쉬운성경(NLT)의 문제점 3(영어자료입니다)

쉬운성경(NLT)의 문제점 3(영어자료입니다)

자료출처 http://www.bible-researcher.com/nlt.html

 

The following "Brief History of the New Living Translation" written by Mark Taylor (son of Kenneth Taylor and president of Tyndale House Publishers) was found here on the World Wide Web.

A Brief History of the New Living Translation

Mark D. Taylor, Chief Stylist

In some respects, the New Living Translation had its origins in 1940, when Ken Taylor was a young staff member of Inter Varsity Christian Fellowship. In his autobiography, My Life: A Guided Tour, Ken writes:

One afternoon I was in my room, studying the Bible in preparation for leading the weekly student meeting that evening. I found myself baffled about the meaning of a chapter in Ephesians, on which I had been asked to speak. I read the chapter several times, without much comprehension. Then I read it slowly, a verse at a time, with no better results. I could understand the words, of course, but I just could not understand the significance of the teaching or make any useful application to my life or the lives of the students.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the realization that my Bible reading in the New Testament letters had ever been thus. All my life I had wrestled in vain to understand them. Others could grasp the meaning; why couldn't I? Was I more stupid than my friends who gloried in reading the Word? Frustrated and ashamed, I exclaimed to the empty room, "Why can't somebody translate the Bible so a person like me can understand it?" (p. 96)

That same yearning found another expression fifteen years later when Ken's ten children had the same trouble understanding the King James Version that he had always had.

Ken and Margaret Taylor had family devotions each evening after supper, but when Ken asked the children a few questions to make sure they had understood the day's Bible reading, he was often met with blank stares. So Ken would restate the meaning of the passage in simpler terms. In his autobiography he describes a poignant moment that brought back his own frustrations: "I remember that after I had explained the meaning of one particular verse from the King James Version, Janet, then about eight, said, 'But Daddy, if that's what it means, why doesn't it say so?'"

One Saturday morning, Ken was puzzling over how to communicate the meaning of that evening's Scripture passage to his children. He decided to write out a simpler version of the passage in advance. It worked, and from time to time he used that method of paraphrasing the Scripture passage for the family. Eventually he decided to paraphrase the entire book of Romans, followed by the other epistles of the New Testament.

Ken thought other families might also find his paraphrase helpful, so he sent the manuscript to several publishers. They all turned him down, but he was undaunted, so he decided to publish it himself. He called the book Living Letters and arranged for 2,000 copies to be printed. He named his tiny company Tyndale House Publishers in honor of William Tyndale, the sixteenth-century translator who translated the Bible into English and was burned at the stake for his efforts.

Living Letters was published in 1962, and within a few years it was followed by a series of books containing other portions of Scripture paraphrased into modern English. By the time the complete edition, The Living Bible, was published in 1971, the paraphrase had become phenomenally popular. Over the next twenty-five years, more than 40 million copies of The Living Bible were sold in dozens of different formats. Despite its popularity, however, Ken Taylor and his colleagues at Tyndale House were frustrated that it never received wide acclaim by pastors and scholars. Too often it was dismissed as being "just a paraphrase."

In the summer of 1986, Mark Taylor, president of Tyndale House, and Ron Beers, the senior editor of the Life Application Bible (and later Editor-in-Chief at Tyndale House), were discussing ways in which The Living Bible might be made more acceptable to pastors. They concluded that pastors' perspectives on various translations are established during their seminary years, so Mark and Ron asked themselves how The Living Bible could be made more acceptable to seminary professors. This line of reasoning led to the conclusion that a group of seminary professors should be invited to assist in revising The Living Bible. If The Living Bible were revised by an independent group of scholars, it would be easier to convince other seminary professors to see it as a bone fide translation.

In October of 1987, Tyndale held an initial conference with several professors of Old Testament and New Testament to explore the possibility of revising The Living Bible. The first step was to form the Bible Translation Committee, which included six general reviewers:

• Daniel I. Block, Pentateuch. Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
• Barry J. Beitzel, Historical Books. Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
• Tremper Longman III, Poetry. Professor of Old Testament, Westminster Seminary
• John N. Oswalt, Prophets. Professor of Old Testament and Semitic Languages, Asbury Seminary
• Grant R. Osborne, Gospels and Acts. Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
• Norman R. Ericson, Letters and Revelation. Professor of New Testament Studies, Wheaton College and Graduate School

Each general reviewer was responsible for five major sections of the Bible (individual books or groups of books), and each was given the task of finding three world-class evangelical scholars to assist him in each section. They put together a "dream list" of scholars who had written major commentaries on the respective books in their lists, and then they invited those scholars to participate in the process of reviewing and revising The Living Bible. Most of the scholars they contacted accepted the invitation, so the final list of 90 scholars is a world-class group of evangelical scholars.

