The NASB update carries on the NASB tradition of being a true Bible translation, revealing what the original manuscripts actually say--not merely what the translator believes they mean.This statement strikes me as curious because for the translator to deny it results in Moore's paradox. The paradox was originally "It's raining but I don't believe that it's raining," here it would be "I believe the Bible says X but it does not say X." Of course every translator believes his beliefs about what the Bible says correspond to what it actually says. Or, wait a second, maybe not. A translator could be stuck in the preface paradox, where he knows he probably made a mistake somewhere because everyone makes mistakes, but doesn't know where the mistake is and so goes on believing, on a line by line basis, that every line is translated correctly.
All very interesting... though I suspect the blurb writer was just wanted to say something more impressive sounding than "the translators of this version didn't make mistakes," so made a vacuously verbose blurb that ends up saying nothing more than that, even though it tries to give the impression of doing so.
1 comment:
He didn't exactly mean "we didn't make mistakes." He meant, "If legitimate scholarship compels us to translate something in a way we don't personally like, we did that." There's a bit of internecine struggle here. Conservatives, who often favor the NASB, think that the folks who made the NRSV are guilty of that particular intellectual dishonesty.
Incidentally, I am a conservative Christian who daily reads the NRSV (it read more easily), which makes me very confusing to some of my more easily confused friends.
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