Thank you for all of the wonderful links. Nesrad, if there was a “like” button on your post I would’ve clicked it. I took 2 full years of Spanish in college and still can’t make heads or tails of it. It would take me a century to learn Latin!
I have a new living translation study Bible (Protestant). Are the footnotes about meaning of the text skewed by a Protestant perspective?
The New Living Translation is a very loose, dynamic-equivalance translation, which is excellent in it’s readability and clarity of expression. I believe it is translated to approximately a tenth-grade vocabulary level.
However, it is an explicitly Protestant translation, executed from a Protestant Evangelical perspective. It may have employed one or two Catholic consultants, and the translators certainly did not deliberately mistranslate this version to suit their biases. BUT YOU CAN DEPEND ON IT THAT THOSE BIASES SEEPED THROUGH. This is an inevitability in any work of translation, especially one which is as controversial as Scripture.
For example, Evangelical Protestants usually assume a priori that grace is primarily an act of Divine favor, not the Divine power working in and through His Creation (as Catholics and, I believe Orthodox, have always understood grace). So Mary is not declared by the angel to be ‘full of grace’, but instead ‘highly favored’. This affects how Protestant Bibles depict Mary, and how those Bibles describe the life of grace in a Christian’s life.
Likewise, the vast majority of Evangelicals are heavily influenced in the direction of Calvinism, and so an Evangelical translation is going to favor an understanding of “once-saved/always-saved” in pertinent passages, while downplaying the idea that Godly persons can, by submission to Christ, achieve true inner sanctity and holiness.
Finally: Protestant Evangelicals believe in the supremacy of Scripture, and the private interpretation thereof, over the authority of the Church. Nuances in translation will tend to encourage readers to gloss-over such passages as “who hears not the Church, let him be anathema”, and “the Church. . . .the pillar and ground of Truth”.
One last thing, although this is a fault in some contemporary Catholic translations too: the tendency to gender-neutral translations to make them more inclusive has numerous theological and exegetical issues. One of these is that gender-neutral translations obscure the reasons for a male-only clergy. This is not such a huge issue in the almost entirely non-sacramental Evangelical denominations, where some ecclesial communities have been “ordaining” women for upwards of a century.
I don’t know which, if any, of these issues the New Living Translation–even the “Catholic Edition”–might present. I’m fairly certain it is one of the most aggressively gender-neutral versions out there, so I think my last point is definitely germaine. Just be sure that although the translators of a Protestant version of Scripture certainly may have meant well–these versions should always be used with extreme discretion.
Hope this helps.
