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June 10, 2025 |
| Translators Have Agendas | ||
I've mentioned Bible translators frequently and their work. Sometimes we've been working through some Bible verses, and I've pointed out a problem in a translation. Sometimes an entire study has been focused on some aspect of translations. This topic has always been important to me.
Because we cannot read the original languages ourselves, we must work with someone's translation into English. This leaves us trusting that the translator did the translation accurately and without bias. But, how can we know that?
This is especially a danger with paraphrase Bible translations, where the translator is expected to adjust the text to make its meaning clear for a modern reader. But who determines what is clear? The translator does. This gives the translator a lot of opportunity to insert his own ideas, … unintentionally or intentionally.
I use a very direct translation so I can hear God's words, but even there, I sometimes find translation problems.
We can all agree that translating is difficult. The Bible is especially so due to the heavy use of metaphors, idioms, and words with double meanings. The consequence of that is that translators make mistakes.
Some errors are honest mistakes, like not fully understanding what is being said. There are lots of passages that are not clear to anyone. … But, if we are going to be honest about it, we need to say that some translators are pushing an agenda. They are translating to get a preplanned result.
In the past, I've encouraged you to use more than one translation. If your usual translation is a paraphrase, like I mentioned, you especially should have another kind of translation to check against, a non-paraphrase translation. We'll look at paraphrase translations more in a moment.
For everyone, you should be aware of the hot-button issues in the church right now. These topics are also the agendas that some translations are pushing. They include homosexuality, slavery, and the broad category of feminism, … which shows up anywhere from changing the gender of God to spinning the words of the Bible's authors. Whenever the Bible is speaking on one of these topics, it's important to be able to consult a different translation.
I decided to do this study after I found a YouTube video about problems with Bible translations. It discussed various problems, but one of them was new to me. It has to do with something translators have started doing, breaking chapters into sections. The video also referred to a set of verses that provide a good example, which I will be using here as well.
If you read the Bible online, you've seen the section headers that most translators are adding now. Maybe they are also in printed Bibles, but I haven't opened one of those in many years.
I had already seen that translations break chapters into sections differently. The section breaks come at different places in the verses, and the section header text is different, … different as in not even close. That alone shows there is a problem with section headers, and their value may be close to zero.
You might be thinking, "sections headers? You did a study on section headers?" This topic might seem too trivial to care about, but there is a very important aspect to it. This study looks at this aspect of translations.
The bold text in this image is a section header. It breaks a chapter into sections, and it tells the reader what the following section is going to be about.
Section headers are very common in writing. They break up the page. They help keep the reader engaged. They give the readers' eyes a rest. They are a good thing that way.
The author of the text can add the section header because he knows where the section breaks are, and he can summarize the section because … after all … he is the author.
That isn't the case with the Bible. God, the author, did not add section headers. He could have, but chose not to. So, the original texts of the Bible do not have section headers. Any section headers you see are the creation of men.
Understand, the original texts do not have chapters either. Those breaks were also added by men. How is that different from section headers? Chapter breaks are different in purpose. The chapter breaks are there so we don't have to say things like, "Romans verse 385." There are 433 verses in Romans. So, the chapter breaks only provide an easy way to reference verses. Instead of having very large verse numbers, we have short chapter numbers and short verse numbers.
In most cases, the chapter breaks were pretty obvious. That isn't so with these section breaks. As I mentioned before, there is no agreement on where the section breaks should be. Also, some translators are positioning the section breaks to spin what the Bible says. We'll see an example soon.
Section Headers also try to be summaries of the verses that follow. Chapter breaks don't do that. Those summaries are like a paraphrase translation of the Bible. The translator's opinion of what the section is about becomes the summary. You might expect that of a section header in a paraphrase translation, but these section headers are also in direct translations now.
If you compare the section headers of two translations, they will not agree, not in the position within the verses, nor in the text summary. This should ring alarm bells in your head. Why can't people who are supposedly spirit-led people agree on this?
As I said, the section header allows the translator to put his opinion into your Bible. If you read that section header, the translator has also put his opinion into your head. Because a section header tells you how to understand the verses you are about to read, it conditions you to think in a certain way, to understand the verses in a certain way.
Aside from the general problem of being controlled by a translator, we have to ask who should be guiding our understanding of the Bible. It should be the Holy Spirit. This is just another aspect of the man-guided church that Christianity has become. So much for letting the Spirit guide your reading of the Bible.
But, looked at from a completely different perspective, the section headers also provide a look into the worldview of the translators. Their summaries show us how they understand the text, … and that tells us about them. This gives the reader the ability to spot, for example, a liberal perspective. The example we'll be looking at is a good test for that perspective.
The verses we'll be looking at come from Ephesians 5:18-27. Paul has been talking about the relationship of the members of the church to each other. Then he changes to talking about wives and husbands. What is the "hot button" issue here that should make us think to look at a more direct translation? It's the word submit.
The liberals in the church want a husband and wife to be equal in all things. This is part of a bigger goal for society to have men and women be equal.
Most translations do not accept this. I'm going to use the LSB (Legacy Standard Bible Translation), but most translations are similar. They place the section header in the logical place for what Paul is saying. They see verses 18 through 21 as a variety pack of guidance points for the members of the Ephesian church. Those are:
That's a variety of quickly made points.