In the early stages, the revision task was seen as simply correcting any words, phrases, or verses where The Living Bible's exegesis (interpretation) was judged to be faulty. As the project unfolded, however, the translation team came to see that they were creating a new translation from the Hebrew and Greek (rather than simply a revised paraphrase) that followed the dynamic equivalence theory of translation. The goal of this translation theory is to produce in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the message expressed by the original-language text—both in meaning and in style. Such a translation attempts to have the same impact on modern readers as the original had on its own audience.

A dynamic-equivalence translation can also be called a thought-for-thought translation, as contrasted with a formal-equivalence or word-for-word translation. Of course, to translate the thought of the original language requires that the text be interpreted accurately and then be rendered in understandable idiom. So the goal of any thought-for-thought translation is to be both reliable and eminently readable. Thus, as a thought-for-thought translation, the New Living Translation seeks to be both exegetically accurate and idiomatically powerful.

In making a thought-for-thought translation, the translators must do their best to enter into the thought patterns of the ancient authors and to present the same ideas, connotations, and effects in the receptor language. In order to guard against personal biases and to ensure the accuracy of the message, a thought-for-thought translation should be created by a group of scholars who employ the best exegetical tools and who also understand the receptor language very well. With these concerns in mind, the Bible Translation Committee assigned each book of the Bible to the three team scholars. Each scholar made a thorough review of the assigned book and submitted suggested revisions to the appropriate general reviewer. The general reviewer reviewed and summarized these suggestions and then proposed a first-draft revision of the text. This draft served as the basis for several additional phases of exegetical and stylistic committee review. Then the Bible Translation Committee jointly reviewed and approved every verse in the final translation.

As a result of this intensive team process, the final translation is precise in its rendering of the meaning of the original and is even more readable than its predecessor, The Living Bible. Tyndale House and the Bible Translation Committee decided to call the translation the "Holy Bible, New Living Translation" to show that this translation is built on the heritage of The Living Bible but is also a translation in its own right.

The translation work was finally completed in 1995, and five different editions were typeset and released in 1996: the Deluxe Text Edition, the TouchPoint Bible edition, the New Believer's Bible, The One Year Bible, and the Life Application Study Bible. Other editions followed in subsequent years, including the Large-Print and Giant-Print Editions, the Reference Edition, the Student's Life Application Bible, The Daily Walk Bible, The Praise and Worship Study Bible, The Daily Study Bible for Men, and The Daily Study Bible for Women.

In the first ten years of publication more than 14 million copies of the New Living Translation have been sold.

When the NLT was first published in 1996, the Bible Translation Committee said, "This translation is so good, it's a shame not to make it even better." So Tyndale House encouraged the outside scholars to undertake a review of the entire text. The challenge was to raise the level of precision of translation without losing the dynamic qualities that were already making the NLT very popular. An example of improved precision is that the poetic passages of the Old Testament were recast into a poetic format rather than using the prose format of the original NLT translation. The entire revision process took six years, and the second-edition text of the NLT was launched in 2004. Over a period of several years Tyndale House will be replacing all first-edition formats with the second-edition text.

Through the publication of The Living Bible and then the New Living Translation, Ken Taylor's dream has been realized: "Someone has finally translated the Bible so a person like me can understand it"!
Mark D. Taylor
July 1997
Updated March 2006

