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Nida also presents word studies from the Greek New Testament, including a partial list of the ways the word logos is rendered in English Scripture. The list includes the figurative title for Christ in John 1:1 ("Word" in English), "reason" in the phrase "the reason for your hope" in 1 Peter 3:15, "financial accounts" in "the servants' accounts" in Matthew 18:23, and a half dozen others. Sarks is similarly versatile, meaning "skin" in Revelation 19:18, "human form" in 1 Timothy 3:16, "humanity" in 1 Peter 1:24, and "race" in Romans 11:14. Nida said he and colleagues once produced a list of 25,000 meanings for the New Testament's 5,000 words. This made Nida skeptical of "the prevalence of 'word-worship,'" which he says "almost always results in skewing the meaning of the original and making artificial the form of the resulting translation." The solution is to find "the closest natural equivalent in meaning and impact."
This makes Ryken's skin crawl. His book is in many ways a response to Nida's career, if not his memoir (Ryken discusses English, while Nida mostly considers other languages). Nida, Ryken says, championed the "forthright elevation of the reader over the author" and "caters to readers."
Ryken clearly believes that the plain English translations that have flourished in recent decades—dynamic equivalence versions that emphasize accessibility above all—have gotten carried away with their alterations of Scripture. What began as an effort to bring the Bible to a broader audience by revising and simplifying archaic language, Ryken says, ended up replacing established, elegant versions of the Bible with diluted ones (and he places the popular New International Version in the latter category). This shift, he contends, has left many English-speaking Christians with a shallow understanding of theology and drained the Bible of the essential literary features of rhythm, parallelism, and vividness, to name a few.
Take the handsome phrase "establish the work of our hands upon us," which the English Standard Version uses in the last verse of Psalm 90. The Contemporary English Version changed this to the relatively lame phrase "let all go well for us"; the Good News Bible has the Oprah-esque "give us success in all we do." Or take James' statement that believers are "a kind of firstfruits of his creation." The CEV has that as "his own special people," with echoes of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.
But once Ryken gets rolling on this point, he takes it too far, to the point of excessively glorifying the King James Version. He even uses the phrase "the words of the original" in a way that I initially took as a reference to the KJV. At one point, Ryken says that God gave us "the Word as he wants us to have it." If that were true, we wouldn't be reading the Bible in English at all.
As a result, Ryken registers little of the struggle to get the cat of the original languages into the carrier of English. Ryken's cat nestles snugly; he leaves the word "essentially" in the term "essentially literal" undefined. He also fails to acknowledge that the KJV translators took all kinds of stylistic liberties with the original Hebrew and Greek (although at least those liberties were beautiful, and are now set off by italics).
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