Where Everybody's Crazy

OK, I'm being melodramatic - I actually don't trust the NIV. But then, for good Evangelicals, that is the Bible so...

We're sitting in Christology, looking at Colossians 1:15-20. Let's count the mistakes:

15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

"Over"? Wait, the Greek is just a genitive, which really ought to be translated "the firstborn of all creation". However, we can't translate it to that, because Arius lost. Hmmm? Arius was the guy who claimed that Christ was created; he was pretty much universally anathematized at Nicea. JWs reject Nicea and are the modern manifestation of Arianism. They hang pretty heavily on this verse, because if it says "the firstborn of all creation" (which it does) then that suggests Christ is part of the created order.

I submit to Nicea as an ecumenical council of the whole Church. I think Arius was wrong, and I'd be happy to point JWs at the next verse for a clarification ("For...") of what Paul's saying there. But that's not what the Greek says, and there's no excuse for twisting your translation to fit your theology. It's scary to think that the Jehovah's Witnesses have a closer translation of the Greek than the NIV here.

Big overtranslation to make a point.

16: For by him all things were created:

Stop there. The Greek says "en auton". That's "in him". But we can't translate it to that, because this is supposed to be a refutation of gnosticism. Hmm? Well, take out the references to "the blood of his cross" and "the church" in this passage and you've got something which really doesn't refer to Christ at all. I'm with Kasemann here that this is a gnostic hymn with a couple of bits added on by Paul. Or possibly it's Jewish sophiology, the mystical exploration of the Wisdom of God. (Proverbs 8 has a lot of this in it.)

But if it's either of these, the hymn would see "him", whether that's Wisdom or the Gnostic redeemer, as the sphere inside which all creation happened. If that sphere is Christ, though, we get what's called the doctrine of the cosmic Christ, where Christ is the space in which the universe gets created. And we don't want that, so we can't translate it as "in him". Even though that's what the Greek says.

Another overtranslation.

...all things were created by him and for him.

"eis" means "for" now, does it?

19 For God was pleased...

So now we move from talking about Christ to God the Father. Except that we don't. "God" is not the subject of that sentence; "theos" does not appear in the Greek. It's just a completely gratuitous insertion by the NIV translators. Another overtranslation.

My favourite gratuitous overtranslation is 1 Peter 4:1-6. First, we we have to weaken the force of 4:1 - where the Greek says "he who has suffered in his body has stopped sinning", because we still sin, we need to translate that as the more ambiguous "...is done with sin", even though the original is pretty clear. Then, since, we don't believe that the Gospel is effective for dead people, only live people, (despite 1 Peter 3:19) when we translate 1 Peter 4:6, we add the word "now":

For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead.

...because the Gospel cannot possibly have been preached to "the dead". Even though that's what the Greek says. Integrity? What was that?

OK, I know translating the Bible is hard. I wouldn't like to try doing it and I don't suggest I would do a better job, and if I did, I'd probably have my agendas as well. But it's worth distrusting the translations you get; there's an awful lot of overtranslation to make theological points, particularly in the NIV. And given that the preconceptions we have about Christianity are in part formed by years of reading the Bible without necessarily realising that the translators have an agenda, it's no wonder we get mixed up. Urgh.