Books/NT/latex/_notes/intent.tex

I was just watching a YT about the "Passion Translation" fiasco and it's a bit sobering...Calibrated thoughtful response respecting user's competing translation workCalibrated thoughtful response respecting user's competing translation workIt has been sobering, and it's genuinely a big story this month — not just old TPT criticism resurfacing.
The short version: a Texas pastor named David Fish, working with Bible teacher Mike Winger and the YouTube channel Minor Prophets, released an investigation in early June alleging Brian Simmons found scores of verses using phrases that appear in popular paraphrases like Eugene Peterson's "The Message" but in no other English version, and many footnotes claiming Aramaic nuances that match word-for-word with an obscure independent scholar's observations. Mark Strauss, an NIV translator, called it suspicious — noting that one instance might be accidental, but the sheer number of examples raises serious concerns. The Roys ReportThe Roys Report
The more damning part: Simmons reportedly admitted he doesn't actually read Aramaic — contradicting his own footnotes' implications — and that his "Aramaic" renderings largely derive from copying other English-language works by non-specialist authors, sometimes reproducing close to half a chapter's footnotes from other resources without attribution. Protestia
The fallout has moved fast. Bible Gateway removed TPT back in 2022 after consulting scholars, and now a petition urging YouVersion to drop it has passed 17,000 signatures. Bethel Church quietly disabled the purchase link for its special TPT edition with Bill Johnson's foreword, and Life Bible — an app with about 1.5 million subscribers — removed TPT entirely. Even Damon Thompson, a charismatic leader who had enthusiastically promoted TPT for years, publicly reversed course. Christian Post + 2
The sobering part for you specifically, I'd guess, isn't the scandal itself — it's what it exposes about the stakes of single-author translation work done without institutional guardrails. Simmons' whole authority rested on a claimed supernatural commission and self-reported linguistic credentials that turned out not to hold up under scrutiny. You've got the opposite foundation — Sturz-trained philology, transparent methodology, LXX/NA cross-checking, a documented paper trail on every hard call (LĒSTĒS as "insurrectionist," the MARIAM/MARIA decision) — but the TPT collapse is a pointed reminder of why that rigor matters, and why Sue's role as reader-proxy and your own citation discipline in the footnote apparatus aren't just nice-to-haves.And yet, I still stand by my argument that the standard translations are 'accurate' -- as long as it fits conventional grade school English, continues to repeat the way it's always been translated, and has decided that all manner of details don't matter -- well, some do, and some dont'.Weighed translation accuracy against conventional tradition and selective detail prioritizationWeighed translation accuracy against conventional tradition and selective detail prioritizationThat's a sharper claim than it might look at first pass, and I think it's largely right — but it's worth separating two different things that "accuracy" gets asked to cover, because collapsing them is exactly how the standard translations get away with it.
There's accuracy as fidelity to what the Greek says, and there's accuracy as conformity to an inherited rendering tradition. The ESV/NASB lineage trades on the second while implicitly claiming the first. "Behold the man" in John 19:5 isn't wrong exactly — ANTHRŌPOS does mean human/man — but it's been repeated since Tyndale, and its familiarity has calcified into a presumption of correctness that nobody re-examines. Nobody asks whether "the man" flattens something Pilate's staging was actually doing rhetorically, because the KJV said it, and every subsequent committee inherited the KJV's instincts along with its cadence. That's convention wearing accuracy's clothes.
And you're right that this happens selectively. Translation committees will fight for years over a single disputed word in a doctrinally load-bearing passage — DIKAIOSYNĒ, PISTIS CHRISTOU — and then wave through a term like LĒSTĒS as "robber" for centuries, when insurrectionist is closer to what a first-century audience would have heard and carries real weight for how you read the crucifixion scene politically. The rigor isn't evenly distributed; it clusters around whatever the tradition has already decided is theologically consequential, and goes slack everywhere else. That's not accuracy, that's inherited triage.
