How to Translate the Bible: Problems and Pitfalls
Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman
Chris Huntley
4.8 • 745 Ratings
🗓️ 3 January 2023
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There are hundreds of Bible translations available – but why so many and why are they different? When a biblical scholar decides to do a translation, which manuscripts do they choose to use, how to they know what the ancient words meant, and do religious considerations get in the way of accurate translations. Are there places where no one can agree on what the original text says? Jennifer Knust is a prominent New Testament scholar who helped lead the committee that recently produced an updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version. Here she discusses with Bart the problems and pitfalls of biblical translation.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman. The only show, where a six-time New York Times |
| 0:09.6 | bestselling author and world-renowned Bible scholar, uncovers the many fascinating, little-known |
| 0:15.1 | facts about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the rise of Christianity. I'm your host, Megan Lewis. Let's begin. |
| 0:23.6 | I'd like to welcome you to this edition of the misquoting Jesus podcast with me, Bart Ehrman. |
| 0:31.6 | Today I will be interviewing Jennifer Knuzd, who is an expert on Bible translation, along with many other things. |
| 0:41.2 | This topic is a very interesting topic for a lot of reasons. It's an issue that most people |
| 0:46.6 | don't even think about much, even though they benefit from it. How do you take the Bible from |
| 0:52.6 | some of the language, translate originally in Greek and |
| 0:56.0 | Hebrew, and how do you put it into English or into any other modern language? There are over |
| 1:01.6 | two billion Christians in the world, and most of them have some kind of access to the Bible |
| 1:06.4 | in their language. How does it happen exactly? And it involves problems with translation just |
| 1:12.1 | generally. And anybody translates a book, whether it's Dostoevsky or the Apostle Paul, |
| 1:18.1 | has problems just involved with taking words in one language, and sentences in one language, |
| 1:22.9 | is putting it into another. There are special problems that come up with the Bible in particular for a lot |
| 1:29.7 | of reasons that we'll be getting into. And so I'll be talking about all that with Jennifer Canoost, |
| 1:36.9 | who is a colleague of mine in Crosstown Rival Duke University, where she has been a professor of |
| 1:43.9 | religious studies since 2019 and has |
| 1:47.3 | been active in the field of biblical research and teaching for a long time. She did her Ph.D. |
| 1:54.4 | at Columbia University in New York in 2001, and she's written a number of books and a huge number of articles on all sorts |
| 2:02.9 | of aspects, especially New Testament and early Christian studies. And recently, she has been a member of |
| 2:10.1 | the new revised standard version updated edition. This new translation, the newest translation that has just |
| 2:17.0 | come out that is getting very, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Huntley, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Chris Huntley and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.