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Thursday, April 25, 2019

A note on biblical inerrancy

I'd like to float a suggestion regarded a neglected, potential solution to some apparent biblical discrepancies or contradictions. The Bible is bilingual (with some Aramaic thrown in for good measure). In the NT, speakers like Paul alternate between Greek and Aramaic, depending on the audience. Although Jesus probably did most of his public teaching in Aramaic, he may have switched to Greek on some occasions. But the NT itself is written in Greek.

Take a sample sentence like:

Jeremy gave a spirited speech

Suppose we paraphrase that using different synonyms for "spirit":

Jeremy a vigorous speech

Jeremy gave a tipsy speech

Jeremy was possessed when he spoke

The ghost of Jeremy spoke

Now these four different renderings are discrepant. They don't mean the same thing. Yet all of them are true to the meaning of the original wording. Put another way, the synonyms are inconsistent with each other, but consistent with "spirit".

Although that's a paraphrase rather a translation in the strict sense, a paraphrase is a kind of translation, not into a different language, but rendering the original in different words. So it illustrates the basic principle.

In theory, Bible writings could quote the same underlying statement in different translations. The translations might be discrepant, yet each would accurately render the original statement. So the "contradiction" would be superficial. Each would be correct renderings. 

I haven't bothered to run through a series of examples. At the moment I'm just offering this suggestion for consideration, where applicable. 

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