Lojban Bible
The project to translate the Christian Bible into Lojban is working from English rather than Greek and Hebrew. It's apparently the Douay-Rheims translation. I think we currently only have one or two Lojban-speakers in Israel and none in Greece that I know of; even if we did, they no longer speak Koine Greek in Greece.
Something recently occured to me that amused me very much. My community of origin believes in secondary inspiration; the doctrine that not only does God directly dictate every word of a canonical text to the original authors (they act only as stenographers), but also Bible translators are miraculously inspired so that they infallibly write every jot and every tittle as God wishes to say it in English or any other language. If I participate in translating the Bible into Lojban and use a descendant of the correct Greek and Hebrew versions (the Textus Receptus according to them), I wonder if my teachers, pastors and parents would have to consider me to be in the ironic position of an atheist who is the mouthpiece of God? Then again, if I use the "corrupted" Alexandrian text on which the NIV is supposedly based, it would create no cognitive dissonance at all, since versions other than the KJV are bibles of the devil as far as they're concerned. Interesting isn't it?
Basically the KJV-only idea is that the Alexandrian Greek and Hebrew manuscripts were corrupted copies. They seem to do some interesting historical revisionism around the question of whether the Textus Receptus truly originated with Erasmus, or whether it was merely faithfully compiling what had come straight from the lips of the New Testament authors to the pens of the amanuensis, and therefore the Textus Receptus had existed since the mid-first-century and merely received its name when it was finally collected in one volume later. As far as I know, no one disputes that until around that time, most people had a few books of the canon at most. They would even pass them around from city to city (if I recall my lessons correctly).
When I was a Christian I once told my former pastor that even if there existed one copy of the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic text hidden somewhere in the world, God would have technically fulfilled the promise to preserve his word. He was scandalized by the idea, since that seems to be a rather worthless form of preservation. And yet that is precisely the problem that faces the doctrine of perfect preservation *in any case.* It cannot be sufficiently preserved so that the whole world has it. This pastor thinks the promise of miraculously preserving the bible has been fulfilled if he can read it. It does not seem to have occurred to him (due to English-biased provincialism) that there will always be people who do not have a translation of the bible in the only language they know. Therefore by that standard, the promise would not have been fulfilled. Apparently English is God's new language, although few of them would say so out loud.
Personally, I would have no problem translating from the English to Lojban (as long as I pay careful attention to the margin notes) because I have no concern about preserving the intent of the original authors. It's impossible anyway. To my perspective, nothing important is conveyed by the document, it's just a milestone of any language to translate the world's most-printed book. If someone wishes to translate it from the original languages, they could use our translation as a starting point to modify and much of the heavy lifting would have been done.
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matt-arnold on (None)
brendand on Mar. 15, 2005 3:06 AM
My problem is that even the greek, hebrew, and aramaic texts were all written by people. Not even THOSE copies have "the word of God."
bardicwench on Mar. 15, 2005 3:49 AM — Translating...
When I was in college, I took a classical greek language course (freshman year... 8am mondays and wednesdays... yes, I was crazy) and one of the things we did in Greek 2 was translate part of the bible...
I would sit there with my notes from class, the section that I was supposed to translate, and 3 or 4 different versions of the bible, and I would compare my translation... and one thing that I found amusing is that you can have ONE word in Koine Greek that translates to EIGHT words in English... and you're supposed to pick depending on context...
Anyone else see a problem with this?
Anonymous on Mar. 30, 2005 10:30 AM — The most printed book
Not that I disagree with your reasoning, but I have to say that the most printed book in the world is actually the Ikea catalogue (the Scandinavian furniture makers/sellers). Of course this doesn't mean that the Ikea catalog should be translated to Lojban instead :P
-- Andreas (andreas at unstable dot nl)
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