A young man gave a talk in our Sacrament Meeting that was a first for me, in that instead of using scriptures and written notes, he used his PDA. He said he had come to appreciate the Old Testament, as he discovered how New Testament writers (he focused on Paul especially) had drawn from the Old Testament, particularly the Psalms. He was using his hand-held devise to track himself from one testament to the other, showing how a phrase in Paul had its match somewhere in the Old Testament. My thoughts strayed from his presentation to wonder if he was using a computer program that would search and match phrases for him, and then to think about problems of translation.
I wondered if his parallels were brought to us courtesy of the erudition and theological bent of the King James translators. I wondered if the same parallels showed up in other English translations, or in Bible as translated into other languages.
Philip Barlow’s Mormons and the Bible explains how Mormons came to prefer the King James version over other translations. On page 176 he cites a conservative Mormon scholar who objects to using other translations of the Bible because they obscure doctrines of the restoration. He compares the KJV’ s “dispensation of the fullness of times” to, for example, “when the time is right,” or “when the time fully comes.” Other examples in a footnote include saying the “curtain” of the temple, rather than “veil,” and “confirms for us the message of the prophets” rather than “we have . . .a more sure word of prophecy.”
Curious, I did some comparing of my own. Doing a “marvelous work and a wonder” (Isaiah 29:14) becomes “being prodigal of prodigious prodigies” in my Jerusalem Bible. That there are “also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial” (1Cor 15:40) becomes “there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies”. In Jude 6 “angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation” becomes “angels which had supreme authority but did not keep it and left their appointed sphere.”
This raises some interesting questions. We would like to believe our doctrines are founded on a concept rather than a turn of phrase. We would like to think these concepts would be present in any translation.
So, I have a question especially for all of you who served foreign missions. What vintage was the Bible translation you used in your mission? Was it as old and its language as antique as our King James version? Did you have trouble finding the doctrines of the restoration in the Bibles you used? (This is Kathleen from Dialogue querying.)