Bible. He is referring specifically to his own book. “The words of the prophecy of this book” refers to Revelation not the entire Bible (after all, not all the Bible is prophecy; Leviticus for example is law code). The Bible is actually a collection of 66 books not a single book. This is not controversial. Any good commentary will confirm what I’m saying. So John is warning people not to add to or take away from the prophecies of this book (that is Revelation).
That said, it is standard translation practice (goes back in English to the King James Bible) for words to be added in order to help make sense out of what is being said. Original readers would have understood idioms, context, social customs, which modern readers don’t. Every translation adds words to help make sense of these foreign languages, but not every translation tells you up front. In fact, the NIV translation team did. I think I read that is your favorite translation. They chose, however, not to tell you which words were added the same way we and others do by italicizing them (e.g., KJV, RSV, ESV, etc). The above example is a good one. The additional words are giving to explain or unpack the meaning of words which are not readily understood. We did this translation, by the way for people who have never read the Bible before or find the Bible a hard book to read and understand.
I hope this helps some. If you have further questions, let me know.
thanks,
dbc
Hopefully this eases your fears {if you have any} as it does mine. More than anything, I love that this version was written with the new-bible-reader in mind. It can be a confusing and intimidating book to read so having a resource like this with the chance that it will be read, understood and applied makes me a big fan.
Again, if you’d like more information on The Voice translation, you can visit their website
here.
