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| One of my friends told me that NASB is translated from the majority text. She goes to a tiny little 70-student college and the NASB is the "official Bible" of her college, but they DO talk about the different texts. They say NASB is the closest to KJV so there's nothing wrong with using that. Is that correct? | ||
| Your friend is confused, or your may have misunderstood her. The NASB does come from the Critical Text, not the Majority Text. However, many people favor the NASB because they claim it is the most “literal” translation. What that means is that more grammatical structure in the originals is maintained, as well as some idioms and figures of speech that are “interpreted” more in other translations. Take a modern example as an illustration. If I ask you in English, “What’s up?” you understand my idiom/figure of speech to mean “What is going on?” If I translated the English phrase “What’s up?” into another language, “What is going on?” would be accurate, but not necessarily literal. A literal translation wouldn’t make sense, since the person I was talking to might think that I am asking what is in the direction opposite of down! So again, the NASB prides itself on the fact that it is a “literal” translation, but that does not automatically mean it is better. As for comparing version with version, I guess it could be helpful if all the versions were translated from the same text, since additional perspectives/opinions on the range of meaning of a word, or the best English equivalent could be enlightening. However, in this case, the differences between the texts themselves would make comparison problematic, and (in my opinion) a waste of time. If I believe that the Received Text contains the exact words God wanted me to have, why would I care what a translation of different words concluded? It’s almost an apples and oranges kind of thing.
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