Random Thoughts: The Message Translation

I haven't posted for a while because I've been working like a dog. Seeing as I only have about 3 hours to myself a day, I haven't really made blogging a priority. This post will probably have no structure but that's the nature of my "random thoughts" posts. It's kind of like following my thoughts as I organize them at the moment. Well, here's a tidbit of what I've been thinking in terms of Bible translation.

I'm liking the Message Bible a lot more now. I know this won't sound so sweet to many people (especially of the Reformed tradition) but I'd like to organize why I've recently swung towards this position.

I've hesitated to bash Mark Driscoll again but I thought it was okay as long as I said that he is freaking amazing (that pretty much covers it). Still I obviously disagree with him on some points as a previous post made evident (I also disagree with his doctrine of divine humor but that's not so important). The point to be made here is he wrote somewhere - I forget where - that we cannot change God's words, thus, when he writes "man" anywhere in the Bible we are not at liberty to change that to "humanity."

I use this to illustrate what I've come out of. Basically my philosophy of language has changed. If someone else said "Man is totally depraved" and wrote it down as "men and women are totally depraved" would that destroy the meaning? Would I be perverting his words as so many opponents of the TNIV translation seem to suggest?

I suspect that many people who argue on these lines have not wrestled with the issues important to missionaries and how they can make the Biblical language relevant to a totally different culture. This is not tangential but is of utmost importance, I just simply cannot elaborate on it now.

Recently our youth group was reading about John the Baptist's announcement of Jesus where he says he's nothing and that the one coming after him was magnificent and that he was not even worthy to untie his sandals. The Message says (to paraphrase a paraphrase) that John the Baptist is only a mere stagehand and that Jesus is the show.

Now I've only been to a couple broadway shows, but reading this really made the text come alive because of my experience. Does this disrupt the meaning of God's words? Nope. Are they God's words? Well, sorta, just as much as a pastor's sermon concerning the same words are.

People who criticize the Message seem to forget that it is a paraphrase; it's like a Targum. It's no different than expounding the text through the use of a contemporary illustration to our audience.

Do we distort God's words when we write "humanity" when he explicitly said "man"? Depends on your philosophy of language. Really, God usually meant "men and women" as much as "the image of God in man" means in "men and women." Keeping the literal rendering sometimes actually hinders the "understanding curve" of many readers.

Any bilingual person could affirm the basic idea of what I've just said. Sometimes I feel like people who hold the NASB on a pedestal because it's so close to the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek (in literal word transposition but not always accurate or relevant in meaning) only speak one language.