JESSICA: Hi, my name is Jessica, I attend the Master’s College...
JOHN: Hi, Jessica.
JESSICA: I was greatly encouraged by the Truth in Life Conference.
JOHN: Good...good.
JESSICA: And I had a question regarding that.
I know that God’s Word is God-breathed and infallible and I believe that He is faithful
in preserving His Word throughout the translations which is why I was concerned when you were
speaking about the word doulos and its faults in the translations.
So I was just wondering that our English translations are not fully reliable unless we look back
at the original language.
And are there other places that are mis-translated?
JOHN: This is a very good question.
Some months ago I talked about doulos, the word slave, which the English translators
inevitably have translated servant or bondservant which is kind of an invented word.
And I talked about how much we have lost because the word is slave and it should be translated
slave and that’s a paradigm that really helps us understand what it means to be a
Christian, kurios, doulos, Lord, slave...there’s no such thing as a Lord who doesn’t have
slaves, no such thing as a slave that doesn’t have a lord or a master.
And I laid that out.
And one of the sad realities of New Testament translation is that the word which means slave
is so often translated servant.
A servant is somebody who works for a wage.
A slave is somebody who is owned.
That’s a big difference.
The idea of slavery is a paradigm which makes sense out of the New Testament.
So her question is, why would God permit this word in the English versions?
Is He not protecting His Word?
The answer to your question is, He is protecting His Word because we know without question
what the original is.
We know it without question.
Everybody has always known it.
We haven’t lost the Word of God at all, we know exactly what it is.
The text is pure.
It is doulos.
In fact, none of the doulos passages that I know of, and there are almost a hundred
and fifth of them in the New Testament, are disputed.
They’re all clearly doulos.
Now your second question is, are there other things that are obscured?
I’ve never come across anything like this before.
That’s what’s been so remarkable about it.
And by the way, we have a new assistant baseball coach at the college and after I spoke on
this the other night, Christ Bando, you may know the name, he played in the major leagues
for ten or eleven years, a wonderful, wonderful Christian man, his wife and his sons, part
of our college family now, Christ came up to me after I did that and he had a fresh
new Greek translation of the New Testament by Jay Adams.
You know who Jay Adams is?
And he had been faithful to translate doulos slave all the way through.
So maybe this is making a resurgence.
There are definitely some historical things that find their way, and I don’t know of
anything anywhere close to the breadth of this.
It’s the only one I know of.
But the text has not been corrupted.
And I don’t know everything about every other language in the world and how they deal
with that word, but God has protected His Word.
Occasionally translators are unfaithful to that.
But we know what the original says.
And anybody..that’s why I’ll say this, Jessica, that’s why it’s so important
for people who teach the Scripture to deal with the original languages.
Even English sometimes misses the nuance.
If you use the word “servant” for example in English, that would translate at least
six and maybe seven Greek words that all have a different nuance.
That’s the value of digging in to the original languages.
JESSICA: Thank you.
JOHN: Good question...thank you.
See how insightful the Master’s College students are.
Great question.