Dr Paul Allen

There is a Hebrew word that we transliterate as tan, with the feminine form tannah, which refers to jackals. It occurs, for instance, in Malachi 1:3, where God declares that, according to the NIV,  “Esau I have hated, and I have turned his hill country into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”  That is straightforward, and it makes excellent sense in the context. But here is the problem. From the same root, there is also another word, 'tannin', which usually means a regular snake or serpent but can also signify a monster, sea serpent, or sea monster.  The word is used in this sense on multiple occasions to refer to the mighty monsters of the deep seas, probably implying whales. But it also looks as if it might conceivably be a plural for tan, jackal.  On several occasions in the Hebrew Bible, the words are confused, even by translators who should have known better, and that confusion has left a long shadow in English readings. On multiple occa...

A new milestone has been reached as the Bible has been translated into its 700th language, according to Wycliffe Bible Translators. The charity reports the milestone is indicative of the acceleration that is happening in the work of Bible translation – to the extent that it is impossible to state which translation was actually the 700th, as there were several dedications of physical Bibles as well as several being made available online and via apps, all at about the same time. James Poole, Executive Director of Wycliffe Bible Translators, says:  ‘This is such exciting news, and represents the tremendous work that Bible translators are doing across the world. Every time we hear of the Bible being translated into another language, we know that means that for the first time the people in that language group can fully access the complete picture of God’s story.’ James continues: ‘It’s good to take a step back and realise what this 700th Bible means: 5.7 billion people who speak 700 lan...

The first of Luther’s famous 95 Theses —whose 500th anniversary we celebrate today—is a critique of an erroneously translated phrase in Jerome’s translation of Matthew  4:17 . In English we know this as, “ Repent , for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Luther wrote in Thesis 1, When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said,  Poenitentiam agite , he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance . (See  Luther’s Works ,  31:25 ) Luther does not come out and say that Jerome erred—not on October 31, 1517. But by at least May 30, 1518, writing to mentor Johann von Staupitz , he feels that the Roman church was indeed “misled by the Latin term, because the expression  poenitentiam ag[ite]  suggests more an action than a change in disposition.” It makes Jesus sound like he’s saying, “Do penance.” And, Luther says, “in no way does this do justice to the Greek.” ( Luther’s Works ,  48:67–68 )  What Jesus really said was, “R...

Hasn’t the Bible been rewritten a number of times? If that’s the case, does the Bible we have today look anything like the original? A friend said she couldn’t trust the Bible because it had been rewritten “like eighteen times.” I asked her if she thought it would be smarter for Christians to just go translate the oldest documents they could find. She said yes—and then I had some good news for her: that’s already what we do. So, are we truly reading the same book now that the earliest Christians used in the first or the second century? Or is it a book that has been rewritten and changed over the centuries? This is actually quite an easy question to answer because of the discovery of so many ancient manuscripts of the Bible in the past one hundred years. The Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Copies of the Bible One of the biggest discoveries of ancient copies of the Bible was the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Among these scrolls were copies of every Old Testament book (with th...