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Re: translations
Paul,
I think your summary of the state of the evidence is very reasonable.
Though I can't speak to the textual history, I can speak to translation
as a literary specialist. I favor the dynamic equivalent for ordinary
readers. It *does* reflect a doctrinal bias more, but then most people
are fairly committed to a denomination anyway, and don't engage
theological questions outside the authority/leadership of their church.
If they *tried*, with a literal translation, to do theological/word
studies, they would probably make huge mistakes, since they wouldn't be
trained to know what they were looking for, or what stood behind the
text. At most the advantage of a literal translation for a
non-specialist would be the ability to draw a few more connections
between related passages than would be possible in a dynamic equivalent
translation.
And I do have a favorite in the NIV translation - as being the most
fluent, literary, and readable of the dynamic equivalents I know of (of
course all the literal translations are out of the running altogether!).
-Greg Jordan
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
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