Good Bible translations will demonstrate that they have paid attention to the way God’s gift of language actually works. They won’t propose impossible linguistic ideas or promise special insight into “what God really meant” in the originals, insight no other translations provide. They won’t baptize one language as specially divine.

If you find an English Bible translation on your Christian bookstore shelf, it’s almost certainly good. Buy it. Read it. Trust it.
But there are some “bad Bibles” out there, Bibles you won’t find careful evangelical biblical scholars recommending. In my last article I discussed Bible translations that give in to sectarian impulses. In this article, I discuss the second major category of bad Bibles: crackpot translations.
I’ll drastically qualify that word “bad” for some of these; and “crackpot” is about as nice a thing to say as “sectarian,” I’m afraid. Perhaps I should say instead, “idiosyncratic.” Some Bibles are indeed just odd; they rely on ideas about Scripture that are just weird—the kinds of ideas that make you purse your lips and glance from side to side, looking for a way out of this conversation ASAP, the kinds of ideas that get weeded out when translators must have accredited degrees and work in a group with checks and balances.
I have a soft spot in my heart for idiosyncratic evangelical Bible translations. I think they are, from one perspective, a great problem to have. The Bible is such an absorbing interest of American evangelicals that we produce extraneous Bible study resources. (I don’t see Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox doing this, though I admit I may simply be ignorant here.) And I assume these idiosyncratic projects usually don’t do much harm. But if they’re not “bad” in the consequentialist sense, they’re not good either. And they merit our attention here. I will give, again, four examples.
1. The Amplified Bible
I hope I don’t offend anyone, but the Amplified Bible is a good example of what I’m talking about. When I first encountered this Bible edition as an 18-year-old, I was intrigued to have provided for me in such a convenient format the “fuller meaning” of the Hebrew and Greek I hadn’t yet studied at the time. It was as a young college student that I bought the Comparative Study Bible, a four-version parallel Bible including the KJV, the NIV, the NASB, and the Amplified. But I didn’t end up using that last one much; it came to feel like the editors were just piling on English synonyms in all those many brackets that fill (and clutter) the Amplified Bible. Who possibly is helped by adding that parenthetical to the following sentence?
We ourselves (you and I) are Jews by birth. (Gal. 2:15a AMP)
And how many readers will understand that systematic theology, and not “the true meaning of the Greek,” has been inserted in a bracket into this statement?
If, in our desire and endeavor to be justified in Christ [to be declared righteous and put in right standing with God wholly and solely through Christ] … (Gal. 2:17 AMP)
(I chose the first two examples my eyes fell upon when I opened the Amplified at random.)
What I came to like about the Amplified was actually that, because its interpolations made it so much longer than the other Bible translations, it opened up margin space at the bottom of pages for me to take notes in. My purposes would have been better served, however, if the column taken up by the Amplified had simply been left blank.
After I learned Hebrew and Greek, I came to feel that the Amplified was mostly harmless but that it raised false expectations among readers—readers who thought they were getting deeper insight than they really were. This isn’t entirely its fault, but the Amplified Bible inserts interpretation into the text in a way that, I discovered, misleads lay readers into thinking that they’re being told something from the Hebrew or Greek that traditional English translations obscure.
2. את Cepher
Cepher is an English Bible translation far weirder than the Amplified. The progenitor of Cepher—whose name I don’t care to give but who, I note, claims to have a doctorate but provides no details regarding it that I could find—is fascinated with the alleged power and depth of the Hebrew language in a way that echoes the Tree of Life Version (discussed here). But he takes his fascination to a level I can only call, well, idiosyncratic—and he places his most eccentric idea on the very cover of his Bible edition. We’ll get there; first, some other oddities in Cepher.
In the introduction to Cepher, we are given examples of the many Hebrew words that are transliterated rather than translated in this volume.
Another wonderful [Hebrew] word we have elected to use in the text is the word yachiyd (יחיד) which in its use declares tremendous meaning. In its first use, we find it in Bere’shiyth (Genesis) with the instruction to Avraham, saying: … “Take now your son, your yachiyd Yitschaq, whom you love.”