Then Paul changes to the topic of wives and husbands. Actually Paul is not changing topic, not really. He is pivoting on the words "be subject" and broadening the scope of what he has already said. The words "be subject" in verse 21 remain as "be subject" in verse 22, but he is going to start speaking about the relationship between wives and husbands. That's the pivot. In that relationship, he sees a parallel with what he has just said about the church. So, verses 18 through the end of the chapter are all about similarity in relationships; members to members, wives to husbands, wives and husbands to God, and members to God, … written in that order.
But, the liberals place verse 21 after the section header for wives and husbands, because of their agenda. They want to move the part about "being subject to one another" into the wives and husbands section. Without that change, the relationship between wives and husbands that Paul describes would not look like the equality they want.
The next change will be a technique that is commonly used by liberals when they are changing things. They glorify it with a name that sounds glorious. Some other examples in the Bible are "Lord's Day" and "Lord's Supper." By adding "Lord's," they've tried to glorify their change. In this case, they are going to glorify the section header, which we see here as only "Wives and Husbands". We'll see what that becomes. I'll point that out when we get there.
The last change will be to add some words to make their agenda-based changes flow smoothly.
The same verses can be seen here, but this example comes from the NLT (New Living Translation). This translation is only a little liberal or modern, but enough that they do the things I just mentioned.
As you can see, verse 21 is included in the section about wives and husbands. They've added a couple of words, "and further," to that verse to try to preserve the continuity of Paul's teaching. But, really, all that shows is that verse 21 belongs in the section above.
Remember that the "hot button" issue here is equality of the sexes. They want to show mutual submission, submitting to one another, as equality.
However the verses that follow don't support that. Verse 22 would be saying that the wives' part of that submission is submission, but verse 25 would be saying the husbands' part of that submission is love. There is no equality in that; there is no mutual submission. Paul goes on to parallel the husband's love for his wife with the Messiah's love. Then he describes that love. It is the husband giving up his life for her to make her holy and clean by using God's word. How does he make her holy and clean? He is to give up the time he could have spent on other things in order to teach her God's word.
Why would Paul say that? Can't the woman hear for herself? Why does the man need to teach her? In our time, it isn't a problem. Back then, though, when windows had no glass, walls had no soundproofing, and there was no way to amplify voices to send them great distances, women with children often could not be present to hear the messages in the church's assembly. Therefore it was the husband's responsibility to teach his wife what he had learned in the assembly. On a side note, it was also his responsibility to teach the children the word of God, once they had become of age.
They also added words to make the verses say what they want. I've marked them with arrows here. They added the "And further" words that I mentioned on the previous slide. They also added the other words shown here to help support the idea of being mutually subject, subject to one another.
They may have added other words, but I've only focused on the ones they added that support that idea.
Adding words to a translation is a dangerous business. Sometimes it is necessary, due to differences in the languages, but it is also what scoundrels do to support their ideas. In this case, there is no linguistic reason to add these words. They were added to support the idea of being mutually subject.
Notice how they add the word "for" to make "for wives" in verse 22 and "for husbands" in verse 25. They do this to try to link those two paragraphs to that central idea of being mutually subject in verse 21.
While researching this study, I found a lady who has this equality of sexes view of these verses. She sees what moving verse 21 into the "wive's and husband's" section does, and she says, it's "an overall exhortation to submit to each other, followed by examples."
As I said before, this just doesn't work for the careful reader because there is nothing mutual about what Paul says about each of those "examples" as she calls them.
Notice that the section heading they use adds the words "Spirit Guided." This is the glorification that I mentioned. It is done to add strength to their changes. I guess they think no one would question the changes when they were "Spirit guided."
Is that a reasonable thing to add? Looking at the rest of our verses, the Spirit is not mentioned, so its use here is gratuitous.
We saw the LSB uses the heading "Wives and Husbands." It is part of the NASB family of translations, so of course, the other family members use the same words. The AEIB, the translation I prefer, also uses those words. The NKJV (New King James Version) and the Amplified Bible use only the word "marriage".
It's also interesting that the NLT would add the words "Spirit guided" here, when their work is plainly not spirit-guided.
This study hasn't really been about section headers. There is a much bigger issue involved. Who will you trust to guide you?
Men want you to trust in them, but they are not worthy of your trust. They want to tell you what to read in the Bible, how much of the Bible to read, how to read the Bible, when to read the Bible, and how to understand the Bible. You must only trust in God. For your guidance, that is the Holy Spirit and the unadulterated Word of God, the unchanged Word of God. Let the Holy Spirit be the one who tells you what, how much, when, and how.
More specifically, and given what we've seen in this example, I have to recommend that you ignore these section headers. God could have put them in, but chose not to do so. He doesn't think you need them.
Even if the people who added these section headers had good intentions, those people may have biases in themselves that they don't recognize. That's a common problem.
I can't say it too many times. You should allow the Holy Spirit to be your instructor. He knows what you need to hear and to see, at all times, and will point those out for you.
You must be aware that sometimes the translators are intentionally pushing an agenda. They won't be warning you about that.