One of the criticisms made of all contemporary, readable Bible translations is that they are “watered down” versions of God’s Word. Interestingly, the people who make those charges never give examples of how the new translations dilute the Scripture. Still that doesn’t stop them from making what amounts to a baseless accusation.
A different version of same argument was made around 500 years ago when the language of the church was Latin. “If people want to read the Bible,” they said, “let them learn Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. Don’t put the Scripture in the language of the people.” The Bible, they thought, was too important to be rendered in a tongue as banal as English. You see, in those days English was considered a vulgar language, the language of the poor and huddled masses. Important documents were written in Latin. The language spoken in the English court was French (in those days France and England were getting along). If a member of the aristocracy spoke to a peasant about spreading fertilizer in his field, he spoke English. But if he spoke to an equal, he used a proper language like Latin or French. No wonder people objected to having Scripture in so common a tongue.
That same dynamic is at work today. English may no longer be considered a vulgar language, but there are spiritual elites among us who think we need to keep Scripture in a form which makes it hard to reach. Some apparently prefer the sound of “Biblish” to English and think others ought to prefer it too. But when you study the Scriptures carefully, you realize the language of the New Testament was “common Greek.” It wasn’t written in some highfalutin tongue spoken only by the upper classes. It was the way people spoke in the market, at home . . . essentially, where people lived. Apparently, God wanted the Bible to be in a language where the most people could get it, read it, understand it, live it.
I learned a long time ago that the smartest people around are those who can take complicated language and hard concepts and teach them so that others can understand. But the true intelligentsia may not be those leading graduate seminars in the elite universities; they are likely to be found teaching 4th graders in public schools or middle-schoolers in Sunday School. Just because the Bible is now on a shelf that people can reach does not mean it is watered down; it means that more and more people will be reading, paying attention, and living it.
This is why we did The Voice.
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