A NON-ECCLESIASTICAL NEW TESTAMENT

William Tyndale was the first person to produce an English translation of the New Testament from Greek, although translations from Latin had been made before his time. Tyndale was executed for his "sin" of creating "untrue translations," for the Church and King did not appreciate certain of his renderings, which contradicted or called to question some doctrines of the Church.

What surprises the author of this work is how surprisingly similar Tyndale's work was, theologically speaking, to the teachings of the very church that burned him at the stake for his crimes. From before the time of Tyndale, through the times of great and small translations such as Coverdale's (1535), the Great Bible (1539), the Geneva Bible (1560), the Bishops' Bible (1568), the Rheims Bible (1582), the King James Bible (1611), the Revised Version (1881), the Revised Standard Version (1946), and even up to the present day, wherein we have translations available to us such as the Revised English Bible, the New Revised Standard Version, the New International Version, and the New American Bible, nearly every English translation of the Greek New Testament has been colored by a paradigm which all the translators have shared: the ecclesiastical paradigm.

That way of thinking has projected our more modern preconceptions about "Bible," "church," and God into the original writings. When any translators, including the present one, read the Greek New Testament, they interpret it in light of their own notions of what were the authors' intents, priorities, and backgrounds. This translation is like all other translations in that respect: it reflects the understanding of the translator.

However, the present translator does not share the ecclesiastical paradigm which is the dominant world view today. Rather, when he reads the New Testament, he sees a much simpler state of affairs. Suppose that when reading the New Testament, one were to discover that Jesus' intent in coming here was to abolish religious systems of worship that were almost identical to what we have today. A new translation would certainly be required. Consequently, certain terms that are normally left untranslated (or translated into Latin) appear translated in this edition. "Christ" is rendered "Anointed One," and whenever the reader passes over the term, it ought to convey the full force of the Messiah that had been promised to the Jews. There are no apostles, angels, deacons or ministers, bishops, devils, demons, or preachers in this edition; rather, the reader will find envoys (those who are sent out as representatives), messengers, servants, overseers, accusers, spirit beings, and heralds. The term "church" has also been dropped in favor of "assembly," which is the meaning of the Greek word. Here, this translator has followed certain former translators who refused to retain the "old ecclesiastical words."

The translation largely follows the 26th/27th edition of the Greek New Testament, called the Nestle-Aland text, although in some books, particular manuscripts (usually the oldest or most reliable) have been given a greater weight. The recent analysis by Young Kyu Kim (Biblica 69, 1988) which redates manuscript p⁴⁶ to the late first century has not escaped attention. A comparison has been made to any or all of the following translations: KJV, RV 1881, ASV, RSV, Emphatic Diaglott, Original New Testament (by Schonfield), NASB, NAB, and NIV, with more comparisons being made in more difficult sections of the text.

It is this translator's effort to provide a translation as free of tradition as possible, in the hopes that this will bring the reader closer to the paradigm of the original followers of Jesus. And while every translator or group of translators believes that their own translation is most accurate, one thing must be noted:

This is a translation into English of a set of documents that were written over 1900 years ago in Greek. In many cases, Greek was a second language to the authors, who existed under entirely different conditions than we do today. While they saw clearly what were their own customs and patterns of thought, we today often have trouble distinguishing between the intent of the author and our own preconceived notions. It is the present translator's contention that "the church" today is extremely dissimilar to the meetings of Jesus' original group of followers. Therefore, we must carefully distinguish between our own opinions and the facts. Every translation follows the opinions of the translators and is therefore an opinion. This is not, therefore, "the Word of God;" it is a translation, an opinion, a mere human viewpoint of an ordinary human being. The value of this translation rests not in its authoritative nature but in the examination of the different paradigm which it may be found to contain.

                                        Frank Daniels
                                        from the desert, 1995

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