One aspect of Islam that I appreciate is their approach to translation of scriptures. You see, the Quran is considered a sacred text that was originally revealed in Arabic, and translations into other languages are often called “interpretations”. This is because Muslims believe that the Quran’s sacred character is unique to the Arabic language, and that translating it into another language changes its meaning. While I don’t know that the original language of a volume of scripture is sacred per se, any translation of that text can be viewed as an interpretation that changes its meaning to one degree or another and should be approached with a degree of caution as a result.
The Renaissance has an excellent example of why this is important to keep in mind while reading scripture. In Western Europe, the Vulgate (a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible prepared by Jerome) was the main form of the Bible used throughout the middle ages. As humanism began to gain traction, however, there was an increased emphasis on going back to original sources. Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (Erasmus of Rotterdam) was a key figure in this movement’s impact on Christianity due to his work on scholarly Greek and Latin editions of the New Testament.
During his work in comparing the Bible text with earlier Greek manuscripts, Erasmus discovered that some Catholic doctrines were problematic because they relied specifically on the Vulgate in ways that the Greek did not support. Christian historian Diarmaid MacCulloch shared an example of this:
Most notorious was Erasmus’s retranslation of Gospel passages (especially Matthew 3.2) where John the Baptist is presented in the Greek as crying out to his listeners in the wilderness, ‘metanoeite’. Jerome had translated this as poenitentiam agite, ‘do penance’, and the medieval Church had pointed to the Baptist’s cry as biblical support for its theology of the sacrament of penance. Erasmus said that John had told his listeners to come to their senses, or repent, and he translated the command into Latin as resipiscite. Indeed, throughout the Bible, it was very difficult to find any direct reference to Purgatory, as Orthodox theologians had been pointing out to Westerners since the thirteenth century.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Kindle Edition, 596.
This translation undercut the Catholic system of penance, including the payment of indulgences that Martin Luther would oppose (partly based on Erasmus’s work). In another example,
Erasmus faced up more honestly than most theologians to one problem which later proved as troublesome to Protestants as to Catholics, and whose solution was unavoidably dependent on the exploitation of allegorical reading of the Bible, whether humanists and Protestants liked it or not. This was the universally held belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity – that she had remained a virgin all her life. Much of the traditional case for this belief, which has no direct justification in scripture, was based on allegorical use of Ezekiel 44.2, which talks about the shutting of a gate which only the Lord could enter. This was then bolstered by the forced Greek and Latin reading of Isaiah’s original Hebrew prophecy that a young woman would conceive a son, Immanuel (Isaiah 7.14; see p. 81). Erasmus could not read these texts as Jerome had done. In response to shocked complaints about his comments, he set out a precise position: ‘We believe in the perpetual virginity of Mary, although it is not expounded in the sacred books.’
Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Kindle Edition, 596–597.
Another Catholic doctrine (the perpetual virginity of Mary) proved to hinge on the translations that had been commonly used for the past millennia rather than the actual texts of the Bible.
These specific points proved to be fodder for Protestant Reformers, but I think they highlight a broader issue—overreliance on a specific translation as a source of doctrine. One example of a doctrinal interpretation that relies on the language of the King James Version comes in the narrative of Adam and Eve. When the Lord God is talking to Adam about the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, He states, “ Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” (Genesis 3:17). Based on this specific wording and the Latter-day Saint view of a fortunate Fall, some Latter-day Saint leaders have interpreted the phrase “cursed is the ground for thy sake” in a very positive way. For example, President Marion G. Romney of the First Presidency taught: “Note that the curse was not placed upon Adam, but upon the ground for Adam’s sake. Rather than a curse upon Adam, it was a blessing to him” (“In Mine Own Way,” Ensign, Nov. 1976, 125). The problem here is that “for thy sake” doesn’t actually mean “for your benefit,” as President Romney thought. A better translation is “because of you.” For example, in the NRSV, it reads “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:17, NRSV). The NIV also renders this as “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.” Thus, this is a situation where an interpretation is based on the specific wording of the KJV that does not hold water when going back to original sources.
