The
NAB bible translates
Romans 1:20 (Douay-Rheims: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. His eternal power also and divinity: so that they are inexcusable.” Vulgate: “
Invisibilia enim ipsius, a creatura mundi, per ea quæ facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur: sempiterna quoque ejus virtus, et divinitas: ita ut sint inexcusabiles.”) asIt uses “in” in the phrase “in what he has made,” as though God is in the things of the world (
pantheism). Why? Is this a translation error? The Vulgate says “from,” the preposition “
a” in “
a creatura mundi.”
There are many more errors in the NAB and non–Vulgate-based translations.
The NAB was translated from the Vulgate. It was translated from Hebrew & Aramaic (the OT) & Greek (the NT). The ancient versions can be useful, as the LXX is for the OT; but that does not make them the basis for the translation.
It could be that the Greek text followed by the translators of Romans 1.20 differs from that which underlies the Vulgate
The Vulgate itself has plenty of textual variants. Whatever the reasons for the difference noted, a difference between resulting translations of a text does not automatically imply error on the part of the translators of either: nor does it imply incompetence, unorthodoxy, or any other objectionableness. The burden of proof that the translators are in error here is on those who say so.
As for Romans 1.20:
The explanation for the difference ? In the phrase translated, what “in” means here, is “by”. It’s a dative plural,
not a preposition (as the Greek of it would need to be, if the meaning were pantheist), so it is therefore part of a phrase: “in what he has made”; or, in the Greek, tois poiēmasin. “In his poems” is nice and literal, but is unnatural English, because in English “poems” means something very different. A more natural translation, that makes Paul’s meaning far clearer, is “in what he has made”; the verb is supplied, because the sense requires it. Any translation that is not to be slavishly literal, & quite possibly misleading as a result, of any literary text of that period and others, undergoes the same sorts of operation as the Greek of the NT does. That word X in translation Y does not match an older translation of the same word, is not a sufficient reason to condemn the new or the old as wrong. And difference =/= error. To privilege any one translation as alone to be used, unless it be so privileged for reasons unconnected with its value as a translation, is to fall into KJV-Only-ism, Catholic version.
Translators of the Bible have an unenviable task: they have to satisfy religious, text-critical, and translational standards, and they also have to make the result readable in the receptor-language. Quite apart from deciding whether the translation is intended for liturgical, academic, devotional or other use. Not to mention the difficulty that the use of English is fractured today in away it was not, a few centuries ago: an academically excellent translation is no good, if the English used is unintelligible - which is one of the reasons many translations render a phrase twice, putting the literal one in the margin, & something more immediately intelligible to the non-specialist in the body of the text. Mgr. R. A. Knox devoted a book “On Englishing the Bible” to the topic of translating the Bible - & he was working from the Vulgate. There is so much more to translation than converting one item from a dictionary into an item from another. All that most people see is the result of the process.
