Ideally, the most boring Bible translation would be one in which every single question of meaning was put up for a vote by the most qualified scholars who have looked deeply into the question being discussed.

I do not have such a gaggle of scholars at my disposal, but I do want to produce a public domain translation that sticks as closely as possible to the kind of text that would result by consulting experts in such a way.

The first procedure that I plan to use to ensure that I’m somewhere in the right ballpark will be to use the American Standard Version as a base. This text was a revision, made by a committee of American scholars, from another revision, the Revised Version, produced by a committee of British scholars, which in turn was a revision of the famous version of 1611, which was similarly produced by a committee of scholars.

In other words, using the 1901 American Standard text as a base will ensure that we start with something that at the least was at least generally acceptable to the mainstream of scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The simplest way to find what the majority of qualified scholars say is to find the testimony of a qualified scholar about what his peers are saying. For example, in the Masoretic Text, the words “and it was so” appear at the end of Genesis 1:7. In the Septuagint, however, they are missing from 7 but found at the end of verse 6.

According to Westermann, “the majority of modern exegetes follow [the Greek] here”. Excellent! Now we have tentatively located a majority opinion. I say “tentatively” because it could turn out that something has changed since Westermann wrote, or because Westermann could have been mistaken. But we do not have the luxury of perfect evidence in all cases.

Another way to form a rough idea about a majority position is to start collecting the opinions from all the scholarly sources available to me, and seeing what shakes out. I attempted this with the question of whether bᵉrešit in Genesis 1:1 in the construct form — I seem to have found that the majority of interpreters since about 1980 are clearly on the side of it being in the construct state. But this procedure is limited by the possibility that my reading selections might not accurately reflect the majority position of the most qualified interpreters.

Another possible method is to look at several translations produced by committees of mainstream biblical scholars. On the Protestant side, this includes the NRSV. Catholics have produced the NAB and NABRE. Reform Judaism has produced the NJPS translation. The NEB and REB, produced jointly by Cambridge and Oxford, are worth a look.

This method should be used with caution, however, for several reasons. First, when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, the great majority of translations are not an attempt to translate “the original text”, whatever that might be. Instead, they are generally attempts to translate the Masoretic Text, except here and there where some piece of the Masoretic Text seems particularly problematic, at which point the translators may rely on text-critical insights on an ad hoc basis.

Consider, for example, Westermann’s statement that most “modern exegetes” place “and it was so” at the end of Genesis 1:6, rather than at the end of 1:7 as the Masoretic Text has it. The NAB follows the Greek, while NABRE follows the Hebrew. The NEB and REB both follow the Hebrew. And so we certainly cannot automatically imagine that the majority of these translations will reflect majority of scholarly opinion about the “original text” of a given biblical passage. Indeed, not all scholars are concerned with the idea of an “original text”, and many either explicitly or implicitly content themselves with studying the Masoretic Text as their primary text.

In any case, I will muddle along, as best I can, and always with the hope in mind that someone more familiar with the scholarly literature might come along and clean up any messes I will make.

References

Westermann, Claus (1984 [1974]). Genesis 1-11. A Continental Commentary. English translation from the original German by John Scullion.