VOLUME 10, ISSUE 38
WAY OF LIFE LITERATURE
SEPTEMBER 18, 2009
Friday Church News Notes
A Warning About Bible Translation Work Today
Friday Church News Notes, September 18, 2009, www.wayoife.org
EVOLUTION IS A RELIGION
"Belief in evolution requires a vitally important element of faith. According to one of the most popular theories on the origin of the universe, all energy and matter of the universe was once contained in a plasma ball of electrons, protons, and neutrons and other subatomic particles (how it got there, no one has the faintest notion). This huge cosmic egg then exploded--and here we are today, several billion years later, human beings with a threepound brain composed of twelve billion neurons each connected to about ten thousand other neurons in the most complicated arrangement of matter known to man. If this is true, then what we are and how we came to be were due solely to the properties inherent in electrons, protons, and n e u t r o n s . To b e l i e v e t h i s obviously requires a tremendous exercise of faith. Evolution theory is indeed no less religious nor more scientific than creation" (Duane Gish, Evolution: The Fossils Still Say No, pp. 19, 20; Gish has a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley).
The amount of Bible translation work that has occurred over the past 100 years appears impressive. In 1910, the Bible in whole or in part was available in 722 languages, whereas today the number is roughly 2,500. The problem is two-fold. First, the vast majority of the new translations are based on the exceedingly corrupt critical Greek text, which omits 2,886 words from the Greek Received Text upon which the old Reformation Bibles were based. This is equivalent to omitting the entire books of 1 and 2 Peter from the Bible. These omissions include 45 entire and 185 partial verses and have significant doctrinal implications (Everett Fowler, Evaluating Versions of the New Testament). Further, the modern translation methodology itself is corrupt. Created by Eugene Nida fifty years ago, it is called "dynamic equivalency." By this method, the translator is allowed to take frightful liberties with the infallible words of God, modifying and adapting the Scripture to "the culture." The dynamic equivalency methodology even adopts pagan names for God. For example, the United Bible Societies and Wycliffe Bible Translators have used the following names for God: In Samba of Africa they used Nyaama (the sun); in Lame in Chad they used Yafray (mother of the heavens); in Ga in Ghana they used Ataa Naa Nyonmo (the father mother God). Philip Noss of the American Bible Society says, "God reveals himself through his word and through each culture" ("Bible Translation in History and into the Future," Lausanne World Pulse, September 2009). (For more on this see the report "Dynamic Equivalency: Its Influence and Errors" at the Way of Life web site.)

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