A Few Ironies in Luke 4:16–30: judsongreene.micro.blog
@JudsonGreene This is a great example of where the translators could help us out and use the same word in both verses. “No prophet has favor in his hometown” isn’t the most obvious choice, but it’s completely clear and shows us something about the underlying text.
@isaacgreene Yup. Translators are more likely to make it “sound like the Bible” (I.e., KJV) and sound like the other Synoptic Gospels unfortunately. The fact that the Church has a fourfold Gospel and rejected harmonizations as heretical (Tatian’s Diatesseron) has been growing more profound for me lately.
@JudsonGreene I’ve read most of the NLT with translators notes now. I consistently dislike the decisions they make in the text, but the decisions are transparent and I can see what’s going on. Would love that for other translations.
@isaacgreene Yeah. I think two problems also come into this: translators spend most of their time at the sentence level, while for these sorts of decisions you need to take in a paragraph (or at times reflect another translation decisions from chapters earlier). You have to be a good literary reader, not just grammatically proficient and handy with a lexicon.
The second issue is that too many translations are vying for the money crop of “pew Bible”—ESV, NASB, NIV, NKJV, etc. To be read out in churches you want to sound like the Bible and that promotes “conservative” translation choices—that is, not translations that are close to the Greek but translations that have president in the history of English Bible translation (Harvey Hicks calls this “translation inertia”). Because it sounds a bit odd to say “has favor in his hometown”—potentially even distracting from the sermon—its likely to not pass muster. It’s not like these translation committees are trying to be the translation, but to be widely used become the next pew translation is the best way to do it. If more would do the translation with weird decisions + notes (NLT, NET) like you’re saying, we could actually have a more diverse translation tradition in English. My frustration is that on several passages I’m passionate about, virtually every translation will go with “the standard” reading instead of the one I think is correct. A less risk-averse approach would make not that particular translation better per se, but would help an English reader drawing from a pool of translations. I doubt too many translation committees are saying “let’s be less risk averse!” though. Prolly just David Bentley Hart.
@JudsonGreene This is a good place to plug Richmond Lattimore’s NT translation, which I wish were better known and used.
@todd @isaacgreene @JudsonGreene YES the NET notes are worth their weight in gold, even when the final translation choice isn’t always the best
@JohnBrady Oh THAT’S interesting. I know him from his excellent translations of Greek tragedies. Thanks for the tip. What do you like about his NT translation?
@drwalt He seems genuinely to be translating from scratch w/o reference to the KJV tradition. No one can fault his knowledge of Greek. He believes (as in his translations of the classics) that trying to come close to word-for-word translation is the best way to transmit the voice of the author. I might not use it in church services, but I always find something refreshing when I read it.
