Some Arduous Tasks for the
New Revised Standard Version
I had several duties as the research assistant to the
translation committee of the New Revised Standard
Version in 1987-88,.
Probably the most difficult
involved trying to make sure that there was a
consistency in the translation, from one biblical
book, passage, and verse to another.
How does one
determine if a translation is internally consistent?
It’s not easy.
I had to work through the entire
translation, and whenever I came across a key term in
the Hebrew or Greek that had been rendered into
English in one way in one passage, I had to check
whether it was rendered similarly in other passages
where the same word occurred.
The translators were absolutely not bound and determined to
translate the same Hebrew (or Greek) word the same way every
time it appeared in the Bible. In some contexts a word will
be better translated one way, in others another. But they at
least had to be aware of the fact that the term appears in
various passages and they had to be cognizant of how it had
been translated each time. In many instances a word will mean
exactly the same thing in various contexts, and when that is
the case, it should probably be translated the same way.
The problem with the NRSV translation committee, as I have
pointed out, is that…
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