a note to students of the New Testament
To the scholars and students of the NT translation community, past and present,
I thank God for you all, for the sacrifices you have made in order to bring to light the Word of YHWH. Some of you paid with your lives - some have gone through times of great trial and testing, some have spent decades in faithful endurance. The Lord knows your work and your reward because of your desire to know and share YHWH's Word in truth. Thank you to all those who created study guides, references, lexicons, commentaries, concordances, translations, a multitude of useful tools for the truth seeker. You have helped build up YHWH's Household.
It is also my desire to help build up YHWH's Household, but as with each of us, only time will tell how much that will be the case. I do not know how much time remains for me to complete this work to the extent the Lord desires, but I do know how it has strengthened my trust in Him and His Word.
How was The TENT made?
The Transparent Experimental New Testament (TENT) is not a 'targeted-audience' text of the New Testament, nor an inventive paraphrase, nor simply an updated English version. Rather, The TENT is the experimental result of a method of translating large texts, which I call the N2LR (Natural Language Learning Redundancy) translation method. This method has populated The TENT Lexicon, which in turn has enabled the creation of three TENT translation versions (source text, study version and devotional version) through various digital coding processes.
My work was to test the N2LR translation method by using it to create the digital codes for each parsing, then to either pass or flag every change which the method made to the 'traditional' or 'accepted' English of current New Testaments, then to work out the flagged difficulties in a continuous refining process until all grammar and NT contexts were accounted for, which led to the gradual building of The TENT Lexicon and The TENT Source Text.
The TENT has different strengths and weaknesses from those of traditional English versions. For instance, what I know of Greek I learned immersively like a child, not primarily as a taught student. I learned biblical Greek as an autodidact, and only visually, by number and parsings rather than by hearing and speaking. I had to learn only what the method required me to learn. As a German language student, I had already learned how cases worked, and for learning the rest I depended on other resources - mostly the results of the N2LR method itself coupled with widely available Bible study tools and aides.
I might recognize the look and "flow" of Greek; I might be able to pick out a paraphrastic, an ellipsis, an anacoluthon, but what I have not picked up are all of the English terms for various Greek grammar constructions. I hope these shortcomings in my Greek will not hinder biblical discovery in The TENT by Greek scholars who have spent long years mastering biblical Greek. The unfamiliar Greek grammar constructions I came across during translating I have put in a Grammar Glossary mainly for myself to refer to. Some constructions for which I could find no online references, I named on my own, such as the "deistic article," the "switch function," and the "p/a-sub." If there are names already accepted for those constuctions, I will gladly change mine.
The initial translating for The TENT Lexicon was derived at first from individual contextual word studies, with an emphasis on the contextual, i.e. guided by every biblical context where the word was found. This was done in the descending order of the number of occurrences of the words in the NT text, starting with words of most occurrence first, since these would have a greater influence on the translation of other words, providing more context in a shorter time. This was the backbone of the N2LR method based on information theory - the protection from information loss through creating redundancy.
The results of the N2LR method
This method also had another strength. It became all too obvious that it was self-correcting, and enabled me to... no, forced me to make corrections as they became necessary. To my mind, the whole method depended on this, because it is my belief that Scripture interprets Scripture, and I thought that leaving anything to chance would doom the method from the beginning.
I may know the strengths of The TENT, yet only some of its weaknesses. So far I have found that its strengths greatly outweigh its weaknesses, and make it already highly valuable for me as a Bible student. That is what has kept me working on it since the turn of the millennium, and it is why I trust that my decades before that, when learning other things, were a preparation.
The step to publish is daunting. Although The TENT Lexicon at this stage must be considered a beta-version, it is even now quite usable. I have been using it for a number of years and I keep finding incredible things, some of which I share under the "Valuable" and "Contextual" sections.
I hope to have The TENT Lexicon and its devotional NT version available as free downloads, though any online payment company usually has a reasonable minimum service charge. There will be a cost for the study version and the source text. All the content and downloads from this website are under a Creative Commons ANCND license, which allows unlimited quotes with attribution, but disallows making changes or using it commercially, i.e. you can use it to help create a product for sale, like a word study, an article or your own NT version, but you can't sell this website's content by itself or offer it as a download.
All the content on this site must remain on this site or be downloaded from this site and be attributed to this site or to whatever website might be the future home of the TENT. I feel a great responsibility to protect the most uncorrupted version of God's Word in English, which I believe is what the TENT is. The TENT will not be changed unless I am convinced of the accuracy of those changes. There may be quite a number of these when it comes under more scrutiny, but I am the one having the most vested interest in maintaining the level of its accuracy and consistency.
Use The TENT Lexicon to do word studies, or to translate any NT verse according to Strong's numbers. Using The TENT Lexicon can even go a long way toward translating the Greek Septuagint, the over two thousand year old Greek translation of the Old Testament. In The TENT study and source texts, Strong's numbered alternate readings depend on which Greek textual tradition seemed to best fit the grammar and context.
