Is it really a Bible if you REMOVE the Son of God? (expand)
Caught!
They were caught, and they knew it. These Bible translators had wanted to make it easier to understand the Bible. But they failed at a crucial place. In some of their translations, Jesus was no longer the Son of God!1 So those translators also had to change the verses that call God the Father of Jesus. Why would they make a change like that to the clearly understood, literal words of God? The translators lived in a Muslim culture. They had some serious issues to face when it comes to the name of God. Muslims falsely say that Allah is the God of the Bible. Their Qur’an says that Allah would never have a son,2 and it is blasphemy to call Christ "Allah,"3 or to call Allah "one of three in a Trinity."4 Yet the Van Dyke Arabic Bible and others use the word "Allah" for God! This puts translators in a confusing and perilous situation. Blasphemy is often punishable by arrest, torture or death. Should their Bible say: "For Allah so loved the world, that he gave his only son"?5 Or should Thomas fall at Jesus' feet and exclaim, "My Lord and my Allah"?6 The bottom line was this: they could either change God's holy words into something acceptable to the culture, or they could face the serious consequences. Some of them decided the cost was too great to leave God’s words as He said them. So some of them compromised. It's quite tempting to bend the truth, if the alternative is persecution, exile, death, or worse. Was this tiny detail mentioned in the churches when they raised missionary funds for Bible translation? Probably not. Would you want to talk about possibly compromising the word of God so they would be accepted by a foreign culture? But they got caught, sacrificing God’s literal words to be accepted by people of another religion. “…be sure your sin will find you out:” (Numbers 32:23). When challenged, the Bible translators in these countries were divided over what to do. |