Question and Answer 3
These are a series of posts responding to questions in a Q&A
session after the 2nd service on Sunday (we will have it up soon here).
People texted their questions in
during the message, on all subjects, and we tried to answer them.
Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to answer them all. This is a
joint effort
among me (J.D.) and my 2 fantastic associates, Charlie Dunn and Mike
McDaniel.
The second approach is called dynamic equivalence. The goal here is to convey the meaning of the original text most clearly. The emphasis is on readability. The downside is that you are relying more on the interpretation of the translators. Various translations lean more toward literal translation and ease of readability. At the risk of being a little simplistic, the NIV tries to translate sentence by sentence. The New Living Translation (NLT) goes paragraph by paragraph. The Message translation basically reads a page of the Greek, waits a day, and then goes back and jots down what the author remembers from what he read. (That's a joke). But translation like The Message and the NLT take a lot of liberty. Sometimes they nail it and sometimes I feel like they really blow it.
Now that I’ve succeeding in confusing you, let me clarify. There are versions that fall more in the middle. The NIV is a good one. I recommend the English Standard Version (ESV). It’s fairly literal but much more readable than the NASB. (The NASB is great, it's just that the translators forgot people were actually going to read it). To be honest, it’s a good idea to keep more than one version around. That way, when you come to a passage, you can read it in different versions to help you understand. That’s one reason that J.D. uses different versions on Sundays. In this Song of Solomon series, Pastor J.D. has used both the ESV and the NLT, sometimes interchangeably. Sometimes I do my "time with God" from the NLT because of the readability. If I really want to dig in to the text, I will break out my ESV.
What version of the bible do you use? Which one should I use? I’m not a scholar.
That makes two of us. Basically, the different versions of the Bible fall into two categories. These categories are based on the approach the translators took in rendering the Bible from the original languages into English. The first approach is formal equivalence. Here the goal is a word-for-word translation. The downside is that this can cloud the meaning, like when there doesn’t exist an equivalent word in English. Good examples of literal translation are the English Standard Version (ESV), the King James Version (KJV), and the New American Standard Bible (NASB).The second approach is called dynamic equivalence. The goal here is to convey the meaning of the original text most clearly. The emphasis is on readability. The downside is that you are relying more on the interpretation of the translators. Various translations lean more toward literal translation and ease of readability. At the risk of being a little simplistic, the NIV tries to translate sentence by sentence. The New Living Translation (NLT) goes paragraph by paragraph. The Message translation basically reads a page of the Greek, waits a day, and then goes back and jots down what the author remembers from what he read. (That's a joke). But translation like The Message and the NLT take a lot of liberty. Sometimes they nail it and sometimes I feel like they really blow it.
Now that I’ve succeeding in confusing you, let me clarify. There are versions that fall more in the middle. The NIV is a good one. I recommend the English Standard Version (ESV). It’s fairly literal but much more readable than the NASB. (The NASB is great, it's just that the translators forgot people were actually going to read it). To be honest, it’s a good idea to keep more than one version around. That way, when you come to a passage, you can read it in different versions to help you understand. That’s one reason that J.D. uses different versions on Sundays. In this Song of Solomon series, Pastor J.D. has used both the ESV and the NLT, sometimes interchangeably. Sometimes I do my "time with God" from the NLT because of the readability. If I really want to dig in to the text, I will break out my ESV.
So after we pick up the bible we want to use, how do I go about studying a piece of scripture. I have recently bought a book that yall recommended called "Living By The Book", but have not yet gotten to read it because of other books I need to finish. Generally how can I have my own J.D. sermon, that we all love so much, in my own quiet time? Or what is your routine. How can I take the knowledge of J.D. into my own time in the WORD. Or maybe it is more than this one blog post.
Posted by: Jackson | May 22, 2008 at 06:20 PM