Cultural developments require new sensitivities in language! Recent awareness of the evils of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of discrimination have shown have certain language is slanted or biased, with corresponding efforts to develop more 'inclusive' language alternatives.All living languages continually change and develop over time! Not only is 'Modern English' very different from 16th century English, but the language used in Great Britain, America, Australia, and other countries are slightly different from each other (in spelling, grammar, idioms, word meanings, etc.).Every 'translation' is already inevitably an 'interpretation'!Anyone who knows more than one modern language realizes that 'translations' often have meanings that are slightly different from the original, and that different people inevitably translate the same texts in slightly different ways.Ancient languages are very different from modern languages! Not only do Ancient Hebrew and Greek use completely different alphabets and vocabularies, but their grammatical rules and structures (word order, prepositions, conjugations of verbs, etc.) are very different from modern English.The meanings of some biblical texts are unknown or uncertain! Some Hebrew or Greek words occur only once in the Bible, but nowhere else in ancient literature, so their exact meanings are unknown and some biblical phrases are ambiguous, with more than one possible meaning.the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Codex Sinaiticus) have helped scholars get closer to the original text of the Bible, so that modern translations can be more accurate than medieval ones. Important old manuscripts were found in the last 200 years! Recent discoveries of older manuscripts (esp.The extant manuscripts contain numerous textual variations! There are literally thousands of differences in the surviving biblical manuscripts, many of them minor (spelling variations, synonyms, different word orders), but some of them major (whole sections missing or added).All we have are copies of copies of copies, most of them copied hundreds of years after the original texts were written. No original manuscript of any biblical book has survived! All of the texts written by the biblical authors themselves have been lost or destroyed over the centuries.

Today read are not the original biblical texts, but other people's translations of the scriptures.īut why are there so many different English translations of the Bible? And why can't churches or scholars agree on just one translation?

The Bible was not written in English - not even 'King James English'! Most of the books of the Old Testament were originally composed in Hebrew (with a few portions in Aramaic), while the entire New Testament was originally written in Greek (although some books may also incorporate Aramaic sources). English Translations of the Bible English Translations of the Bible

Tyndale bible translation sources