On The Inspiration of Translations Question

L. Gaussen’s classic French work formerly published in English in 1871 in Edinburgh Scotland under the title of “Theopneustia: The Bible, its Divine Origin and Entire Inspiration, Deduced from Internal Evidence and the Testimonies of Nature, History, and Science.

This is a resume of one chapter in which Gaussen puts to a double death the notion that if the translation of the Bible is not inspired of God then it does no good for the original to be inspired by God. He ends the discussion by saying, “let it no longer be said, then, What would it avail to us that we have verbal inspiration in the one case, if we have not that inspiration in the other case? For between these two terms, which some would put on an equality, the difference is almost infinite.” He gives 5 considerations to demonstrate his point. Assuming that the original is verbally and plenarily inspired of God, there is no need to assume that the succeeding translations need be inspired of God, for the difference between the two operations, (1) the “passing of thoughts of God into human words, and (2) the simple turning of these words into other words, the distance is as wide as from heaven to earth. God was required for the one, man sufficed for the other.”

Here are those considerations reduced as best I can to the fewest words.

1. The body of divine thoughts incarnated into the original words (1^st operation), need only the change of dress (2^nd operation), not change of the body, to be understood in other languages. The 2^nd operation (human translation) is so inferior to the 1^st operation (divine originals) that an erudite unbeliever who was skilled in the rules of grammar and philology would better transmit the Holy Spirit’s meaning than would a passionate believer in the Holy Scriptures but less skilled in translation, whose renderings would tend to be his prejudiced interpretations rather than an exact understanding of the text. He cites a Basel professor's modern translation of his time as being preferable to the great reformer, Luther’s translation in German, because the former kept closer to the expressions of the text, while the latter at times “endeavored after something more.”

2. The divine original in every case was given to one man. The human reprints have been done by many capable men in many languages devoting their whole time and energies, who from age to age control and check one another, making it less and less possible to stray from the original.

3. The divine originals were given in most cases to uncultured, ignorant men with no literary cultivation. No matter, for divine inspiration decreed absolute exactness for each writer. But all the copies were made by highly literate and laborious persons, versed in the study of language. Any straying from the originals would be unthinkable, un-tolerated and easily detected.

4. The originals were a one time impression upon the soul, like a flash of lightning. Any mistake and the thought is lost for ever. Not so the translations, which have always the divine text at hand so as to correct and re-correct their translations to be as close as possible in accordance to the eternal type. “God’s phraseology is still before us, with which to correct our modern versions, as dictated by God himself, in Hebrew or in Greek, on the day of its revelation.”

5. The range of speculation as to the original meaning of the divine author, diminishes, not increases, with the passage of time and the multiplication of translations. He illustrates: if your father writes you a last letter before his death, from India in the Bengali language, and you don’t know Bengali but are convinced that the letter is his, you are going to be highly interested in several and all credible translations of that letter until with the accumulation of enough of them, you are with time going to be convinced not only of the writer but of the exact sense of what he wrote.

The author is not writing against KJV only type people but against modernists who argued the same as the KJVonlyers. That being, “if the translations are not inspired then what good does it do that the originals are inspired? Though inspired in the originals they would be ultimately corrupted in the translations. Hence: for the modernist, no inspiration at all; for the KJVer, double inspiration – for the original and for the translation. He ends his argumentation by declaring masterfully (in my opinion) “…if all have been dictated by God in the original, and even to the smallest expression, ‘to the least iota and tittle,’ who is the translator that could seduce me, by his labors, into any one of these negations, and make even the least of these truths disappear from my Bible?” I say, Amen and amen.