But yachid just means “only.” It does not have tremendous meaning. It should not be transliterated in an English Bible at all; it should be translated. But Cepher gets weirder as it traces this “wonderful word” throughout the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament. At the end of its discussion of the Hebrew word for “only,” Cepher’s introduction says,
It is with these considerations that we have made the following change: “For Elohiym so loved the world, that he gave his yachiyd, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
So a Hebrew transliteration into Roman characters is inserted into an English translation of a Greek sentence. From the middle of this language mélange, two key ideas are dropped out: where is the word “Son”? And where is the “begottenness” that forms such an important part of the doctrine of the eternal generation of that divine Son? I’m not saying the editors in charge of Cepher undercut Trinitarianism on purpose; I doubt that, honestly. My guess is that they are so fascinated with the nifty possibilities provided by faux insights into Hebrew that they got carried away.
Cepher does this with other Hebrew words that, it alleges, “carry … additional meaning” beyond what English is capable of communicating. This is why we get Hebrew transliterations elsewhere in the Cepher New Testament. In John 17, for example, Cepher has Jesus praying that his disciples “all may be yachad,” the Hebrew word for “one.” Exactly whom or how this helps is to me very much unclear.
Cepher also “restores” many Hebrew names by making more tortuous transliterations of them than we already possess in the English Bible tradition (is Avraham really more deep or accurate or even Jewish than Abraham?). Moses is Mosheh in Cepher; Joshua is Husha; Jesus is Yahushua. And Jesus’ name gets a fanciful etymology that contradicts what the angel Gabriel told Mary. Instead of “Yahweh saves,” Cepher says that Yahushua means “Yah is He who makes equal.”

The Cepher intro also finds impossible phonemic connections between Hebrew and English, connections that aren’t really there—like seeing the English word “hell” in the Hebrew word the KJV translates as “Lucifer.” This is a game a clever person could play all day long in every language of the world. It is crackpottery.
My last complaint about Cepher (though I could go on, I assure you) regards a Hebrew word on its cover. It’s just two characters long; you could pronounce it “et.” But it’s actually not a word, per se; it’s a grammatical marker indicating that what follows is a direct object. It’s kind of like the practice in German of capitalizing nouns. It’s rare that this is truly needed; it’s just something biblical Hebrew does.
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If our time in the womb as we develop is called by God a “knitting together,” a complex process that takes place over time, an intentional and careful and loving process by the very hand of God, then this truth will teach us something about the nature of the inverse as well. If time in the womb is being “knit together,” then the act of intentionally subverting, interrupting, or undoing that knitting is an act of destruction. It’s the deliberate sabotage of a personal, intentional, meaningful creative work.

The Miracle of Life
Anyone who has ever held a newborn child in their arms knows the feeling of being overwhelmed by the glory of the miracle of life. A new life, a human being made in the Creator’s image, is a miracle. Life is a miracle each and every time, a miracle in the fullest sense. It’s a work of divine agency, a beautiful and welcome act given from above, something more than the sum of mere material and biological processes. Anyone who has held a newborn child knows something divine is at work, something beyond our understanding. When we see the beginning of a life, we understand that God has worked a true miracle – He did this in his original breathing of the breath of life into the lungs of the first man, but He also reworks the same miracle each and every time He speaks another unique human soul into existence. When a human being is conceived, God weaves together spirit and matter, He inseparably intertwines the immortal soul with the bodily flesh in the womb of the mother. This union will never be broken, each of us is a body as much as a soul, and though the two will briefly separate, God has promised we will someday be reunited with our bodies for eternity.
This is the humbling mystery: that when God performs His favorite and most impressive miracle, the bringing forth of new life, He chooses to do it through us – specifically, through women. This is perhaps the greatest natural honor that God can bestow on humanity, that he works through sinful, broken humanity to bring forth the miracle of the creation of life. God works a miracle at every birth, every conception, and continues working the same miracle of life throughout each lifetime as He sustains us, causes our hearts to beat, fills our lungs with air, and keeps us from harm until our days have run out. God brings us forth and sustains us, and the unbelievable gift is that this miracle is performed through sinful and unworthy intermediaries: us.