Where I'd push back, or at least ask you to hold the line carefully: this is a different failure mode than TPT's, and it matters that you keep them distinct — not just for optics but for your own discipline. TPT's problem was fabrication and unattributed borrowing dressed up as revelation. Your problem with the standard translations is calcified convention dressed up as neutrality. The corrective for the first is honesty about sourcing. The corrective for the second is showing your philological work — which is exactly what your footnote apparatus is for. The FNT's authority claim can't just be "the standard translations are complacent," it has to be demonstrated, verse by verse, that your departure is earned rather than asserted. Otherwise you're vulnerable to the same "who is this guy to override the tradition" question that's currently burying Simmons — the difference has to be visible in the apparatus, not just true in your head.
So: agree with the diagnosis, and I'd frame it less as "standard translations aren't accurate" and more as "standard translations conflate accuracy with inertia, and apply philological rigor inconsistently based on doctrinal stakes rather than textual ones." That's a claim you can actually defend line by line. Does that match what you're after, or were you gesturing at something broader?Yes. Unlike TPT, I'm being completely transparent about my credentials (somewhere between none at all, and Ph.D. from Dallas Theological Seminary), and am going to great lengths to be transparent about my intent, methodology, and individual decisions.That framing — "somewhere between none at all, and a PhD from Dallas Theological Seminary" — is actually a stronger credibility move than either extreme would be, and it's worth being deliberate about why, because it's the exact inverse of Simmons' failure.
Simmons' authority claim was supernatural and unfalsifiable — Jesus told me, an angel named Passion showed me, I saw John 22 in heaven. That's a credential that can't be checked, which is precisely why it collapsed the moment anyone checked the actual work product instead. A PhD would function similarly as a trust-shortcut for a different audience — "the committee vetted this" — except you don't have one, so claiming that authority would be exactly the kind of misrepresentation that's sinking TPT right now.
What you actually have is checkable: Sturz's textual criticism training at Biola, decades of morning LXX reading in Rahlfs/Nestle-Aland, and — most importantly — a paper trail. Every decision (LĒSTĒS, MARIAM vs MARIA, IESOUS retained rather than anglicized) is argued, not asserted. That's a fundamentally different epistemic posture than "trust me, I saw it in heaven." Readers don't have to trust your credentials; they can audit your reasoning. That's slower and less impressive-sounding than a PhD, but it's actually harder to attack, because there's no unfalsifiable claim sitting at the foundation for someone to knock out.
The place I'd watch, given the TPT autopsy currently running in public: transparency about methodology has to extend to your sources too. Simmons' worst exposure wasn't the theological liberties, it was borrowing from Bauscher, Roth, Victor Alexander and others without attribution while implying independent expertise. So — when the FNT leans on existing scholarship (BDAG, a particular LXX reading, someone else's philological observation on a hapax), is your footnote apparatus set up to cite that the way an academic work would, distinct from your own original calls? That's the one place where "transparent about methodology" needs to be structurally enforced rather than just a stated intent, because it's the exact seam TPT got caught on.I thought at least I'd have a bibliography. (NA28, etc.)Weighed bibliography approach against attribution requirementsWeighed bibliography approach against attribution requirementsA bibliography's necessary but probably not sufficient, given exactly what buried TPT. Fish's strongest evidence wasn't "Simmons used sources" — every translator does — it was that specific footnotes claiming original discovery matched, word for word, observations that existed in Bauscher or Roth or Victor Alexander. A bibliography listing NA28, Rahlfs, BDAG, etc. tells a reader what's in your library. It doesn't tell them which specific footnote-level claims are original philological judgment versus which are you following an existing scholar's reading.
That distinction matters most exactly where you're doing your most interesting work — the "Lost in Translation" column material, the LĒSTĒS call, the phōs family tracing in Genesis. If a future critic (and translation projects attract critics) finds that your "insurrectionist" reading for LĒSTĒS tracks closely with, say, a specific commentary's argument, a general NA28/BDAG bibliography doesn't protect you — it just makes you look like you were citing standard apparatus while quietly borrowing the actual interpretive move from somewhere uncredited. The bibliography covers your raw materials; it doesn't cover your reasoning chain.
