Tuesday, January 5, 2010

That's Greek to me. . .

Koine Greek parchment

Unless you understand Koine Greek as well as you do English, when you combine an interlinear text (done by men) and a lexicon (compiled by men) you are using your limited understanding of a foreign language as a substitute for a real translation.

I will not tell you not to learn or study Greek, but remember that there is no good reason to think the result of all this is a better translation than a thorough translation done by real scholars as is the King James translation of the Hebrew and Greek majority text.

I believe the best approach is to take the KJV (King James Version) and read it. Compare one part against another. It is a literal translation, except where a completely literal translation would be clearly wrong.

The KJV translators deliberately left clues throughout the text to indicate the original word. For instance, in the Old Testament if you see LORD in all capitals, the word in Hebrew was Jehovah. The word Lord, with just the first letter capitalized, indicates the word was translated from the Hebrew, Adonai. And God indicates the Hebrew word was Elohim.

None of this takes away the ability to look at a Greek or Hebrew word if you’re so inclined, as many Greek to English word books are available to purchase. A good one is Strong's Concordance, which I use.

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