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NOTES

1. Craig Blomberg, "Demystifying Bible Translation," accessed 6 March 2009.

2. Mark D. Taylor, "A Brief History of the New Living Translation" (dated 2006), posted online at http://www.geocities.com/bible_translation/list/files/nlthistory.pdf. The claim that the NLT is an "entirely new translation" is also made by another of its translators, Eugene E. Carpenter, in his article "Translating the New Living Translation," Reflections (a publication of the Missionary Church Historical Society) vol. 5, no. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 8-12. Carpenter writes, "Since some of the roots of this translation go back to the popular Living Bible paraphrase, some persons have mistakenly thought that the NLT is a paraphrase. But while the NLT does try to retain some of the emotive quality of the earlier Living Bible, it is not a paraphrase, but an entirely new translation of the Bible. The NLT is based upon a careful examination of the original and most important Hebrew and Greek manuscripts of the sacred texts. It has proven to be an accurate, authoritative, viable devotional and study Bible with clear and emotive language that one reviewer calls a 'can't-put-it-down' quality." This paragraph (which reads more like a blurb from the marketing department of a publisher than the comments of a scholar about his work) clearly indicates that the "entirely new translation" claim was designed to promote the idea that the NLT is "not a paraphrase" like The Living Bible.

3. The "mutual submission" interpretation of Ephesians 5 is egalitarian, and it is not hard to see why the editors have omitted references to the other key passages on the topic, which can in no way bear an egalitarian interpretation. There are other problems with this topical index which we might mention, such as the citation of Colossians 3:25 under the heading of "Discrimination." Next to the citation the editors indicate that the verse teaches, "God will judge those who discriminate." Indeed he will judge those who judge others unfairly, as we may learn from Matthew 7:2 and other passages. But Colossians 3:25 is not saying anything along that line. Rather, this verse teaches that God will judge the misbehavior of disobedient subordinates who will not obey their earthly masters, and the "no partiality" mentioned in the verse refers to God, who will do this judging without any partiality towards the subordinates. There is nothing here about God punishing "those who discriminate." Perhaps a Tyndale editor who wanted to include a reference to this teaching hastily 'found' it in Colossians 3:25 after discovering that in the NLT it is absent from its place in Matthew 7:2. We might also question the use of the ideologically-loaded word "discrimination" in connection with this teaching. This word brings to mind government regulations about "discrimination" against persons on the basis of race, age, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, and so forth, which stem from an egalitarian political ideology quite foreign to the Bible. We notice also that several verses are arranged under the heading "Self-Esteem," an utterly unbiblical concept of modern pop psychology.

4. Vern Sheridan Poythress, "Gender and Generic Pronouns in English Bible Translation," in Language and Life (Dallas: SIL International and The University of Texas at Arlington, 2003), p. 371.

5. Paul Gray, "The Power of Babble," TIME, September 9, 1996.

6. Daniel Taylor, "Confessions of a Bible Translator," Christianity Today, October 27, 1997.

7. Quoted from the Tyndale House website.

8. Quoted from an interview by Joel L. Rissinger, "Giving the World the Word," The Plain Truth, November-December 1998.

9. Another interpretation understands Paul's 'be reconciled to God' in 5:20 not as an appeal to the Corinthians but as descriptive of his apostolic proclamation of God's offer of reconciliation in Christ in general. Most English versions supply a "you" after "we implore" here, but the Greek text does not have the pronoun. See Andreas J. Köstenberger, "We Plead on Christ's Behalf: Be Reconciled to God: Correcting the Common Mistranslation of 2 Corinthians 5:20," The Bible Translator 48 (1997), pp. 328-31. This interpretation has been adopted in the Holman Christian Standard Bible, which reads "we plead on Christ's behalf, 'Be reconciled to God.'"

10. Frederick Godet in his commentary on the epistle draws attention to Paul's use of the preposition ὑπο "under" here, and asks, "why [does Paul] use the preposition υπο, under, and not the preposition εν, in, which seems more suitable to a notion like that of the state of grace? Is grace, then, a yoke, as well as the law? Is it not, on the contrary, an inner life, a power? In other connections Paul would certainly have made use of the preposition εν, in, with the word grace. But the idea of the whole passage about to follow is precisely that of the decisive control which grace exercises over the believer to subject him to righteousness with an authority not less imperious, and even more efficacious than the law (vv. 15-23). And it is this idea which is expressed and summed up by the preposition υπο, under. (Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, by F. Godet, translated by Rev. A. Cusin and revised by Talbot W. Chambers [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1883], p. 252.)

11. Craig Blomberg, review of The Word of God in English by Leland Ryken, Denver Journal: An Online Review of Current Biblical and Theological Studies, volume 6 (July 2003).