Have you ever read Chaucer or Shakespeare in the original? Most of you would look at that Olde English and understand a few words of it, but unless you were a scholar of that time period, or had Cliff's Notes, you would miss most or all of the puns, political references, etc. peculiar to that time. Now if we have such trouble with 400 year-old English, imagine what trouble the Septuagint translators had with even older Hebrew! They read it - but you can bet they didn't always UNDERSTAND it!

Modern investigative techniques have helped us clear up many of these kinds of problems in the Bible, but not all of them - and because many of our translators seem to revere the text nearly to the point of worship, many of these discoveries have not surfaced in our modern Bible translations. For example, in the list of unclean "birds" in Leviticus, the final entry is "bat". Skeptics (Jim Merritt and C. Dennis McKinsey, for example) point this out as an error: Bats are not birds. However, the Hebrew word in Leviticus that we translate "birds" is better rendered "flying things" - it was a generic term for any animal that flew; more literally, "the owner of a wing." (See here for more.) This applies obviously to birds, but also to bats, and certain insects. Unfortunately, even our newest Bibles use the word "birds," which only provides more grist for the skeptical mill. Our translators should be careful of this kind of thing. But it seems they revere the exact wording in some cases more than they revere exact understanding. At the very least, our Bibles should have footnotes explaining passages like the one in Leviticus. You usually have to get a commentary to get a proper explanation.

What are some of the difficulties encountered in any translation? Let's start with something related to Hebrew specifically: The old form of the language didn't use vowels. (Why that is so is beyond our scope here. Perhaps they couldn't afford the $250 to buy each one, or else their vowels were stolen and later purchased by the Hawaiians at a Phonetic Garage Sale.) To illustrate the problem, try reading this:

gt n bd

Does this say "get in bed?" Got no bid? Got on bad? An ancient Hebrew could figure it out, but not us so easily. Context helps, of course, but remember that context is not always helpful, and where there was a place where either of two or three words MIGHT make sense, the scribes who added vowel points much later on were undoubtedly working with their own preconceived notions. To make the problem worse, suppose an earlier scribe had slipped and added an extra consonant:

gt n brd

That extra "r" could lead to translating the phrase "get on board." From there, things could get worse. Maybe the scribe skipped his coffee break and did this:

grt n bld

Now we have a phrase that's totally off. A later scribe could get very confused and just change the consonants altogether, just to make sense of the phrase.

These are problems in Hebrew only; there are greater problems for all languages across the board. In Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, Maurice Casey, in examining the process of Mark's use of Aramaic sources in composing his Greek Gospel, offers these inevitable complications of translation and bilingualism, and actual examples in practice:

• How a bilingual learns a language -- and how they keep up with it -- inevitably affects their translation ability. There is a vast difference between a person who grows up with both languages (and may therefore be less proficient in both of them) and a person who learned a second language, and did not use their first language for many years.

  As Casey puts it, though, "All bilinguals suffer from interference," and translators more so [94] A couple of examples:

• Bilinguals "often use a linguistic item more frequently because it has a close parallel in their other language. " Thus: "...Danish students are reported using the English definite article more often than monoglot speakers of English. This reflects 'the fact that Danish and English seem to have slightly different conceptions of what constitutes generic as opposed to specific reference.' " Or: "...there is a tendency for English loanwords among speakers of Australian German to be feminine -- die Road, die Yard, etc. -- and this is probably due to the similarity in sound between the German die and the accented form of English 'the', whereas the German masculine der and neuter das sound different." [94]
• When a source text is culture-specific, there is great need for changes to make the text intelligible. The French cartoon Asterix the Gaul, with its many exotic character names, has "given rise to different decisions by translators into several different languages." [97] The name of a village chieftain is Abraracoucix in French, and remains so in Italian and Dutch, but was rendered Majestix in German, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, and became Vitalstatistix in English. Then there is an example of how two German editions of Alice and Wonderland translated a particular passage differently:

  'Perhaps it doesn't understand English,' thought Alice, 'I dare say it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror.'

  One edition substituted "English" so that the translation simply said that the mouse did not understand much, and to make the reference to William the Conqueror intelligible, added a phrase about William coming from England. A different translation though made the language not understood by the mouse into German, and changed William the Conqueror into Napoleon. [101] There were thus two different methods used to make the text intelligible to native readers.

• A German person on a bus asks a person next to an empty seat, "Ist dieser Platz frei?" It is literally in English, "Is this place free?" But an English person would say, "Is this seat taken?" Or, a polite request in Polish to a distinguished guest to take a seat is literally, in English, "Mrs Vanessa! Please! Sit! Sit!" The "short imperative" to "Sit!" sounds "like a command rather than a polite request" made to someone unruly rather than to a distinguished guest. (For a great example of this sort of misunderstanding by critics in the Bible, see here.) [105]
• Translating Dickens into German, there is a phrase in The Olde Curiosity Shop where a character speaks of it being "a fine week for ducks." English speakers naturally know this to mean it was a rainy week. A German translator however concluded that for us, "a fine week for ducks" meant it was a fine week to go hunting for them! [106]

  Such then are typical problems of translating from one language to another. The sort of exhaustive knowledge required to perform an exact translation is simply beyond the understanding of most people, and presents a practical impossibility.