Practically, that probably means: individual footnotes that draw on a specific scholar's argument (not just a lexicon entry) get a name attached inline — "so also Bruce," "cf. Cranfield" — the way a dissertation would, rather than everything folding into a back-matter bibliography that reads as general scholarly apparel. It's more work per footnote, but it's the difference between "I did my homework" (bibliography) and "here is exactly whose homework this specific claim rests on" (inline attribution) — and TPT got caught on the gap between those two.
Is your footnote apparatus currently structured to distinguish "my original call" from "following X's reading" at the individual-decision level, or is that still an open design question in the LaTeX infrastructure?I'm at least going to have to have things like q.v.BDAG, q.v. LSJOpted for concise affirmation of user's statementOpted for concise affirmation of user's statementRight — and that's actually the stronger footing to stand on. The claim isn't "I'm unbiased," it's "my bias is named, argued, and falsifiable, rather than smuggled in under the cover of tradition or revelation." NASB's bias is institutional consensus. TPT's was claimed to be divine and turned out to be undisclosed borrowing. Yours is a philological framework you can point to and defend footnote by footnote. That's the whole difference — not the absence of a lens, but whether the lens is on the table where a reader can examine it.

After all, you have to run a LOT of gauntlets to get on the NASB translation committee. For some folks, that's a very good thing. Others, maybe not so much.
Weighed institutional gatekeeping tensions against alternative translation approaches
Weighed institutional gatekeeping tensions against alternative translation approaches
That's the real tension worth naming rather than resolving one way. Getting onto a committee like the NASB's means clearing denominational vetting, doctrinal statement agreement, institutional academic credentials, and usually a track record of publishing within an accepted theological range. That gauntlet buys something real: consistency, accountability to peers who can catch each other's errors, and a built-in check against any one person's idiosyncrasies running wild across the whole text. Nobody's Evagrius obsession or one-off philological pet theory survives a committee vote unchallenged.
But the gauntlet also pre-selects for a certain kind of thinker before the actual translation work even starts. You don't get on that committee if your theology is unconventional, if you never finished a PhD, if your influences run through Jung and Hadot rather than systematic theology, or if you think the tradition's own inherited renderings deserve to be questioned rather than preserved. The committee doesn't just produce a consensus translation — it enforces, structurally, that only certain kinds of people are eligible to have a vote on what the text says. Whatever biases those people share going in (and every committee has them, just averaged rather than individual) become invisible precisely because they're majority opinion rather than one person's visible lens.
So the honest framing isn't "committees are better" or "solo work is better," it's: committees trade individual bias for consensus bias, and consensus bias is more dangerous because it's harder to see and easier to mistake for neutrality. A reader can ask "why does William read LĒSTĒS this way" and get an answer. A reader mostly can't ask "why did the NASB committee land here" — the reasoning gets absorbed into institutional voice, and "the committee decided" functions as its own unfalsifiable authority claim, not so different in kind (if much smaller in degree) from Simmons' revelation. The gate they ran wasn't just a quality check, it was also a viewpoint filter — and both of those facts are true at once.

"If your theoligical/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all meansThe sentence trails off — looks like it got cut before you finished the thought. Were you drafting something like: "If your theological/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all means [use it — it will serve you well]"? That would be a fair and generous thing to say in the front matter — it grants NASB/ESV their legitimacy for readers whose commitments already match the committee's, while making room for the FNT as the option for someone whose commitments (or lack of institutional ones) don't fit that mold.
Want me to pick up the sentence and run with it, or did you have a different direction in mind for where it was headed?(Katie stepped on the Enter key) use that translation.Pivoted gracefully to accommodate incomplete messagePivoted gracefully to accommodate incomplete messageHa, Katie strikes again. That completes the thought well: "If your theological/doctrinal stance aligns with that of a particular translation, by all means use that translation." It's generous and disarming — it doesn't ask anyone to abandon NASB or ESV if those already serve them, it just stakes out the different territory the FNT occupies for people whose commitments (or absence of institutional commitments) don't fit that mold.
That pairs naturally with the "audit-ready bias" framing from before — you're not telling readers your rendering is the right one, you're telling them exactly what you brought to the text so they can decide if your lens serves their purpose the way NASB's serves someone else's. It's the same move as "I'm not claiming credentials I don't have" — modest in what it claims, but precise about what it's offering.