The Word of God in English: Criteria for Excellence in Bible Translation [Paperback]

It is very important that laymen learn the proper rules of hermeneutics, and learn how to interpret the Word of God, however, their interpretations should still be subject to the church. What is sad is that modern Bible readers do not get the full appeal of the original text. All the literary forms that the Bible uses are all obscured into prose. This is not good English usage.

Ryken does not defend the NASB as much as he does the ESV, because he prefers "essentially-literal" over more of a "woodenness" of which the NASB has (I love the NASB, by the way). Bible translation issues, as well as linguistics, are a few of my interests, and I defend essentially-literal to a more literal theory of translation.

There ARE good things to some modern translations, but many readers DO fundamentally need more than one translation to compare the different translations. Ryken doesn't really address the feminist issues of translations very much. He may discuss it a little, but his main concern is the literary nature of the Bible. The ESV included him as a literary advisor for their translation, and they made a very good choice. He offers a good critique of Eugene Nida's, the one who popularized dynamic equivalency.

The only real qualm I have with the book is tha it did tend to get redundant in places. When critiquing the modern translations, he tended to say the same thing about the different figures of speach that he said about other figures of speach. But, this did not devalue this fine work.

For years I have read and studied from the NIV but always have my doubts and suspisions about the NIV. Having taken New Testament Greek I was aware of some of the problems I had personally found in the NIV. When the New Living Translation (NLT) came out in 1996, I bought it and instantly rejected it. It was simply too free in its translation, too "dumbed" down for me, and simply ignored much of the Greek text. After reading Dr. Ryken's book, I have found my ammunition for defense of the essentially literal translations.

I now enjoy teaching and preaching from the RSV, NKJV, and the NASB. I would encourage you to pray that the evangelical church hears Dr. Ryken's words of wisdom and returns to a solid literal translation in the heritage of the King James Version.

The fear I have, as a preaching minister who loves the Word of God and what it accomplishes in the lives of hurting people, is that people will listen to the debate over translation and then be afraid to read modern translations of the Bible. I have read treatments of the translation issue that leave me afraid to open anything short of witnesses to the original MSS (in Hebrew and Greek) for fear of being corrupted by false teachers and their false teaching.

Dr. Ryken does an excellent job of exposing the issue, demonstrating the alternatives taken by the literal translations and by the dynamic equivalent translations, and then making his case for the literal approach. His greatest contribution to the debate is that he does so without being or sounding like an alarmist.