One of the charges that non-Christians often raised against the Bible is that it's been changed and changed and changed and changed and changed—thousands of times—over the centuries. Indeed they'll say, “look at how many different versions of the Bible exist now. Just go to a Christian bookstore and you'll find all different version. The Word of God has been changed. You can't even know what it said originally.”

There are a lot of claims there, and we're not going to get into all of them. But I do want to address the central claim that the Bible keeps changing today, in our context, in our lifetime. This is perhaps on on the mind of people because the ESV, the English Standard Version from Crossway Publishers, has announced that they are freezing the translation after one last batch of changes. They're going to be revising some verses, and then they're going to be freezing it, never to be changed again.

This has some pros and some cons I'd like to talk about. First you may think, they're revising the Bible? Someone's revising the Word of God? Here's the thing, we're not actually reading the original words, ever, in our English translations that were actually inspired by God—God breathed—and written down by the original authors. This should be evident when we think about it because English, the language, wasn't around back then. Your NIV New Testament is not written in Greek. The Old Testament isn't in Hebrew. We're not reading the original words. We're reading a translation. As much as a translation carries and brings forward what was originally said, it's accurate.

This gets into why translations are constantly being amended and revised. Translation committees and editors are constantly striving to better represent what was originally said, what God originally spoke and was written down thousands of years ago. It's not that we're changing in regards to culture. We're not amending what the Bible used to say to fit a new narrative that culture is somehow forcing on us. No, what we're doing is two things, often times, we're saying there are better reasons that we understand now (based on research and scholarship or the discovery of new manuscripts) to translate this verse more accurately but differently. Remember the goal is to faithfully represent the original not create something new but get as close to what was original and accurate before as we can.

Sometimes these changes are based on research but another reason to continually update a Bible translation, even if you discover no new information, is that language changes. The words we use change over time. You might think, well the dictionary still has many of the same definitions. That's true. A dictionary contains, what's called, the denotation of a word. How it is said to work in a dictionary, how it's denoted to work. However, as we all know words take on a connotation, how they're used. These connotations often changes much more quickly than what's in the dictionary.

For instance, in Shakespeare's day if you were to eat a meal, let's say at your mother-in-law's house and say, "Oh, that's awful." She would have smiled and beamed because you meant that you were full of awe. This was a wonderful meal. Yet, what would it mean today if you told your mother-in-law that the meal she cooked was an awful meal? It would not mean that you were full of awe and it was wonderful. It would mean it was horrible. The word's definition or actually it's connotation too have flipped over the centuries. This is one of the reasons why the King James Bible, in addition to some textual issues, is not a great translation especially to give to someone who did not grow up reading “King James English,” or in other words, didn't grow up in church becau…