Not your fault. Just hit an unexpected nerve. Sorry.illuminator wrote:Sheesh. Sorry I asked.
Bart Ehrman's work touches on the topic of 'good translations' as well as the topic of the nature of the NT writings and their transmission. I'm not sure which standard translation he thinks is 'best' though, or if he has every said one way or the other. There might be a reasonable case to be made for different translations for different PARTS of 'the Bible' rather than assuming a single person or committee is going to be excellent in two separate languages - three I guess, if you include English.
One thing to consider is that the OT was written over many centuries (minimum of 4, or as many as 10) in Hebrew, and of course Hebrew itself changed over that length of time, while the NT was written (or the earliest texts we know of were written) in Greek.
(four centuries is about how far we today are separated from Shakespeare, and he wrote in 'English' but we can't understand him all that well without footnotes)
Greek is at least an Indo-European language, but Hebrew is Semitic - ideas conceived and written in Hebrew aren't always easy to bring over into Greek, and both are tricky to put into modern English. The whole mindset is different.
Just one simple example: in Greek thought, apparently the sea is a dark color ('the wine dark sea'). That is not a simile that would spring to mind nowadays. I read a whole essay about that phrase once, ranging from a possible change in human evolution involving how the eye sees color (unlikely) to a cultural awareness discussion on how we classify colors, emotions and impressions. Just on that one phrase (and similar ones) from antiquity.
