There has been a lot of interest in the fact that you are meeting to “review” the ESV. People are asking how extensive is that review going to be.
Watch Paul House respond (Windows Media format).
I’ve been asked several times already why it is the ESV committee is meeting to make some changes to the 2001 printed ESV. I think we have to acknowledge two things: One, it’s a great privilege to translate God’s Word, and there are many parts that are very easy to handle, and it’s a joyous thing to handle them. But I think we have to be honest and say that Bible translation is a great challenge, that it is more than any of us can handle effectively. And that’s true because there’s new scholarship coming out all the time that helps us understand the background of words and the meaning of words in their context. And so we’ve been meeting to try to take some of that new information into account.
We also are becoming aware as our Bible is being read around the world, that there are many cultural contexts. And sometimes English read in a cultural context other than ours, when it’s read there it doesn’t ring true in the same way we want it to. So we’ve had to make some adjustments. If something sounds odd in a cultural context, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.
It’s also a challenge as people around the world have been reading the Bible, some of them have seen ways which we can add clarity and crispness to the translation, so we’ve been wanting to do that. I suppose in a way, then, the challenge is really to come closer and closer to a perfect Bible translation. I personally don’t think we can achieve this while we’re on earth, but we continue to get the best help we can from scholars and from regular readers to make the best translation we can. That’s why we’ve been meeting.
As we’ve mentioned before, the potential changes the translators discussed were minor issues; they were corrections and clarifications rather than big “revisions.”
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