Debate has fired up between theologians over the merits of the English Standard Version (ESV).
Two years after the Bible’s release into the Australian market, opinions are divided over the ESV’s usefulness in church life and whether the promoters and publishers ‘oversold’ the translation.
The ESV was promoted as a more accurate but not ‘impenetrable or difficult’ translation than the widely used New International Version (NIV).
While the NIV translates the original Greek and Hebrew texts ‘thought-for-thought’, the ESV uses a word-by-word ‘essentially literal’ method to reflect the original languages more closely, while aiming to retain flow and readability.
Yet some believe it falls short of its stated aims.
Professor Allan Chapple, lecturer in New Testament at Trinity Theological College in Perth, has criticised the US publishers and their Australian distributors, Matthias Media, over claims that the ESV is superior to the NIV.
In a recent edition of the Reformed Theological Review Professor Chapple said he has become “increasingly uneasy about the criticism being made of the NIV as part of the publicity for the ESV”.
“In practise, it is an elitist translation,” Professor Chapple said. “I doubt that it will be easily understood by believers under 35 or so, especially if they come from an unchurched background.”
Statements that the ESV rated at a Year Eight reading level were in Professor Chapple’s view incongruous with the actual reading of the text: “Even well-read Year Eight students would struggle to define [certain] words accurately,” he said.
In an earlier essay on Bible translation US theologian Don Carson criticised Matthias Media’s Publishing Director Tony Payne for making ‘sweeping judgements’ in an article in The Briefing concerning the strengths of the ESV.
But Matthias Media is standing by the Bible version.
“We were positive and enthusiastic about the ESV, both personally and in our advertising – there’s not much point advertising any other way,” Mr Payne said.
“But we also made it very clear that this was a new translation with great potential, that it was not perfect; no translation is, and that we wanted people to buy it, use it and evaluate it for themselves. Our goal – which we stated publicly in 2002 – was to get the ESV ‘out there’ in the Christian community and thus to create some momentum for this new project.”
Matthias Media became a retailer of the ESV through a deal with Chicago-based Crossway Bibles that ensured an affordable black-letter ESV would be available in Australia.
“It was a financial risk for us to get involved, but we thought that the ESV showed enormous promise, and would be welcomed by many people in Australia – as indeed it was,” Mr Payne said.
He remains confident that the ESV is the better choice as a general purpose Bible for most churches in Sydney.
Mr Payne said, “apart from a small minority of verses that should, and I think will, be revised, the ESV doesn’t require an unusually high degree of literacy. And it does give the reader greater access to what the authors originally wrote.”
However, he said congregations with more limited literary skills, or younger members, may be better off keeping the NIV ‘and accepting the compromise’.
Sydney clergy remain generally positive, despite concerns that the ESV has failed to meet expectations.
“It’s a good translation but it was a bit oversold,” said the Rev Dr Mark Thompson, Academic Dean and senior lecturer in theology at Moore College. “It’s not the last word in English translation. It’s not perfection in the biblical sense and to suggest that it is [would be] disingenuous.”
Huge interest was sparked internationally when the new translation was announced in 2001.It was the Bible many evangelicals said ‘they have been waiting for’.
A number of well-known names were involved in the project, including General Editor Dr JI Packer; Bruce Winter of Tyndale House at the University of Cambridge; David Peterson, Principal of Oak Hill College in London, and Dean of St Andrew’s Cathedral and founder of Matthias Media, the Rev Phillip Jensen.
The Rev Zac Veron, Rector of St George North, ‘loves the ESV’. “It’s my preferred translation when I read daily,”  Mr Veron said. However, as the average person in his parish has difficulty with the NIV in public reading, he has chosen not to use the ESV in congregational life.
“In my parish most of them recognise the NIV is a good translation, it’s accessible,” he said. “[The ESV is] a much harder read.”
The Rev Sandy Grant, Rector of St Stephen’s, Kurrajong, said while the criticism of Matthias Media ‘was a bit uncharitable’ some aims did not match the reality of the text. “Fairly early I came to the conclusion that it didn’t use its own philosophy, for example of not having archaic language,” Mr Grant said.