Monday, October 22, 2012

A Glimpse Under the Hood

Last year Crossway changed [updated/revised/corrected] about 500 words in its uber-popular ESV translation.  I was unaware of this until quite recently when, while teaching a class on Ephesians, I was blindsided by one of them that was not insignificant.  I docked my students points on a memory quiz for "misquoting" Ephesians 1.17 - that God may give you 'a spirit of wisdom' vs 'the Spirit of wisdom'.  After several vociferous protests, and actually being shown several ESV's with the first wording I discovered that the original edition said 'a spirit', while both of my updated 2011's say 'the Spirit'.
I have been slow to jump on the ESV bandwagon because of an innate cynicism toward heavily-marketed products, [which this translation is] and an uncertainty of the philosophy behind the textual selections differing with the KJV/NKJV at many points.  But as time goes by, I have grown fond of the ESV, despite these reservations.  It is almost always the version I use for family reading [had a great time last night talking with my boys after reading Is 36.12 ... only rivaled in shocking verbiage by the original KJV's rendering] and more and more for pulpit use.

Here is a great clip of the revision committee debating about one of my favorite Greek words: doulos.

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