Question: What text tradition is the TENT translation based on?
A basic and important decision for every translator of the New Testament is which text tradition to follow. This issue is loaded with controversy and emotional zeal. I did not know which text tradition was better or best when I began my translation work. I was hardly even aware of any controversy, but when it did come to my attention early on, my question to the Lord ran this way: should I base this translation on the incredible amount of ancient scrolls, portions of scrolls, pages, and fragments comprising the Byzantine Majority text tradition handed down through the centuries as the received text, the Textus Receptus, the Greek text leading to the King James Bible? Or...
Should I trust the more ancient scrolls, the Alexandrian texts of the New Testament, discovered in an ancient Egyptian monastery repository for ancient scrolls, which scrolls had long been considered too old and delicate to be used, much older than any ever before discovered? Scholars have found many discrepancies between these two text groups and I precipitously concluded, “ Well, the older scrolls might have been put there because they had mistakes.” That was my thinking, but after asking the Lord to show me which text type I should use, and without my knowledge, my ever helpful husband bought me a New Testament interlinear he thought would be one I could use in my studies. I looked it over.
I was immediately impressed with it's thoughtful layout and overall attractiveness. It even had footnotes describing the differences between the two textual traditions! I took it as an answer to prayer and began to use it to check problem words and phrases. I was using for my main source a PCSB Bible study program on my computer. It also had the two text traditions which I could place one below the other to make comparisons. When the two diverged I could check my new volume, Nelson's NKJV Interlinear (edit. by Hodges and Farstad). However, I went through a maze of doubt before I found out why.
If I had decided ahead of time to choose one text tradition over the other, I would have completely missed the incredibly instructive process of checking the details of how the texts differed in the Greek. I think that since I was committed to grammatical accuracy from the start, the Lord prevented me from taking the broad yet deceptive way of simply choosing which English translation I liked best. I'm sure I must have whined, “Lord, this will take sooo much more work!”
All grammar and semantics must be checked, and I soon found myself doing exactly that. The New Testament interlinear my husband had bought for me was a crucial step which kept me open to both sides of the controversies over which text tradition was “better” or "earlier" or “more authentic.”
I learned that in the process of comparing the Greek grammar underlying each tradition at points of discrepancy, I was encouraged to keep on doing so by what I found by using the N2LR translation method. After finding solutions to traditionally controversial passages by using this method, I saw how these discrepancies could have come about, why one text form might have been changed to another.
As the years went by, I slowly became confirmed in previous suspicions that cropped up during this very lengthy process. The fact that I kept finding solutions to long-standing textual controversies and mysteries encouraged me that I was on the right track. I came to understand that the earliest texts we have are generally faithful copies of faithful copies of everything written that would later be called the New Testament. But later texts were another matter.
As time passed tumultuously, and empires rose and fell, and some spoken languages gained dominance while the speakers of more ancient languages grew fewer until there were no more, the importance of the New Testament writings remained. Periodically, felt needs arose to create a translation in more current language or to clarify outdated expressions, one that a new generation or a new people-group could understand, because wasn't the whole point to spread the Good News?
God blessed the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire and kept it for over a thousand years. The original New Testament writings were early translated into Greek, even if perhaps not originally written in Greek. The ancient Hebrew writings comprising the Old Testament we have today had already been put into Greek hundreds of years before Yeshua’s birth. They are called the Septuagint.
The Septuagint was an obvious model for the transmission of the New Testament text as the “Good News”. All of the New Testament stories and letters having any veracity were quickly collected and treasured, along with the Greek Septuagint itself, since it was the source for most New Testament scripture quotes from the Old Testament. And so today we have copies in Greek of both Old and New Testaments.
Recently the Greek Septuagint has been receiving much more Christian study as the anciently revered OT source which the New Testament authors almost exclusively quoted from. It is an exciting recent discovery, based on the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the almost 2,000 year old Greek Septuagint scrolls found in the Dead Sea caves are semantically closer to the Greek Septuagint text still in use today by the Greek Orthodox Church and some few others, than they are to the Masoretic Hebrew texts used to translate most English Bible Old Testaments today. The compilers of the Masoretic text in the Middle Ages were descendants of the Pharisees of Yeshua’s day. Perhaps that accounts in part for the differences found between the much more ancient Old Testament writings in Greek and the Masoretic Text.
