Another hat tip to Mike Aubrey for linking to another post at Koinonia, Craig Blomberg’s interesting defence of the rendering “brothers and sisters” in James 3:1. This post touches on the gender issues which have been debated rather exhaustingly on this blog in the past. It also goes beyond them to make more general important points about Bible translation:
Every translation, in fact, has to balance some measure of literal rendering (formally equivalent translation) with understandability (dynamically equivalent translation). The only completely literal translations are interlinear Bibles that are consistently unintelligible if one were to read them solely in English! So one always must ask (and balance the answers to the two questions) both what is at stake if someone misunderstands a translation because it is too literal and what is involved if someone misunderstands a translation because it is too free.
