Mark Ward
A commenter on YouTube wrote to me: “I’d be interested in your thoughts on the NASB ‘star’ feature in the New Testament (indicating the present tense).”
Did you ever notice this little asterisk in your New American Standard Bible? This is what the NASB says it’s doing:
“A star (*) are [sic] used to mark verbs that are historical presents in the Greek which have been translated with an English past tense in order to conform to modern usage.” For example, instead of, “They go into Galilee,” which is a literal translation of the Greek, the NASB will have, “They went* into Galilee,” which is more natural in contemporary English.
This is the NASB being fastidious—too fastidious, I think. Unnecessarily, almost superstitiously fastidious.
However …
I still love the NASB, and I think it’s a great repository for “Bible code” conventions like that asterisk—hidden messages for the initiated. The NASB capitalizes deity pronouns, it uses small caps for Old Testament quotations and instances of Lord (when it translates Yahweh), and it bolds the verse numbers at beginnings of paragraphs.
These shorthand tricks are mainly useful for people who are a little more advanced in their Bible study skills. So they might as well toss in even more special tip-o ̈ s, like those asterisks. It’s good to have one Bible translation on your shelf (or in Logos Bible Software!) that reliably does this sort of thing. And don’t forget italics for words supplied by the translators—and, oh, Hebrewא letters ב introducing ג all ד of the strophes of Psalm 119. Those are cool-looking.
But here’s my question: where does it stop? English doesn’t have grammatical gender, except in certain pronouns (he, him, she, her) and professions (fireman, chairman). Do we need to fix the Queen of England’s oversight by marking masculine original language words in the Bible with blue, feminine with pink, and neuter with gray? Modern printing techniques can handle this if need be. Logos Bible Software can already do this if you really want.
Also, English can almost never fully communicate all the wordplay going on in the Hebrew and Greek—like alliteration (words that begin with the same letter), assonance (words that contain rhyming vowel sounds), or consonance (words that contain similar consonant sounds). Should we develop a system of, say, dots and dashes in our translation to indicate which words were supposed to rhyme with which?
English doesn’t specify whether who and whom are plural or singular, but Greek does. Should we put double underlines beneath plural relative pronouns and single underlines under singular ones?
At some point you just have to acknowledge that translation between two languages always carries limitations. God set it up this way at Babel. Commentaries and lexicons and other tools are just going to have to pick up at the level of detail where translations leave off. And that’s going to have to be OK.
I’d never want the NASB and all its nerdy quirks to go away. They were helpful to me before I could really access commentaries and lexicons. But I don’t like it when Christians get the idea that other translations without these frankly odd and not-strictly-necessary conventions are hiding something, or are less faithful, or are less accurate. (Oh, those poor, benighted Christians who don’t know that this verb is actually a historical present …)
God gave us a world in which no one language perfectly maps onto another, which is the biggest reason why Christian angst over “which translation is best” is unnecessary and even divisive. I feel like I say this all the time. Maybe too much. So, in the future, when I need to repeat that “all translation requires compromises, and we can all chill regarding this fact,” I’m just going to use this symbol: ‡. Can you remember that? Thanks.
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This article was originally published in the January/February 2021 issue of Bible Study Magazine. Slight adjustments, such as title and subheadings, may be the addition of an editor.
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