Adam88, welcome to the Christogenea forum.
I was really only being sarcastic when I implied that the Dutch translation of the New Testament was based upon the King James Version. The sarcasm stems from an idea which is held by many English speakers, that the KJV is the perfect and only valid translation of Scripture.
EzraLB wrote:You didn't translate John 3:3 for us, unless I missed it--I'm fascinated how a Dutch speaker would understand it to mean.
Out of curiosity, could you also translate Philippeans 2:14? This is a verse about racial purity, and I was wondering if it has that sense in Dutch:
I never expected to find support for my own translations of the New Testament from the translations of Scripture in other languages. That is because I would rather expect to find that Christians of all languages were infected by the same universalist doctrines and worldview of the Roman Catholic Church, which Protestantism never repaired. Wycliffe and Luther translated Scripture long before the King James Version was created, yet even they reflect general Roman Catholic universalism.
Even the brightest minds never break out of the worldview in which they were educated. For that reason we have Kevin MacDonald, E. Michael Jones, Michael Raphael Johnson, all intelligent men who have portions of truth and never come all the way.
Look at the wake-up call that Paul of Tarsus required.
So the Geneva Bible translators, seeing the hypocrisy of the Roman Church, discovered that
ecclesia referred to the assembly of the people, not the Church as an institution, and they translated it as
congregation. But they did not rectify their translation much more than what had to do with their differences with Rome, and since all Refromers did not even view those differences alike, we ended up with Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians.
In my humble opinion, the Christogenea New Testament is the only translation to start with a clean slate - there are no denominational doctrines it cares to uphold. It is based on the meanings of the Greek words reflected in the secular Greek writings and presented in lexicons used by secular translators for the translations of those writings. Therefore it strives to reflect how everyday Greek speakers understood the language, rather than Medieval churchmen.
Of course, there are purposeful departures for the names of God and Christ. One reason for this is that it is asserting a claim to an inheritance in the Old Testament in direct opposition to the claims of the Jews. Nothing pisses the Jews off more than that, and it is the plainest way to make that assertion. We are not Christians because Jesus gave us the inheritance formerly promised to worshippers of Yahweh. Rather, we are Christians because Yahweh is and always was our God, and Yahshua came to redeem us from our sins.
Being a Roman Catholic, or a (re-)former Roman Catholic, one simply cannot translate the New Testament correctly, since first, one does not have the whole picture to even comprehend what the book is saying, and second, the Romish doctrines created to gloss over what the book is saying will always be a stumbling-block.
Just my opinion, as to why the translations of the New Testament in other European languages are probably going to be just as wrong as the King James or the slightly better Geneva Bible.