At quite an early date the Byzantines must have found the ancient Christian writings were not being properly understood in some instances, as in 1 Cor. 7:36-38. This was detrimental to the faith, and so, under undoubtedly strict oversight, newer Byzantine copies were made containing minor changes to the original Greek. These were changes of style or clarification. As older copies wore out, copies of the updated text were sent out and became eventually codified.
It was either unknown or hidden that a few teachings were changed due to the gradual adoption of pagan Greek philosophical ideas by gifted and influential Christian theologians. Chief among these errors was the idea of a human soul as innately immortal. This notion's requisite offspring, the idea of eternal torment for unbelievers after death, has held sway in the Church for a thousand years. But is it valid?
During the early Dark Ages Jerome (347-420 CE) had translated the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. Through the 1200s various "Christian" Crusades were launched to rid the Holy Land of the "enemies of Christ". Toward the end of the Middle Ages, Islam's violent spread since the 600s was headed for Europe. In 1453 the Muslim Ottomans finally besieged and took Constantinople, the Queen city having been slowly weakened through corruption after a thousand years.
The handwriting was on the wall, and before the end, many Greek scholars with the most precious ancient texts made their escape to the former Roman Empire, now Christian also. The Muslims killed or enslaved the large Christian population (once a million people) of Constantinople (now Istanbul). The Byzantine Empire’s capital in the East had finally come to an end.
Rome, as the western capital of the former Roman Empire, then became the main spiritual center of the Christian parts of Europe. The Christian religious establishment in Rome must have decided that they too should improve some readings in the NT text which seemed to be in need of a more understandable, preferably non-Jewish (due to their cultural anti-Semitism) interpretive view.
In particular, they made changes to little-known Jewish terminology and customs and worldview, to the extent that it helped “clarify” their view that God had rejected the Jews and chosen the Church to replace them as His covenant people. I think it probable that the eternal punishment idea was deemed a necessity to play down, if not eliminate, the Hebrew worldview, which had no such teachings. The Hebrew OT consistently teaches final destruction for the ones finally rejecting YHWH.
It seems inevitable that, after it was seen as necessary and acceptable to change the early texts so as to be understood in current languages, the genie was out of the bottle. Under the medieval papacy, both Jewish and spirit-filled Christian communities were targeted and eliminated by the Roman Church, justified by official corrupted Church texts and teachings.
Only because the N2LR translation method highlighted the discrepancies between the Textus Receptus and critical texts could I see what had to have happened. Of course exactly when and how changes were made is speculation, but the results speak for themselves.
The texts underlying the KJV and many other English translations, have been put on the defensive by many new versions based on the more ancient NT text discoveries (which keep being made). These newer versions are designated by phrases such as “based on a critical text” or “based on an eclectic text.” What I have found, though, is that these newer versions, even if they are based on "more authentic" texts, are still, to different extents, being translated into English with traditional Church meanings inherited from a fifteen-hundred-year-old institutionalized Roman Church.
Text restoration will not fully occur until there is accurate and consistent translation from the earliest Greek versions which we now have, into accurate and consistent vernacular meanings in target languages. However, traditional Greek-English lexicons tend to perpetuate past problems. I propose that scholars begin to test the TENT Lexicon for accuracy and consistency of its definitions discovered through the N2LR method of translating large texts.
The situation today for NT translations from critical texts seems to be a free-for-all, or a buffet -- just look at 1 Cor 7:36-38 or James 4:5. Scholars are trying to translate critical text grammar into either traditional or current English phraseology! There seems to be a dearth of enough rigor and accountability in both text and context. This is where the N2LR method of translating large texts shines.
Bible translators are trying to make readable English sense out of the critical texts, but they will keep being frustrated until they commit to accurately translating Greek grammar. I’m not talking about literalism; idiomatic expression can also be acceptably translated, but the foundation should be an accurate and consistent NT Lexicon.
The textual problems and the long-standing controversies disappear like bad dreams when we translate what the Greek NT writers actually wrote. Of course, this requires learning NT Greek as naturally as possible -- like a child. This is what the Lord showed me how to do using the N2LR method for translating large texts, the larger the better for the sake of increasing the redundancy that language uses to correct itself.