Knitting with Parental Threads
Scripture tells us that God knits us together in our mother’s womb (Psalm 139). This means that our formation was an intentional, deliberate crafting. We’re handmade, not just a result of natural processes. God directly and intentionally shapes and molds each of us inside our mother. There is of course a sense in which all such biological processes are a direct result of God’s intentional hand – after all, it is He who causes the sun to set, the rain to fall, and the Earth to turn. But there is a sense in which this is even more true for human beings than it is for any other natural or biological process. We are God’s image bearers, His representative here in creation. We are unique in our honor and place among the created things. When God knits each of us together in our mother’s womb, He gives each of us unique abilities, traits, characteristics, and personalities. The mind-boggling part of this is that in His sovereign working of all things, God chooses not to create each individual human ex-nihilo, from nothing. Instead, He chooses to form us out of our parents, using traits and characteristics from the mother and father in the creation of the child. Each of us to a degree looks, acts, and thinks like our parents – sometimes, one more than the other. God knits us with the threads of our parents, both physical as well as spiritual, emotional, and mental. God doesn’t start with a blank slate and simply choose characteristics from a list, but instead crafts us by His hand with aspects of our parents. Even our first parents in the Garden of Eden weren’t created from nothing, but formed from dust and rib, from earth and from man. We are by nature creatures with origins.
This truth is an incredible blessing and a burden. Because we are sinners, when our children are formed out of us, some traits they may inherit will be sinful tendencies. The struggles, issues, and sins that plague our parents can plague us too. The Bible speaks to generational sin, and when the Bible talks about sin, it means sin – not “trauma.” 
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A serious Christian school must have an explicit, orthodox, Christian mission and it has to hire administrators, faculty, and staff for that mission. It has to have a fully informed and committed board that insists on those things happening. Above all, it needs a president committed to an orthodox vision who is willing to insist on a board that understands and supports it, as well as one who insists on hiring according to that vision.

In yesterday’s post, I recounted Burtchaell’s argument about the threats to Christian higher education and my response recorded in the book, Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions.1
Burtchaell’s response to me, in a private letter, was quite complimentary but he claimed I was wrong on two types, the critical mass and the intentional pluralism, which he thought would easily secularize. Initially, I didn’t accept his verdict, but as the new century progressed, I was haunted by his judgment that the two types were unstable and would weaken.
First, I had close-at-hand evidence that Burtchaell was right about the instability of my third type, “intentional pluralism,” which was how I typed my own college, Roanoke.
Soon after I returned from by sabbatical at Valparaiso, I was asked by the new president to lead a task force to write a proposal for a substantial Lilly Grant that would enable the college to strengthen the Lutheran teaching on vocation in its curriculum. Our task force wrote a strong proposal, but one that had two fatal flaws. The task force did not prepare the faculty adequately for such a serious proposal, and the president did not take ownership of the initiative.
During one of the longest mornings of my life, a strong majority of the faculty—led by a cabal of secularists—thoroughly rejected the proposal. While I was quite embarrassed about the flaws in our task force’s approach, I think in retrospect that no strong proposal could have survived. The later history of the college more or less confirms that.
Since then, there has been a gradual secularization that has finally led to a complete sanitation of the college’s religious baggage. The final blow came in 2017, when the college was to celebrate the 175th anniversary of its founding, as well as the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Throughout its history the college had taken pause at its anniversaries to reflect on its identity and mission. That always included a grappling with its Lutheran heritage. In 1992 we had done so at its 150th, with a fine program of broad reflection.
In order to do my share in participating in such reflection, I spent four years on writing a history of the college’s relation to its religious heritage. It is entitled Keeping the Soul in Christian Higher Education: A History of Roanoke College.2 I timed its publication to come out during the year of remembrance and vision. As I wrote the book over several years, I submitted each chapter as I wrote it to the president and discussed with him his reaction to each one. He seemed pleased with each chapter, even the last one. In the final chapter I argued that certain steps needed to be taken to preserve the public relevance of the Christian faith in the life of the college.
Upon publication of the book, which the president had the college subsidize, he ordered a large number of copies to distribute to the board, to new faculty, and to display in his office. He even invited me—to my great delight—to engage the college board for several hours at one of its meetings. Those of us who cared about the college’s religious heritage looked forward to a pivotal conversation at its 175th birthday.
Lo and behold, nothing happened. The whole event was canceled, though one faculty member did arrange observations of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. But no college-wide discussion of our identity and mission as a church-related college. Indeed, the president shelved the many copies of my book he had ordered on an obscure bookshelf. My engagement with the board was cancelled. Instead, I was given five minutes in the midst of the board dinner to say my piece.
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