  ---

  When discussing Biblical inerrancy, it is important to remember that ONLY the original texts of the Bible are claimed to have been inerrant. Furthermore, one might suggest that the "original" text was in something of a different format. How? Take the book of Ezekiel as an example. Zeke certainly didn't bang out all 48 chapters of his book in one sitting; his oracles were composed over his lifetime, and were collected together at a later date (by him, or by one of his students; it makes no difference), when - presumably - they were put together into the unified whole like that we now have. But did the collector of this material leave everything "as it was"? In all likelihood, yes, given the reverence held for the work of a prophet; but this would not necessarily prevent the addition of transitional phrases needed to make the oracles into a sensible whole.

  Skeptics will throw up their hands at this and ask how we can therefore believe accept our present text, since any number of errors could have crept in. At this we should reply with:

  1. The percentages given earlier: The OT is 95% accurately transcribed; the NT, 99%. That means (in a Bible without any commentary) 50 pages of your OT and 3 pages of your NT may have been fumbled by later writers. Since most of the "errors" critics harp on turn upon no more than one or two letters or words, those 53 pages give us plenty of room to accept intellectually the idea that the original texts were inerrant! (By the way, if the Skeptic wants to lower those percentages, he just adds more room for the possibility of transcription errors. It kind of leaves them stuck, logically speaking.)
  2. The reverence accorded to prophetic material. This would not allow for wholesale change, but only for, at most, the tailoring necessary for creating a unified whole.

  Bottom line: It is a matter of ideological orientation in both directions. Christians have a predisposition to say that the original text, whatever its form, was inerrant, and that we have a shadow of it in our modern Bible; Skeptics have a disposition to say that it was not, and the worst of them will posit all manner of textual conspiracies otherwise unevidenced in the text. I affirm this in light of several years now of dealing with such persons who clearly seldom or never make their arguments having done adequate homework.

  
  
  Skeptical obfuscation in this area, however, abounds: One 19th-century Skeptic said that there were "150,000 blunders in the Hebrew and 7,000 in the Greek." That sounds bad until you remember that these "blunders" consist for the largest part of JUST ONE LETTER OR NUMERAL spread across multiple copies! Thus, if a letter is put 26 different ways in 26 different manuscripts, that counts as 26 "errors". Let's keep things on perspective, here!
  
  It should be obvious that since many of the "errors" in our Bibles turn on single letters, numbers or words, no doctrine of Christian belief is the least bit altered by any questionable reading in Scripture. Nor does salvation require a functional belief in inerrancy; indeed, if it did, those who were illiterate or did not have a Bible in their own language could never be saved. The number of horses in Solomon's army, the name of Saul's daughter who had no children - these things should be recognized and corrections noted, but they should be no cause for shipwreck of anyone's faith or an excuse for disbelief in the Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ. For certain Skeptics, however, the miscues are gold; but they are fools' gold: They conceal the true reason for their disbelief, whether that be a dislike of Christians, the inability to come to terms with God, or the desire to live a sinful lifestyle, or any number of reasons not listed here.
  
  No convinced skeptic will turn to Christ simply because we explain why Chronicles says Ahab's bathtub held 75 gallons while Kings says 85. Their reasons for disbelief are beyond that. But for those who watch and observe our debates, and are considering not only our answers, but the WAY in which we answer, the apologetic for inerrancy is important. We should be aware of the basic issues surrounding translation and transcription.
  
  A few further considerations in this regard:
  
  
  • Who is it who "killed" the languages in question? As I reminded a certain well-known skeptic recently, it was men who did it. (Although remember, Hebrew and Greek are still alive today.) And in any event, the language of the NT - Koine Greek, a sort of common man's Greek of the time - was in NT times the established lingua franca of the Roman Empire. It was the language used and/or usable by the most people alive in the Roman Empire at that time. Thus did God ensure the rapid spread of His message of salvation.
  • Moreover, we have also lost touch with various social and literary constraints that governed the composition of the Bible. My favorite example of late has involved passages composed with Greco-Roman rhetorical technique in mind. Thus, for example, as I have noted in our reply to Jim Merritt, the alleged contradictions between the accounts of Paul's conversion in Acts can be understood in a way that sees them as quite intentional. Likewise, understanding ancient proverbial literature in its context eliminates a great many perceived difficulties, in particular regarding the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
  • This may not apply to either Meritt or Barker, or to any skeptic in particular, but if there are so many of us willing to learn a foreign language for travel, business, or just for the heck of it, why should we complain about learning Biblical Hebrew or Greek? Again, this is not necessary to grasp the most important truths of the Bible, but there is also no excuse for not taking the time to study - especially if we are going to be like skeptics and pick at things of which we have no knowledge, like Barker, Merritt, and of course Steve Allen.