Remembering Eugene Nida (1914-2011)

    Eugene Nida is a towering figure in the history of Bible translation. In good ways and bad, few people more than Nida impacted the way the Bible is “received” in the modern world – in what guise and in what form. Scholars of biblical literature are ignorant at their own peril of the contribution of Nida to the history of reception of the literature they study. After all, people read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars do too, I’ve noticed, though they prefer literal translations, because they are “transparent to” the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - i.e., said translations serve as crutches for those whose command of the biblical languages is weak.

    The strength of GNB– Nida’s great gift to Christianity and to the modern world – is that it knocks the crutches right out from under the reader of the Bible, and forces the reader to grapple with the content of the literature in new and fruitful ways. The weakness of GNB, for those who think of “tradition” as essentially positive (Nida, a typical Baptist, thought otherwise, which is why he “under-translated” paradosis in 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and 3:6, like NIV and CEV, two other evangelical Protestant translations), is that it severs the Bible from its history of reception – that is, it cuts the umbilical cord that tethers most English translations to the Tyndale-Geneva-KJV translation tradition.¹

    In that light, GNB is not fit to be a pulpit or pew Bible; in fact it rarely serves as such. But it is an excellent study Bible, at least for those who can compare and contrast it with the language of the originals or, less satisfactorily, with a literal translation like ESV or NASB. For all its faults, GNB is an excellent gateway Bible, a transparent window into a foreign thought-world via accommodation to ours, of use especially to readers who do not have the time or the inclination to acquire a relatively stand-alone code of signifiers and significants – the challenging task a literal translation forces upon its readers.

    It is instructive, I repeat, for a student of biblical literature to read the texts, alongside reading them over and over again in the original languages, in a translation that aims for dynamic or functional equivalence. So much goes wrong in dynamic translation – but so much finally goes right.

    Nida - an American Baptist, a faith tradition which has contributed to the common good of Christianity in almost inverse proportion to its numerical strength – had an enormous impact on modern evangelicalism. He was a keynote speaker at Urbana (of InterVarsity fame) in 1951 and 1961. He was instrumental in encouraging a number of then young people to offer up their lives as a living sacrifice in the name of Jesus Christ on mission fields near and far. Moreover, Nida rewrote the rules of Bible translation with mission in mind. Nida’s theory and practice of dynamic equivalence is eminently suited to the work of “tradition-free” evangelization (see note above). It is no accident, therefore, that the Catholic church, committed as it is to tradition and creed, continues to move steadily away from a short-lived post Vatican II acceptance of “free” translations even in official circumstances, and back toward formal equivalence translation in the slipstream of the first versions of the Bible in Greek by Jews, of Jerome’s Vulgate, and of other standard “literary” translations of the Bible, even if non-Catholic in origin, such as KJV.

    On the other hand, many Protestants and Catholics learned to love the Bible because they read it in the GNB version, the Living Bible version, or now read it in Peterson’s The Message. Put another way, Christianity now suffers from double vision in its reading of the Bible, thanks largely to the contribution of Nida. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

    Rich Rhodes, a linguist who teaches at UC-Berkeley, revisits the topic of dynamic equivalence over at Better Bibles. His post is well worth consideration; follow the comment thread.

¹ Even Nida seems to revise KJV rather than translate from the Hebrew or Greek on plenty of occasions.

Comments

[Ernst Wendland]

As a friend and former colleague of Eugene A. Nida, I appreciated this well-deserved tribute and the insights expressed concerning the nature and purpose of the GNB, which Gene was instrumental in producing and promoting.

[JohnFH]

And thank you, Ernest, for your work on ancient Hebrew poetry, which I have read with interest and profit over the years.

[Frank]

I discovered the work of Eugene Nida when studying NT Greek as an undergraduate. Encouraged by my professor, I was interested in figuring out the best ways of saying in informal English what I thought the Greek NT was saying. I often thought that the Good News Bible did that just right.

[Wayne Leman]

And the CEV (Contemporary English Version), GNB's successor, goes even further toward natural English. The GNB was a breath of fresh air to me, a young Bible school student, eager to hear scripture clearly so it could touch my soul and help change my life. But the GNB, as good as it was, still bears the marks of some literalisms. The CEV moves many of those further down the road toward natural English that still attempts to capture the original meaning accurately. Neither translation succeeds the accuracy test in every verse, but the attempt was sincere. And I suspect that if testing was done to determine how well different Bible versions *communicated* the original text meanings accurately, the GNB and CEV would rank among the highest.

Thanks, John, for your fair treatment of the positives and negatives of Nida's legacy. He was one of the greatest Bible translation scholars of all time. Yet he had his blind spots and other scholars have helped move his ideas toward a healthier equilibrium. I am thankful that Bible translation can take place within the community of faith and scholarship.

[JohnFH]

Thank you, Wayne, for your commitment to better Bible translations in the Nida tradition.