Put yourself in this situation. It’s the year 5000. Robots power the world and people in the west no longer have to work for a living for the most part. Your first language is Mandarin. You’ve decided to translate an old text you found online written in a really old form of English the people stopped using back in the year 2020. It’s a short story about a local county fair and a pie eating contest. You come across this English text:
“Yeah, that guy flat out destroyed that pie.”
Will you write that someone consumed the pie quickly and with great effort, or that the guy blew it up into a million pieces?
You could write in the Mandarin equivalent:
“Yes, that man thinly abused that pie.”
“Yes, he squished that pie.”
“Yes, he flattened and broke that pie.”
“Yes, he destroyed that round baked dessert.”
From the example above, I don’t know that you’d ever get that any pie was consumed. But here you can see some options you’d be looking at if English wasn’t exactly your first language. Maybe he did get angry and destroyed the pie. Maybe he didn’t. The point is, you have to know more than just the sentence to understand the whole story.
That’s called context. You have to understand what’s going on before and after the text. What also matters is who the story was written to and who wrote it. Their biases could also figure into the exact words you’ll use.
Now consider the text 1 Peter 4:7 “The end of all things is near.”
In order to fully know the truth, you have to study the bible not just read it. Who was this written to? Who was it from? In what context was it written?
By expanding the context we see that Peter was talking about the destruction of Jerusalem which we know happened in 70 AD. “The end of all things” to a Jew involves the loss of their temple, Jerusalem and likely their religion. “Is near” means very soon and certainly that proves to be the case since the war started in AD 66.
Some pastors today are agreeing to the “Yes, he flattened and broke that pie” version of translations by inserting gaps of time, magic mermaids, and little troll dolls into the subject which then morphs the original purpose of the text to fit a wild fantasy they have about the future.
As long as we keep ignoring historical facts, these morphings will continue.
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