I live in the Chicago area. And there are certain common\nexperiences and ideas that are understood when I talk to fellow Chicagoans. For\ninstance, when someone starts talking about the \u201cIke\u201d without any further\nexplanation, I know they are talking about a highway that goes into the city\nfrom the west. It\u2019s also called 290. It\u2019s always busy (even at 3 am), and there\nwill be a backup around the Austin exit. This is context that I just know\nbecause it\u2019s part of my everyday experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m sure you have places and things in your life that don\u2019t\nrequire additional explanation for listeners who share common experiences, places,\nactivities, etc. This was true in Bible times as well. When Jesus spoke to the\ncrowds, some references he made were simply \u201cunderstood\u201d because they were part\nof the everyday lives and shared experiences of his audience. But for us, who\naren\u2019t Jews living in a Roman dominated world, what was common knowledge can\neasily get lost in the centuries of separation and cultural differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is an area where meaning-based translations are\nextremely helpful. Meaning-based translation views and translates the words of\nthe Bible text through the lenses of the Bible\u2019s contexts\u2014culture, politics,\ngeography, literary genre, and other elements of common knowledge for the\noriginal hearers. Accounting for the ancient contexts in translation ensures\nthat the translated text\u2019s meaning isn\u2019t as likely to be missed by readers\ntoday who aren\u2019t experts in the Bible\u2019s world. As one of our translators says,\n\u201cWe\u2019re not just translating words, we\u2019re translating worlds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We received a great question about a choice the NLT\ntranslation committee made when translating the story of the Good Samaritan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Question:<\/strong> When I checked Luke 10:30 in the NLT, I saw that the victimized man was described as Jewish. I saw that the ESV described him as just \u201ca man.\u201d Interesting. So I went to my online parallel Bibles and found that all the versions except NLT describe him as \u201ca man\u201d or \u201ca certain man.\u201d Is there any particular reason why the NLT identifies him as Jewish?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Answer from Mark Norton, member of the NLT Bible translation<\/strong>: This is a good question, and it does involve contextual interpretation, not just a simple argument from the wording in the Greek text. In a sense, it doesn\u2019t really matter if the beaten man is Jewish. And as he lay there by the road, it would have been hard to tell if he was or not. But there are some reasons to presume that Jesus (and his listeners) had in mind that the beaten man was Jewish, and this presumption does strengthen the force of the story a good deal, especially for a Jewish audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jesus was telling his parable with a radical surprise in it,\nand that surprise was clearly racially loaded. His listeners would have assumed\nthat a traveler on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho was almost certainly\nJewish. Why? The Jerusalem-Jericho road was the primary route Jews used to\ntravel between Judea and Galilee. The reasons for this were various\u2014the route\nstraight north from Jerusalem, though shorter, led through Samaria (where Jews\nweren\u2019t welcomed and didn\u2019t feel safe), and it was a rough, mountainous route.\nThe alternate route (and the route most taken) went east from Jerusalem to\nJericho, then north up the Jordan Valley. The road between Jerusalem to Jericho\nwas fairly mountainous too and it did make the journey longer, but then the\njourney north to Galilee followed the Jordan River, which had a good water\nsource the whole way and was relatively flat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The number of Samaritans on the Jerusalem-Jericho road would\nhave been few. If they wanted to go to Jericho for trade, they likely would\nhave taken one of their own roads to the Jordan and traveled the Jordan Valley\nsouth to Jericho, avoiding Judea altogether. The Samaritan hero in the story would\nhave been an exception to the rule.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other reason for assuming the wounded man to be Jewish\nis that Jesus didn\u2019t identify the race of any of the first characters in the\nstory\u2014until the Samaritan. Here is the radical surprise in Jesus\u2019 definition of\nthe term \u201cneighbor.\u201d The person who culturally and historically had every\nreason not to stop was the one who in the story stopped to help the wounded\nman. If the wounded man had been a Samaritan too, it would have undermined the\ntruth that Jesus was teaching, and no one would have been surprised at the\nattitudes of the Levite and priest, who might easily ignore a wounded\nSamaritan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The BTC scholar team (and other commentators support this)\nbelieved that identifying the wounded man as Jewish was supported by the\nhistorical, geographic, and literary context. When translating the meaning of a\ntext with clarity from one language to another, translators are forced to weigh\ncontextual concerns along with the grammatical. Clear translation doesn\u2019t only\ninvolve simple grammatical equations. This is clearly the case here. After\nclose review, the BTC scholars saw the best equivalent for the literal \u201ca\ncertain man\u201d to be \u201ca Jewish man.\u201d It is what the original listeners would have\nheard Jesus saying as he told the story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I live in the Chicago area. And there are certain common experiences and ideas that are understood when I talk to fellow Chicagoans. For instance, when someone starts talking about the \u201cIke\u201d without any further explanation, I know they are talking about a highway that goes into the city from the west. It\u2019s also called […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[44,50],"tags":[77,109,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4873"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5632,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4873\/revisions\/5632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmu3.northcentralus.cloudapp.azure.com\/nlt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}