As a part of the N2LR method, I have depended on different kinds of redundancy to try to determine which variant among textual traditions best suits the contextual meaning. For instance in the new SBLGT, in Jude 5, the questionable article before "Lord" plus the highly controversial translation of "Jesus" instead of "Lord", make me believe that a "switch function" is operating there, and without the questionable article, the name should be translated as "YHWH", which solves the difficulties in Jude 5.
Translation issues
I believe many NT translation issues can be resolved beginning with a simple acknowledgment. Beginning with the very first translation from the NT Greek there has always existed a largely unaccountable step, the initial translation from biblical Greek words into either a mental word list (vocabulary in a second language) or a physical word list (a bilingual lexicon) in the translator's target language. At the time of the earliest NT translations, the translator's native language might even have been koine Greek, but if the translator at that time only had Greek and one second language, it was still a distinct advantage in knowing two living languages.
By nature of biblical Greek's use only in the remote past, a Greek NT lexicon can not possibly contain all the original language's contextual, figurative and idiomatic information for every word. Depending on the translation process used and the level of familiarity with biblical Greek possessed by the creators of the lexicon, any translation based on it would to some degree suffer a loss of information.
How the N2LR method can help
The only way to restore translation information that has been lost is through the application of the idea of redundancy found in information theory. Translations can be refined and corrected piecemeal by comparisons with enough ancient text fragments, but this process depends on money, time, energy and existence of fragments. Most of all, it depends on enough context. Ancient fragments are much more numerous than context-rich ancient scrolls, making such a process slow and imperfect.
It seems to be generally assumed that no one today can learn biblical Greek as a living second language. This may be true for only some parts of the language, pronunciation being the most obvious, or for long vanished contextual or idiomatic meanings. However, I believe it is possible to restore many extremely important things only seen in the Greek NT text through applying the redundancy based process of the N2LR method, which was developed for the very purpose of providing a more accurate New Testament in English.
The closest we may ever come to an accurate, consistent, transparent and readable English NT text is to create a Greek NT lexicon based on the N2LR method. With such a lexicon, English speaking translators can more accurately use dynamic equivalence to translate into other languages. Does anyone on earth speak like a first century Hebraic Greek speaker? Only one voice seems to remain, the Hebraic voice of the Greek New Testament itself. This is why it is of primary importance to ensure the accuracy and consistency of any initial translation of the biblical Greek into any lexicons for translators. Only then can decisions regarding "functional" translations be grounded in "literal" reality.
I came upon a comment posted under an article by Peter Gurry describing a 'slow-to-be-published' situation in regards to a purported "earliest" fragment of Mark's gospel. It spoke to me about my concerns in putting out this new N2LR translation method experiment.
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http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2017/07/new-details-emerge-about-first-century.html
The comment poster, Eric Rowe, first quotes from an interview with Scott Carroll by Josh McDowell, then Rowe comments:
"Eric Rowe 7/14/2017 3:51 pm
[quoting Carroll:] 'It’s a lengthy process, actually going through—especially with this because it’s going to get, it’s gonna go out there and there are going to be people immediately trying to tear it down, questioning provenance—so where it came from, what it dates to—especially with the date. And so they want an ironclad argument on the dating of the document so that it won’t be—I mean they have a responsibility to that. But this is going to be very critical [inaudible]. It will be a major flash-point for the news when this happens.' [end of Carroll quote]
[Rowe comment:] I don't know if that is Carroll speculating about the reason for the delay, or if this is really the reason that whoever owns the manuscript is using to justify it. But I can't appreciate this line of thought at all. Why do you have to have what you think are ironclad arguments about all those issues before putting it out there for others to see? Why not accept that the conclusions already reached about those matters are debatable, and welcome the ensuing debate about them? And why assume that the scholars working on it, whoever they are, are capable of making ironclad arguments? That's like saying, 'When I finally let the world study my manuscript, there will be nothing about it to learn any more. My team will have done too thorough of a job to allow for any further debate, and there will never be any other scholars in the world who have the ability to perceive anything about this manuscript they didn't perceive so as to dispute their conclusions, from now until eternity.' It also sounds a lot like, 'We need to make sure that we prove it's as early as we want it to be, and we won't show it to the rest of the world until we can accompany it with proof to support that conclusion.'"
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I appreciate Rowe's attitude. In my own situation, much as I want this N2LR translation method experiment to be perfect, it won't be. My main concern has been not whether scholars are going to accept or reject its propositions and solutions, but whether they are going to dismiss it out of hand or judge it without a trial because I have no formal training. Rowe's comment encouraged me to engage with critical feedback (and to just deal with any bad manners that might come with it), always sticking to the facts with a willingness to change what needs to be changed.
I pray that this work will be helpful to you in spite of, or perhaps because of, its "different-ness," and if it is, please consider telling me about it so that your words might encourage others to investigate it for themselves.