RE: Can a Chrisitan lose his/her salvation?
July 15, 2017 at 1:47 pm
(This post was last modified: July 15, 2017 at 1:48 pm by mordant.)
(July 15, 2017 at 8:08 am)Lutrinae Wrote: No matter in which language the bible was originally written, I think we can all agree that it has been translated so many times that the original meaning of what the book was supposed to convey is most likely lost in translation.I really don't understand this line of argument, which seems to be increasingly popular with my fellow unbelievers. It is overdetermined and unnecessary.
The Bible is not a translation of a translation of a translation ... etc. It is translated from manuscripts that are copies of copies of copies in the original languages, which is a different issue. Each credible translation is based on a corpus of the best available / most ancient manuscripts, a corpus which tends to improve over time as more ancient manuscript copies are discovered and digitally preserved. Older manuscripts tend to be more fragmentary and may, for example, represent a fragment of two sentences that can be compared to a more complete but newer (and therefore later generation) manuscript.
If you are objecting to the original manuscripts being far removed from the originals, that is legitimate and you should use that terminology. If you're objecting to translations of translations then you are simply not correct, sorry.
I am not here to defend the scriptures by any means but at the same time I don't want to see arguments mounted that are incorrect or use misleading terminology so that theists will have reason to critique us (legitimately in this particular case) for illiteracy about the provenance of scripture.
There is plenty wrong with scripture at every level without claiming people are translating translations, e.g., taking the KJV and using it as the basis for some other translation. That simply doesn't happen.