What is your favorite Bible translation? For those whose language is English, there is a very wide choice of translations. Does it really matter which one you use? I am only a layperson. I do not know Hebrew nor Greek. I depend on those who study these ancient languages to do a good translation of Bible verses.

Most (not all) translations are faithful. We can say the original Biblical text are a perfect copy of God’s Word. But, as soon as we translate the perfect, original copy into another language we run into the challenge of interpreting the original meaning into another language.

This is because languages have different ways of communicating ideas and thoughts. One Hebrew or Greek word can have many meanings and yet cannot be perfectly translated into one English word. A famous example is the English word “love” that has multiple different words in ancient Greek. I can say I love hamburgers, my wife, my neighbor, and God, but that’s four different words for “love” in Greek. On top of that, any word in any language usually has multiple meanings. And, to make it harder yet, more than one of them can be used and still make sense for a verse within the context of a chapter of a book!

Given all this, what are we do?