New Life for an Old Religion

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One of the things I harp on is that high school kids should make an effort to read through the Bible. If you’re going to profess Christianity, you ought to know what the book says. 

To get a little motivation and put my money where my mouth is (I haven’t read the Good Book from cover-to-cover in a good long while), I decided to get a new Bible in the New Living Translation. The NLT is a functional-equivalence translation, as opposed to a formal-equivalence translation like the New American Standard Bible (which is a very good translation.)

Formal-equivalence is a literal translation, and functional-equivalence is a translation of meaning. Here’s how a Bible translator once explained the difference to me. Let’s say that you were translating the Bible into an obscure language in a tiny village in Indonesia. If you were using formal-equivalence and you wanted to translate the phrase “lamb of God” into this people’s language, you would have to use the Greek word “amnos” to stand for lamb. Then you would have to explain what an “amnos” was and why the villagers should care about it. These people have no experience with lambs and have no reason to value them. In your explanation you might say, “in Bible times people valued an amnos the same way that you value your pigs. It was part of their system of wealth.”

If you were using functional equivalence you could cut to the chase and simply call Jesus “the pig of God.”

And there you have it.

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