Sufficient Intelligibility and False Friends

The most prominent recent conversation about the Bible (that I’ve seen) revolves around “sufficient intelligibility” of the King James Version.  Some words used by the King James translators have changed in meaning since their translation.  Podcaster Mark Ward declares about one hundred words as “false friends.”  As an overview of the definitional usage, “false friend” means the following provided by an AI aggregation:

A false friend is a word in one language that sounds or looks similar to a word in another language, but has a different meaning.  It is also known as a false cognate or bilingual homophone.

Unlike the new Mark Ward usage of the terminology, false friend does not refer to a word in the same language that over the centuries radically changed in its meaning.  Instead, linguists calls this a “semantic change.”  Mark Ward did not originate the concept of “false friend.”  He simply uses the two word phrase in a different way than its original and definitional usage.  It does not refer to the changing meaning of the word.  That is semantic shift or semantic change.

History of False Friends Versus Semantic Change

At the same time, Ward was not the first to use “false friend” in the novel way that he does.  British linguist, David Crystal, began using the term “false friend” to refer to words in William Shakespeare’s writing that have now changed in meaning from their original understanding in Elizabethan English.  He accumulated an appendix of these words as long ago as 2010.  As far as I know, Crystal and Ward are the only ones using “false friend” like they have and do.  In some ways, it’s an either rhetorical or marketing tool.  Others are now imitating this new usage, but Crystal coined “false friend” for Shakespeare and then Ward for the King James Version.

Semantic shift or change is real.  Ward and his host of assistants have searched for words with semantic changes in meaning in the King James Version.  However, they’re a little late to the party, because those using the King James Version already provided these lists of words and their meaning for decades.  In 1998 the late D. A. Waite and his Bible For Today at great effort published The Defined King James Bible.  Even before Waite’s book, men wrote helps in this way.  Thomas Nelson Press published The King James Version Wordbook in 1994.

In 1978 in An Introduction to Language, Victoria Fromkin and Robert Rodman wrote (p. 314):

In the King James Version of the Bible (1611), God says of the herbs and trees, “to you shall be for meat” (Genesis 1:29).  To a speaker of seventeenth-century English, meat meant “food,” and flesh meant “meat.”  Since that time, semantic change has narrowed the meaning of meat to what it is in Modern English.

Two Actions

You can see that Fromkin and Rodman referred to this alteration of meaning, as do many others, as a “semantic shift.”  This occurs in every language over time.  Words take on a new meaning and contemporary readers should be informed of this in an older book or translation.  Two different actions could alleviate the confusion for one hundred or so words most egregiously affected by semantic changes.

One

One, the meaning of these one hundred or so words could be placed in the margin.    The Trinitarian Bible Society definitely does that in their classic and Westminster reference Bibles.  Why should someone do a total retranslation of the King James Version, when this simple solution exists?  It does not even require a giant group of Hebrew and Greek scholars to put in thousands of hours to accomplish this task.  That work is done already.

The 1611 King James translators placed into the translation marginal notes.  This isn’t new.  There were 7,342 of them.  The marginal notes were designed to provide readers with additional insights into the text. They often included alternate translations, explanations of obscure passages, and clarifications on specific terms or names found within the biblical text. Some notes defined biblical terms or provided context for certain characters, enhancing the reader’s understanding of the scriptures.  When I say scriptures, I mean what God inspired, the original language text.

As some of you reading here might know, providing a definition in the margin is unacceptable to Ward.  I’ve never heard him give an answer as to why.  He defames and castigates any church leader who opts for public continuation of usage of the King James Version, even with provision of definitions.  Ward recently said these leaders are sinning by continuing to have the KJV as their church Bible.  The only option for Ward, besides changing to a modern version, is the next one.

Two

Two, someone could update the translation of the King James Version in the spirit of the Blayney edition of 1769, that almost everyone already uses.  Some will say, “That’s already been done.”  People will mention The New King James Version first.  I’ve already written here in many posts how that the underlying text is different for the NKJV, which eliminates it as a possibility.  I believe there are over one hundred places where the NKJV translators came from a different word, not identical to the King James Version.

Another new translation that claims the same underlying text is the Modern English Version.  This was started in 2005 under the leadership of James Linzey, a Southern Baptist.  Many men worked on the MEV from a lot of different denominations with many different doctrinal and gospel positions.  It was published in 2014 by Passio, an arm of Charisma Publishing House, a Charismatic organization.  I haven’t looked into the MEV like I have the NKJV, so I don’t have much to say about it.

Some have given the Modern English Version a good review and some bad.  It seems like originally it was meant to meet a concern of chaplains in the British military and what they should give to their soldiers.  The MEV does question the underlying text of the KJV in its footnotes, calling into doubt the text preserved and available to the Lord’s churches.  I can’t in good conscience hand to someone or recommend to him a translation that denounces the very text from which it was translated.  The MEV does that.

Semantic and Translational Choices Versus Underlying Text

With everything said so far about semantic and translational choices in the English translation of the original languages of the Bible, how does that contrast with a different underlying text?  The modern versions don’t translate from the same Hebrew and Greek words.  There are thousands of differences in words between the critical text, the underlying text behind the modern versions of the New Testament and that of the Textus Receptus, the underlying text behind the King James Version.  Thousands.  Those are different words, not words that could have variation in meaning so someone could understand them in different ways.

It’s important to translate words right.  Translating the original language words into intelligible language is also good.  If you can, you want to translate into words that people can understand.  You don’t want to translate into words that have a different meaning now than the word in the underlying text.  This is called “getting it right.”  When someone translates, if possible he should try to get the English word with the same meaning as the original language word.  At the same time, having the wrong underlying word is worse.

Having a hundred words with a translation with a changed semantical meaning is not as bad as actual wrong words.  Someone can learn the old meaning of the word that has had a semantical change.  A totally different or wrong word is still different and wrong, even if it’s translated right and intelligible.  No explanation or translation can change the wrong word in the underlying text.  That’s worse than a “false friend.”

Important Consideration

I ask that you also take the next obvious truth into consideration.  Someone such as Mark Ward and others, but especially him, will say it is sin to distribute one hundred words he assesses as unintelligible in translation.  Yet, he will not consider or call it sin to distribute five thousand wrong words.  This comparison should qualify the outrage over intelligibility.  I’ll let you judge.  Those one hundred misunderstood words look like more of a red herring next to five thousands wrong words.

Ward himself to his credit won’t say that semantic change is an error in translation.  It isn’t.  However, the wrong word is an error.  You can never translate the right word from a wrong word.

What’s lost with the hodgepodge of English translations on the market today?  It dismisses the biblical and historical doctrine of preservation of scripture.  Among other things, that is what is most unacceptable in an evaluation of this issue.  In the late nineteenth century, B. B. Warfield at Princeton Seminary invented a new doctrine of inerrancy to compensate for this very betrayal of the doctrine of preservation.

Mark Ward speaks with certainty about a sin of unintelligibility.  He isn’t certain about the words of scripture though.  He calls it confidence, something less than being certain.  And that’s fine, to be expected from his and others’ perspective.