Reddit reviews And God Said: How Translations Conceal the Bible's Original Meaning

> What I'm thinking of is more a case of having a base translation that you think is pretty good for right now, and then updating it one verse at a time with something more like a text replacement.

Yep. This is usually how translators work. The NIV went though and replaced instances of the word "thong" with "sandal" when "thong" took on its modern "underwear" meaning.

But this doesn't always work out as perfectly as you would hope. Say you want to replace "bread" with "tortilla" in a culture where corn tortillas are the staple food. What do you do with the Exodus story? God told them to make unleavened...tortillas? But tortillas are already unleavened. Ok, so that's an exception. We have to leave "bread" there, maybe with a note explaining what bread and leavening meant to the Israelites. But then we have to check all the instances of "bread" to see if they mean "staple food" "specific type of bread" "metaphorical image" or whatever else. And there are books (and software - check out Logos) with this sort of information that translators use (lexicons, concordances, grammatical analyses), but there is still disagreement over what sense a word has in a particular passage. So there will still be a human decision somewhere down the line as to what "bread" in a specific passage means. And that I think is where we can't rely on the sort of program which does replacements of concepts. There are too many concepts to make this feasible. See Hoffman's book And God Said for another view of some of this.

Another problem would be that replacing single words or even phrases would create a very clunky translation. The original translation might be in one style, but the people who filled out the form might use a different dialect or vocabulary. That MadLibs-style result would be at least as jarring as a footnote. The Bible is indeed a text composed by many human authors, but a single passage usually has one person making it cohesive. This is more of a trivial problem, not affecting the core meaning, but it will affect how the resulting product is read, which can very easily affect the meaning people take from it. See how the style of Donald Trump's speech completely changes when he has a British accent. The words are still the same, but the style completely changes how I feel about those words. And accent is something even beyond what we're talking about here.

> However this kind of thing usually doesn't happen on controversial verses

But...they are controversial exactly because there is disagreement about the core truth of the passage. I think this is where you are going to run into the most problems with this project. If there was a definitive core truth of a passage, we wouldn't still be arguing about it 50, 100, 1000 years later. Yes, we can decide to pick the more progressive interpretation. And yes, I think that people should have access to the progressive/liberal interpretation in the surface text, rather than in a footnote. But the Bible is not a collection of core truths. It's a text written in a context by specific people, and interpreted through millennia by people. The disagreements over the text are as much a part of the the interpretation of the text as the words themselves. That's why the Jews have Talmud. That's why we have subreddits. To struggle with the text. To discover nuances people 200 years ago couldn't have imagined, but are perfectly relevant to today.