Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Nope. I understand exactly what you're saying, but this is the peril of relying upon a translation for religious study. That's precisely why the Koran can be studied in translation as a text, but for religious use, only the classical Arabic version is permitted to be used. Nobody would dream of using a translated Koran for religious devotion for the very reason you cite - it would be disrespectful to God.
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That's all well and good, but can you imagine the response in the Islamic community if an ebook Arabic version of the Koran were published with an error or two in the text, even something you personally would consider a minor font issue? Don't you imagine that the publisher would take a lot of time to ensure such errors didn't exist before making it available? For that matter, can you imagine the initial response to Zondervan if they had made basic formatting errors like this in the print publication of the NIV? It would have forever tarnished their reputation and likely would have meant the NIV would have had a long, uphill struggle to become the widely accepted version that it is.
I understand what you are saying about a truely devotional, authoritative scholarly study of the text of the Bible needing to be done in the original Hebrew and Greek. But amongst the Christian community, as opposed to your example of Islam, using an English translated text has long been acceptable for personal devotional study. Even so, you will not find very many Christians attempting to devotionally study the Bible using a paraphrased version such as "The Living Bible". If an original language study is impractical for the average person, a direct translation as opposed to a paraphrase is clearly the next best thing. I seriously doubt, for example, that every single Muslim in the world is capable of reading Arabic, yet they manage to be devotional and strongly religious just the same.