The ESV and the English Bible legacy by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-11-22T16:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

The English Standard Version:

Heir to the Great Tradition

10

WHAT THE PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION TELLS US

The number of Bible readers who read and understand the prefaces to English Bible translations is statistically insignificant. I myself did not read such prefaces until I began writing books on English Bible translation. For the uninitiated, the technical matters discussed in these prefaces, along with the specialized vocabulary used in them, are a mystery.

However, for people who have been initiated into the issues involved in Bible translation, the prefaces to the various versions are a gold mine of information. For those who have “ears to hear,” these prefaces are a road map to the translation that follows. In the complexity of the current scene, what is left unsaid can be as telling as what is said.

The preface to the English Standard Version (ESV) does not leave anything unsaid. It is a shorthand capsule that summarizes what I cover in the other parts of this book. The preface plants a series of “flags” that situate the ESV in the landscape of current English Bible translation. The purpose of this chapter is to unpack the specific assertions that the preface to the ESV makes. The material falls naturally into ten parts.

“THE CLASSIC MAINSTREAM OF ENGLISH BIBLE TRANSLATIONS”

I showed in an earlier chapter that dynamic equivalent translators are at pains to distance themselves from the King James Version (KJV) and by extension with a whole tradition that shares the qualities of the KJV. By contrast, the preface to the ESV sends numerous signals that its translators want to be associated with the mainstream tradition.

The opening paragraph begins with the engaging historical note that in English coronation ceremonies an English Bible is handed to the new monarch with a stately pronouncement. The point is then made that those very words echo a sentence in the introductory material of the King James Bible of 1611, which states that “God’s sacred Word . . . is that inestimable treasure that excelleth all the riches of the earth.”

That is only the beginning of the links drawn between the ESV and the tradition with which it is aligned. We read in the second paragraph that the ESV “stands in the classic mainstream of English Bible translations over the past half-millennium.” The goal of the ESV is “to carry forward this legacy for a new century.” Further, “The words and phrases themselves grow out of the Tyndale–King James legacy.”

“THE LIVELY ORACLES OF GOD”

Underlying the ESV is a view of the Bible as God’s Word. The preface quotes with approval the statement from the English coronation ceremony that the Bible is “the lively Oracles of God.” “This assessment of the Bible,” the preface asserts, “is the motivating force behind the publication of the English Standard Version.” Late in the preface we read that the hundred-member team that produced the ESV “shares a common commitment to the truth of God’s Word and to historic orthodoxy.”

As noted earlier in this book, viewing the Bible

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