Here is a link to the "buffet" of 1 Cor 7:36-38 which finally gave me an overview of how muliple overlapping changes to the text could occur between text traditions, and here is a link to the "free-for-all" of what seems to have happened with James 4:5. The N2LR - TENT solutions to both passages are given in those places.
Should I trust the more ancient scrolls, the Alexandrian texts of the New Testament, discovered in an ancient Egyptian monastery repository for ancient scrolls, which scrolls had long been considered too old and delicate to be used, much older than any ever before discovered? Scholars have found many discrepancies between these two text groups and I precipitously concluded, “ Well, the older scrolls might have been put there because they had mistakes.” That was my thinking, but after asking the Lord to show me which text type I should use, and without my knowledge, my ever helpful husband bought me a New Testament interlinear he thought would be one I could use in my studies. I looked it over.
I was immediately impressed with it's thoughtful layout and overall attractiveness. It even had footnotes describing the differences between the two textual traditions! I took it as an answer to prayer and began to use it to check problem words and phrases. I was using for my main source a PCSB Bible study program on my computer. It also had the two text traditions which I could place one below the other to make comparisons. When the two diverged I could check my new volume, Nelson's NKJV Interlinear (edit. by Hodges and Farstad). However, I went through a maze of doubt before I found out why.
If I had decided ahead of time to choose one text tradition over the other, I would have completely missed the incredibly instructive process of checking the details of how the texts differed in the Greek. I think that since I was committed to grammatical accuracy from the start, the Lord prevented me from taking the broad yet deceptive way of simply choosing which English translation I liked best. I'm sure I must have whined, “Lord, this will take sooo much more work!”
All grammar and semantics must be checked, and I soon found myself doing exactly that. The New Testament interlinear my husband had bought for me was a crucial step which kept me open to both sides of the controversies over which text tradition was “better” or "earlier" or “more authentic.”
I learned that in the process of comparing the Greek grammar underlying each tradition at points of discrepancy, I was encouraged to keep on doing so by what I found by using the N2LR translation method. After finding solutions to traditionally controversial passages by using this method, I saw how these discrepancies could have come about, why one text form might have been changed to another.
As the years went by, I slowly became confirmed in previous suspicions that cropped up during this very lengthy process. The fact that I kept finding solutions to long-standing textual controversies and mysteries encouraged me that I was on the right track. I came to understand that the earliest texts we have are generally faithful copies of faithful copies of everything written that would later be called the New Testament. But later texts were another matter.
As time passed tumultuously, and empires rose and fell, and some spoken languages gained dominance while the speakers of more ancient languages grew fewer until there were no more, the importance of the New Testament writings remained. Periodically, felt needs arose to create a translation in more current language or to clarify outdated expressions, one that a new generation or a new people-group could understand, because wasn't the whole point to spread the Good News?
God blessed the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire and kept it for over a thousand years. The original New Testament writings were early translated into Greek, even if perhaps not originally written in Greek. The ancient Hebrew writings comprising the Old Testament we have today had already been put into Greek hundreds of years before Yeshua’s birth. They are called the Septuagint.
The Septuagint was an obvious model for the transmission of the New Testament text as the “Good News”. All of the New Testament stories and letters having any veracity were quickly collected and treasured, along with the Greek Septuagint itself, since it was the source for most New Testament scripture quotes from the Old Testament. And so today we have copies in Greek of both Old and New Testaments.
Recently the Greek Septuagint has been receiving much more Christian study as the anciently revered OT source which the New Testament authors almost exclusively quoted from. It is an exciting recent discovery, based on the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the almost 2,000 year old Greek Septuagint scrolls found in the Dead Sea caves are semantically closer to the Greek Septuagint text still in use today by the Greek Orthodox Church and some few others, than they are to the Masoretic Hebrew texts used to translate most English Bible Old Testaments today. The compilers of the Masoretic text in the Middle Ages were descendants of the Pharisees of Yeshua’s day. Perhaps that accounts in part for the differences found between the much more ancient Old Testament writings in Greek and the Masoretic Text.
At quite an early date the Byzantines must have found the ancient Christian writings were not being properly understood in some instances, as in 1 Cor. 7:36-38. This was detrimental to the faith, and so, under undoubtedly strict oversight, newer Byzantine copies were made containing minor changes to the original Greek. These were changes of style or clarification. As older copies wore out, copies of the updated text were sent out and became eventually codified.
