Comparing Lamsa with Etheridge

[gbausc]

Shlama Akhi Dawid,

I simply stated that in some cases Etheridge and Murdock are very good because they have a greater degree of objectivity.

They have no such thing. They simply had an opposite bias toward Greek primacy.

As to those translators, I did not accuse them of carelessness. What I am saying is that the more important the text is to the translator, the more careful he is likely to be in his handling of it, and vice versa. That is self evident. The objectivity standard you are setting actually would mitigate against reliability and accuracy, all else being equal. Indifference breeds indifference, not diligence and excellence.

Why can you not find an atheist translation of the Bible?

Because an atheist could "care less". And if you could find one, he would produce a "careless" translation, because he would have "no fear of God before his eyes" concerning his work of translating and representing the word of God. If there is no such translation known after 3500 years of Torah history, it seems unlikely one will be forthcoming anytime soon.

Bias can be a good thing.

I want to read Moses' biased writings, David's, Isaiah's, Solomon's, Paul's,Peter's,John's. Each one of them wrote with as much bias as is possible to have, no doubt.

Where is the objective best seller? Where is the objective classic? Even the news is written with strong bias, one way or the other. I don't believe we know how to be objective; it is simply a high sounding word journalists like to throw around by which to impress readers. It is a Chimera. We can try to be objective, but the more important the topic we're discussing, the less objective we are. If we find a topic easy to discuss objectively we will probably find no audience to listen to us and we will bore everyone to death, including ourselves, like the autistic savant who can rattle off a train schedule for the next month for any city on the Eastern coast. It is impressive that he can do it, but no one wants to hear the entire list. We just want a few samples. He will not sell a book with simply the objective information. Someone might write a story ("Rainman") about him or someone like him, giving biography and historical context.

Everyone is interested in interpretation and viewpoint, which are subjective. Many think "subjective" is bad and "objective" is good. This is a fallacy.

They are neither. A subjective report can be trustworty and valuable. A more objective one can be untrustworthy and worthless.

Imagine we had only one report of The life of Yeshua in which only the mass, volume and motion of each person (body) were described. No names were used, either of person or place, but coordinates (latitude,longitude) were used; no dates or time frame. An objective report can omit much critical information and still be objective. Completely objective; completely useless.

A completely objective translation would be no translation at all, simply the original text. Even then, a native Aramaic speaker must interpret each word and phrase in order to make sense of the text. Two Aramaic speakers will have somewhat different views of the same original text.

Dave