How I Translate the Greek Text

Almost all New Testament bible translations are based on paraphrasing the Greek language into English. There are many problems with this approach. The Greek text sometimes uses words that are strange, surprising, ironic, in bad grammar, have double meanings, use puns and word play, or seem contradictory. Sometimes a subject or verb is purposely left out of a sentence assuming the reader can fill in the blank. Sometimes a pronoun (instead of the name of a person or thing) is used in a sentence to purposely make the sentence ambiguous - counting on the reader to read the mind of the author. Did you ever stop to think that maybe the author wrote it that way on purpose? Sometimes you have sentence fragments strung together ... like stream of consciousness writing. Faced with these "problems," the translator resorts to paraphrasing. He translates what he thinks the original author meant rather than what he actually wrote. Many times these translations reflect theological bias.

The problem with paraphrasing is that many times it completely destroys imagry puns and other clever word plays. I take the position the Greek author wrote it that way for a reason. It is up to the reader to figure out what he meant. My translation attempts to render Greek words uniformly and consistently into English even though the translation may seem to be "not correct." My commentary shows how the text may be a visual pun - a kind of shorthand stagecraft - a drawing instruction. We're talking gematria here.

Greek prepositions are notoriously mistranslated in English bibles. An example is the Greek word eis meaning "into." The Greek text can read "Jesus ascended into (eis) the mountain" but the English translation will say "Jesus went up upon the mountain." The Greek text reflects a minds-eye view of Jesus in a distant foreground silhouetted against the background of the mountain. The English translation reflects an historical report of a real life event - a mind-eyes view of being right next to Jesus.

English bibles have a very bad habit of substituting synonyms for Greek words in order to give the text more variety. An example is the Greek word hodos meaning "the-way." English translations use the way, the road, the journey, or the highway to spice things up. Sometimes translators don't consider the possibility that certain words have a secret meaning when they are put next to other words. When a translator substitutes a synonymn it may completely destroy the "mystery" or "riddle" the author was composing.