It was either unknown or hidden that a few teachings were changed due to the gradual adoption of pagan Greek philosophical ideas by gifted and influential Christian theologians. Chief among these errors was the idea of a human soul as innately immortal. This notion's requisite offspring, the idea of eternal torment for unbelievers after death, has held sway in the Church for a thousand years. But is it valid?
During the early Dark Ages Jerome (347-420 CE) had translated the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into Latin. Through the 1200s various "Christian" Crusades were launched to rid the Holy Land of the "enemies of Christ". Toward the end of the Middle Ages, Islam's violent spread since the 600s was headed for Europe. In 1453 the Muslim Ottomans finally besieged and took Constantinople, the Queen city having been slowly weakened through corruption after a thousand years.
The handwriting was on the wall, and before the end, many Greek scholars with the most precious ancient texts made their escape to the former Roman Empire, now Christian also. The Muslims killed or enslaved the large Christian population (once a million people) of Constantinople (now Istanbul). The Byzantine Empire’s capital in the East had finally come to an end.
Rome, as the western capital of the former Roman Empire, then became the main spiritual center of the Christian parts of Europe. The Christian religious establishment in Rome must have decided that they too should improve some readings in the NT text which seemed to be in need of a more understandable, preferably non-Jewish (due to their cultural anti-Semitism) interpretive view.
In particular, they made changes to little-known Jewish terminology and customs and worldview, to the extent that it helped “clarify” their view that God had rejected the Jews and chosen the Church to replace them as His covenant people. I think it probable that the eternal punishment idea was deemed a necessity to play down, if not eliminate, the Hebrew worldview, which had no such teachings. The Hebrew OT consistently teaches final destruction for the ones finally rejecting YHWH.
It seems inevitable that, after it was seen as necessary and acceptable to change the early texts so as to be understood in current languages, the genie was out of the bottle. Under the medieval papacy, both Jewish and spirit-filled Christian communities were targeted and eliminated by the Roman Church, justified by official corrupted Church texts and teachings.
Only because the N2LR translation method highlighted the discrepancies between the Textus Receptus and critical texts could I see what had to have happened. Of course exactly when and how changes were made is speculation, but the results speak for themselves.
The texts underlying the KJV and many other English translations, have been put on the defensive by many new versions based on the more ancient NT text discoveries (which keep being made). These newer versions are designated by phrases such as “based on a critical text” or “based on an eclectic text.” What I have found, though, is that these newer versions, even if they are based on "more authentic" texts, are still, to different extents, being translated into English with traditional Church meanings inherited from a fifteen-hundred-year-old institutionalized Roman Church.
Text restoration will not fully occur until there is accurate and consistent translation from the earliest Greek versions which we now have, into accurate and consistent vernacular meanings in target languages. However, traditional Greek-English lexicons tend to perpetuate past problems. I propose that scholars begin to test the TENT Lexicon for accuracy and consistency of its definitions discovered through the N2LR method of translating large texts.
The situation today for NT translations from critical texts seems to be a free-for-all, or a buffet -- just look at 1 Cor 7:36-38 or James 4:5. Scholars are trying to translate critical text grammar into either traditional or current English phraseology! There seems to be a dearth of enough rigor and accountability in both text and context. This is where the N2LR method of translating large texts shines.
Bible translators are trying to make readable English sense out of the critical texts, but they will keep being frustrated until they commit to accurately translating Greek grammar. I’m not talking about literalism; idiomatic expression can also be acceptably translated, but the foundation should be an accurate and consistent NT Lexicon.
The textual problems and the long-standing controversies disappear like bad dreams when we translate what the Greek NT writers actually wrote. Of course, this requires learning NT Greek as naturally as possible -- like a child. This is what the Lord showed me how to do using the N2LR method for translating large texts, the larger the better for the sake of increasing the redundancy that language uses to correct itself.
Here is a link to the "buffet" of 1 Cor 7:36-38 which finally gave me an overview of how muliple overlapping changes to the text could occur between text traditions, and here is a link to the "free-for-all" of what seems to have happened with James 4:5. The N2LR - TENT solutions to both passages are given in those places.