A more peripheral example is from a General Conference talk by Linda K. Burton from 2017. In the talk, she discussed reading in the gospels about how “certain women” were present at key moments in the Passion narrative. Then she noted how she interprets the phrase:
I have read and passed over the seemingly unremarkable expression “certain women” numerous times before, but recently as I pondered more carefully, those words seemed to jump off the page. Consider these synonyms of one meaning of the word certain as connected to faithful, certain women: “convinced,” “positive,” “confident,” “firm,” “definite,” “assured,” and “dependable.”
As I pondered those powerful descriptors, I remembered two of those New Testament certain women who bore positive, confident, firm, assured testimonies of the Savior. Though they, like us, were imperfect women, their witness is inspiring.
Linda K. Burton, “Certain Women,” Conference Report, April 2017, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2017/04/certain-women?lang=eng.
She does mention in the footnotes that, “In English the word certain has a second meaning of ‘a selection of’ or ‘a variety of,’” which, from what I can tell, is more in line with the meaning of the Greek. For example, modern translations of the same passages she discussed have interpreted the same phrase as “some women,” “some women of our group,” or “some of our women” (see NRSV and NIV for Luke 8:1–3 and Luke 24:22–23.) In this case, it doesn’t negate the basic purpose and message of her talk, but it isn’t a great way of getting to that point. I can imagine that it also caused a fair amount of headaches for the folks translating her talk into other languages that don’t have that double meaning like it does in English.
All of this is partly why I am hesitant to limit myself to the King James Version or any other specific translation of the Bible in my study. As I stated up front, any translation of the Bible can be viewed as an interpretation that changes its meaning to one degree or another and should be approached with a degree of caution as a result.
I have seen thing occur in local Church services. During one Elder’s Quorum small group discussion a few months ago, a confident well-spoken missionary took a phrase from an assigned verse in the New Testament to start teaching a principle he thought profound. I looked up the same verse in multiple translations on my Logos Bible app amid our discussion and found that the phrase did not entail anything close to what he was extrapolating when reviewed in multiple other Bible translations. But another example of how perspicuity has profoundly influenced our faith’s culture and community, especially when monolingual members are unfamiliar with, untrained to, and/or unwilling to expand their reading comprehension by considering different Bible translations and editions in Church discourse and personal study.
I heartily agree with the overall concept of this post. Another point I would like to add is that in our study of the scriptures, one needs also to beyond the passage of scripture itself to learn the literary context that passage rests. An example: the Isaiah 7:14 passage you cited, one needs to read the entire chapter 7 to discern what Isaiah was really talking about.
Man is pretty bad at interpreting scripture. Even in our own scriptures we are not very good at interpreting. Semantics is a big thing in understanding scripture. It is baffling how sometimes we get it so off its ebarrassing. The parable of the talents is one we get way off. Somehow we keep thinking the parable is how we use our gifts and special abbilities. The parable has nothing to do with that.
Thanks God for Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon to bring clarity to the various interpretations of scripture.
I think even from Joseph Smith’s day to the present we are seeing semantic shift within defining doctrine, terms, etc, within our own doctrine in the church. The way we currently understand salvation has shifted. In Joseph’s day the words “saved” and “damned” as found in both the NT and BoM were understood quite differently than we use them now. This would mean that we have shifted the doctrine of Christ, not added clarity. We could be going the wrong way in some degree.
And yet the things President Romney and Sister Burton said are at least arguably true. They only erred in thinking that the Bible said them (and it sounds like Sister Burton probably knew that). I do think there’s great value in trying to discern the message that the author of a scriptural passage was trying to convey–without that there’s the risk of our scripture study turning into an echo chamber that only repeats what we already know. But that’s not the only way to read (la mort de l’auteur and all that). I think sometimes the Spirit takes advantage of our mis-readings to teach us truths we need to learn that don’t happen to be in the scriptures we’re reading. More often our mis-readings are nothing so profound, but basically harmless.
Other than sometimes being annoying to others–I’ve definitely been there.