How to take the Wiki thing way too far — try to translate the Bible that way:
The eclectic group includes a liberal Christian living in the United Arab Emirates and a Methodist financial counselor in Texas. Some claim to be formally trained in Biblical Hebrew and classical Greek; others, such as user John Kloosterman, admit to being “without qualifications of any kind.” The project will take a few years to complete and require constant refinement, says John Vandenberg, one of project’s main administrators. But “that is part of the beauty,” he writes. “It’s a laissez-faire translation.”
But Bible translation isn’t a laissez-faire project. (Oh, yeah, note to Newsweek: Classical Greek wouldn’t be a lot of help; the New Testament is written in Koine Greek, which is a commoners’ version of the language. Also, if you can read Greek, you should be able to sound it out!)
There are so many potential problems in this, it’s hard to know where to begin: Which Hebrew and Greek texts are translators using? (There doesn’t seem to be any standard.) Do these folks even KNOW the original languages? (Not all of ‘em, apparently.) Do they understand the subtleties of the Greek participle? (Argh!)
I’ve taken Greek and Hebrew. I know enough to be able to make a rough translation of the text, with plenty of help from language software, lexicons and other aids — the point being that fighting through your own translation helps an exegete to identify critical words, phrases and other points in the text that make for fruitful teaching and preaching.
I wouldn’t presume to think I can do a better job of translating than the scholars who labor for years on Bible versions.
Even Bart Ehrman, the lapsed evangelical who was caught up in the “Gospel of Judas” hype, isn’t buying the Wiki Bible:
“Democratization isn’t necessarily good for scholarship,” says Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who worked on the most recent translation of the New Revised Standard Version in 1988. “Those were the best Greek and Hebrew scholars in the country, and it took them 20 years.”
