Consistent – or Twisting Words?

For years, the front page of my site has stated: “The guiding principle is a consistent, literal (concordant) Bible translation.” Time and again, I am reminded of the enormous value of this approach. Discordant Bible translations are, by definition, trapped in a hermeneutical circle: the translation flows from what people think, while what they think is based on the translation. There is only one way to escape this circle: choose consistent translation words. This approach turns out to be a self-correcting principle. This time I want to illustrate that with an example that is completely neutral dogmatically.

I am referring to the Greek word ‘plateia’ (Str.4116). ‘Plateia’ is derived from the Greek word for ‘broad’ and, incidentally, is also related to our word ‘flat’. In any case, ‘plateia’ occurs a total of nine times in the New Testament and is rendered by the NBG as follows:

Matthew 6:5 — …in the synagogues and at the corners of the squares…

Matthew 12:19 — …no one will hear His voice in the squares.

Luke 10:10 — …go out into its streets and say…

Luke 13:26 — …and You taught in our streets.

Luke 14:21 — Go at once into the streets and alleys of the city…

Acts 5:15 — …so much so that people carried the sick out into the street.

Revelation 11:8 — And their corpse [will lie] on the street of the great city…

Revelation 21:21 — …and the street of the city was pure gold…

Revelation 22:2 — In the middle of its street…

Twice ‘square’ and seven times ‘street’. This latter rendering (‘street’, that is) is quite confusing because elsewhere this is again the translation of a completely different Greek word, ‘rhume’ (Str.4505), which itself occurs four times in the New Testament. Here are the passages:

Matthew 6:2 — …in the synagogues and on the streets…

Luke 14:21 — Go at once into the streets and alleys of the city…

Acts 9:11 — Rise and go to the street called Straight…

Acts 12:10 — And when they had gone outside, they went one street farther…

Of the four times that ‘rhume’ occurs, it is therefore translated three times as ‘street’ and (note this) only once as ‘alley’. As if those were the same thing… Why this one exception? Is ‘rhume’ not simply ‘street’? Yes, but then the NBG would have become hopelessly tangled up in Luke 14:21. It would have had to translate: “Go at once into the streets and streets of the city….” Had ‘plateia’, however, been consistently translated as ‘square’, there would have been no need here to take refuge in ‘alleys’… In a single Scripture passage like this, the discordant rendering is completely exposed! Only by rendering words consistently can this kind of word-twisting be avoided. Then ‘plateia’ would not only have been rendered as ‘square’ in Matthew 6 and 12, but also in the other seven occurrences. And ‘rhume’ could then, without exception, have been rendered as ‘street’.

I admit it: the above concerns a fairly harmless translation term, but it once again illustrates strikingly how valuable (indeed, how necessary!) it is to translate consistently. If this is not done, the ultimate consequence is that, in principle, Scripture can be made to say anything one thinks it says. A very popular approach among theologians. This is called dynamic equivalence, and such a fine academic term is supposed to legitimize the twisting of words…

Share: